The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last year brought attention to the safety risks associated with atomic energy. Before Fukushima, nuclear energy was on the rise and many countries developed plans to build more power plants. But after the disaster, nuclear energy became a subject of international debate and countries like Japan and Germany started to shut down reactors. How should the United States deal with nuclear energy?

A 2011 University of Michigan study of more than a thousand middle school students found that those who regularly ate school lunches were 29 percent more likely to be obese than those who brought lunch from home. Of course, what a child eats for lunch is just one of many factors that determines whether he or she becomes overweight or obese. But many schools' dependence upon revenue from vending machines and brand-name fast-food over the past decade may be a tipping point.

Amit Gupta first appeared on The Takeaway in October, three weeks after being diagnosed with leukemia, to discuss his experiences trying to find a bone marrow donor. Amit is of South Indian descent, and South Indians are severely under-represented in the donor pool. His friend Seth Godin, who writes for the popular blog SethGodin.com, offered $10,000 to the first person to be a donor match with Amit.

It was supposed to help pregnant women deal with their morning sickness. But when the women who took thalidomide gave birth they were confronted with a horror story. Children were born with a birth defects and other problems that could be fatal. It was 50 years ago the drug Thalidomide was withdrawn after it became clear it was causing serious and sometimes fatal harm to the unborn babies of thousands of women in Europe and around the world.

By most accounts, the history of AIDS begins sometime in the late 1970s, before the first official cases were diagnosed in 1981 among a handful of gay men. But a striking new book by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, upends medical history. In "The Origins of AIDS," Pépin traces the roots of the disease back to 1921 when a handful of bush-meat hunters in Africa may have been the first to be exposed to infected chimpanzee blood.

Yesterday, we spoke with blogger Seth Godin, who wanted to help his friend and colleague Amit Gupta, who has leukemia, so he offered up a challenge to his readers: the first bone marrow donor match to Gupta who would donate stem cells would receive $10,000. But under the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, better known as NOTA, it’s a federal crime to give or receive "valuable consideration" for any transplantable organ or tissue, specifically including bone marrow." Many Takeaway listeners responded to this story.

When Seth Godin, who writes a popular blog at sethgodin.com, learned that his friend and colleague Amit Gupta had leukemia, he quickly offered up a challenge to his readers: the first bone marrow donor match to Gupta who would donate stem cells would receive $10,000. Gupta, who is of South Indian descent, is a poor candidate for a bone marrow match in this country, where minorities in general — and South Indians specifically — are under-represented in the donor pool.

The movie "Contagion" swept the box office this fall. While the film featured an ensemble cast of famous faces — from Kate Winslet to Matt Damon to Gwyneth Paltrow — the real star of "Contagion" was the virus that murdered millions throughout the movie. Biologist Nathan Wolfe served as a consultant on the film. And while the movie is fiction, Wolfe’s new book warns of the very real threats posed by global pandemics.

Blogger Seth Godin wanted to help his friend and colleague Amit Gupta, who has leukemia, so he offered up a challenge to his readers: the first bone marrow donor match to Gupta who would donate stem cells would receive $10,000. But under the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, better known as NOTA, it’s a federal crime to give or receive "valuable consideration" for any transplantable organ or tissue, specifically including bone marrow. And beyond the legal aspects, some people may find Godin's gesture ethically questionable.

How people move on planet Earth affects everything about the quality of their lives. Humans have always thought of motion collective or otherwise as extensions of their individual physical bodies. Transportation involves people and machines interacting intimately. Think of it as putting on and taking off a "car suit" to drive, or a much larger "airplane suit" to fly. Thinking of transportation in this sense, how humans conduct their day-to-day lives seems much less efficient.

In September 2001, just a week after the 9/11 attacks, another wave a fear began to grip the nation. It wasn't from a hijacked plane or a bomb, but from letters sent in the mail, and the white powder inside. The five envelopes were filled with a powder laced by the anthrax bacteria killed five people and sickened 17 others. It was the most notorious act of bioterrorism the country had ever seen. In 2008, Dr. Bruce Ivins, the key suspect of the nine year federal investigation committed suicide under the pressure of the intense scrutiny. After his death, investigators explained their belief that Dr. Ivins acted alone in distributing the deadly virus.

For decades, Microsoft Research's Bill Buxton has been tracking innovation through history — online, Buxton maintains an archive of interactive devices, tracking how technology evolves. He's a firm believer that the seeds of our most innovative ideas and products have been around for years, just waiting for the perfect storm of conditions that can turn a good idea into something more potent.

The Nobel Prize committee decided on Monday to posthumously award Dr. Ralph Steinman a prize in medicine and physiology. Steinman's ground-breaking winning research into dendritic cells helped treat his own pancreatic cancer, but he died just three days before the committee awarded him with the prize. Nobel rules say the award can only go to living scientists, but the foundation did not know Steinman had died on Friday and thus did not reverse their decision. Steinman shares this year's award with two other researchers, Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann.

On April 12, 1955, Edward R. Murrow interviewed Dr. Jonas Salk on the CBS show, "See it Now." Salk’s polio vaccine had just been proven effective in preventing the disease. Murrow asked who owned the vaccine. "The people I would say," Salk answered. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Medical research culture has changed dramatically since Salk's time. Had it been invented today, it seems likely that the polio vaccine would have been patented immediately, and that Salk would have worked for a pharmaceutical company, rather than a university.

A study released on Monday shows that women using two popular hormonal contraceptives put themselves — and their partners — at greater risk for HIV. While this is a problem for all users of these drugs, it is particularly worrying to people in southern and eastern Africa, where these affordable and easily available contraceptives are used in a very high risk environment.

Two Cornell researchers used a large-scale study of posts on Twitter to track the world's mood shifts, and the discovered a pattern that transcends nationalities and climate. The study focused on Tweets from two million people, in 84 countries, posted at all times of day, month, and year. They found some fascinatingly similar patterns. Might their study have any implications for the way people do research going forward?

Scientists have found that babies can become fluent in foreign languages at an extremely fast rate; one that begins to slow down by their first birthday. What is it about the make-up of their brains as newborns that gives them this ability? Could adults train their brains to be more like the brains of babies?

A single map inside the latest edition of the well-respected "Times Atlas of the World" has caused friction between the cartography world and the scientific community. A map of Greenland in the book shows that the country has considerably less landmass than ever before. Harper Collins, which prints the "Times Atlas," recently circulated a press release that said Greenland had lost more than 15 percent of its coastline after nearby glaciers melted, thanks to global warming. Scientists say that number is incorrect. 

Einstein's Law of Relativity is one of the few scientific equations most people know — and it's a pillar of modern physics and fundamental to the way that the universe works. The equation states that nothing is faster than the speed of light, but one of the world's foremost laboratories says they've found subatomic particles called neutrinos that travel even faster. If their findings are proven true, it may alter our understanding of the universe.

For Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, the idea of being a human-cyborg isn't just something of science fiction books, but a real world possibility. Ritaccio was born without his right hand, and through his work, as the director of the Epilepsy and Human Brain Mapping Program at the Albany Medical Center and J. Spencer Standish Professor of Neurology at the Albany Medical College, he has learned to map intentions of the human brain. In his lab, Ritaccio is mapping out the electrical layout of the brain, in hopes of building interactions that will one day change the lives of millions of Americans with physical and mental disabilities.