In all the talk about electric vehicles and hybrids, I was starting to wonder about hydrogen-powered cars. Well, it turns out that Britain just got its first public hydrogen filling station. Now…I guess they just need some hydrogen powered cars to stop by. In this episode of WTP, you’ll hear from one person who thinks hydrogen power can play an important role in weaning ourselves off of gas-powered vehicles, and also from a skeptic who says the tech (not to mention people’s will to switch) is just not there yet.

Also in this episode: India’s $35 tablet computer (yes, that’s with a government subsidy), the Chinese and conflict minerals in Congo, and Israel tries to embrace solar power.

A reminder that you can ignore us equally on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google +.

This week: We meet an Indian scientist who spent nearly three decades developing improved varieties of pigeon pea. A Dutch company is trying to make urban agriculture a possibility. And faced with the shortage of electricity, residents of Tokyo find creative ways of dealing with a hot summer.

Developing Hybrid Pigeon Pea: It’s not your most glamorous of crops. But pigeon pea is popular among thousands of subsistence farmers in India and other parts of the world. There are reasons for it’s popularity, especially in arid, drought-stricken areas. It’s deep roots impart drought tolerance to the plant. It also replenishes levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil, so farmers don’t have to rely as much on fertilizers. Crop scientist K.B. Saxena, of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has spent nearly three decades developing high-yielding hybrid varieties of pigeon pea. Now, Indian farmers are benefiting from his years of work, by using his newly developed varieties.
Learn more about pigeon pea from ICRISAT’s website.
See pictures of Saxena’s pigeon pea hybrids, and take a tour of ICRISAT in this slide show:

Japanese Get Creative Without AC: This summer is especially hot for residents of Tokyo. Not because temperatures are higher than usual, but because of the ongoing electricity shortage since the shut down of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. So companies are getting creative: shuffling the work week, getting wild with its dress code, and covering buildings in vines. Reporter Liz Ruskin has the story.

Indoor Farming in the Netherlands: A Dutch experiment is attempting to make urban growing a viable possibility. Clark Boyd has the story.

Masai herdsmen's cow getting tagged. (Photo: Anders Kelto)

This week, we’re talking about eradicating diseases. The U.N. just announced that rinderpest, a deadly cattle disease has been eradicated. This is the second disease to be eradicated in history. The first was a human disease—smallpox. We’ll hear from one of the scientists who led that global campaign. We’ve also launched a Forum discussion about conquering deadly diseases. Click here to join the conversation. Also, we hear from a listener in Barcelona.

End of Rinderpest: This week, the U.N. announced that for only the second time in history, a disease has been eradicated. The illness, called rinderpest, was a devastating plague of cattle and other animals. Anders Kelto reports from Kenya, the site of the last known case of the disease.
Read more here.
Efforts to eradicate Guinea worm disease in Podcast 60.
Challenges to conquering polio, in Podcast 72.

Eradication of Smallpox: The first disease to be eradicated was smallpox. That was more than thirty years ago. One of the scientists who led the global campaign was epidemiologist, William Foege. He was most closely involved in the eradication efforts in Nigeria, and India, the last stronghold of the disease. Foege has written a new book about his experiences during the fight to beat the disease. It’s called House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox. He spoke with The World’s Lisa Mullins about his book, and about the possibility of conquering other diseases .

How to Kill Killer Diseases: Foege is also taking your thoughts and questions about smallpox, and other infectious diseases in our latest Science Forum discussion. Click here to join the conversation.

Photo by Tom Paulson

[player]Download MP3
Listen to our interview with William Foege here.

William Foege was one of the scientists who led the global campaign to eradicate smallpox, a deadly disease that plagued humankind for centuries. At the time, he was working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. His new book about the eradication campaign is called House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox.

Foege is now a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he is our guest in this Science Forum discussion.

When Foege first started working for the smallpox eradication campaign in the late 1960s, the plan was to vaccinate everyone in affected countries. But while working in Nigeria, he found himself facing a shortage of vaccine supplies. So he enlisted local missionaries to find affected communities and only vaccinate people in the immediate vicinity of patients. The strategy is what public health officials call “surveillance and containment,” and it ultimately succeeded in eradicating the disease globally.

More than thirty years later, smallpox remains the only human disease to be eradicated. (The United Nations has just announced the first eradication of a livestock disease—rinderpest. Click here to read/listen to our story.) There are efforts to eradicate other diseases like polio, Guinea worm, and malaria.

Is eradication a feasible goal for all diseases? When should we decide to eradicate a disease versus just control it?

Bring your thoughts and questions for Foege. He’ll be participating in this discussion until July 12th.

Additional Resources:

• A review of  ‘House on Fire,’ The Wall Street Journal.
• William Foege on eradicating other diseases, NPR’s Humanosphere blog.
• Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
• Eradicating Guinea Worm Disease, PRI’s The World.

I’m posting the podcast from Canada. I’m in British Columbia doing some reporting that you’ll hear in future episodes. But in today’s episode we’re talking about toilets. That’s because about a third of the world still does not have access to proper sanitation. The World is airing a series called Toilet Tales. In this podcast, you’ll hear the first part of the series. You’ll hear a story about innovative project to solve China’s sanitation problems, and a story about the world’s only Toilet Museum. We’ve also launched a new Science Forum discussion about innovative ways to solve the world’s sanitation crisis.


Toilet Tales-China: The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports on an effort to save water and recycle nutrients in an arid part of China by building an apartment complex with dry, composting toilets.
Read more about the project here.

The Benefits of Eco-Sanitation: Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Arno Rosemarin about the potential of dry composting toilets to help solve the world’s sanitation crisis. Rosemarin runs the ecological sanitation project at the Stockholm Environment Institute. He’s also the guest in our latest Science Forum discussion. Join the conversation!

India’s Toilet Museum: Some 600 million people in India alone don’t have access to basic sanitation. That makes the country an unusual place for what may be the world’s only Toilet Museum. I recently visited that tiny museum, and brought this report about the museum’s public health and social mission.
Read more here.

Listener E-mail: Listener, Andrew O’Keeffe is a regular listener of this podcast. He works as a gardener for the City of Burnaby, not far from Vancouver, Canada. He sent us this photo of his workplace.

Bin Laden’s DNA Analysis: Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to Scientific American editor Christine Gorman about the range of biometric tools used to identify the body of Osama Bin Laden.
How Biometrics Helped Identify the Master Terrorist.
Osama Bin Laden: The Science of his End.

Predicting Bin Laden’s Whereabouts: Two years ago, UCLA geographer Thomas Gillespie led a study that used scientific methods that tried to predict the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden. Turns out he wasn’t that far off. Gillespie employed theories normally used by scientists to predict the distribution of endangered species. Can these theories be applied to tracking other terrorists? Ask Gillespie. He’s the guest in our latest Science Forum discussion. Add your thoughts and questions to the conversation.
More about Gillespie’s 2009 study in The World Science Podcast no. 2.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Climate Change in Himalayan Villages: Indigenous perceptions of climate change–including warming temperatures, drying water supplies and diminishing snow–are consistent with scientific measurements in the Himalayas and elsewhere. Local knowledge may help scientists understand how climate change affects specific geographic regions, even where formal data are scarce.
  The study.
  BBC coverage.
  Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment.
• Neanderthals Were Right-Handed: Ancient humans were just as predominantly right handed as we are, suggests a study of fossil teeth. (Yes, teeth!) Researchers wonder if handedness was linked to language ability among Neanderthals, as it is in modern humans.
  The study.
  LiveScience coverage.
  More on handedness and language.

This week: Two new studies outline characteristics that help alien species become invasive. India rethinks its ambitious nuclear energy plans. A new study shows what we might have known all along — human language originated in Africa. Yet another study suggests that rules of grammar are far from universal. Also, our ongoing Science Forum discussion about how our physical environments influence human behavior goes until Thursday, April 21st. So, stop by and add your thoughts and questions to the conversation here. (Photo: The Burmese python has invaded parts of the U.S. Credit: U.S. National Park Service.)

India Rethinks its Nuclear Energy Plans: The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear complex has led India to rethink its increasing reliance on nuclear power. New York Times correspondent Vikas Bajaj tells anchor Marco Werman the demands for power in India are huge and growing. Forty percent of India’s population currently has no access to electricity.
Read the transcript of the interview.
Listen to my story on India’s nuclear energy plans in Podcast no. 91.
Asia’s Push for Nuclear Power — a Wise Bet? An online Science Forum discussion.

Fukushima vs. Chernobyl — Comparison Less Useful Than Ever: Fukushima is nothing like Chernobyl — except, it’s sort of the same. Of course, it’s no nearly as bad — unless it’s worse! If your head’s hurting right now trying to keep track of official evaluations of the scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, well, get in line for the aspirin — if not yet the iodine pills. Read more in this blog post by guest blogger Peter Thomson, The World’s environment editor.

The Original Language: The world’s 7,000 languages appear to share a common ancestral tongue, which was spoken in Africa at least 50 thousand years ago. Linguists hadn’t been able to trace the roots of language that far back in time before. But by stripping speech down to its most basic components, such as vowels and consonants, a researcher was able to show how languages changed as humans migrated across the globe.
The study.
The author’s website.
ScienceNOW coverage.
Links to more news stories.

No Universal Grammar: Although all modern languages have common roots, they share few grammatical rules. Linguists had expected that certain rules of syntax would always occur together so that changing one rule would mean changing others in concert, perhaps because of the way the brain works. But a new study suggests that languages evolve in varied ways, governed more by culture than biology. Does this challenge linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar ? My fellow podcaster, Patrick Cox (host of The World in Words podcast) helps us answer that question.
The study.
The authors’ user-friendly summary.
Wired Science coverage.

Invasive Species: As humans travel around the globe, we bring other animals and plants along. Biologists wish they could better predict which of these species will become invasive in their new habitats–as Burmese pythons have done in Florida. Two recent studies suggest that extra chromosomes (for plants) and big brains (for reptiles and amphibians) help species invade new habitats.
The studies: Plants and reptiles.
More on invasive plants in the U.S..
More on big brains.
Regulating trade could keep out alien invaders.

So I was thrilled to learn that the 2011 annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) had a session on bilingualism. It was titled ‘Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Are Telling Us About Mind and Brain.

Recent research by neuroscientists is starting to reveal some surprising facts about the basis of bilingualism in our brains. I’ll have more about these findings in upcoming episodes of my Science Podcast, which you can subscribe to from here. For now, here are the best bits from yesterday’s session.

“Bilinguals are mental jugglers,” says Judith Kroll, a psychologist at Penn State University and the organizer of the session.

Every time a bilingual person speaks or hears a language, they do more mental math than their monolingual friends. It turns out that a second language is always active in a bilingual’s brain. (more on that here) Even for simple tasks like naming an object, a bilingual’s brain has to choose between two options.  As several researchers described it, this leads to a “conflict” between the two languages in a bilingual’s brain.

That ‘conflict’ has become more apparent in my own life lately. Growing up in urban multilingual India, I switched back and forth between languages, and borrowing words from one language when speaking another. In other words, I often spoke Hinglish (Hindi+English), or Hindali, or Bengdi (Hindi + Bengali) or Benglish (Bengali + English). (Note: My father coined those terms out of frustration that my brother and I didn’t speak Bengali without mixing it up with Hindi and English) But once I moved to the U.S., I was stuck with one language – English. Even though I speak it fluently, I sometimes find myself at a loss for words. And when I do, my brain throws Bengali, or Hindi words at me. Unlike when I lived in India, I now have to ignore those words and continue to look for the right word in English.

So how does the brain of a bilingual or multilingual person resolve these conflicts? Well, that’s something that researchers are starting to figure out. (you can read more in this Science magazine article) But one thing that they do know now is that all this mental juggling comes with some advantages.

As York University’s Ellen Bialystok said during her presentation, bilinguals exercise parts of their brains involved in higher functions, like attention, multitasking and problem solving. As a result, bilinguals are often much better at problem solving than monolingual people. (Phew! At least there are some benefits to the battle of languages inside my brain.)

Bialystok’s more recent work also suggests that being bilingual can protect us against the cognitive decline that comes with ageing. It can even push the onset of dementia by 4-5 years. So, if you are considering learning a new language, remember doing so can come with a lifetime of benefits.

Blogger: Rhitu Chatterjee
More on language in The World’s Science Podcast:
Click Languages in Podcast 100
Clues to Bilingualism in Podcast 29.
Evolutionary Roots of Language in Podcast 88.

