KQED Science Video Podcast

The cobra lily (Darlingtonia californica) uses deception and patience to trick unsuspecting insect prey into its highly specialized pitcher traps.

Whether it’s a lager or ale, sour or bitter, dark or light, most beer has one thing in common: yeast. KQED Science visits a commercial yeast laboratory and a local brewery to reveal how this key ingredient is a major player in both science history and beer production.

What happens when you fill up a giant space with over 200 eager science fans from around the Bay Area for a weekend? You get Science Hack Day San Francisco, a two-day event where a diverse group of "hackers" -- from developers and designers to scientists and students -- works side-by-side to see what they can quickly create within 24 consecutive hours.

Something strange and unsettling is happening to Bay Area honeybees. Entomologists at San Francisco State University have identified the culprit: a tiny parasitic fly is causing the bees to exhibit bizarre nocturnal behaviors before suffering a gruesome demise.

Forty percent of the food produced in the U.S. goes uneaten. From "farm to fork", there are many reasons for food waste, including consumer demand for perfect produce and confusion over expiration dates printed on packaged foods. This massive waste occurs as one in six Americans struggles with hunger every day, even in affluent regions such as Silicon Valley.

Stanford University students set out to revolutionize home design by entering a solar powered prefab house into the Department of Energy's biennial Solar Decathlon competition.

Join a research team from University of California, Santa Cruz as they track, tranquilize and collar a wild puma. The special GPS collars collect data on the puma’s location and behavior, and they reveal how the big cats survive in their shrinking habitat in the Bay Area.

More than a million visitors visit Alcatraz every year, but a recent discovery has revealed another attraction that lives within the shadows of this historic prison.

More than a million visitors visit Alcatraz every year, but a recent discovery has revealed another attraction that lives within the shadows of this historic prison.

The University Herbarium at the University of California - Berkeley boasts one of the largest and oldest collections of seaweed in the United States, dating back to the time of the U.S. Civil War. Kathy Ann Miller, a curator at the herbarium, is leading a massive project to digitize nearly 80,000 specimens of seaweed collected from the west coast of North America.

The rural foothills along the Santa Cruz County Coast hold an ancient secret. Deep below the redwoods, White Moon Cave extends for nearly a mile -- making it one of the longest caves in California. But few people have ever been in it. Join the KQED Science team as we squeeze through the narrow clandestine entrance, and meet the uncanny cave inhabitants to bring new light to this hidden realm.

Scientists and farmers are starting to notice that, as California's winters warm up, the state is becoming more hospitable to destructive agricultural pests.

In this edition of "Why I Do Science", we hear from Stephen Palumbi, a world-renowned marine biologist and director of the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California.

Black holes have been the stuff of science fiction since their discovery in the late sixties. But now a new, nimble NASA telescope is using its powerful x-ray vision to hunt for these abundant yet invisible, massive space oddities.

Motion-activated cameras at Stanford University's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve provide scientists a window into the secret lives of the animals that roam around Jasper Ridge at night.

QUEST Producer Sheraz Sadiq interviews Bay Area filmmaker and musician Jesse Hiatt about the experience of filming in one of the world's most extreme environments. See his footage in the QUEST segment, "Field Notes: Dan Costa in Antarctica."

Can nuclear power be produced safely and affordably? A scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, is working to do just that.

SOFIA is more than a telescope tucked into a re-purposed commercial airliner. It's a complete flying astronomical observation platform which carries a dozen or Astrophotographer Rogelio Bernal Andreo's colorful wide field images of deep sky objects like galaxies, nebulae, star clusters has garnered him dozens of photography awards including the Royal Observatory of Greenwich's 2010 Best Astrophotographer of the Year.

At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, scientists are using a cutting-edge microscope, the first of its kind in the world, to image whole cells in 3-D with the penetrating power of x-rays. The new images generated by the microscope are offering a deeper, more precise understanding of cellular structures and how they change with diseases.

SOFIA is more than a telescope tucked into a re-purposed commercial airliner. It's a complete flying astronomical observation platform which carries a dozen or more astronomers, observers and crew far above the clouds to observe objects and phenomena too cold to be seen in visible light.