Charles Bergquist is the director and a contributing producer for PRI's Science Friday. His favorite stories involve chemistry, inventions, nanotechnology, and shiny things with blinking lights.
Airplane cabins have been labeled as strong sources of germs and spreadable diseases. But how likely is it we'll really get sick from planes?
'Tis the season for garish holiday displays. But outdoor lighting is a year-long phenomenon, and it might be having unintended consequences.
If you’re like most people, you probably think of coal as a chunk of black fossil fuel. Geologist Jen O’Keefe sees it differently.
They "found that women tended to have damage to a greater part of their brain and to more discrete areas of the brain than the men who headed the ball the same amount."
A longtime program to collar the endangered cats may be coming to an end. What happens next?
Artificial intelligence can now crack CAPTCHAs, and the implications go far beyond our Internet surfing.
Around 130 million years ago, two neutron stars — those strange, compacted cores of dead stars — collided. Scientists recently detected the signals from that collision, in the form of gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals.
Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China are all interested in lunar missions. For the Trump administration, “it could be a very smart international or geopolitical tool if they do it correctly,” says science journalist Loren Grush.
Finding sea monsters in Kansas is “pretty low tech,” one paleontologist says. “You walk around and look at the ground until you find something.”
At the Aging Aircraft Lab, planes are taken apart piece by piece to learn more about the ravages of time on various aircraft designs — from cracking, to corrosion, to metal fatigue.
Every week we hear about more solar or wind resources coming online. New research suggests that humanity could accelerate this process and be running the world entirely on renewable energy by the year 2050.