Will Lord, professional flint-knapper:

"When I was a boy, my family lived in a house in the forest with no modern conveniences. We made bows and arrows and flint arrowheads, and we tanned animal skins.  At the time I wondered if I was missing out on modern-day life. Now I see I was living an incredible childhood adventure -which I'm still living."  

Will and his parents, John and Valerie Lord have spent the last thirty-odd years mastering prehistoric technologies and teaching these skills in classrooms and museums across Britain.  This family looks the part (long hair all round) and dresses the part (leather leggings, pelt ponchos and furry boots.) But this is no gimmick:  the Lords see themselves as keepers of the "skills and art" of their distant ancestors.

In August 2009, Jill (Shinefield, my co-producer) and I enlist John and Will to help us conjure up the people who lived during the heyday of Stonehenge.  On a hazy afternoon, father and son join us, in full regalia, at West Woods, about 20 miles from Stonehenge.  It's a densely wooded area where massive sarsen stones (like those standing at Stonehenge) lie strewn about the forest floor.

 
Will Lord as an archer. Photo courtesy: Kevin Tod Haug

Sunday morning, 8:30 am--the third full day of the AAAS Meeting--and it's NOVA's turn to step out of the audience and onto the podium. NOVA Senior Science Editor Evan Hadingham (aka my boss) is one of a panel of science communicators here to talk about how they are using a variety of media--everything from shiny new Twitter to those creaky old TV sets--to share stories of scientific discovery with the public.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to talk about astrobiology. Life in space. Aliens. But when scientists talk about extraterrestrial life, what is the public really hearing?

You already know that Google can track the flu, capture the zeitgeist, and make a mean guacamole. But did you know that Google has its virtual finger on the (feeble) pulse of the economy? Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, says that Google can track unemployment well enough to predict the end of a recession. All those searches for "unemployment benefits," "where's the nearest unemployment office," and "resume advice" add up to a remarkable likeness of the "real" number of new filings. And when those filings peak, says Varian, it means a recession is on the wane. 

At the next session on my AAAS Meeting agenda, What's Next for the Net, the speakers talk fast. Really, really fast. Alvin and the Chipmunks fast. And somehow this seems Important, as if in all their deep thinking about the future of the internet, what they've really discovered is that speaking aloud is hopelessly slow and old-fashioned--that opening our mouths and vibrating our vocal chords will soon be as obsolete as the floppy disk, as quaint as the phonograph. That soon we'll be Tweeting straight into each others' brains and won't that be grand.

It's not that I don't like my cubicle. I love my cubicle! The nubbly beige quasi-walls. The ghostly fluorescent lighting. The buzz of my tiny, tiny fridge. But every now and again it's nice to step out into the world and meet and greet other science journalists and scientists, and that's what the AAAS (that's the American Association for the Advancement of of Science) conference is for. So here I am at the San Diego Convention Center, joining about 8,000 scientists, policymakers, and journalists to find out what's new at the intersection of science and society.

Exactly eighty years ago, Clyde Tombaugh (February 4, 1906 - January 17, 1997) discovered the elusive Planet X, which later became known as Pluto. Clyde Tombaugh wasn't your average planet hunter.  At eleven years of age, Clyde was already working on the family farm.  He planted corn and wheat by day and searched the skies at night.  He built his first telescope at eighteen and found the ninth planet in our solar system at twenty-four.  Clyde Tombaugh, a self-educated farm boy from a small town in the Midwest, discovered the most controversial celestial object in the history of astronomy!  To learn more about the man behind the discovery, The Pluto Files crew traveled to Clyde Tombaugh's hometown.

Behind the Scenes - On the Streets of Streator, IL
Filming in Streator, IL, birthplace of Clyde Tombaugh, was an amazing experience.  The people were so generous and were more than happy to accommodate our demanding film crew.  My first task in Streator was to find what we called a picture car.  For the film, the producer wanted Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of The Pluto Files, to drive into town in style.  So, I asked around and learned that Streator had just held its annual Roamer Cruise Night.  Over 600 vintage cars and 20,00 people attend this event.  (Streator's population hovers around 15,000.)  I hit the jackpot! Neil ended up driving this set of wheels:

But, this is no ordinary vintage 1959 pink Cadillac. This car can shoot fifty-foot flames from its tailpipes! After we finished filming, the owner was kind enough to demonstrate. Unfortunately, you will not see any dragon-like breaths of fire in The Pluto Files. You'll have to visit Streator, IL for that.

