On the subway, in doctor's waiting rooms and during college lectures, millions of Japanese can be found glued to their smartphones. But they're not texting or making phone calls — they're playing video games.
In the U.S., video games are usually played on computers and consoles, like the PlayStation or Wii, but in Japan, gaming has migrated to smartphones.
With an ice coffee in one hand and an iPhone in the other, grad student Yoshiro Hinoki is fixated on slaying tiny cartoon monsters.
Adams (left) talks with Swetnam in their laboratory, nestled under the football stadium.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Rex Adams, a senior research specialist at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, steps away from a band saw that he uses to slice tree ring samples.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Swetnam leaves his laboratory for the evening. Fires in the Southwest have been getting bigger and bigger over the past two decades. The Wallow fire in Arizona, Swetnam says, was "a tornado of fire." "It burned more than 40,000 acres in the first eight hours," he says.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
By cross-dating different tree-ring samples from a given area, researchers can get a clearer picture of how a forest burns.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Swetnam stands in the catacombs of storage boxes that house thousands of tree-ring samples. His laboratory is buried under the bleachers of the University of Arizona football stadium.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A perfect tree-ring slice is a window in time, a slice of a forest's history.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A tree's rings are marked on graph paper. Experts use this technique, called skeleton plotting, to help them cross-date tree-ring samples. This sample evinces no fire scars in the latest years of the tree's life.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
University of Arizona professor Tom Swetnam examines a tree sample at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson, Ariz. Swetnam's research focuses on understanding how forest fires are influenced by climate change.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Tree-ring samples are collected from every corner of the world and meticulously studied and stored in Swetnam's lab. The thick, dark rings on these samples are fire scars. Last year, more than 74,000 wildfires burned over 8.7 million acres in the U.S.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Swetnam holds a tree ring sample; it shows no forest fire scars from the past 100 years. The Forest Service's aggressive efforts to fight fires over the past century have had unintended consequences.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A Smokey the Bear fire prevention sign sits in Valles Caldera along Highway 4, which was one of the front lines in fighting the Las Conchas Fire in 2011.
The history of fire in the American Southwest is buried in a catacomb of rooms under the bleachers of the football stadium at the University of Arizona.
Here rules professor Thomas Swetnam, tree ring expert. You want to read a tree ring? You go to Tom. He's a big, burly guy with a beard and a true love for trees.
Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., says Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the GOP vice presidential candidate, asked him to end his Senate bid after recent comments he made referring to "legitimate rape."
Republican Rep. Todd Akin's decision to stay in the U.S. Senate race in Missouri is likely to leave him with support from the state's evangelical community, but not much more, says a political scientist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
As cases of West Nile virus continue to increase, authorities warned today that this could turn out to be the worst outbreak since the virus first showed up in the United States in 1999.
The New York Times reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still unsure about "where and how far" the disease will spread, but so far there have been 1,118 cases and 41 deaths reported.
Rotten jackfruit and tomatoes are sorted at a dump in New Delhi. India loses an estimated 40 percent of its produce harvest for lack of infrastructure. And Americans waste about 40 percent of our food.
Originally published on Mon October 15, 2012 8:58 am
The food world is buzzing today about the latest news on just how often we waste perfectly good food. And we admit, the statistics are pretty depressing.
About 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. The average American consumer wastes 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia — up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s. Yet, 1 in 6 Americans doesn't have enough to eat, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And food waste costs us about $165 billion a year and sucks up 25 percent of our freshwater supply.
The daily fighting in Syria included this gun battle Wednesday involving rebels in the northern city of Aleppo. Still, the rival sides recently worked out a prisoner swap in which two women were freed from state custody, while the rebels released seven pro-government fighters.
The bitter fighting in Syria seems to grow worse by the day, yet the rebels and the government do occasionally manage to work out something that requires each side to trust the other: prisoner swaps.
In one recent exchange, two women held by the government were freed in exchange for seven men who were fighting on behalf President Bashar Assad's regime.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke talks to educators Aug. 7 in Washington, D.C. At their most recent meeting, many Fed members backed action to boost the economy.
The Federal Reserve could take more steps to boost the struggling U.S. economy. That's according to minutes released Wednesday of the Federal Open Market Committee's July 31-Aug. 1 meeting.
"Many members judged that additional monetary accommodation would likely be warranted fairly soon unless incoming information pointed to a substantial and sustainable strengthening in the pace of the economic recovery," the minutes said. [PDF]
The "Loving Happiness Band," supported, in part, by the Communist Party, plays for a crowd on Nanjing Road.
Credit Frank Langfitt / NPR
In 1999, Shanghai turned Nanjing Road, the city's most famous shopping area, into a walking street. On summer nights, thousands fill the street, surrounded by colonial architecture and riotous neon signs.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was one of the world's most exciting — and notorious — cities. But all that came to an end in the middle of the last century, when the Communists took charge.
Over the past decade or so, though, a vibrant Shanghai has re-emerged. Today, it's a dynamic city of 23 million, with a skyline that dwarfs Manhattan's.
As far as portraits from the Civil War go, this one is quite famous. It shows a confederate soldier looking a bit disheveled and very serious while holding an 1855 Springfield single-shot pistol carbine.
The question of whether to circumcise a newborn son is no question at all for most observant Jews. In Europe, the practice has come under fire. This summer, a German regional court ruled that circumcision is physical abuse, and a Swiss hospital temporarily banned the procedure. The debate has infuriated Jewish community leaders there.
In Israel, even the most secular Jews overwhelmingly have their sons circumcised. But the debate in Europe has drawn attention to a still small but growing number of Israeli Jews who are forgoing the procedure.
The Larsen B ice shelf, a large floating ice mass on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, shattered and separated from the continent 10 years ago. A NASA satellite captured the event in this image from Feb. 23, 2002. The 650 foot-thick, 1,250-square-mile ice shelf had existed since the last ice age.
Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. But a new study finds that the story isn't quite so simple.
There's no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice. But a lingering question is whether these events can be attributed to human-induced global warming.
Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney campaign in Waukesha, Wis., on Aug. 12, the day after Romney made the Wisconsin congressman his vice presidential running mate.
Originally published on Wed August 22, 2012 2:39 pm
Picking Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate has helped GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the Badger State, but just a little, a new poll suggests.
Obama leads Romney among likely voters in Wisconsin, 49 percent to 46 percent, according to a Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday afternoon. The poll was conducted Aug. 16 through 19, following Ryan's selection as Romney's running mate on Aug. 11.
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. Bird owners are clucking with alarm now that Bird Talk magazine has folded its wings. The September issue will be its last in print. For 30 years, the magazine has published everything from glossy cover photos of feathered pets to avian health tips to a story about a bird-mitzvah, once held for an African gray parrot.
But, like so many print publications, Bird Talk struggled to make money and so it is no more.
