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Movie Interviews
8:50 am
Wed February 29, 2012

'Being Flynn': When Dad Needs To Take Shelter

Writer Nick Flynn was working in a homeless shelter in his 20s when his father – an alcoholic and self-proclaimed writer who left when Flynn was a baby – showed up as a client. Flynn wrote about the experience in his 2004 memoir, Another B------- Night in Suck City.

His story is now a movie called Being Flynn, starring Paul Dano as the young Nick Flynn and Robert De Niro as his father, Jonathan.

On Wednesday's Fresh Air, Nick Flynn and Paul Weitz, the film's director, talk about adapting Flynn's memoir for the big screen.

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Shots - Health Blog
8:43 am
Wed February 29, 2012

The High Price Of Caring For A Loved One With Alzheimer's

As a kid, Joy Johnston was Daddy's little girl.

Her father, Patrick, worked in the trucking trade, took care of his family and loved singing to his daughter.

When Joy got older, she moved to Atlanta for work and her parents retired to New Mexico. When she flew in for a visit in 2008, she noticed her father was changing. He would pay for gas but not fill up the tank. He would ask his wife, Jane, "Where's Jane?"

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The Salt
8:28 am
Wed February 29, 2012

Truffles Take Root In Appalachian Soil

Credit Regis Duvignau / Reuters /Landov
Perigord truffles for sale in southwestern France. American farmers say they've figured out how to make the delicacy flourish in Appalachian soils.

As orchards go, truffle orchards are upside-down and backwards. The magic happens beneath the oak and hazel trees, where a richly flavored mushroom sprouts from fungal colonies laced about the trees' roots. They're called black Perigord truffles, or tuber melanosporum.

These truffles are notoriously hard to cultivate, even in France, where Perigords orginate. Now, in the rolling hills and clay soils of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, a growing number of farmers are hoping to establish southern Appalachia as the new truffle capital of the world.

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Research News
8:28 am
Wed February 29, 2012

The Man Working To Reverse Engineer Your Brain

Our brains are filled with billions of neurons, entangled like a dense canopy of tropical forest branches. When we think of a concept or a memory — or have a perception or feeling — our brain's neurons quickly fire and talk to each other across connections called synapses.

How these neurons interact with each other — and what the wiring is like between them — is key to understanding our identity, says Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at MIT.

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All Tech Considered
8:16 am
Wed February 29, 2012

How To Adjust Your Privacy Settings, Before Google's Big Shift

News that Google will place its dozens of services under one privacy policy — a change that also means the company will compile and collate each user's data from all those products — has some of its customers scrambling to restrict their privacy settings before the new policy goes into effect on March 1.

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