Science & Environment

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FLORA LICHTMAN, HOST:

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

Even for a hardcore David Lynch fan, the idea that a film of his would be used to weird people out in a psychology experiment is a tad weird.

But it gets much stranger than that — fast.

Imagine the experiment involved testing whether Tylenol could help people overcome the angst triggered by a four-minute dose of Lynch. A related experiment tested Tylenol's effect on people asked to write about what happens to their bodies after they die.

At the University of British Columbia, psychologists went both places.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

We're accustomed to hearing about local weather conditions like high pressure zones or the jet stream. But just outside of the atmosphere, the conditions are a little stranger.

(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES)

BLOCK: That's a recording made by two new NASA satellites launched to study space weather.

As Lauren Sommer reports from member station KQED, the satellites could be in for some extreme conditions this year.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered three new "habitable zone" planets that are close to Earth's size, even if they're not all that close to Earth.

NPR's Joe Palca reports, the trio of worlds is about 1,200 light years away and are thought to lie in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" — where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water.

Astronomers have found three planets orbiting far-off stars that are close to Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone": a distance from their suns that makes the planets' surfaces neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

One of the three planets orbits a star with the prosaic name Kepler-69.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: