Please Explain (The Leonard Lopate Show)

On today's edition of Please Explain, we’ll look at the Earth’s atmosphere—what it's made of, how it makes life on the planet possible, determines weather patterns, and how human activity is changing it. We'll be joined by Dr. Joel S. Levine, Senior Research Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, and Dr. Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change.

The honeybees is just one species of bee, and they often get the most attention, but there are an estimated 20,000 different species of bees in the world. Bees play an important role in pollinating plants, and many have highly developed methods of socialization and communication. We'll learn all about bees, and the latest on Colony Collapse Disorder, with Bryan Danforth, professor of entomology at Cornell University, and Maryann Frazier, senior extension associate in the Department of Entomology at Penn State University.

Today's Please Explain is about the nature of girls--their minds, bodies, brains, emotional lives, and behaviors.

Listen to last week’s Please Explain: Boys.

Bankruptcy rates went up 32% in 2008 compared to the previous year. Marie Beaudette, blogger for the Wall Street Journal’s Bankruptcy Beat and Dow Jones Newswire reporter, and Robert Lawless, Galowich-Huizenga Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law, explain what filing for bankruptcy means for corporations and consumers and why the rate of bankruptcy filings is expected to go up in the next year.

Improvisation is one of the most important aspects of Jazz, but it's not as easy as it sounds. Jazz pianist Bill Charlap breaks down improvisation and gives a special live performance.

There’s substantial evidence that the earth is undergoing major adjustments as a result of human-made carbon emissions in the atmosphere, but what does climate change really mean? NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and photographer Joshua Wolfe, editors of Climate Change: Picturing the Science, explain how scientists gather evidence and information about how the earth’s climate is changing—measuring air and ocean temperatures, water levels, glaciers and polar ice caps, and tracking storms—and how that data is interpreted.

There are more than 20 million substance abuse addict in America today and about 2 million of them turn to residential rehab each year. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins us to explain the science behind addiction and the toll it takes on individual addicts.

The lives of more than 100,000 patients in the U.S. depend on finding an organ to replace a damaged or diseased one. Only a fraction of people who need a new kidney, liver, or heart actually receive one, but the procedure saves thousands of lives every year. We’ll be joined by Dr. Jean Emond, Thomas S. Zimmer Professor of Surgery and Director of Transplantation at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and by Susan Senk who received a heart transplant in 2007.

Find out more about organ donation in New York at

If it comes to you easily, being able to read is easy to take for granted. But reading is an extraordinarily complex process, one that researchers are still working to understand fully. On today's Please Explain we look at the science of reading. Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz and Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz are professors in Learning Development at the Yale University School of Medicine and Co-Directors of the Yale Center for Learning.

The term "socialist" has been tossed around in the news lately in reference to any number of Obama Administration policies. Find out what socialism really means, where it came from, and how it got such a bad wrap. Eric Foner is Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and James Surowiecki is business columnist for the New Yorker.