Cool new website allows you to drive a lunar rover around on the moon.

My good friend and colleague Jim Russell turned me on to the latest Arbitron Report profiling the public radio audience –

Public Radio Today: How America Listens to Public Radio (2009 Edition).

And some of the conclusions contradict what you may think about radio listening. Because while print media is tanking, the headlines read:

Public Radio Audience Rises 5%
The Greatest Increase Is From Teens

Quoting directly from the report: While the lion’s share of public radio listening comes from Adults 35+, the greatest increases seen between Fall 2006 and 2008 came from teen boys and girls, whose cume ratings were up 37% and 21%, respectively. Data suggest that listening by teens increased significantly across all dayparts by as much as 50%.

These data can only be great news for the future of Public Radio. And they back up the data showing a sharp rise in our Science Friday audience, too.

You can download the entire report free.

With all this talk about Prez Obama's Peace Prize, what about all the other Nobel prizes, e.g science, medicine, economics, yada, yada?

Is there's lots of politics involved in winning those?

Your thoughts, please....

In case you haven't noticed, our web site has a new addition: a section aimed at science and the arts, SciArts.

You can find the SciArts link at the top of our home page. Movies, theater, artwork...check it out..and make some suggestions for stuff we may find useful.

SciArts producer Laura Pelcher deserves the kudos...

It's easy to categorize people into convenient "boxes" and we journalist too often take that route - liberal, conservative, tree hugger. But when your life intersects even briefly with someone you would not normally find running in your circle, you are forced to consider a new perspective.

To me, for decades, William Safire was just conservative columnist for the Times whose column I read weekly. I did not necessarily agree with his perspectives but he did offer an insight into Nixonian era thinking. I always enjoyed his weekly column about language and it was through this column that our paths first crossed.

I had been hearing a new phrase being bandied about by colleagues in Washington, describing people loosing control and screaming in a blind rage. They called it "going ballistic." Having studied what the term "ballistic" meant in physics and having heard the term "ballistic missiles" thrown about during the arms race of the 60s, I couldn't help but notice this new phrase and wondered how it found its way out of military and scientific terminology and into our common language.

So I dashed off a letter to Safire at the Tiimes, giving him a heads-up for the birth of a new phrase in our culture. Little did I think that just a short time later he would mention the item, with credit, in his usual Sunday Times language essay. But he did, having researched the topic and adding a bit more meat. He even included my definition of what ballistic means in physics.

That was decades ago and I gave little more thought to Safire until one day he emailed, out of the blue, a few years ago. He was inviting me to a dinner party at his house. I was flabbergasted. And impressed. I wrote back that I would love to come but that it was the first night of Hanukkah and I had my own family affair to attend at home. He wished me a happy holiday, said of course he understood and that was the last I heard from him.

I don't ever recall reading a Safire column that dealt with science so I'm not sure why I was invited. But now that he is gone, I'm left with one of those "death remorse" moments wishing I had known him better and that Hanukkah had come but one day later.