Elsa’s Favorite Time Stories:

• Redefining the Second: To most of us, a second is just a fraction of one day. But the official international second is defined in terms of the cesium atom and the frequency of the microwave radiation that it can absorb. This ultra-precise atomic clock is the basis of GPS technology, but physicists such as Patrick Gill say we could do even better. New atomic clocks could measure time with a precision in the trillionths of a second (instead of mere billionths)–but the formal definition of the second won’t change until at least 2019.
  Patrick Gill’s work on new atomic clocks.
  All about the cesium clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado.
  A brief history of timekeeping, from NIST.
• Hugs in the Present Moment: Olympic athletes hug their coaches for three seconds following a performance. That rule applies to Asians, Europeans and Americans alike, says developmental psychologist Emese Nagy. Her discovery fits in with decades’ worth of data that suggest that our perception of the present moment lasts about three seconds.
  The study.
  Related news story from ScienceNOW.
• Tricking Our Internal Clocks: Our natural sense of time is fairly mysterious–and it’s susceptible to illusions. There isn’t a pacemaker in our brains that ticks off seconds, minutes and hours; rather, our timing emerges from a variety of brain functions. And, according to a new study led by neuroscientist Maneesh Sahani* and colleagues, what we see makes a difference too. The researchers could accelerate or brake participants’ perception of a half-second by changing the rate at which random movement played on a computer screen.
  The study.
  Watch the “rolling clouds” clips that fooled peoples’ internal clocks.
  More on our sense of time from the L.A. Times and from Discover.
  *Correction: Maneesh Sahani is at University College London, not King’s College as I said on the podcast. -EY

Chevron in Ecuador: Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with the BBC’s Irene Caselli about the latest turn in a long legal battle over the environmental legacy of oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon. A court yesterday ordered the U.S. company Chevron to pay damages of roughly $9 billion in the case.
Irene Caselli’s BBC coverage.
New York Times coverage, including background on the case.
Ecuador’s plans to conserve forest by keeping some of its oil in the ground.

Northern Bird Habitat: The Great Backyard Bird Count gets under way this weekend. The idea is to report on what’s on view in your backyard. Miyoko Chu of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology explains why counting birds such as the bar-tailed godwit is important.
The Great Backyard Bird Count.

Rethinking Polio Control: In podcast no. 72, we brought you an interview with D.A. Henderson, the man who wiped out smallpox. At the time, Henderson was skeptical of aims to eradicate polio. He has since changed his mind.
Read more in this New York Times article.
‘Gates calls for final push to eradicate polio,’ in the New York Times.

Peruvian Potato Varieties Headed for Doomsday Seed Vault: Indigenous groups in Peru have announced that they’re sending some 1500 varieties of potatoes to the doomsday seed bank in Svalbard, Norway. The potatoes are currently grown in the Cusco Potato Park, located in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Read more here.
More about potatoes from The International Potato Center.
More about potatoes in this slide show by The World’s David Baron.

This week: We continue our series on medical rationing. You’ll hear a story from Zambia about implicit forms of rationing for AIDS patients. Then, a story about how creative thinking helped a doctor in India avoid rationing medical care during a pandemic. Finally, we get some perspective on health care rationing here in the U.S. We’ve also launched an online discussion on the topic. Harvard ethicist Daniel Wikler and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink are taking your questions. Share your stories and bring your thoughts to the conversation here. And click here for our Rationing Health series home page.

Rationing by Queue in Zambia: The rationing of health care is not always obvious or explicit. Implicit factors may determine who receives care and who does not. One such factor may have imposed a form of unintentional rationing on AIDS care in Africa.
Reporter: David Baron

Rationing in Disasters: Medical rationing sometimes seems inevitable during disasters. Major earthquakes, floods, and pandemics can leave health workers scrambling to care for all the patients who need attention—and can force some patients to go without. But even in such dire circumstances, can rationing be avoided? An Indian doctor offers a hopeful tale.
Reporter: Sheri Fink
Home page for our series: Rationing Health: Who Lives? Who Decides?

Rationing in the U.S: Harvard ethicist Daniel Wikler speaks with The World’s Lisa Mullins to give some perspective on health care rationing in the U.S. He argues that the U.S. is already rationing health care because thousands of people who cannot afford good insurance — or any insurance — are not able to get the care they need. Join our online conversation with Dan Wikler. He and reporter Sheri Fink are taking your thoughts and questions in our latest Science Forum discussion through December 31st.
Guest: Daniel Wikler

Music in Science: Zen Faulkes recalls the Christmas that he got hooked on movie soundtracks. Now heroic movie themes give him extra punch to work on problematic papers and analyses. Faulkes is a professor at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he studies the evolution of brains and behavior in crayfish and other crustaceans.
Guest: Zen Faulkes
Music: Imperial Attack, by John Williams (from the Star Wars sound track)