#458 - Western: Cisco Kid "The Hothead Sheepherder" 1950, Frontier Town "Thunder Over Texas" 1949

Tuned To Yesterday features programs from radio's golden era. Drama, Comedy, Western, Sci-Fi and more. Produced by Mark Lavonier.

#457 - Romance: MGM Theater Of The Air "Love Is A Headache" 4/6/51

Tuned To Yesterday features programs from radio's golden era. Drama, Comedy, Western, Sci-Fi and more. Produced by Mark Lavonier.

The Oakland minister who predicted the end of the world would take place on Friday, Oct. 21, was confronted by the continuation of the world instead. It marks the second time this year that the ministry led by Harold Camping, 90, has settled on a doomsday date, only to have it tick by in quotidian fashion.

But to be fair, Camping has said that "the end is going to come very, very quietly," as Mark reported last week.

The state of Texas already made waves in September when it decided to stop honoring death row inmates' final meal requests. The decision was prompted by the huge meal requested by white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in Pakistan to urge the country's leadership to eliminate safe havens for terrorists, says that U.S. officials met with the Haqqani network this summer. She did not say who the participants were, or what was discussed.

As the BBC reports:

Reports about such a meeting circulated over the summer but the US refused to confirm them at the time.

Mrs Clinton said the US had reached out to the Taliban and to the Haqqani network to test their sincerity and willingness to engage in a peace process.

In the space of a few weeks, Hollywood will give us four serious dramas about mentally unstable characters. It's a mini-trend at best, and most likely coincidental. But it got me thinking about how filmmakers use narrative form to shake up audiences and put them in the same frame of mind as the characters they're watching.

Every high school chemist has no doubt fiddled with a Bunsen burner--but where did the apparatus get its name? Science historian Howard Markel talks about the German chemist Robert Bunsen, and why his experiments necessitated the invention of the gas burner still in use today.

In a new book writer Debbie Nathan digs into archived material documenting the experiences of a patient known as "Sybil," who reportedly suffered from multiple personality disorder. Ira Flatow and guests discuss MPD, and its modern equivalent--dissociative identity disorder.

In a letter to the journal Nature published this week, astronomers Aaron Geller and Robert Mathieu offer an explanation for the origin of blue straggler stars in a star cluster called NGC 188. Geller suggests the stars fed on neighbor stars, leaving behind white dwarfs.

Transcript

IRA FLATOW, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Imagine you no longer have monthly utility bills. All that money you use to spend on gas and electricity, still in the bank. Instead you get a check every month for making electricity using your solar shingles on your roof and pumping that surplus electricity back into the grid.