Backyard putting them in in a jar and watching them glow so we don t tend to think of them as anything all that mysterious Well they do one thing very nicely which is flash on and off that s all fireflies do flash but what interests Steve Strogatz a mathematician at Cornell University is that there are places in the world and not here but in Southeast Asia in Malaysia or Thailand where fireflies don t just flash randomly like we re used to they somehow flash together there are enormous congregations of fireflies along river banks how many it could be tens of thousands of tree after tree extending for literally miles along the rivers all flashing in sync like a Christmas tree rows and rows of Christmas trees all wired together going off and it s one of the most hypnotic and spellbinding spectacles in nature because you have to keep in mind it is absolutely silent. Picture it there s a river bank in Thailand in the remote part of the jungle you re in a canoe slipping down the river ther
You know if you ve seen the streets of San Francisco as in cars flying through the air that s those kind of hills without bricks you know because what you really wanted to do even as a little kid is he wanted to fly Yeah and when Lincoln was 18 years old he met one of the pioneers of the derivable and he got this young guy Lincoln beachy to be his derivable pilot and what is it a ritual it s a big floating sack of hot air that s that s the basic idea Ok Sim says you could steer this thing sort of because it s kind of an early blimp Yeah but for beachy just well enough he wanted to fly in a plane planes were the future keep in mind this is early 1910 years after the Wright brothers flew their 1st flight planes were pretty primitive basically like a flying bicycle or even so people were getting really excited about aviation so they were going to air shows that had every kind of flying machine that didn t work and be cheap and he tracked down the guy who put together most of the really b
Wait you re with. Your listening to radio last radio from the new unit w n y say. Hey I m Jabba Rod I m Robert Krulwich This is Radio Lab today well we re defying odds we re going to look at 2 people 2 daring do s pushers of limited bad as actually who are yes pioneers one in the air and the other on us yet we re going to start off just for kicks in New York City Harlem with I m page Poti one Cheney s junk to my name is Captain mighty and I go to school if he has 203 girls doing a little jump rope champ in d.c. d but I was itching to God and I listened to the scene about that and that he felt that I had him anyway. And beachy that I was Ok so this is a story actually about the guy at the center of this jam being jump rope about James Lincoln Beatty and he s someone I heard about from a friend of mine Hello my name is Sam Keene and I m a writer and I met this guy Hey my name is Frank. And together they told us the story of the most famous man you ve never heard bt. We can you to what
I just found I got to find somebody to help this woman today we re going to tell you the story of the of the woman on the other end of that phone call this is her story you might say their story so from my title Tracy I m Sarah Gray I m the mom. Promises and how did you get me where were we met at a bar in Glasgow really yes I m vacation with a girlfriend and it was it it was it it was it. What it what happened that gets to me. We ve got different ideas different recollection of often. When he started dating crossed the ocean for a year and a half and then he moved to America 5 days after he arrived they were married a few years after that they were pregnant with twins and when did you 1st know that something was up it was at the 12 week screening they called the 1st trimester screening and they re checking for birth defects I think the most common one is Down syndrome but it was September 30th 2009 they went in for the screening the ultrasound tactical scan of the 2 fetuses and short
Fictional to. Make matters worse the doctors said that the unhealthy twin was posing a threat to the healthy and if we were to be safe we would do a selective terminations to save the life of the healthy twin So Sarah says they were suddenly faced with this choice I actually talked to 2 priests on the phone about it really yeah her family s Catholic she was raised Catholic I don t know I guess I wanted to see what their take was on this yeah this is by not the direction I want to go to for this my radio story but you know me I m suddenly interested basically what I was saying is would you come into a blessing over the selection termination and what they say One priest said no he just said he wouldn t do a blessing over a selective germination and then the other priest said that because of a Thomas Aquinas rule of like it was called Double account or something basically like the rule that if you if a train is coming in you like you want to save the life of someone on the train tracks a