While volcanic activity in Iceland, Papua New Guinea, and Hawaii may have caught the public’s attention in recent weeks, such phenomena aren’t that unusual. In fact, there may be as many as 75 volcanoes erupting on land every year, and thousands more on the seafloor. Geophysicist Cynthia Ebinger and Elizabeth Cottrell, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, talk about the world’s volcanoes and what’s known about the processes that drive them, deep beneath the planet’s surface.

Learn more at http://scifri.me/byv2lx

Keeping an Eye on Eruptions Around the World

Ryan Rykaczewski describes one of the most massive migrations on the planet, driven by the sun. Image by Tintinnidguy (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

#ExplainTheSun  - The Largest Migration on The Planet

Once, there was the ordinary incandescent light bulb. It shone brightly, but wasted much of the energy put into it as heat. Then came the compact fluorescent. And as costs have dropped, consumers have increasingly been switching to light-emitting diode (LED) technology for many lighting applications, in an ongoing search for a more efficient bulb. Now, in work published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, researchers report that nanophotonic devices may be able to breathe new life into old incandescent technology. Marin Soljačić and Ognjen Ilic, two authors of the study, explain how they’ve been able to “recycle” some of the incandescent bulb’s wasted heat and re-emit it as visible light, boosting efficiency.

For the Lowly Incandescent Bulb, a Ray of Hope

Science, technology, and other cool stuff from public radio's Science Friday. It's brain fun, for curious people. From WNYC Studios.

Keeping an Eye on Eruptions Around the World

SciFri

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