Once upon a time, in those quaint, curious days between the Stone Age and the iPad Age, a telephone was a beige, boxy thing with a dial on the front and a bell inside.

Today, dials have given way to touchpads and rings have been ousted by ringtones. But I don't want to get all nostalgic. After all, your old phone couldn't ring the NOVA theme song, could it? I didn't think so! Now, at long last, your cell phone can ring with the sweet sounds of NOVA.

+=ringtone

You can right-click and download the NOVA theme (doo doo doo DEE doo doooo...doo!) as an mp3 and convert and upload it to your cell phone. (You're on your own there--here are a couple of how-tos.)

Being from the old beige-box generation, I was shocked to discover that ringtones are big business, estimated to bring in between half a billion and a billion dollars each year. (The total seems to be shrinking as consumers learn to make their own ringtones.)

But don't worry, the NOVA ringtone is totally free. So, give it a try, tell a friend, and let the NOVA love ring!

Click below to listen.

Image Courtesy Istvan Takacs and Wikimedia Commons

Publicist's Note: Kirk Wolfinger is a producer working with NOVA on a new documentary on the science behind predicting earthquakes.

Filming in Haiti was a chaotic success. This disaster is the entry point for a much bigger story that we hope to tell: can we ever predict an earthquake? The work of the researchers that we interviewed down there is just a start--scientists believe this is possible, but we aren't there yet.

 As soon as we hit the ground in Haiti, all that we planned in advance for this shoot flew out the window. We did everything on the run and made decisions as we went. It is a war zone limited--thank God--to only a few weapons. Right now, there are no rules in Haiti. Money and the black-market rule. At the airport, stacks upon stacks of food, water, tents, and other aide sit on the tarmac while people line the street with sacks three blocks away, merely hoping for some rice.

On the first day, I did a preliminary interview with earthquake scientists Paul Mann and Richard Koehler in the hub of the airport. For now, these men are scientists on the run. So we ran with them, to capture their work. We crammed six people into a five-passenger helicopter, much to the chagrin of the pilot, and flew over the Haitian countryside, searching the surface of the land for evidence of earthquake fault lines.

The second the helicopter skids hit the ground, with the blades still turning, what seemed like an uninhabited stretch of country sprung to life. We were surrounded by anywhere from 50 to 150 friendly, but hungry, people.

We followed Paul and Richard and their new Haitian entourage as they scoured the landscape for signs of eruptions in the earth.

Photo Courtesy of Doug Gordon

It may seem strange to shoot a segment for a show called Smaller in Las Vegas, a city where a "small" hotel still has over three thousand rooms, where showgirls' headdresses can weigh over 40 pounds, and where the smiling visages of Donnie and Marie tower ten stories over the Strip

The Making Stuff team was in Vegas, however, for something very small. We were there to crack open the inner workings of every gadget, camera, computer, and TV on the market today.

If you want to see the world's biggest collection of gadgets, then there's only one place to be: the annual Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Now, there's nothing small about CES itself.  It's the biggest convention Las Vegas sees each year, with over 120,000 people walking over 1.8 million square feet of exhibition space.  The only thing bigger in Vegas may be the portions at an all-you-can eat buffet. 

But everything at CES is powered by some very small stuff.  Nanotechnology is at the heart of everything the average tech user, well, uses.  Thanks to advancements in nano-sized transistors, today's smartphones have more computing power than the entire Apollo space program.  The Library of Congress has nothing on a well-stocked Kindle and an iPod.  Even the newest and thinnest flat-screen TVs are here thanks to nanotechnology, which allows them to be very thin indeed.  (Some of them are so thin you'd be inclined to roll them up in a poster tube.)

With host David Pogue leading the charge, the Stuff team's goal at CES was to find out if any of the over 2,500 exhibitors space could explain how nanotechnology makes their products work.  Plenty of people could tell us what their products do--a digital camera takes pictures, an MP3 player plays music--but very few people could explain how they do those things they do.

 "Far smarter minds than mine are at work on that question," said one humble product manager.  "You'll have to ask our engineer, but he's not here," said one slightly embarrassed PR rep.  My favorite response was from someone who simply could not explain how a Dick Tracy-like watch accessed the Internet.   Her giddy explanation?  "It's magic!"