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While we all wait to see if there will be an NFL season this year, we reflect on the fact that "home court advantage" has been proven to be true in every sport. Is this because the cheering fans make the home team more likely to win or is it because the refs are prejudiced–maybe without even realizing it?

Fan enthusiasm has been discounted: In basketball, free-throw percentages are the same at home and away. In baseball, a pitcher’s strike-to-ball ratio is the same at home and away. And it’s not the travel tiredness: Teams from the same metro area (such as the Yankees and the Mets) lose at the same rate as teams from across the country when playing in their rival’s stadium. read more

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More exciting discoveries from the Kepler telescope: A planetary system of the kind never seen before, with two planets in the same orbit around their star. They circle their sun every 9.8 days, one of them ahead of the other. In the night sky of one of the planets, the other planet must seem like a constant light, almost a second sun (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show).
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Milk may be dangerous in Japan, but are fish and chicken safe for US to eat? They’re great diet foods, and fish is usually very healthy (depending on how you cook it), but we keep hearing that some kinds of fish contain mercury. Mercury contamination, a worldwide environmental problem, has been called "public enemy No.1" in California’s San Francisco Bay, and scientists have finally discovered where all that mercury is coming from.
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T.S. Eliot’s poem "The Hollow Men" says, "This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper." The Japanese nuclear plant meltdowns may end the same way. How will the affected plants finally be closed? A look at what happened at Chernobyl can give us a clue: Several times a month, especially after it rains in that part of the Ukraine, the water that has seeped through the cracks in the reactor is removed so that radiated water does not escape into the atmosphere. The area endangered by the Chernobyl reactor is 15,000 square miles–about the size of Switzerland–and the danger will last for over 300 more years, even though the meltdown occurred 25 years ago.
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