Host Steve Curwood digs beyond the news headlines with Peter Dykstra publisher of Environmental Health News, ehn dot org and the Daily Climate, and discovers how some shale developments could be guilty of over half of the deadly sins and which state believes scientific ignorance is truly bliss.

Though it seemed to many of us in the north and central US that winter would never end, spring has at last truly sprung, as Mary McCann and many birds celebrate in Birdnote®.

A breakthrough in battery technology could make large-scale energy storage practical. Researchers at Harvard University say their organic flow-battery would be affordable and efficient. Professor Michael Aziz tells host Steve Curwood how the technology works and why it could significantly improve the demand for wind and solar power. (7:30)

Solar power makes up less than one percent of the US energy output but utility companies including Northeast Utilities, a provider of power in Massachusetts, want to scale back a key incentive for homeowners to install the panels. Bryan Miller of The Alliance for Clean Energy tells host Steve Curwood that utilities want to reduce or do away with net metering, by which home owners get credit on utility bills for the electricity their solar panels generate.

On St Patrick's Day, the smog in Paris was so bad that authorities made public transit free and banned half the cars from the roadway. Former Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Fred Salvucci tells host Steve Curwood public transit is a key way to limit congestion and reduce emissions from cars, though many cities with public transit including Boston aren’t keeping up with growing demand.

Out of seemingly amorphous chaos comes order and pattern. That's the nature of Emergence, and you can see it in phenomena as diverse as flocks of birds and the structure of crystals. Ari Daniel reports.

Life in the ocean is a longstanding mystery to most humans, and even now we can travel deep beneath the waves, we've barely scratched the surface. A new book, The Extreme Life of the Sea, sheds an entertaining and informative light on some of the ocean’s oldest, oddest, fiercest and strangest creatures. Coauthor and biologist Steve Palumbi discusses the work with Steve Curwood.