Science & Technology

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

The shellfish industry on the West coast has had a bumpy few years and increasingly, it is pointing to climate change as the cause. Scientists believe the oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air and they are not sure if oysters and other shellfish will be able to adapt to this change. Lauren Sommer, from member station KQED, has this report.

LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: Cary Sawyer(ph) does a brisk business in oysters.

For Thanksgiving, NASA's space food experts always try to make sure astronauts get to enjoy traditional holiday fare, even if its not exactly home cooking. And being so far from home, astronauts can get pretty attached to their comfort foods.

This year, Kevin Ford, the commander of Expedition 34 and currently working at the International Space Station, says he has the ingredients to make one favorite Thanksgiving dish the NASA nutritionists may not have anticipated: Candied yams with marshmallows.

The yams are thermostablized and come in a plastic pouch.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

As we charge into the holiday gift buying season, gadgets are usually near the top of many people's wish lists. Our regular technology commentator Rich Jaroslovsky of Bloomberg News tells us about his gadget picks for 2012.

Rich, thanks for joining us.

RICH JAROSLOVSKY: Thank you.

WERTHEIMER: First, Rich, let's look at the camera. It's an amazing little machine. It doesn't even vaguely look like a camera. It looks like it must be expensive and do lots of clever tricks?

Hewlett Packard is claiming it was duped into overpaying when it acquired Britain's largest software company a little more than a year ago. HP released its latest quarterly earning report on Tuesday and announced that it was writing off most of the $11 billion investment. The firm HP bought, Autonomy, denies there were any improprieties.

Why people yawn is a mystery. But yawning starts in the womb.

Past studies have used ultrasound images to show fetuses yawning, but some scientists have argued that real yawns were getting confused with fetuses simply opening their mouths.

So Nadja Reissland, a researcher at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, used a more detailed ultrasound technique to get images of fetal faces that could distinguish a true yawn from just an open mouth.

When his teenage son ventured into social media, Virginia father Mike Robinson wanted to make sure he could keep tabs on him. Robinson works in IT, so he rigged a surveillance system that works no matter what kind of device either of them is on.

"It's sort of like a version of remote desktop that enables you to run the program kind of silently in the background," Robinson says.

One day, checking in from his iPhone, Robinson discovered that his son had come across an adult meet-up site on Facebook.

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CELESTE HEADLEE, HOST:

We want to switch gears now. Tomorrow is Black Friday, as you probably know. That's when many stores offer massive discounts to shoppers who are willing to wait in huge lines and sometimes get into brawls in those lines. It's such a boon for businesses, that many stores are turning it into Black Thursday. They're opening their doors tonight.

Black Friday is right after Thanksgiving - even starting Thursday night at some stores - and then soon after comes Cyber Monday, a multi-Billion dollar day of sales over the Internet; that one day is also a big opportunity for cyber thieves to take advantage of weak links in online security.

You may be focused on turkey and football games, but a quick lesson in cyber security will give you and the family something different to talk about over dinner other than politics.