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Well, what you mentioned, Nigeria was enjoying an oil boom. The '70s in general are often considered an era of excess. I'm not trying to suggest that, you know, every man, woman and child in Nigeria was swimming in pools of gold because the distribution of wealth was still quite unequal, and the oil prophets in general were grossly mismanaged across the board. But there still was this notion that Nigeria was a place where you could actually make it, that if you had the right degree or if you came up with the right business plan or you got into the right hustle that you could be living in the fast lane just like all the other big cats at the time.

Private mansions, five-star hotels - these are the venues for some of the most elite celebrity poker games in Hollywood. This past week, one of these high-stakes but low-profile games was put right in the spotlight. Several celebrities, including "Spider-Man" star Tobey Maguire, were slapped with lawsuits trying to get at their poker winnings - in Maguire's case, more than $300,000. The suits accuse one of the players, a former hedge fund manager named Bradley Ruderman of gambling away his investors' money in these celebrity games. Ruderman's now in prison, convicted of running a $44 million Ponzi scheme. As for those investors, they want their money back. Now, private poker games are legal in California, as long as no one makes money for operating the game, but the lawsuits allege that this particular game was illegal. And as a result, the defendant shouldn't be able to keep Ruderman's stolen cash. Celebrities like Matt Damon...

Well, the cholera outbreak was an extraordinary setback to a country that was just trying to climb out and recover from a tremendous tragedy to begin with. The initial case fatality rate was more than 9 percent, and that's incredibly high, and that means we lost far more children than ever should've been the case. The United States, working through the Centers for Disease Control and other partners, really sent our best, most capable disease control experts to Haiti to help, work with them, to bring down that case - fatality rate. The global goal went - in cholera epidemics is about 1 percent. Today, that case fatality rate is 0.56 percent. And so, the goal is to really save as many lives as is possible and to try to keep cholera under control, and that has largely been achieved. We have to keep at it and keep focused at it. And, hopefully, there'll be some new tools like vaccines and other strategies that can help eliminate the problem all together in the near future.

I think the answer to that is yes. And that a concern with congestion charges is that they fall more heavily on the poor for whom travel is a bigger share of their budget and who tend to have less discretion about when they go to work. I think the way you want to think about this is that road infrastructure and transportation infrastructure is fantastically expensive to build. And what we want to do is want to organize the way we use these assets so that we use them to their best advantage, right? And that may mean that some people move to different cities. It may mean that some people change the time when they go to work. We can anticipate all the different margins of adjustment. Some of them will be painful for people and some of them will not be.

China went dollar for dollar with the United States on Friday, imposing its own tariffs on $34 billion worth of American goods. And one product on the list - soybeans. It appears that China wants to inflict pain on rural voters who make up part of President Trump's political base. Trump says tariffs will ultimately help create a more level playing field for American workers, but some in the U.S. are suffering consequences from this back-and-forth. And we have Michael Petefish on the line with us. He is president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association. And he is at member station KZSE in Rochester, Minn. Mr. Petefish, good morning.

You do do that. I mean, all of that stuff is--there's a very clear paper trail on every amendment that's submitted to a committee, for example, for markup on a bill has to come from a member of Congress; it's got to be sponsored by somebody. And so I disagree with the supposition of the caller that somehow this is all very mysterious. Now do lobbyists suggest to members of Congress changes in wordings of legislation? Absolutely. But I wanted to go back to my first point. I mean, given the choice between some corporation that drops into my office unannounced who I have no relationship with who, you know, theoretically and sort of the way this has been colored, is going to raise a lot of campaign money for me, or my constituents back home, at the end of the day most members of Congress want to get re-elected, and the way to get re-elected is to make your constituents back home happy. And so again, I think I want to disabuse folks of this notion that somehow there's this sort of vast array of disembodied lobbyists who show up in members' office that don't have any connections to them. Most of it, even the campaign money, the grassroots organization--at the end of the day it's the focus to get people re-elected, and the way you usually get re-elected is by keeping people back home very happy.

No way around it - 2017 was a great year to own stocks. The S&P 500 index had risen almost 20 percent over the year. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 25 percent over the same period, buoying portfolios, dividends and retirement accounts. And it's a similar story around the world on financial markets in Japan, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. All this happened despite a wave of political turmoil in the U.S. and around the globe. To find out why 2017 was such a bull year, we're joined now by NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner. Hi, Uri.

Well, that's the ideal thing of the death penalty rhetorically. Do you believe in the death penalty? Yeah, I believe in it theoretically for some crimes. But the more you bring it home to the people, that changes. And in fact, nationally now, we have it slipping below 50 percent. And I believe that's changing with Catholics, too. Pro-life Catholics believe in the dignity of innocent life, but now it's being stretched and extended to even those who are guilty of terrible crimes. As Pope John Paul said in St. Louis, even those people have a dignity that must not be taken from them.

Oh, that. OK, I wasn't sure where you were going with it. Oh absolutely, yeah. The running refrain of basically all my years driving a cab is what's a white guy doing driving a cab, if you want to just really boil it down. Or there's a lot of presumptions that go with that, but yeah, but why - sort of, you're one of us, what are you a doing menial job for, kind of thing. Yeah, it's a running thread. It repeats over and over again. I could have written a whole book of just those stories, which would have probably been more depressing than what I ended up with, I hope.

And, you know, there's a new drug out now on the market that treats short stature in kids by replacing a hormone they're missing. Should drugs that make us smarter or boost our muscle mass or make us live longer be allowed, too? What's in store there? Pregnant women today can undergo prenatal testing for a host of genetic diseases, with the option of terminating a pregnancy if a disability is discovered. And while few would argue that preventing debilitating diseases isn't a worthy goal, what if it doesn't stop there? What if parents can someday select for characteristics such as intelligence, height or gender, and perhaps not by terminating a pregnancy, but perhaps by genetic engineering? So for the rest of the hour we'll be talking about the advances in medicine and technology that may someday allow us to be better, stronger, faster and maybe even disease-free. But, of course, with that future comes also these questions: Do these advances also change what it means to be human? And who will be left behind in our quest for perfection? Probably people who can't afford to get those kinds of treatments. Our number: 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK. As always, you can surf over to our Web site at sciencefriday.com.

Fatah al-Islam is an offshoot of another militant group. It got new blood with a new leader - relatively new leader - who is a Palestinian fugitive. He's wanted in Jordan in connection with the murder of Laurence Foley, an American diplomat. He's believed to be an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who was killed in Iraq. So you have a dangerous situation in the north of Lebanon with a lot of these groups. A lot of them have been around for a long time in one form or another. But due to the Iraq war in the past several years, they've gotten a tremendous infusion of loyalty; they've really been, kind of, stretching their muscles a lot.

Well, I was a federal employee for 25 years, and I just got so tired of all that bureaucratic and legalistic writing. And I was also tired of trying to deal with the fallout from that. First off, it's very expensive because people have to call and - or write, and then the government has to respond. But more essentially, people get denied benefits because they don't understand what they have to do to get them. People get penalized because they did something wrong because the government's instructions weren't clear. And I just couldn't understand why government writers didn't understand that they needed to be clearer in the documents that they were writing.

This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. We're talking about the politics of biracial today. President-elect Obama, of course, self identifies as African-American. There are those who argue he should embrace a biracial identity. Does it matter what Barack Obama calls himself or other biracial people? Why, or why not? Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation at our Web site, npr.org; just click on Talk of the Nation. Our guests are Dawn Turner Trice, who writes about race for the Chicago Tribune, and Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of history at Rutgers and author of the book "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family." Let's get some more callers on the line. This is Pamela, Pamela calling us from Malvern, Pennsylvania.

In contrast, the second story on March 2nd mostly made me tired. It sought to chronicle the ongoing debate among upper middle class white women struggling to balance work versus child raising issues. At least I came away thinking the story focused on upper middle class white women since the date abided by Social Sciences was not broken down by race and seemed not to include low-income women. And beyond the limited research and handful of social scientists quoted in the story, the only real woman quoted was the 37-year-old white former Silicon Valley Tech Executive turned homemaker. A mother of three whose husband is a lawyer, Cathy Watson Short was speaking of herself and other women in her circle when she told the New York Times, most of us thought we would work and have kids at least that is what we were brought up thinking we would do, no problem. But really we were kind of duped, none of us realized how hard it is, she said.

Charles and Ray were a team. They were husband and wife. Despite the New York Times' and Vanity Fair's best efforts recently, they're not brothers. (Laughter) And they were a lot of fun. You know, Ray was the one who wore the ampersands in the family. (Laughter) We are going to focus on Charles today, because it is Charles' 100th birthday. But when I speak of him, I'm really speaking of both of them as a team. Here's Charles when he was three. So he would be 100 this June. We have a lot of cool celebrations that we're going to do. The thing about their work is that most people come to the door of furniture — I suspect you probably recognize this chair and some of the others I'm going to show you. But we're going to first enter through the door of the Big Top. The whole thing about this, though, is that, you know, why am I showing it? Is it because Charles and Ray made this film? This is actually a training film for a clown college that they had. They also practiced a clown act when the future of furniture was not nearly as auspicious as it turned out to be. There is a picture of Charles. So let's watch the next clip. The film that we're about to see is a film they made for the Moscow World's Fair. Video: This is the land. It has many contrasts. It is rough and it is flat. In places it is cold. In some it is hot. Too much rain falls on some areas, and not enough on others. But people live on this land. And, as in Russia, they are drawn together into towns and cities. Here is something of the way they live. Eames Demetrios: Now, this is a film that was hardly ever seen in the United States. It was on seven screens and it was 200 feet across. And it was at the height of the Cold War. The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate happened about 50 feet from where this was shown. And yet, how did it start? You know, commonality, the first line in Charles' narration was, "The same stars that shine down on Russia shine down on the United States. From the sky, our cities look much the same." It was that human connection that Charles and Ray always found in everything. And you can imagine, and the thing about it is, that they believed that the human mind could handle this number of images because the important thing was to get the gestalt of what the images were about. So that was just a little snip. But the thing about Charles and Ray is that they were always modeling stuff. They were always trying things out. I think one of the things I am passionate about, my grandparents work, I'm passionate about my work, but on top of all that I'm passionate about a holistic vision of design, where design is a life skill, not a professional skill. And you know, those of us with kids often want our kids to take music. I'm no exception. But it's not about them becoming Bono or Tracy Chapman. It's about getting that music thing going through their heads and their thinking. Design is the same way. Design has to become that same way. And this is a model that they did of that seven-screen presentation. And Charles just checking it out there. So now we're going to go through that door of furniture. This is an unusual installation of airport seating. So what we're going to see is some of the icons of Eames furniture. And the thing about their furniture is that they said the role of the designer was essentially that of a good host, anticipating the needs of the guest. So those are cool images. But these are ones I think are really cool. These are all the prototypes. These are the mistakes, although I don't think mistakes is the right word in design. It's just the things you try out to kind of make it work better. And you know some of them would probably be terrible chairs. Some of them are kind of cool looking. It's like "Hey, why didn't they try that?" It was that hands-on iterative process which is so much like vernacular design and folk design in traditional cultures. And I think that's one of the commonalities between modernism and traditional design. I think it may be a real common ground as we kind of figure out what on earth to do in the next 20 or 30 years. The other thing that's kind of cool is that you look at this and in the media when people say design, they actually mean style. And I'm really here to talk about design. But you know the object is just a pivot. It's a pivot between a process and a system. And this is a little film I made about the making of the Eames lounge chair. The design process for Charles and Ray never ended in manufacturing. It continued. They were always trying to make thing better and better. Because it's like as Bill Clinton was saying about Rwandan health clinics. It's not enough to create one. You've got to create a system that will work better and better. So I've always liked this prototype picture. Because it just kind of, you know, doesn't get any more basic than that. You try things out. This is a relatively famous chair. Its early version had an "X" base. That's what the collectors like. Charles and Ray liked this one because it was better. It worked better: "H" base, much more practical. This is something called a splint. And I was very touched by Dean Kamen's work for the military, or for the soldiers, because Charles and Ray designed a molded plywood splint. This is it. And they'd been working on furniture before. But doing these splints they learned a lot about the manufacturing process, which was incredibly important to them. I'm trying to show you too much, because I want you to really get a broth of ideas and images. This is a house that Charles and Ray designed. My sister is chasing someone else. It's not me. Although I endorse heartily the fact that he stole her diary, it's not me. And then this is a film, on the lower left, that Charles and Ray made. Now look at that plastic chair. The house is 1949. The chair is done in 1949. Charles and Ray, they didn't obsess about style for it's own sake. They didn't say, "Our style is curves. Let's make the house curvy." They didn't say, "Our style is grids. Let's make the chair griddy." They focused on the need. They tried to solve the design problem. Charles used to say, "The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem." It's kind of a brutal quote. This is the earlier design of that house. And again, they managed to figure out a way to make a prototype of a house — architecture, very expensive medium. Here's a film we've been hearing things about. The "Powers of Ten" is a film they made. If we watch the next clip, you're going to see the first version of "Powers of Ten," upper left. The familiar one on the lower right. The Eames' film Tops, lower left. And a lamp that Charles designed for a church. Video: Which in turn belongs to a local group of galaxies. These form part of a grouping system much as the stars do. They are so many and so varied that from this distance they appear like the stars from Earth. ED: You've seen that film, and what's so great about this whole conference is that everybody has been talking about scale. Everybody here is coming at it from a different way. I want to give you one example. E.O. Wilson once told me that when he looked at ants — he loved them, of course, and he wanted to learn more about them — he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale. So here is the tiny creature. And yet simply by changing the frame of reference it reveals so much, including what ended up being the TED Prize. Modeling, they tried modeling all the time. They were always modeling things. And I think part of that is that they never delegated understanding. And I think in our family we were very lucky, because we learned about design backwards. Design was not something other. It was part of the business of life in general. It was part of the quality of life. And here is some family pictures. And you can see why I'm down on style, with a haircut like that. But anyway, (Laughter) I remember the cut grapefruit that we would have at the Eames house when I was a kid. So we're going to watch another film. This is a film, the one called Toys. You can see me, I have the same haircut, in the upper right corner. Upper left is a film they did on toy trains. Lower right is a solar do-nothing toy. Lower left is Day-of-the-Dead toys. Charles used to say that toys are not as innocent as they appear. They are often the precursor to bigger things. And these ideas — that train up there, being about the honest use of materials, is totally the same as the honest use of materials in the plywood. And now I'm going to test you. This is a letter that my grandfather sent to my mom when she was five years old. So can you read it? Lucia angel, okay, eye. Audience: Saw many trains. ED: Awl, also, good that the leather crafter's guild is here. Also, what is he doing? Row, rowed. Sun? No. Well is there another name for a sunrise? Dawn, very good. Also rode on one. I ... Audience: You had, I hope you had — ED: Now you've been to the website Dogs of Saint Louis in the late, in the mid-1930's, then you'd know that was a Great Dane. So, I hope you had a Audience: Nice time, time — ED: Time at. Citizen Kane, rose — Audience: Rosebud. ED: No, bud. "D"'s right. At Buddy's — Audience: Party. Love. ED: Okay, good. So, "I saw many trains and also rode on one. I hope you had a nice time at Buddy's party." So you guys did pretty good, cool. So my mom and Charles had this great relationship where they'd send those sorts of things back and forth to one another. And it's all part of the, you know, they used to say, "Take your pleasure seriously." These are some images from a project of mine that's called Kymaerica. It's sort of an alternative universe. It's kind of a reinterpretation of the landscape. Those plaques are plaques we've been installing around North America. We're about to do six in the U.K. next week. And they honor events in the linear world from the fictional world. So, of course, since it's bronze it has to be true. Video: Kymaerica with waterfalls, tumbling through our — ED: This is one of the traditional Kymaerican songs. And so we had spelling bees in Paris, Illinois. Video: Your word is N. Carolina. Girl: Y-I-N-D-I-A-N-A. ED: And then Embassy Row is actually a historical site, because in the Kymaerican story this is where the Parisian Diaspora started, where there embassy was. So you can actually visit and have this three-dimensional fictional experience there. And the town has really embraced it. We had the spelling bee in conjunction with the Gwomeus Club. But what is really cool is that we take our visual environment as inevitable. And it's not. Other things could have happened. The Japanese could have discovered Monterey. And we could have been born 100,000 years ago. And there are a lot of fun things. This is the Museum of the Bench. They have trading cards and all sorts of cool things. And you're kind of trapped in the texture of Kymaerica. The Tahatchabe, the great road building culture. A guy named Nobu Naga, the so-called Japanese Columbus. But now I'm going to return you to the real world. And this is Cranbrook. I've got a real treat for you, which is the first film that Charles ever made. So let's watch that. Nobody's ever seen it. Cranbrook is very generous to let us show it for the first time here. It's a film about Maya Gretel, a famous ceramicist, and a teacher at Cranbrook. And he made it for the 1939 faculty exhibition. Silent. We don't have a track for it yet. Very simple. It's just a start. But it's that learn-by-doing thing. You want to learn how to make films? Go make a movie. And you try something out. But here is what's really great. See that chair there? The orange one? That's the organic chair. 1940. At the same time that Charles was doing that chair, he was doing this film. So my point is that this scope of vision, this holistic vision of design, was with them from the beginning. It wasn't like "Oh, we made some chairs and got successful. Now we're going to do some movies." It was always part of how they looked at the world. And that's what's really powerful. And I think that all of us in this room, as you move design forward, it's not about just doing one thing. It's about how you approach problems. And there is this huge, beautiful commonality between design, business and the world. So we're going to do the last clip. And I've shown you some of the images. I just want to focus on sound now. So this is Charles' voice. Charles Eames: In India, those without, and the lowest in caste, eat very often, particularly in southern India, they eat off of a banana leaf. And those a little bit up the scale eat off of a sort of a low-fired ceramic dish. And a little bit higher, why they have a glaze on a thing they call a thali. If you're up the scale a little bit more, why, a brass thali. And then things get to be a little questionable. There are things like silver-plated thalis. And there is solid silver thalis. And I suppose some nut has had a gold thali that he's eaten off of. But you can go beyond that. And the guys that have not only means, but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, go to the next step, and they eat off a banana leaf. And I think that in these times when we fall back and regroup, that somehow or other, the banana leaf parable sort of got to get working there, because I'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of. But it is that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf. ED: I've been looking forward to sharing that quote with you. Because that's part of where we've got to get to. And I also want to share this one. "Beyond the age of information is the age of choices." And I really think that's where we are. And it's kind of cool for me to be part of a family and a tradition where he was talking about that in 1978. And part of why this stuff is important and all the things that we do are important, is that these are the ideas we need. And I think that this is all part of surrendering to the design journey. That's what we all need to do. Design is not just for designers anymore. It's a process. It's not style. All that great thinking needs to really get about solving pretty key problems. I really thank you for your time. (Applause)

Now it's time to step into the Barbershop. That's where we invite interesting people to talk about what's in the news and what's on their minds. Today, we want to talk about a subject that's been percolating in the wake of the news that the Virginia governor and the attorney general were blackface at parties years ago. Another Virginia official was the editor of a yearbook with many such racist photos in it. The - Governor Ralph Northam has been pressed to resign, even by members of his own Democratic Party. But instead of doing that, the governor sees a teachable moment.

Well, it's a matter of making sure that we honor the humanitarian claims that some children might come forward with. That means having properly trained asylum officers available to talk to the children to see if they have credible claims and moving those cases forward expeditiously. But it also means being willing in the cases where folks - kids get on the other side of that process and they don't qualify. We have to be willing to return them and we have to do that in cooperation with their home countries because these are children. We recognize this as a humanitarian situation. They've been through a harrowing journey.

Well, maybe it's because Kennedy collided with his first year. I mean, he hadn't been - you're absolutely right about all the stirring rhetoric and charm and Camelot and everything like that. But he had the Bay of Pigs in April of his very first year, which was not only considered a moral failure, but it was a sheer military failure, and the United States was kind of caught lying in the street. So it was - that was pretty difficult. And then he had the conflict with President Khrushchev and he's in the middle of the freedom rides and had promised he was going to end housing segregation with a stroke of a pen and was paralyzed by those issues. So I think Kennedy had a very, very rough baptism and he had to recover from that. And in that sense, it is a little more like Clinton who didn't come in with all of the high expectations but also had a first - rough first year.

...Have been totally frozen out of this process. So that's a problem one. But problem two is Republicans are divided at least three ways on this and maybe more. You have really, really hard-line Republicans who want - who voted for Robert Goodlatte's - Bob Goodlatte's bill that failed that was a very hard-line - the congressman from Virginia - a hard-line bill. And they don't even like the so-called compromise very much. You've got Republicans coming from suburban, moderate to liberal districts who really simply wanted a solve the problem of the DREAMers. They don't like the hard-line. And then you've got this vast, mushy middle that would like to vote with Ryan. But with the president out there sending a constant stream of mixed signals, they don't know which way to go either.

The next 24/7 lecture will be delivered by a professor of chemistry at Oklahoma University, a visiting professor at MIT, a science adviser to the television program "Breaking Bad," Donna Nelson. Her topic: single-walled carbon nanotubes. First, a complete technical description in 24 seconds. On your mark, get set, go. DR. DONNA NELSON: We analyze functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes by using NMR. Initially, we found that the analyses were not reproducible. They seem to depend upon how long the samples set before analysis. We thought the nanotubes might be re-bundling, so we tried sonicating the samples just before taking the NMR. That produced consistent results.

Well, in March he has some tough decisions to make because if the auto industry has failed to restructure, which is one of the promises of this current deal, then the question will be, well, if that was the bridge loan, now do I reinvest, do I put good money after bad money after bad money? And then there's also the question for President-elect Obama. If he doesn't, what impact does it have on the overall stimulus package that he's trying to put in place? Again, the idea being to buck up the job market. That's a real important step for him. He doesn't want to have his administration kick off and known for high levels of unemployment and recession.

Iraq was the subject of heated debate on Capitol Hill yesterday. In the Senate a Republican attempt to force a vote calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops was rebuffed by Democrats. Senators did approve a special funding bill to provide additional money in this year's budget for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the President signed that measure last night. Meanwhile, members of the House squared off on a non-binding resolution formally defining the war in Iraq as part of the war on terror. Two days of debate ended today with the approval of that resolution. NPR's Don Gonyea has our report.

Well, you know, Israel's existence is real. It's always real. The question is whether its neighbors are willing, after sixty years, to accept its legitimacy and the reality of its presence. Unfortunately, I think this situation is grim. I think that the politics of Syria and Iran, and the most recent incident with Hezbollah in Lebanon, suggests that there's much more Arab animus out there. And the willingness to compromise, the willingness to negotiate, the willingness to live as peaceful neighbors is losing out to a kind of radical Islam. A kind of reluctance to join the modern world of civilized communities.

It isn't. And I think that is - will be one of its key selling features to conservatives on the Hill. I don't see this treaty as being very controversial. What I do see in the Nuclear Posture Review is an attempt to provide a balanced document. There's a lot in there about continued extended deterrence, the continued strategic triad putting more money into the nuclear weapons complex, that I believe have a domestic audience, and that is the Hill, which is, these are some of things that you want. We would like ratification, consent to ratification on START Treaty and CTBT. I agree with Tom - sorry -Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I agree with Tom...

I called off my first wedding, well, now I'm happily married but I called off my wedding six months beforehand because deep down I knew he was not the right guy for me. And I think what made it so difficult was that he was a nice guy. But I knew deep down in my gut that it wasn't going to work. And you had said something earlier. You know, people throw that term around, cold feet. But I think what it boils down to is that cold feet is not necessarily about the change, you know, the fear of making a change in your life, but more about your doubts about a relationship.

Because I think, you know, in the Trump era, you have to resist. But as important is to persist, persist in holding up something affirmative for someone to - for people, voters to believe that we represent a better way of life for them. I don't think we've been specific about an agenda that we would advance if we take a majority. I would simply say that should the American people entrust Democrats with the majority in the House, we will within 30 days have a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill on the floor. We will authorize folks between the ages of 50 and 64 who are getting clobbered with huge health care premiums to buy Medicare as a health insurance option.

It certainly is. The debates changed the trajectory of the race. After the first debate, Romney really got some momentum. The Romney camp thinks that that was a tipping point, the tipping point they were looking for. The president thinks his performance at the second debate brought things more or less back to where they were before the Denver debate, very close. But they believe they have an advantage in the Electoral College. The polls have been volatile and contradictory. We have two today about Ohio. One, Suffolk University, shows a tie and the other, Quinnipiac, shows a five-point lead for the president. So, it does all come down to turnout. That sounds like a cliche, but it's really what it is. And people are beginning to talk about that nightmare scenario where there is a split between - a possible split between the popular vote and the Electoral College vote.

Hi there, thanks for taking my call. Yeah, once again I believe that the electorate is going to be very susceptible to just exactly what's happening in the economy one to two months before the election. And I myself am a Democrat and am very happy with what Obama has done with the economy, especially considering what he inherited. And I would hope that the electorate would be a little more in-depth in their analysis instead of just taking the unemployment numbers, you know, right before the election, look at the two candidates and really evaluate who will be the best candidate. If they're voting for the economy, really decide which one is going to do it rather than just what the numbers are just before.

Well, it depends on the situation at hand. I mean, individual, home by home, yeah, that's a local decision by a homeowner. Whether they're allowed to build in that flood plain is generally governed by a local government of some type in terms of who has the land use authority. The federal government does not get into local land use decisions. Where the federal government does come in is sort of in the restore-repair version, which is the - what I would call the Federal Emergency Management Agency, get the community whole as much as you can after a disaster, particularly a presidentially declared disaster like we've seen.

And lastly, I wanted to also comment that this thing does detect - at least the C variant - it detects if it's in a so-called virtual environment. You know, us security researchers, we spend a lot of time digging through this in a secure environment, like a virtual machine. And it can detect that and not do anything to make our job harder. Well, that inherently protects anybody that does cloud computing or virtualization on their servers because it thinks it's in a little honey pot but it's really in the production server and it will actually protect them. So they got a little added bonus like the Apple and Linux guys at this time around.

Absolutely. Without a doubt, it has all been worth it. I've gotten to travel the world. I've seen most places that people will never get a chance to see. I've met incredible people, made some amazing friends. And to compete for the United States - I've been fortunate enough to be part of the U.S. National Team for the past six years - and to go out and compete with the U.S.A. on your chest is an honor that most people will never get a chance to feel. And whether or not I get to compete in Beijing, I'll still have that, you know, for the rest of my life. And I'm really proud about that.

No, I don't think we are. And I think part of that is because of, I think, sometimes the inability or the unwillingness of our American politicians to see the differences. But I think the other reason it's happening is that those differences are becoming a lot less distinct coming from the other side. I mean traditionally the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, while obviously it has to do with the fact that there's a Jewish state in the midst of otherwise predominantly Muslim countries, most of that has been more of a - that has traditionally been more of a geopolitical issue. I mean the PLO was never really a religious organization. What you're seeing now, though, is more of a fusing of the religious aspect. In fact, you saw leaders from Hamas weighing in on this controversy involving the pope. And so I think because of the Muslim awakening that seems to be going on across the world, particularly in the Middle East, many of the secular leaders are trying to figure out a way to co-opt it so it doesn't completely and totally overrun them. And that's why, now, the religious aspect is just, in a sense, merging into the geopolitical cauldron.

Well, you know, it's entirely likely that both sides are right. One of the White House talking points is that the number of people who could potentially be impacted by these changes is only about one percent of the workforce. Those are basically people who don't have health insurance, they work more than 30 hours and work for companies with more than 50 employees. That's not big enough, they say, to really affect the economy on a macroeconomic level. And clearly it's not. But one percent of the workforce is more than a million people. That's more than enough to make for a lot of anecdotes.

Right. And so this is sort of the follow-up. The Dutch announced just last week that they've caught four, they say, GRU agents with high-tech equipment in a rental car outside the office for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was testing the chemicals apparently used in the attack back in March. Now, they were caught in a rental car. They apparently tried to smash some of this equipment. One of the phones was apparently traced to GRU headquarters in Moscow, had only been used a couple days earlier. They even found a receipt for a taxi from the barracks to the airport in Moscow.

Baker's partner is former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who previously co-chaired the 9/11 Commission. Other heavy hitters in the group include former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA Director Robert Gates, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and former Attorney General Edwin Meese. Earlier this month the group spent four days in Iraq meeting with dozens of Iraqi leaders, as well as with U.S. military commanders. At a news conference today, Baker and Hamilton said they would not be releasing their official assessment of the Iraq situation or their policy recommendations until after the mid-term U.S. elections in November in order to keep their report out of the political debate.

