Science, Spoken

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Imagine if there was a carbon-free form of energy hiding in the ground beneath you. One that we could turn to anytime, even on cloudy, windless days. There’s no need for imagination: It exists. Research suggests that geothermal energy could be the key to running the country on purely renewable power. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The military is decidedly not here for wind farms, Facebook busted up more fake news accounts, and we have some advice for your next poo. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines The military is locked in a struggle with wind farms Advocates say that wind power is a win-win: wind farms help struggling rural economies with a new source of revenue, while also helping wean utilities off of fossil fuels. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Guo Xinhua wants to teach computers to echolocate. He and his colleagues have built a device, about the size of a thin laptop, that emits sound at frequencies 10 times higher than the shrillest note a piccolo can sustain. The pitches it produces are inaudible to the human ear. When Guo’s team aims the device at a person and fires an ultrasonic pitch, the gadget listens for the echo using its hundreds of embedded microphones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A little over half a century ago, chaos started spilling out of a famous experiment. It came not from a petri dish, a beaker or an astronomical observatory, but from the vacuum tubes and diodes of a Royal McBee LGP-30. This “desk” computer—it was the size of a desk—weighed some 800 pounds and sounded like a passing propeller plane. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tornadoes are tearing up the Midwest, Airbnb calls truce, and we've got some books for your long weekend. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines Tornadoes are tearing up the midwest. So why are they so hard to predict? Over 200 tornadoes have hit the Midwest in the past week alone, wreaking havoc on the towns they pass through. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fierce storms lashed across the central US this week, unleashing hundreds of powerful tornadoes that carved a path of destruction through parts of Missouri and Oklahoma Wednesday night and left at least three dead. While the worst of the violent winds have passed, the region is now bracing for massive flooding, following record amounts of rain brought by the severe weather system and with more expected over the weekend. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The year 2019 isn’t even halfway over yet, and it’s already the worst year for measles since NBC stopped airing episodes of Saved By The Bell. Since January 1, the rash- and fever-causing virus has sickened 880 people across 24 states. That’s more than all the cases of the past three years combined. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Plankton don't get nearly the respect they deserve. These tiny organisms (phytoplankton being plant-like cells that produce much of the world’s oxygen, zooplankton being little animals) float around at the mercy of currents and form the very foundation of the ocean food web. You like whales? They eat krill, which eat, wait for it, plankton. You like your climate? Phytoplankton soak up CO2 and spit out oxygen, helping keep the planet a pleasant human habitat. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the early morning of April 21, 10 students from the University of Southern California’s Rocket Propulsion Lab piled into the back of a pickup truck with a 13-foot rocket wedged between them and drove down a dusty dirt road to a launchpad near Spaceport America, in southern New Mexico. When they arrived, their teammates helped them lift the 300-pound rocket onto a launch rail. Dennis Smalling, the rocket lab’s chief engineer, began the countdown at 7:30 am. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Friday, the legislature of Missouri passed a ban on abortions, among the most extreme of any state. It prohibits any abortions after eight weeks of gestation, putting it among the category of misleadingly named “heartbeat bills” that use fetal cardiac activity as a marker for … well, illegality, really. Like a law signed earlier last week in Alabama, the Missouri bill contains no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices