Twenty years ago this fall, Bill Nye came into homes across the U.S. with his TV show, “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” and struck a chord with curious children.

There were segments on volcanoes, the science behind the human heart and even why people cry from onions.

To celebrate two decades of teaching children science, Nye released a free app by Disney via iTunes. Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

Image credit: ABC News

“When I talk to the camera, I do my best to talk to one person,” he told ABC News. “I’m talking to that kid I want to influence. I want him or her to get excited about this thing that I’m am so excited about: ‘Look at this. The boat displaces water that weighs exactly as it does! What is cooler than that? Come on!’”

At Lehigh University’s graduation ceremony this spring, students rushed to hug Nye, the commencement speaker, before heading to their parents.

Nye said he, in fact, had been inspired by his mother and father.

His mom had a doctoral degree and was recruited by the U.S. Navy to work as a code breaker on a project so secret she did not talk about it until it was declassified in 1992.

His dad was a prisoner of war held by the Japanese in World War II. He spent four years as a captive and Nye said he created a sundial to help him keep track of time while in prison.

“He would take the shovel handle and cast a shadow with it,” Nye said. “Then they would look at the progress of the shadow and he was able to reckon time. He became quite the astronomer, telling 50 constellations without any trouble at all. And so, he brought back these interesting sundials with him, and it affected me in a way I could just really get.”

Nye went to Cornell and later worked as an engineer for Boeing before becoming the “science guy.”

At Lehigh’s commencement, he asked to shake the hand of each graduate – all 1,889 of them.

Nye’s challenge for the students:   “As I say to everybody, I don’t think they are going to remember what I said, but they will remember how they felt, how they feel at that time, and that is very important. … Everybody can make the world better.”

                                                                         (Image Credit: Steve Lupton/Getty Images)

Next time you have a gin and tonic, you might appreciate it a bit more. Gin gets its prominent flavor from junipers, and the plant is now under attack.

A fungus-like organism called phytophthora austrocedrae has been spotted infecting juniper plants and spreading throughout Northern Britain and Scotland.

The pathogen, whose first name literally translates to “plant destroyer,” is part of the same family as the pest responsible for the 19th-century Irish potato famine. Sarah Green, a scientist working with the Research Agency of the Forest Commission in the U.K., says it typically spreads through either groundwater or via streams.

“It attacks primarily through the root or stem, but can also penetrate through the bark and branches, as well,” Green told ABC News.

While it relies on water as its main mode of transmission, the organism can also hitch a ride on both animals and people. The Lake District, one of Britain’s national parks, is one of the most badly affected areas because wandering visitors can inadvertently spread the disease.

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Juniper populations across the U.K. were already on the decline. The bushes themselves can be older than a century, but the seeds they produce don’t often sprout into new plants.  Eighty-five percent of juniper sites don’t have any plants younger than 5, according to Plantlife, a charity dedicated to preserving the country’s native vegetation.

This particular species of phytophthora has also been spotted in Argentina and Chile. Some people believe the juniper outbreak seen today originated in South America, but Green disagrees.

“[The two] have distinctly different DNA,” she said. “We think it came from another location.”

Where that other location might be is still unknown.

Gin companies apparently don’t often get their junipers from the U.K.,  but phytophthora could eventually make its way outside the country.

“Personally, I find it hard to imagine that we’re the only country in the world where this is coming on juniper,” Green said.

Determining how the organism first came to the country could be key in ensuring the safety of gimlets, martinis and, of course, gin and tonics worldwide.

In a macabre display of affection, the male dark fishing spider (Dolomedes tenebrosus) dies shortly after it mates with a female, a new study in the journal Biology Letters finds. But unlike black widows, whose females are infamous for eating the males once the deed is done, the male dies on its own. According to the study,  once the male transfers its sperm to the female, the clock starts ticking down until the male’s demise.

The male begins courting the female by touching her legs and jiggling his abdomen back and forth. After the female spider positions itself, the spider releases its sperm from one of its engorged pedipalps (an appendage located at the front of its head), and then immediately seizes up, curling its legs and lying still.

Although it appears dead, the spider is technically still alive at this point.

