Talk of the Nation on HD-2

In a 2003 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to uphold affirmative action and said it expected that in 25 years, "the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." The court will hear a case involving race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas in the fall.

More than half of children born to women under 30 in the U.S. are born out of marriage, according to the research group Child Trends. In an op-ed in Slate magazine, writer Jessica Olien says she wants to raise a child alone, without a husband to complicate the process.

When doctors autopsied tuberculosis patients, they described finding round, white swellings, especially in and around the lungs. Medical historian Howard Markel describes how those potato-like growths led to the disease being called tuberculosis, from the Latin tuber.

Web browser manufactures often market their products to consumers with an emphasis on privacy, assuring users that their products can better control how personal information is used online. Carnegie Mellon privacy researcher Lorrie Cranor explains that many companies have developed quiet ways to step around some of that privacy-protecting code.

Bloomberg News reporter John Lauerman volunteered to have his DNA sequenced by Harvard researchers to demystify the process for the public. What he didn't expect to uncover was that he possessed two gene variants--one linked to rare blood disorders and the other to a higher risk of Alzheimer's.

Reporting in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers write of harvesting electricity from microbe-rich river sediments--enough to power a small LED bulb. Grant Burgess, a marine biotechnologist at Newcastle University, discusses the hunt for electron-burping bugs.

Photographer and videographer Edward Aites, of Seattle, submitted this time-lapse video to Science Friday. He looked at ice through a macro lens and cross-polarizing filters, and found a colorful, surprising landscape. This is ice like you've never seen it before.

Flu season usually peaks around February. But this year it's missing in action, with the CDC reporting the slowest start to the flu season on record. