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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.

Henry Kissinger once joked at a press conference: Does anyone have any questions for my answers? If politicians had their way, they might just write their own questions for the press, but, of course, politicians can't write all the questions. So instead, they're coached on the art of question-dodging, taught how to segue from the question they're asked to the question they wish they had been asked and are prepared to answer.

The Brits are in the middle of another scandal involving a semi-nude royal: After issuing a strong condemnation, the royal family said it would sue a French magazine for publishing photos of a topless Duchess of Cambridge.

The Duchess, if you're not a royal watcher, is Kate Middleton, Prince William's wife and ostensible the future queen of England.

What happens at the Northeast Mycological Federation Foray? "Mushrooms only," according to attendee Gary Lincoff, an instructor at the New York Botanical Garden and author of The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms. Science Friday stopped by the conference for mushroom talk, mushroom crafts, mushroom eats and a mushroom hunt.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.

In a few weeks, NASA's Curiosity rover may use its powerful drill for the first time on Mars, and that has been a cause of a concern - not because the drill may be malfunctioning, but because the drill bit might be contaminated with germs from Earth.

A squadron of Chinese patrol vessels has turned back from a tense standoff with the Japanese coast guard near a small group of islands claimed by both countries.

The uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, known to Japan as Senkaku and to China as Diaoyu, have been the subject of a decades-long dispute between Tokyo and Beijing.

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Last Monday, an amateur astronomer in Wisconsin, Dan Peterson, was gazing through his telescope when he caught sight of a flash of white light in Jupiter's gassy atmosphere. Lucky for him, someone else also had a scope trained on Jupiter that night. George Hall, an amateur astronomer in Dallas caught that flash on video, hard evidence that an explosion had indeed happened on the giant planet.

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This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow. How much of the world's energy needs could be met by wind power alone? Energy analysts are always quick to point out that the wind doesn't blow all the time, but it turns out that if you look worldwide, and you look up at the sky and not just at ground level, there's a lot of wind available, and that wind carries a lot of energy.

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