Well, we have looked at the diseases that are causing this, so that one we can say with a fair amount of certainty. And what has happened is that, in these counties, a set of chronic diseases like lung cancer, like diabetes have gone up over this period, and then heart disease, other cardiovascular diseases have been going down. But they are not going down nearly as fast as they used to. So, in some sense, they are being, you know, overshadowed by the increase in things like lung cancer. And we generally associate these diseases with things like smoking, with high blood pressure, with obesity, so it seems that there is a set of factors that have a geographical concentration, have gone up more in women recently, and are causing the set of chronic diseases that is really stopping the longevity gain.

Maybe. And that's one of the things that's, again, so different about it, and it's driven in part by the technology. You know, what's happening in warfare today is we have a whole new generation of weaponry that's moving the human role both geographically but also potentially chronologically from the point of action. That is, you can be thousands of miles away from the physical battlefield but still be carrying out action that matters. Or maybe what you did that matters most is something that happened days, months or even years earlier from when the bomb was dropped or when the computer virus actually kicked in. And so that's what the medal is also trying to recognize, is that, hey, you have this kind of fundamental shift going on in the technology of war. And so if we're trying to recognize the human role in it, we may need to shift our definitions of that.

Obviously, I--we all believe that our children will outlive our lives. To have a driver take my son's life away from me after a senseless choice, I have to tell you--it is a shock that I don't want anyone to have to endure. It's a pain and agony that has taken me now 17 years to try to prevent this from happening. Ed, we all know that this is something that can be presented simply by--it's OK to drink; if you have that passion to drink, have your drink, but don't get behind the wheel after you've had that drink. You're impaired and you may cause death or injury to someone else.

The other possibility that we hope not to happen is that it becomes an opportunity for two more years of finger pointing and saying, no, it's their fault. It's their fault. Democrats saying it's the Republicans fault, and therefore, trying to hold on to the White House. Republicans saying it's the Democrats fault, and therefore, trying to win the White House. We really don't have two years to waste on that kind of scapegoat hunt. We need some solutions, and we need to act now. So here's hoping that the first scenario happens and the new Congress decides to really dive in to this huge challenge of - the systemic challenge of fixing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

You write in your book that--and I'll quote from it--"I decided early in October 2001 to venture away from the tried and true"--and you say--use a term STRs--"used daily in forensic work worldwide, because I knew in my heart that path would not return enough of the missing to their families. Unfortunately, the path I chose left my staff emotionally drained and created problems for my laboratory's daily routines. My decision dragged out the testing by at least two years, probably longer, and it almost killed me. While I'm sorry for the extra work and intense emotional pressure I heaped upon my staff, I will never apologize for bringing loved ones back to their families, loved ones who, without these new technologies, would forever remain nameless." Can you explain what that means, what you did and how--the new territory you had to blaze there to make this work, and why it was such an exhausting situation for you?

I'm very sad about it. I completely understand the family's decision but it's a very sad day. There just is so much that we can ask a family to give for this effort. And as someone who - as a family physician who operated her own clinic, I understand what it takes to do that. So I'm very sad to hear it, but I understand - and these procedures will still be done. There are physicians, including in several university centers, who do procedures for severe fetal anomalies, as Dr. Tiller did. The procedures will be done. It's going to be harder for the women to get there.

I know a lot about these laws. And quite frankly, a lot of them are unconstitutional. We have so many of these townships here in Pennsylvania and they're always passing these laws. And it's amazing some of these - there are just - a lot of them are so vague and they call for such subjective enforcement that they're really - a lot of them aren't unconstitutional on their face. But (unintelligible) - as someone who's actually experienced some of these personally, I've been stopped in a few of the townships. And I understand what the other guest is saying about changing behavior and, you know, the whole broken glass theory about targeting bad behavior from its initial course.

You know, when I listen to this, the thing that jumps out at me - well, there's a lot there. But one of the things she mentioned is that she had been considered to be pre-diabetic. That means her blood sugar levels were elevated. And she's certainly not alone. There are 80 million Americans who have elevated blood sugar levels. This is a huge problem because everybody knows that when you go on to develop diabetes, your risks of everything go up. So I think the point here is that we tend to get lost in the weeds of - oh, is it carbs or is it fat? You know, we have this obsession with this sort of carb-fat fight. And I think in some ways, it's just asking the wrong question because we should kind of focus on what we do know. What she pointed out - she said she lost, I think, 14 pounds. There was this very, very important study done about 10 years ago called the Diabetes Prevention Program study.

Well, they did - you know, I don't buy the argument that they're on the descendency because I don't know what that word means, but I do make the case that, you know, while they don't always get their candidate, we've seen in Utah for example Orrin Hatch may not have been the choice of the Tea Party, but because of a threat from a challenge from the Tea Party, he moved further and further to the right in 2012. And so in some sense, they got a win there. But yesterday in Kansas, in state legislative contests, there's been a longtime battle between the so-called moderate wing of the Republican Party and the very conservative wing of the Republican Party, and the conservatives seemed to clean up.

Gibbons hails from tiny Sparks, Nevada, and he's delighted in painting Titus as an outsider. She still carries a thick accent from her native Georgia. Lately, though, Titus has gotten a big boost from the many high-profile Democrats who've been visiting Nevada now that it matters in the 2008 presidential nominating game. The state's presidential caucus has been moved up to just after Iowa's, and that makes the gaming state a player in a very big casino. The morning after her debate with Gibbons, Titus showed up at the Coffee Pub Restaurant looking a little weary. For months, she's been canvassing the state trying to conquer her biggest challenge, picking up votes in what Nevadans call the cow counties.

Sure, probably around your electrical outlets, your switches, anything that's on an exterior wall. I always like to go into--like, for example up in New England, we have a lot of basements, and I always like to go into the basement in a house with the lights off on a sunny day. And I look around the perimeter for any signs of light. And if I see a crack or a hole or a void, fill it with a foam, an expandable foam. Closed-cell insulation expands into those little cavities and actually cuts down on the drafts tremendously. In your attic, you can go up into the attic and you can look for light shining down. So you go up in the attic during the night, turn the lights off, and you look for a light shining through, whether or not it's coming up around the chimney, for example, or through recessed light fixtures or your attic door. All those things are leaking heat away and taking it away from you. So you want to basically keep it in the house.

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Last May, German investigators arrested someone they suspected of being an al-Qaida operative, and they found out that he was carrying several memory chips, and one of them contained a pornographic video. But when the investigators took a closer look, they found that embedded inside that video file were hundreds of secret documents: maps, memos, plans and the like. It's called steganography, hiding one piece of information inside of another, and it's a common practice. But how do they do that? Well, joining me to talk about it is Peter Wayner. He's author of the book "Disappearing Cryptography: Information Hiding: Steganography & Watermarking," now in its third edition. He joins me by phone. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

Yes. I think that's accurate. Hamas has been systematically attacking the security compounds controlled by Fatah security forces and targeting the homes of several senior Fatah officials. And they appear to be gaining more and more ground as this fighting continues. When you talk to Fatah fighters on the street, there's lots of bluster, Renee. They have this sort of we have not yet begun to fight talk. And Fatah-controlled national security forces last night issued a tough-worded statement saying the patience of these forces is over and hit back hard now against this coup. But the fact is, Fatah right now is losing the fight to the Islamists of Hamas, who appear in many cases to be better organized, in some cases better armed and perhaps more committed to their cause. They see their leaders as religious leaders, not political or civilian officials.

Yes, I mean, obviously my mother had a profound influence on my life, and it's an unforgettable experience when you're taken away from your family. It's - you don't do it voluntarily. And I felt that I could not do anything. I could not change what she was feeling and that (unintelligible) is that God was punishing her through me, and because if you look at the Bible and almost every scripture in every faith, it talks about leprosy in a very negative way. Everything is linked back to sin. So my mother thought that she was sinful - epicalora, as is said in Spanish.

And indeed, as we spoke - and I looked around the edges of the crowd and suddenly, there were 15 or 20 strange, very, very scary looking men who had moved in. And they were, you know, whispering to each other. They were looking at him very, very aggressively. And I thought I was witnessing a man basically committing suicide. Finally, we were pushed in the bus and in the kind of commotion, I couldn't see what happened to him. But just as we left, he yelled out, take my name! take my name! Otherwise, I'll be on the death list tomorrow.

Yeah, the indictment that the federal prosecutors unsealed is pretty outstanding in the breadth and scope of the allegations that were included in there - accusations that some of these officers were hanging people over balconies, savagely beating some drug defendants. And the overall scheme that was alleged was that these narcotics cops were beating and targeting drug dealers, stealing their money, and then fabricating police reports, kind of to cover up their crimes - confident in the belief that because, you know, they were cops, no one would take a drug dealer's word over theirs, if anyone came forward to speak out against them.

Well, it's not exactly what we're seeing. I mean, it's certainly after the uprisings in the Arab world - in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Yemen and elsewhere - which were initially voiced in a language of democracy and freedoms and so on, Islamists naturally did well. And I think those of us who know the region would expect that. Islamists have been the most powerful political force over the last 30 or 40 years. And when there were elections, Islamists succeeded. The question is, are those Islamists who are committed to democracy - I think that's clear in Tunisia and Egypt - are they committed to democracy where minorities are guaranteed equal rights and citizenship as those in the majority? And I think many of us in Egypt are at least questioning that to some extent.

Well I think that's a real feeling to pay attention to, because gift-giving is an important way that we show our love, and that we glue our culture together. And one of the rules of gift giving is, somebody gives you something, you should give them something back. But I can tell those people that people appreciate very much a small token, especially if you spent a little bit of time and a little bit of thought on it. What my partner and I do every year is we bake. We bake a lot of biscotti and then we wrap them up looking nice, and we give them to our friends. And everyone is just as happy with that as they would be with the big gift. Now, we don't have children, and it is harder to do, because kids want what everybody else has. But I think even kids can understand, especially if their parents are in tough straits and they live in the same world we do, and they understand that things are hard now.

Your company launches a search for an open position. The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. Now the choosing begins. Person A: Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations. All the right stuff. Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. But remember — both are qualified. So I ask you: who are you going to pick? My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. We call A "the Silver Spoon," the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. And we call B "the Scrapper," the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point. You just heard a human resources director refer to people as Silver Spoons and Scrappers — (Laughter) which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. But before my human resources certification gets revoked — (Laughter) let me explain. A resume tells a story. And over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt, that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away. A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability. Or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the Scrapper deserves an interview. To be clear, I don't hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life has been engineered toward success, how will you handle the tough times? One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. Eventually, he quit. But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed? I want to urge you to interview the Scrapper. I know a lot about this because I am a Scrapper. Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. Our lives were one part "Cuckoo's Nest," one part "Awakenings" and one part "A Beautiful Mind." (Laughter) I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and Scrappers, because my life could easily have turned out very differently. As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality. Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call Post Traumatic Growth. In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. One-third. Take this resume. This guy's parents give him up for adoption. He never finishes college. He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs. In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. In the US, 35 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. What's remarkable — among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful. One of my colleagues had his life completely upended as a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside, the schools were closed and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16, when he got a job in a clothing factory. But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. Eleven years later, when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. He had three months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. So, every day he came home from the factory, took a nap, studied until 4am, went back to work and repeated this cycle every day for three months. He did it, he succeeded. His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. Today, he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard. Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. When things don't turn out well, Scrappers ask, "What can I do differently to create a better result?" Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevents them from giving up on themselves, kind of like if you've survived poverty, a crazy father and several muggings, you figure, "Business challenges? — (Laughter) Really? Piece of cake. I got this." (Laughter) And that reminds me — humor. Scrappers know that humor gets you through the tough times, and laughter helps you change your perspective. And finally, there are relationships. People who overcome adversity don't do it alone. Somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. Having someone you can count on no matter what is essential to overcoming adversity. I was lucky. In my first job after college, I didn't have a car, so I carpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. Along the way I've met many people who've provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. These people don't mind that I once worked as a singing waitress to help pay for college. (Laughter) I'll leave you with one final, valuable insight. Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S&P 500 by 25 percent. So back to my original question. Who are you going to bet on: Silver Spoon or Scrapper? I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose. Hire the Scrapper. (Applause)

Yes, that's right. Our cluster of CRE bacteria began in summer of 2011. And it began with a patient who came in with the bacteria, who was a carrier of the bacteria, which means as Dr. Spellberg mentioned that the bacteria were essentially living peacefully in that patient. But even when the bacteria are living peacefully, they are still transmissible. So what happened despite our putting the patient in isolation is that we had transmission of the bacteria to other patients. And in total the cluster lasted from the summer of 2011 until the summer of 2012, resulted in nine patients with bloodstream infections and 10 patients who just became carriers.

Well, Neal, I don't know if you ever had one of these Christmas's, but I did. I remember my mother coming to us and saying, it's as if she had just thought of it, hey, I have an idea, let's have a home made Christmas this year. And basically, my husband just told this, too. He's one of 13 children and he said that one year, his parents basically announced we're not purchasing presents. We will buy ingredients for you to make something, but we're going to have a creative Christmas. And when I asked him, how that went, he said, well, I'll tell you this much, it was really memorable.

It did. The timing, though, was just oddly perfect. Here he was in a gorgeous, you know, sunny, spring morning in Prague, an outdoor square, tens of thousands of people, to talk about nuclear nonproliferation, the danger of the spread of nuclear weapons. And the speech was rewritten just a bit to insert a couple of paragraphs about North Korea. But again, as you said, it was a speech about nonproliferation. The president called it in the speech the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. And no doubt people were thinking about North Korea when, very early in the speech, Mr. Obama made this statement in Prague this morning.

Well, not just that. The Toomey ads and his support groups are out there saying that there's liberal, there's very liberal and then there's Sestak. I mean, that this guy is so ultraliberal that he's beyond the pail even in a state like Pennsylvania, which has voted Democratic recently. The suggestion, again, is that Joe Sestak is a clone of Nancy Pelosi, does exactly what the speaker wants, votes a hundred percent of the time with Nancy Pelosi, ad after ad assailing him on that. The Toomey campaign has been careful. They recognize and they honor him - that is the admiral - for his military service. Joe Sestak has 31 years - had 31 years in the U.S. Navy. They recognize and honor that, but then they just go on to savage him for being a left-wing radical.

First place I'd like to take you is what many believe will be the world's deepest natural abyss. And I say believe because this process is still ongoing. Right now there are major expeditions being planned for next year that I'll talk a little bit about. One of the things that's changed here, in the last 150 years since Jules Verne had great science-fiction concepts of what the underworld was like, is that technology has enabled us to go to these places that were previously completely unknown and speculated about. We can now descend thousands of meters into the Earth with relative impunity. Along the way we've discovered fantastic abysses and chambers so large that you can see for hundreds of meters without a break in the line of sight. When you go on a thing like this, we can usually be in the field for anywhere from two to four months, with a team as small as 20 or 30, to as big as 150. And a lot of people ask me, you know, what kind of people do you get for a project like this? While our selection process is not as rigorous as NASA, it's nonetheless thorough. We're looking for competence, discipline, endurance, and strength. In case you're wondering, this is our strength test. (Laughter) But we also value esprit de corps and the ability to diplomatically resolve inter-personal conflict while under great stress in remote locations. We have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance. From the entrance, this is nothing like a commercial cave. You're looking at Camp Two in a place called J2, not K2, but J2. We're roughly two days from the entrance at that point. And it's kind of like a high altitude mountaineering trip in reverse, except that you're now running a string of these things down. The idea is to try to provide some measure of physical comfort while you're down there, otherwise in damp, moist, cold conditions in utterly dark places. I should mention that everything you're seeing here, by the way, is artificially illuminated at great effort. Otherwise it is completely dark in these places. The deeper you go, the more you run into a conflict with water. It's basically like a tree collecting water coming down. And eventually you get to places where it is formidable and dangerous and unfortunately slides just don't do justice. So I've got a very brief clip here that was taken in the late 1980s. So descend into Huautla Plateau in Mexico. (Video) Now I have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous. We would not do this today unless we were doing it for film. (Laughter) Along that same line, I have to tell you that with the spate of Hollywood movies that came out last year, we have never seen monsters underground — at least the kind that eat you. If there is a monster underground, it is the crushing psychological remoteness that begins to hit every member of the team once you cross about three days inbound from the nearest entrance. Next year I'll be leading an international team to J2. We're going to be shooting from minus 2,600 meters — that's a little over 8,600 feet down — at 30 kilometers from the entrance. The lead crews will be underground for pushing 30 days straight. I don't think there's been a mission like that in a long time. Eventually, if you keep going down in these things, probability says that you're going to run into a place like this. It's a place where there's a fold in the geologic stratum that collects water and fills to the roof. And when you used to find these things, they would put a label on a map that said terminal siphon. Now I remember that term really well for two reasons. Number one, it's the name of my rock band, and second, is because the confrontation of these things forced me to become an inventor. And we've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this. This is some life-support equipment closed-cycle. And you can use that now to go for many kilometers horizontally underwater and to depths of 200 meters straight down underwater. When you do this kind of stuff it's like doing EVA. It's like doing extra-vehicular activity in space, but at much greater distances, and at much greater physical peril. So it makes you think about how to design your equipment for long range, away from a safe haven. Here's a clip from a National Geographic movie that came out in 1999. (Video) Narrator: Exploration is a physical process of putting your foot in places where humans have never stepped before. This is where the last little nugget of totally unknown territory remains on this planet. To experience it is a privilege. Bill Stone: That was taken in Wakulla Springs, Florida. Couple of things to note about that movie. Every piece of equipment that you saw in there did not exist before 1999. It was developed within a two-year period and used on actual exploratory projects. This gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper, and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave, and it happened to be underwater in Wakulla Springs. It was that gadget that serendipitously opened a door to another unexplored world. This is Europa. Carolyn Porco mentioned another one called Enceladus the other day. This is one of the places where planetary scientists believe there is a highest probability of the detection of the first life off earth in the ocean that exists below there. For those who have never seen this story, Jim Cameron produced a really wonderful IMAX movie couple of years ago, called "Aliens of the Deep." There was a brief clip — (Video) Narrator: A mission to explore under the ice of Europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge. Europa is so far away that even at the speed of light, it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle. It has to be smart enough to avoid terrain hazards and to find a good landing site on the ice. Now we have to get through the ice. You need a melt probe. It's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo. The ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep. Week after week, the melt probe will sink of its own weight through the ancient ice, until finally — Now, what are you going to do when you reach the surface of that ocean? You need an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle. It needs to be one smart puppy, able to navigate and make decisions on its own in an alien ocean. BS: What Jim didn't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier NASA had funded a team I assembled to develop a prototype for the Europa AUV. I mean, I cut through three years of engineering meetings, design and system integration, and introduced DEPTHX — Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer. And as the movie says, this is one smart puppy. It's got 96 sensors, 36 onboard computers, 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code, packs more than 10 kilos of TNT in electrical onboard equivalent. This is the target site, the world's deepest hydrothermal spring at Cenote Zacaton in northern Mexico. It's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything. This is part of DEPTHX's mission. There are two primary targets we're doing here. One is, how do you do science autonomy underground? How do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist? There are more stages involved here than I've got time to tell you about, but basically we drive through the space, we populate it with environmental variables — sulphide, halide, things like that. We calculate gradient surfaces, and drive the bot over to a wall where there's a high probability of life. We move along the wall, in what's called proximity operations, looking for changes in color. If we see something that looks interesting, we pull it into a microscope. If it passes the microscopic test, we go for a collection. We either draw in a liquid sample, or we can actually take a solid core from the wall. No hands at the wheel. This is all behavioral autonomy here that's being conducted by the robot on its own. The real hat trick for this vehicle, though, is a disruptive new navigation system we've developed, known as 3D SLAM, for simultaneous localization and mapping. DEPTHX is an all-seeing eyeball. Its sensor beams look both forward and backward at the same time, allowing it to do new exploration while it's still achieving geometric sensor-lock on what it's gone through already. What I'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that's ever been done. This May, we're going to go from minus 1,000 meters in Zacaton, and if we're very lucky, DEPTHX will bring back the first robotically-discovered division of bacteria. The next step after that is to test it in Antartica and then, if the funding continues and NASA has the resolution to go, we could potentially launch by 2016, and by 2019 we may have the first evidence of life off this planet. What then of manned space exploration? The government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024. The successful conclusion of that mission will result in infrequent visitation of the moon by a small number of government scientists and pilots. It will leave us no further along in the general expansion of humanity into space than we were 50 years ago. Something fundamental has to change if we are to see common access to space in our lifetime. What I'm going to show you next are a couple of controversial ideas. And I hope you'll bear with me and have some faith that there's credibility behind what we're going to say here. There are three underpinnings of working in space privately. One of them is the requirement for economical earth-to-space transport. The Bert Rutans and Richard Bransons of this world have got this in their sights and I salute them. Go, go, go. The next thing we need are places to stay on orbit. Orbital hotels to start with, but workshops for the rest of us later on. The final missing piece, the real paradigm-buster, is this: a gas station on orbit. It's not going to look like that. If it existed, it would change all future spacecraft design and space mission planning. Now, to give you a chance to understand why there is power in that statement, I've got to give you the basics of Space 101. And the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram. Anybody drink one of these here this week? You'd pay 10,000 dollars for that in orbit. That's more than you pay for TED, if Google dropped their sponsorship. (Laughter) The second is more than 90 percent of the weight of a vehicle is in propellant. Thus, every time you'd want to do anything in space, you are literally blowing away enormous sums of money every time you hit the accelerator. Not even the guys at Tesla can fight that physics. So, what if you could get your gas at a 10th the price? There is a place where you can. In fact, you can get it better — you can get it at 14 times lower if you can find propellant on the moon. There is a little-known mission that was launched by the Pentagon, 13 years ago now, called Clementine. And the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon. That signal was so strong, it could only have been produced by 10 trillion tons of water buried in the sediment, collected over millions and billions of years by the impact of asteroids and comet material. If we're going to get that, and make that gas station possible, we have to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload through space. We can't do that right now. The way you normally build a system right now is you have a tube stack that has to be launched from the ground, and resist all kinds of aerodynamic forces. We have to beat that. We can do it because in space there are no aerodynamics. We can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything. This is an idea that, again, came out of Livermore back in 1989, with Dr. Lowell Wood's group. And we can extend that now to just about everything. Bob Bigelow currently has a test article in the orbit. We can go much further. We can build space tugs, orbiting platforms for holding cryogens and water. There's another thing. When you're coming back from the moon, you have to deal with orbital mechanics. It says you're moving 10,000 feet per second faster than you really want to be to get back to your gas station. You got two choices. You can burn rocket fuel to get there, or you can do something really incredible. You can dive into the stratosphere, and precisely dissipate that velocity, and come back out to the space station. It has never been done. It's risky and it's going to be one hell of a ride — better than Disney. The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency. If you try to do that for the moon, you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there. But if you send a mining team there, without the return propellant, first — (Laughter) Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez? This is not like that. I'm much more like Scotty. I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it so we're not going to burn the gear. But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it, and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done. There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years. That's not true. In seven years, we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit. We're living in one of the most exciting times in history. We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space. The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to the general exploration. To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed. We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Lewis and Clark expedition to Shackleton crater, to mine the moon for resources, and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit. Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing. I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED. I intend to lead that expedition. (Applause) It can be done in seven years with the right backing. Those who join me in making it happen will become a part of history and join other bold individuals from time past who, had they been here today, would have heartily approved. There was once a time when people did bold things to open the frontier. We have collectively forgotten that lesson. Now we're at a time when boldness is required to move forward. 100 years after Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote these words, I intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier, in our time, for all of us. Thank you. (Applause)

Well, I think she's partially right, and certainly the Racing Medication Testing Consortium, which is a national group that's looking at this problem, has specifically stated that any licensee, including the veterinarian, must be held accountable. Really a problem in horse racing is what we have the trainer-insurer rule, which basically says the trainer is responsible for everything. He certainly has control over the veterinarian--control over the horse and the veterinarian. But what it has done is our regulatory agencies don't really get to the root of the problem, and I agree a hundred percent. Whoever the culpable individual is needs to be held accountable. Unfortunately today--when I first started practicing, there was one barn for each stable. Now there's eight, 10 veterinarians that operate in the barn independently, and regulating that's going to be difficult, but I agree a hundred percent that whoever's involved needs to be held accountable, not just the trainer. If a veterinarian's at fault, they need to be held accountable.

And Robert O'Connell, you write that Hannibal was a genius at military tactics but that he really should have known from the very beginning there was no way he was going to win. Mr. O'CONNELL: That's really true, Neal. Carthage was essentially a naval power, and Hannibal was a land general through a sort of odd turn of circumstance. And he was invading a country that was basically strange territory, and it had huge manpower resources which Carthage didn't have. And actually, the Carthaginians weren't that enthusiastic about this particular war. So they only reinforced Hannibal one time with a small contingent in the entire time he was in - on the Italian Peninsula, which was 13 years.

And I think it's really ironic at a time that some Republicans in leadership, including the guy who's the head of the Republican National Committee, are trying to make strides to make some - use some really concrete, practical, attractive ways of getting blacks interested in the Republican Party and say these are the reasons why you should not allow the Democratic Party take you for granted. Then you have this kind of stuff and it makes people say, well, wait a minute now, what's going on here. This is the real Republican Party. This is what, these are the real folks. And that's why we don't want - we, black people, are not interested in what they may have to offer in terms of programs and platforms. So it's incumbent upon...

That a lot of the general managers, as I said, draft off of intangibles and not what a player can actually do. Matt Leinart was in a situation in USC where he played with so much talent, it was hard for any quarterback who is halfway decent to not succeed. Vince Young played in a gimmick system at Texas where he was able to do whatever he wanted to, and he's found out in the pros that he's not able to do that. So it just comes down to - the NFL has a different type of game than college football. You're not going to have a loaded team around you all the time where you going to have plays that jump off Reggie Bush from five yards in the flat and he can make plays downfield. Reggie Bush is not a quarterback, but he's also a player that came out and he's also struggled in the NFL.

We will, on May 31st, in Washington DC, in a public meeting that hopefully will be televised on C-Span and other cable outlets, we will reconsider our penalty in light of what Robert said, that the voters should not be penalized. We will give a fair settlement to both states, regardless of the candidates who might be leading, who might be behind. We will come up with a fair recommendation to the body. And I hope that the 48 states that comply with the rules will accept our resolution, and we can go forward toward the convention unified as one party.

But the choice of vice president matters. There are some issues that really resonate with those voters, as well. The judiciaries are a very big issue because that's where we've been deciding, unfortunately, in my view, a lot of the social issues for about 30 years now and John McCain will have some very good issues to raise. And you know, frankly, everybody doesn't like the hot-button issue of abortion but Obama's position on abortion is really quite extreme even by standards of the last several elections. In Illinois, he voted against the bill that would have required the saving of the life of a baby born alive in abortion. There are a small number of such instances where the baby is not aborted, where it's born live, and he voted against the requiring of the saving of the life of that baby. That puts him in as about as extreme a position with pro-life voters as anybody they've ever seen. And I think some of that just has to come out a little bit more on the course of the campaign.

Well, I think the first thing is to understand what is the actual definition of human trafficking that we're talking about? And trafficking in laypersons' terms boils down to three categories. First, we're talking about children that are involved in the commercial sex trade who have some sort of pimp. So you're looking for kids under the age of 18 that are engaging in commercial sex. The second thing that you're looking for is adults who are in the sex trade, who are there through some sort of force, violence, control, manipulation, lies, threats. And the third thing you're looking for is that labor trafficking category. It includes both adults and kids, and you're looking for some sort of third-party control. You're looking for those elements of control, whether or not they're force, fraud coercion.

You know, clearly we've been hearing about the implications of migration from New Orleans; the displacement of a million people, which has had implications for our labor market; implications for the labor market, the education--and as you say, Farai, literally every institution in the places where there are concentrations: Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge--are places that have seen lots. And Houston, I think, has taken so many people that we've heard more about that. Hey, we've got to suck it up. These are American citizens too. The challenge here seems to me to be that people are not looking at these folks as citizens but, instead, as aliens. And so, what if there were some other kind of disaster where we had to absorb people? We've done it in the past, and we can do it now. I won't accuse Houstonians of being ungenerous because I don't think that that's what the case is. But I think that there has been some dislocation of resources and that the federal government really has dropped the ball here in making sure that those people who've been displaced have their displacement cushioned.

Well, let me just give you - let me just sort of paint the picture, first of all. You've got local levee boards that have certain sets of responsibilities. Local parishes that operate pumps. Cities and state government agencies, federal agencies, The Corps of Engineers itself with multiple agencies, and then Congress providing marching orders and dollars to fuel all this. But the problem is that no one entity has any comprehensive set of authority or responsibility to look at the whole system. That's why it developed piecemeal. Furthermore, if you're a levee designer, you need to make some assumptions about whether trees are going to be allowed to grow on the levees, for example. Trees are a very bad thing on levees during hurricanes because they blow over, they pull out giant root balls and extract huge masses of earth from the levee. That's a very bad thing.

Remember, we're not talking efficient warfare where almost any major use of force, even if it's a few combat aircraft, can suddenly make people panic or change their alignments. And a no-fly zone might really have some impact there but it also in some ways is simply the easiest thing to call for. And the problem with calling for it is that, yes, you might stop a few helicopters and you might stop a few fighters, but to make it work and make it safe you've got to get rid of their surface-to-air missile defenses. And if even a limited number of those are operational, you've committed an act of war and you've committed yourself politically.

And I don't think that's terribly surprising. I think that the nature of the polls in this particular election year is such that the two candidates have been tightly, tightly fixed around a number which is 45, and one candidate or the other goes up, usually it's Barack Obama goes up a few points, and then the other candidate comes back up and they come back down to joining at 45 again, that seems to be the conjunct point. And we've seen that dynamic now for some weeks between these two candidates. And I think that what benefit that Barack Obama might have otherwise gotten out of this convention, his convention rather, would have to have been said to have been done in to some large degree by the shift of attention to the Republican choice, which as a surprise, took over the news and as an interesting, dynamic, mediagenic personality person, kept taking over the media conversation for the next two or three days, and then lost it to Hurricane Gustav. So I think at this point, we have seen the Denver convention subsumed into other much larger, much fresher, rather, news stories. And so that has dimmed its effect.

Well, I think in both countries you have a percentage female students that's less than 50 percent as part of the student population. And so one of the things I like to think I do is to role model for students that there is a place for you in higher education. One thing that I learned in Afghanistan was that instead of feeling suppressed or oppressed or a second-class citizen, I became what's known as a third gender. The first gender would be men, whether they're Afghan men or Western men. The second gender would be Afghan women. And then the third gender is a Western woman, which is what I am. This really helped me with recruiting efforts. I could go into an Afghan household, meet with the male head of the family and his brothers. Then I could go to the other room and meet with the women. A Western male would not be able to do that. So in a certain sense I had a lot more access, a lot more influence. So when I joined the university in Afghanistan, we had 18 percent female enrollment, or about one in five. And I'm proud to report the freshman class this year, coming into the American University of Afghanistan, is 50 percent female. So we did this, we moved the needle in two years on the percent female.

Well, this applies to about $200 billion in imported products from China. Now, only about a quarter of those are consumer goods. They do not include things like toys and footwear that were exempted by the Trump administration. They do include things like bicycles and pet food, certain kinds of building supplies. These products can still come into the United States from China just like they always have, but they will face a tariff or a tax of 25 percent instead of the 10 percent they pay now. And this will have to be paid by the company that imports them at the port where they're brought in.

Well, not really, because I'm - my - you know, I - we discovered it because we were working in a particular area. I'm not really working on that. I work on things that interest me. And now what interests me is the fantastic results from about six weeks ago from NASA - the detection of C60 in space. Because when we discovered it, we found it in - under conditions produced in carbon stars. We reproduced the conditions in the carbon star in the laboratory. And at that point, it was telling us that maybe this stuff was coming out of the stars as well. And in 1995, with Mike Jura at UCLA, we published a paper suggesting that if it was in space, it should be responsible for some very puzzling features that have been known for 90 years called the diffuse interstellar bands. And I think now that it's been detecting in space, that particular paper looks really rather interesting.

I mean, I think that it's very hard for most us to read old English right now, so we already have these examples of being - of having aspects of language lost to us. And there is a loss, but there is also a gain with the sort of creativity and punning and rebuses that a lot of these textisms - are created, and we have a history of creating these. You know, the term IOU - which doesn't cause many of us to, you know, stop and say oh, that's horrible - is, you know, really a textism that was, I think - 17th or 18th century is when it was created. So I think that we're better adept at shifting and understanding different layers of meaning and history than maybe we give ourselves credit to. And I think that kids are more adept at code-switching - as switching from 2, the number 2, to T-W-O, than a lot of educators or teachers or parents give them credit for.

Well, on one level, Boehner is completely correct. If the talk is wipe the slate clean and start over, that was never going to happen. And that is not going to happen. Boehner is absolutely right about that. If they're not going have a plan, well, that's not true either. They do have a plan that's been moving forward on Capitol Hill with some dispatch. They're congregating around a few key principles. So it's pretty expensive - $100 billion over 10 years to fund some of the high-risk individuals. They're cohering around a plan. What's interesting to me is it's an old conservative free market plan, which is a built around tax credits and people - individuals buying their own health insurance. It's not the Donald Trump mantra. It's a plan that will shift risk and shift choice down to the individual and the family level. And whether actual Trump voters want that additional risk - that additional choice - that's not clear to me.

Mr. HARRY CONNICK, JR. (Actor): (As Narrator) Skip died, daddy said. He and my mama wrapped him in my baseball jacket. They buried him out under the elm tree, they said. That wasn't totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart. Oh, wipe away those tears. Since then, A.O. Scott has reviewed thousands of movies - good ones, bad ones, animated films, documentaries, dramas, romantic comedies. As we approach the end of the decade and as Tony Scott nears the end of his first 10 years as a reviewer for the Times, he's compiled two lists of the best movies and the most influential movies from - well, whatever it is we're calling this decade. The aughts never really caught on.

NPR's business news starts with a little relief in world financial markets. Asian and European stocks are climbing in value this morning. That follows yesterday's strong rally on Wall Street in which stocks erased the losses of Tuesday's terrible day. The market improved partly because investors were hunting for bargains, and then in the last hour of trade investors got a second wind on positive words from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He sent a letter to Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer in which he said the Fed would step in and take action if necessary. Those were seen as soothing words by traders, who were jumpy about the turmoil in the credit markets. Still, economists say the markets will probably remain unstable until the Fed's next meeting almost three weeks from now.

For another thing, Retired Judge Michael Mukasey, who had first seemed a shoo- in for attorney general, has run into stormy weather in a Senate Judiciary Committee over the issue of torture. As to say whether water boarding, simulated drowning can be defined as torture, Mukasey refused to answer. The White House pleas that he doesn't know, because he doesn't have access to classified documents. Say what? A nominee for attorney general can't see secret documents? The administration is not having much better luck in the courts. In a criminal trial in Dallas, the federal prosecutor accused a Muslim charity of giving material support to terrorists. Under a Bush executive order, much of the evidence was not produced in public. In the end, the jury rendered a not guilty verdict for one defendant on all but one count. On the other 196 counts, the jury could not agree and there was a mistrial. The government had lost previous similar cases in Chicago and Tampa, Florida.

Well, it's not so much a new definition, but it's rather a -understanding why it works. The new definition is that objects that are round, that who's - who are massive enough that the gravity crashes them into a round shape, and orbit a star, should be a planet. And the reason why that's works well is that when we look at all the objects of the solar system that we've seen over the last 40 years with spacecraft, we see processes that - on many objects that we've likened to processes we see on the Earth — atmospheric processes, volcanism, tectonics. And if you group all the objects together which share these geophysical-type processes - sharing some or all of them - we find that all of them are round.

But now, African-Americans have a choice. They don't have to be forced to vote Democratic. They can vote anyway they want, and they can vote for the candidates they wish to vote for. And if they agree with the values that Ken Blackwell has--those, by the way, are the same values that I was raised with in my household, by my parents, my African-American parents--who are, I guess, from a voting standpoint, who in the past were Democrat. When people hear the values that Ken Blackwell has, and the vision that he has for the state of Ohio, he's going to get a good percentage of those votes.

Well, this is exactly what Marines had been doing in Fallujah, as they have been doing for the last year, which is going through and mostly doing foot patrols in the city--I mean, maintaining a presence, as they say. Often this involves, you know, handing out candies and sweets, you know. And often also, the Marines say, they get a mixture of very cold stares, a lot of anger still because of, as Annie described, the quite widespread destruction of the city. I mean, there are hardly any of the 50,000 structures in that city that were untouched by that offensive one year ago. So there's still a lot of residual anger, as you can imagine, as people begin to rebuild, but also, people who are happy that the city is surrounded still and, basically, people prevented from coming in or out, and there's such strict controls. I mean, what I found was people were--you know, as much as they feel that the security circumstances in which they're living are onerous, they also recognize that this is the kind of circumstance that has allowed them to vote in such large numbers in Fallujah and also to, in fact, in many ways kind of take some of the Sunni political power for themselves, because they've been, per capita, the most political people in Iraq in the course of the last year among Sunnis.

And I convinced my partners that we should fill that need. That's classic business 101. That's what economics is all about. You see the need, and you fill it. And I think that so many people in those underserved communities around the country, and especially here in New Orleans, have demonstrated loyalty of brand, loyalty of stores because they've traveled a good half hour to get to your store on a consistent basis. And all they ask is that maybe you can bring the product to us. And so that's what Sterling Farms is all about - making sure that people have access to decent, affordable fresh food groceries.