“We measured the heartbeat, and it’s still there,” says Steven Schwartz, the author of the study and a behavioral ecologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. However, it can’t move and does not respond to any poking, prodding  or other forms of physical stimulation. Less than three hours later, the heart stops beating and the male spider is officially declared dead.

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The female spider does occasionally eat its catatonic partner in an act of sexual cannibalism before the male’s time is up. Schwartz says that this is not the only spider to sacrifice itself upon mating. “The male redback spider actually somersaults into female’s mouth parts to induce the female to eat him,” he says.

As to why these spiders engage in these bizarre behaviors, to kick the bucket then and there, Schwartz hypothesized that it’s  linked to the reproductive effects. “Females that eat their partners are less likely to mate with another spider,” he says. In addition, the female gives birth to more offspring that are bigger or survive better if it eats its mate.

Image Credit: Steven K. Schwartz/University of Nebraska-Lincoln

There are often more sexually mature male dark fishing spiders than females, so there’s pressure to mate. Any advantage to passing on your own genes is a good one, even if it spells doom for the male.  ”Mating is the beginning of the end,” said  Schwartz.

The large balloons will be used to provide internet access to remote or rural areas. (Jon Shenk/AP Photo)

Forget wireless Internet, search-engine giant Google now wants to produce balloon-powered Internet for rural areas.

The company today announced the start of Project Loon, a plan to send large floating balloons into the stratosphere to provide Internet access to rural or remote areas, in addition to helping people get online after major disasters.

According the project’s website, each balloon can provide Internet service to a 40 kilometer diameter area with speed equivalent to a 3G connection. The balloons would float at an altitude higher than air traffic or weather patterns. The balloons would be steered by “sailing” through winds from controllers on the ground.

Users on the ground have to attach a special Internet antennae to their home to pick up signals.

The ambitious project, currently still being tested, is the newest Google “Moon Shot” from their Google X Labs, which also pioneered Google Glass and self-driving cars.

If you think the idea sounds far-fetched even the project’s manager, Mike Cassidy, agrees with you. The name Project Loon was chosen because the idea of spreading Internet access through balloons “may sound a bit crazy.”

However, Cassidy writes that approximately two out of three people across the globe do not have access to the Internet and Project Loon could help remedy that situation without major construction.

“We imagine someday you’ll be able to use your cell phone with your existing service provider to connect to the balloons and get connectivity where there is none today,” Cassidy wrote in a blog post.

The Project Loon team’s first big challenge starts this weekend when they plan to launch 30 balloons in New Zealand for a test run.

Image credit: dpa/Newscom

Although it  launched only five months ago, the mobile-video application Vine is quickly becoming more popular than its photo-sharing counterpart Instagram — at least in the Twitter sphere.

On June 7, four days after Android released a version of Vine, Topsy Analytics, a San Francisco company that gathers and analyzes tweets, reported that the six-second video application had garnered 2.86 million shares on Twitter. This number of Twitter shares surpassed those of  Instagram, which had roughly 2.17 million shares.

Vine also surpassed Instagram in user downloads on Google play today.  Vine was the fourth most downloaded application in Google play, preceded only by Facebook, Candy Crush Saga and Pandora. Instagram was fifth.

Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion last April, also reworked its Twitter features last December, making its photos less compatible with the social media platform. With the change, users can no longer view Instagram photos directly from Twitter and are instead directed to the Instagram website. Vines, however, play directly on Twitter.

Vine, which is owned by Twitter, had more than 13 million users before it launched a version for Android, and became Apple’s most popular application in April. Currently, it is the second  most popular free application in the iPhone App Store; as of today, Instagram was number 19. A Twitter spokesperson said the company had not released information about the number of new users since Vine became available on Android phones.

Instagram did not return immediate requests from ABC News for comment.

Imagine an artificial leaf that mimics photosynthesis, which lets plants harness energy from the sun. But this leaf would have the ability to power your homes and cars with clean energy using only sunlight and water.

This is not some far-off idea of the future. It’s reality, and the subject of a jury-prize-winning film in the GE Focus Forward Film Competition.

Jared P. Scott and Kelly Nyks’ short film, “The Artificial Leaf,” showcases chemist Daniel Nocera, the inventor of the artificial leaf, a device that he says can power the world.

“The truth is stranger than fiction,” Kelly Nyks, a partner at PF Pictures, told ABC News. “What I think is so exciting is that Dan has taken this science and applied it in a way that makes bringing it to scale to solve the energy crisis for the planet real and possible.”

Nocera’s leaf is simply a silicon wafer coated with catalysts that use sunlight to split water to into hydrogen and oxygen components.

“Essentially, it mimics photosynthesis,” Nocera told ABC News.

The gases that bubble up from the water can be turned into a fuel to produce electricity in the form of fuel cells. The device may sound like science fiction fantasy, but Nocera said he hopes one day it will provide an alternative to the centralized energy system — the grid.

Worldwide, more than 1.6 billion people live without access to electricity and 2.6 billion people live without access to clean sources of fuel for cooking.

“This is the model: We’re going to have a very distributed energy system,” Nocera told ABC News. With the leaf, “using just sunlight and water, you can be off the grid. If you’re poor, you don’t have a grid, so this gives them a way to have energy in the day and at night.”

With just the artificial leaf, 1.5 bottles of drinking water and sunlight, you could have enough electricity to power a small home, but the cost is still a problem, though Nocera said he believes that will come down with time and research.

The artificial leaf is cheaper than solar panels but still expensive. Hydrogen from a solar panel and electrolysis unit can currently be made for about $7 per kilogram; the artificial leaf would come in at $6.50.

Nocera is looking for ways to drive down the costs make these devices more widely available. He recently replaced the platinum catalyst that produces hydrogen gas with a less-expensive nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound. He’s also looking for ways to reduce the amount of silicon needed.

In 2009, Nocera’s artificial leaf was selected as a recipient of funding by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), which supports energy technologies that could create a more secure and affordable American future.

Nyks and Scott said they hope “The Artificial Leaf” will bring awareness to the public that sustainable energy solutions do exist.

“We make films for social action,” Scott, also a partner at PF Pictures, told ABC News. “We see films as a tool for social change. And what I think Dan sketches out is that we start with energy. And if we solve the energy crisis, we’ll solve the climate crisis, and then we’ll solve the water crisis, and then we’ll solve the food crisis. But it starts with energy.”

30 filmmaking teams were asked to make a movie that could highlight an innovation that could change the world as part of GE Focus Forward, a series of three-minute films created by award-winning documentary makers including Alex Gibney, Lucy Walker, Albert Maysles and Morgan Spurlock. Nyks and Scott won a jury prize in a related global competition.

Anyone with an Internet connection has access to the videos online. All the films are featured at focusforwardfilms.com.

So far, total media impressions for GE Focus Forward have exceeded 1.5 billion. In addition, the films are screening at all the major film festivals around the world and have played on every continent, including Antarctica.

Nyks and Scott said they hope to take the success of the short and turn it into a feature-length documentary.

(PF Pictures)

Image credit: Dave Ellis/The Free Lance-Star/AP Photo

If you live on the East Coast you’ve started to witness the invasion. Their shells have started to cover the ground and their high-pitched buzzing has begun to fill the air. They’re the Cicadas and the bugs have begun to emerge for the first time in 17 summers.

But if you’re not in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia or one of the other East Coast states which will be home to the insects this summer, you can still see them. And not just in some photos.

The Science Channel has launched a Cicada Cam, which will live stream a group of the soft-shelled bugs through Monday evening. According to The Los Angeles Times, the channel launched the stream to promote its “Swarm Chasers” and “Cicada Invaders 2013″ shows, which premiered on Sunday night. Nevertheless, you can see the bugs crawl around a terrarium that’s been decorated with a model of the Capitol building.

According to National Geographic, the species spends much of its early life underground. When the cicadas emerge after two to 17 years, they latch onto trees and within a week shed their nymph exoskeleton. Without the skin, they have stronger wings. The male cicada makes the loud, buzzing sound to woo the female. There are more than 1,500 cicada species but only  the magicicada septendecim species arrives every 17 years.

Image credit: 9b Hjallerup School

A Danish science experiment by a group of 9th-graders has gained worldwide interest and may have us rethinking the proliferation of wireless devices  in our homes.

Five girls from Hjallerup Skole, a primary education school in Denmark, began the experiment after noticing that when they slept with their cellphones near their heads overnight, they had trouble focusing the next day, according to Danish News site DR.

The resources weren’t available to conduct an experiment around wireless signals affecting brain activity, so instead the girls decided to monitor the growth of plants near WiFi routers – and the results were a bit shocking.

Six trays containing the seeds of a garden cress herb were placed in a room without a WiFi router, and six trays were placed in a different room and next to two WiFi routers which, according to the girls’ calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone, reports DR.

During the 12 days of the experiment, the seeds in the six trays away from the WiFi routers grew normally, while the seeds next to the routers did not. In fact, the project photos show that many of the seeds placed near the routers turned brown and died.

“This has sparked quite a lively debate in Denmark regarding the potential adverse health-effects from mobile phones and WiFi-equipment,” Kim Horsevad, biology teacher at Hjallerup Skole told ABC News.

Horsevad said that some of the local debate over the experiment has been over whether the negative effects were due to the cress seeds drying from the heat emitted by the computer/WiFi routers used in the experiment. But she explained that the students kept the cress seeds in both groups sufficiently moist during the whole experiment, and the temperatures were controlled thermostatically.

A similar study was conducted about three years ago in the Netherlands when researchers noticed that some trees in urban areas were showing “bark lumps,” according to Popular Science. The experiment, conducted by Wageningen University, involved exposing 20 ash trees to various kinds of radiation for three months. The trees chosen to test tolerance to heavy WiFi signals began to show typical signs of radiation sickness, including a “lead-like shine” on their leaves.

As for the attention the girl’s science fair project is getting, Horsevad said neuroscience professor Olle Johanssen with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has expressed great interest.

“[Johanssen] will probably be repeating the experiment in controlled, professional, scientific environments,” said Horsevad. “One would therefore generally be advised to await the results of his experiments before basing any important decisions on the outcome of the girls’ experiment.”

A Dutch scientist hopes he’ll change minds about the viability of test tube meat when his first genetically engineered hamburger, made from billions of stem cells, is served hot off the grill.

Mark Post, the head of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, has spent years growing the synthetic hamburger from bovine stem cells, which his team turned into thin strips of muscle tissue before mincing them into a patty.

RELATED: Lab-Grown Meat: Food of the Future?

While the process has taken time and run up considerable expense — the project received $325,000 from an anonymous donor — Post told the New York Times he hoped the cost of cultured meat could come down in the future, making it a viable food source.

After conducting an informal tasting, Post  gave the synthetic tissue his seal of approval, telling the Times, it “tastes reasonably good” and that he planned to add just salt and pepper before serving it, perhaps at an event in London this summer.

Post told ABC News in 2011 that he expected meat consumption to double in the next 40 years.

“In my mind, meat consumption is here to stay, and if you want to do that at a higher efficiency than what is currently done by cows and pigs, you have to explore the possibility of doing that in the lab,” he said.

(Image Credit: Francois Lenoir/Reuters)

(Image Credit: Paul Caffrey/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

A 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton that was illegally smuggled into the United States was returned today to the Mongolian government, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs officials.

The tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton, which is 24 feet long and eight feet tall, will be flown free of charge from New York City to Mongolia by Korean Air,  U.S. officials said.

The  nearly complete skeleton is believed to have been smuggled out of the country between 2005 and 2012 by Eric Prokopi, 38,  a self-described “commercial paleontologist.”

(Image Credit: Paul Caffrey/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

The artifact was seized by federal agents after it was sold at a Manhattan auction last year for $1.05 million.

Prokopi pleaded guilty in December to illegally importing the fossilized remains of several dinosaurs, according to ICE.

“We cannot allow the greed of a few looters and schemers to trump the cultural interests of an entire nation,” ICE director John Morton said in a statement. “We undo a great wrong by returning this priceless dinosaur skeleton to the people of Mongolia.”

The tyrannosaurus bataar was a carnivorous dinosaur native to Mongolia that lived during the late Cretaceous period, approximately 70 million years ago.

According to Mongolian law, any dinosaur fossils found in the country belong to the government and its people.