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Morning Edition

Weekdays 5:00 - 8:00 a.m.
Renée Montagne, Steve Inskeep
Kerry Bringhurst

Morning Edition provides news in context, airs thoughtful ideas and commentary, and reviews important new music, books, and events in the arts. All with voices and sounds that invite listeners to experience the stories.

Local Host(s): 
Kerry Bringhurst
Genre: 
News/Talk
Composer ID: 
5187cb7ae1c8a892ebf233a6|5187cb66e1c8a892ebf2339a

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Joe's Big Idea
1:23 am
Thu August 23, 2012

Telescope Innovator Shines His Genius On New Fields

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Credit Jason Millstein for NPR
Roger Angel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, stands in front of his new project: a solar tracker. Angel wants to use the device to harness Arizona's abundant sunlight and turn it into usable energy.
Credit Gary Williams/Stringer / Getty Images North America

Angel uses this rotating furnace at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab on the University of Arizona campus to make his giant mirrors. The process, called "spin casting," helps form the molten glass into the parabolic shape needed for focusing light.

Credit Joe McNally / Getty Images
Roger Angel's mirror technology is now used in many large telescopes around the world, including this one, the Large Binocular Telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory in Arizona. Its twin mirrors can produce images 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit Jason Millstein for NPR
Angel does a final inspection on one of his mirrors. The weight of telescope mirrors made the traditional way limits their size. Angel realized he could produce a bigger mirror by creating a mold with a honeycomb pattern, making the mirror lighter.
Credit REhnu
Angel is working to put another mirror-based concept into action, this time to fight climate change. The solar tracker, seen here, makes electricity by focusing sunlight on photovoltaic cells.
Credit University of Arizona
An illustration of Angel's 2006 idea to reduce the effects of global warming by reflecting the sun's light with massive glass shields in space. It's a last-resort sort of idea, Angel admits.
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Originally published on Thu August 23, 2012 10:23 am

You may not be familiar with the name Roger Angel, but if there were ever a scientist with a creative streak a mile wide, it would be he.

Angel is an astronomer. He's famous for developing an entirely new way of making really large, incredibly precise telescope mirrors. But his creativity doesn't stop there. He's now turned his attention to solar power, hoping to use the tricks he learned from capturing distant light from stars to do a more cost-efficient job of capturing light from the Sun.

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First And Main
1:22 am
Thu August 23, 2012

Wis. Business Owner Relates To Romney's Resume

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Credit John W. Poole / NPR
Linda Wendt is the owner of a restaurant on Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin. Republican Mitt Romney "has done what I've done, so I can relate to him," she says. "He knows what business goes through and what it takes to run a business."
Credit John W. Poole / NPR
Wendt's grandchildren, Zach, 9, and Sawyer, 6, play with Nerf guns outside the family restaurant.
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Originally published on Thu August 23, 2012 6:47 pm

As the presidential election nears, Morning Edition is visiting swing counties in swing states for our series First and Main. We're listening to voters where they live — to understand what's shaping their thinking this election year.

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Opinion
1:22 am
Thu August 23, 2012

For Indian Women, Teasing Is No Laughing Matter

Credit Sajjad Hussain / AFP/Getty Images
Protesters take part in a street play during a protest against growing cases of sexual abuse in New Delhi on May 5. The protesters urged police to protect women from abusers and stop blaming victims for attacks.
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Originally published on Wed August 29, 2012 3:15 pm

Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy is back home in India after spending years in the U.S. He finds some Indians are standing up to a very old problem they call "eve teasing."

I lost touch with that peculiar Indian euphemism "eve teasing" in the years I was away from India.

It sounds coy, like a Bollywood hero romancing the pretty girl as she walks down the street, and it can mean that. But it can also mean what happened to a teenager a few weeks ago in the northeastern city of Guwahati.

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Megafires: The New Normal In The Southwest
1:17 am
Thu August 23, 2012

How The Smokey Bear Effect Led To Raging Wildfires

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Credit David Gilkey / NPR
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.
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Originally published on Fri August 24, 2012 5:50 pm

First of a five-part series

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.

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Around the Nation
5:39 am
Wed August 22, 2012

Restaurant Request: Please Don't Pass The Salt

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

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Around the Nation
5:35 am
Wed August 22, 2012

Robber Thwarted By Pot-Wielding Kitchen Worker

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Police say a man had a knife, and confronted the woman behind the counter when he walked into Pop's Barbecue in New Iberia, La. Rather than just give up the money, she grabbed a pot that was on a counter, and whacked him again and again. The robber ran away.

Politics
4:26 am
Wed August 22, 2012

Sen. McConnell Reaches Out To Tea Party Supporters

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Originally published on Thu August 23, 2012 11:55 am

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

In Kentucky yesterday, there was another sign of Tea Party clout. Mitch McConnell - minority leader in the U.S. Senate, and Kentucky's most powerful politician - turned up at his first-ever Tea Party rally. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: This was not McConnell's first Tea Party rally. He participated in a Tea Party event in 2010.] This year, Tea Party candidates have scored upsets in Republican primaries in Missouri, Texas and Indiana. That's where longtime Senator Richard Lugar lost.

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Latin America
3:27 am
Wed August 22, 2012

Haiti's Quake Damaged National Palace To Be Razed

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Among the hundreds of buildings that crumbled in Haiti's 2010 earthquake was the National Palace. The Haitian government announced Tuesday that demolition of the National Palace will begin soon. A non-profit aid group founded by actor Sean Penn will pay the bill, though it's not clear what will replace the palace.

Election 2012
3:23 am
Wed August 22, 2012

GOP Platform Committee Adopts Abortion Position

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Originally published on Wed August 22, 2012 5:20 am

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm David Greene.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep.

A deadline came and went yesterday and Todd Akin remains on the ballot for United States Senate in Missouri. On a radio program, the Republican said his party was overreacting in the effort to drive him out of the race.

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Election 2012
3:11 am
Wed August 22, 2012

Obama Tells Student Voters That He Was One Of Them

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Originally published on Wed August 22, 2012 5:23 am

President Obama has been campaigning among college students. In Nevada and Ohio Tuesday, he told them his policies are better than his opponents for keeping higher education affordable.

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