Michael Kahn, artistic director, thank you, asked me to direct "Romeo and Juliet," and I had to hunt around for a way to make the play feel fresh and interesting for me, and I also hope for our audiences. It's just - it's because it is the best-known play by Shakespeare. It's the one we first read. It's the one we've seen the most number of times. And I was hunting around for a way to make it interesting again, for us to provide a new lens in a way that didn't feel put on, or, you know, like I was setting the play in a period that felt like might work but wasn't ultimately getting at was the heart of the play. And so I thought, what better way than to try to do this all-male convention, which I'd seen - you know, done a numbers of times, were very successfully over the last 10 years. A lot of most influential productions I had seen had done it. But I'd never seen anyone try to do it with a love story.

Yes. You know, I really commend your speaker there and all those who are so entrusted in trying to provide relief to these African countries, but the fact of the matter is that these countries are so corrupt and the leaders are so corrupt, and I can assure you that this forgiveness that we are talking about here--and I won't be surprised if these leaders actually go into these banks in their homeland and take out that money, that they use for themselves and their families. It is so--you have to--I mean, it's one thing to talk about these in theory, but you have to prepare to experience what these leaders do.

It was just so scary, you know, because I'm like, they still need help. We need hospitals. So once we got to the house, we called around to a hospice, because my brother, I had him and he was in hospice in New Orleans. So I found out there was Genesis Hospice out there. I contacted them and they came out immediately with mattresses and oxygen and stuff getting him together. So there was Rita right behind Katrina. The lights went out in Baton Rouge from Rita, like a day and a half. He started having anxiety attacks, because he felt that he couldn't breathe without the big mobile oxygen tank. So we did have the little portable ones, but he just felt like he couldn't breathe. It wasn't enough coming through. So he started having anxiety attacks and stuff, and he started just deteriorating.

Well, small businesses are at the heart of the American economy. In fact, small businesses, those like Molly, who have less than 50 employees, have actually created 303,000 jobs this year so far. It's an indisputable fact that raising tax rates, the top marginal tax rate, dividends, capital gains tax rates, will, in fact, affect small businesses in America. Senator McCain wants to keep those taxes where they are. He's also supportive of the kinds of policies that would make it easier for Molly to have employees work for her, such as a credit for a health insurance for every employee in America. So you would get 5,000 dollars toward a private health insurance policy. That would take the pressure off someone like Molly in providing those benefits, try to address the energy cost that they face.

(Singing) The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. The sun's not simply made out of gas. No, no, no. The sun is a quagmire. It's not made of fire. Forget what you've been told in the past. Plasma. Electrons are free. Plasma. Fourth state of matter. Not gas, not liquid, not solid. The sun isn't a red dwarf. I hope it never morphs into a supernova'd collapsed orb, orb, orb, orb. The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. I forget what I was told by myself, elf, elf, elf. Plasma. Electrons are free. Plasma. Fourth state of matter. Not gas, not liquid, not solid. Plasma. Forget that song. Plasma. They got it wrong. That thesis has been rendered invalid. Forget that song�

It's not just that. It's really also a much broader argument that Stern and his allies make, which is that the AFL-CIO should force its own members to start merging so that you'll have very big unions able to take on the very big international corporations and chains that we have now like Wal-Mart or Federal Express. Stern's argument is that with 56 different unions from large to small, all competing amongst each other, they just cannot deal with companies that are international or cover the entire country, and it takes a whole different organizing strategy. And he does want a lot more money put into organizing, yes.

Right. So we just heard from the sheriff of San Diego, who was actually able to identify the suspect that's in custody right now and being questioned. They identified him as John T. Earnest. He's a 19-year-old white male from San Diego with no criminal record. Currently, the authorities are working to get search warrants for his residence, his vehicle and the synagogue. They were also able to give us an update on the victims. As you mentioned, there is one adult female who is dead. One adult man is actually in surgery right now at the Palomar Medical Center. One adult male is in stable condition there. And one juvenile female has now been transported to a children's hospital nearby. The sheriff did say that they are investigating this as a hate crime with assistance from the FBI and the San Diego Police Department.

Yeah, yeah. And I have a lot of really good players. I coach women. And we have to face these sort of questions constantly. And we have - we don't have quite the resources that the professional teams have, but we do have really excellent training staff. And we do have, you know, a policy about - we watch them and we send them to the trainers. We literally walk them to the trainers, because sometimes they'll just - the kids will blow it off. And we have to make these decisions constantly about, you know, are we hearing the whole picture? We have to make these assessments ourselves. And our - my personal golden rule is there's no single game worth, you know, worsening an injury or possibly jeopardizing this player's career for a long time. So that kind of make it a little more simple. There's just no game that's worth it...

It was just so nice to be able to just have one area, update it when I could, which was sometimes, you know, daily and sometimes I would go weeks without being able to, but - I've also, you know, being a young adult, I've - really, I mean there's a lot of unique issues that, you know, facing cancer in your early 20s, when you're kind of just starting out, and I, you know, wanted to kind of just give a little pitch out there. I mean there's a lot of - there's a community out there for everyone, I guess, and for young adult cancer survivors, there are several - every - you know, several small communities popping up, and - because we face issues like, you know, that other - that, you know, normal adult cancer survivors face, but you know, also additional ones like infertility and employment, insurance.

Yeah, they are gut wrenching pictures. I mean, we're talking about extreme degrees of violence, people being burned alive, being hacked to death. These photojournalists were not afraid of being very close to the violence that they were witnessing. And in some cases, I think these photographers were willing to risk injury or death to get a prize-winning picture. I mean, they were driven to make compelling pictures partly because of their own ego as photo journalists, but also because they had a great since of mission and they knew that these photographs had the power to change public policy and public awareness of what was happening in their country.

Yes. Polar regions are especially susceptible because they have what we call positive feedback. Because they're typically covered by snow and ice, they're like a mirror. Once that snow and ice starts melting, they become dark ground. And - an analogy would be if you go on a hot day in New Jersey or something, if you put your hand on a white car and a black car in the parking lot, they'll both be hot, but the black car will be hotter because it's absorbing heat. That's exactly what's happening in the Arctic. We're shifting from that white car that's like a mirror to a black car that's absorbing. And that's why things happened so much faster up there. It's the positive feedback system.

You'd recognize John C. Reilly. You may not know from where and you may not be able to easily conjure up his name, but you'd know his face. He has played the leading man, but more often than not, he's the best friend, the sidekick, one of two partners in a story. And in some ways, the new film "The Sisters Brothers" is the same. Joaquin Phoenix plays the younger brother, Charlie Sisters, and Riley plays the older brother, Eli. JOHN C. REILLY: Well, Charlie's kind of doubling down on the law of the land as it is in 1851 as he sees it. Like, it's kill or be killed. And it's exhausting them both. But Eli's the first one to say in their story, like, hey, man, what's our exit plan here? Because we've got a lot of people chasing us right now. Like, this is not a sustainable future for us, you know?

Yes. My grandfather was my, pretty much my example, pretty much a blueprint for how I raised my son. He was pretty much old-school and, you know, the steel-worker, lunch-pail, you know, disciplinarian, pay your bills on time, that kind of man. So I - it was like - I grew up without a father. So it was my only example of a father I could use to try to do the same with my son. I had him when I was in high school, so I was a very young man when he was born. So I made a lot of mistakes, but the things I did right, you know, it was because of my grandfather's example.

Well, this is a very unusual election, so I don't know that we can look at any past elections to determine what'll happen. But the Trump campaign would certainly argue that these will be very short-lived jitters, and that eventually the investors will realize that Trump would help the economy, and that that would actually make the stock prices rise over time. But, you know, Michel, the thing is nobody really knows what happens with markets in the long term. If we knew that, we would all be Warren Buffett and we wouldn't be working for nonprofit public radio. We'd be millionaires somewhere.

Well, yeah, because boycott - every time there's been a boycott of the Olympic Games, the athletes are the ones that are hurt. Nothing changes in the world except those athletes who are denied the opportunity to experience the games, to share, and perhaps be great ambassadors in the future. You know, boycotts are purposeless and certainly even in 1980 - nothing changed - not a thing except the lives of the athletes where somehow diminished. So we need to get away from that. Yeah, there are a lot of athletes who have social consciousness and are doing things before, they become Olympians. Not every Olympian wins a gold medal has a podium to say anything.

You get the idea. This time around, despite a political landscape tilted against them, the Obama campaign does retain some advantages. They have the money to be competitive everywhere and with no primary challenge, they have the time to set up an organization around the country. Of course, the fabled Obama grassroots team wasn't able to protect Democrats from a historic loss in the 2010 midterm elections. But Bird is convinced that next year, it will be easier to turn out those expansion voters - because the electorate will be younger, browner and more Obama-friendly than it was in 2010. And...

Yeah, yeah. And then they achieve air. If you look at them, they look - one of the "Star Trek" sequels - I think it was number four - was about whales in San Francisco. And the Enterprise would come in and out of the water, and that's what it looks like a little bit, a spaceship. They're going so fast. I actually spoke with an editor of VSail, a magazine, named Pierre Orphanidis. And I talked to him in Lisbon because there were more yachtsmen there than there are in San Francisco - like I said, only four teams competing - and he said people are just so depressed and so down on what the America's Cup has become, just because yachting is not exactly an un-elitist sport, but it has gone the realm of only billionaires need apply.

Exactly. For me, it's 66 and four months, for example. By the year 2027, it will be 67 for everybody. But in longer terms, when someone takes early retirement and gets a reduced benefit, the cost to the program is about the same. It's a wash because they get a lower benefit. They may start out earlier, but they get a lower benefit all along. It does not increase once you take early retirement. So in terms of the cost to the program and the impact on the solvency of the program, it's really a wash. That wouldn't make much of a difference.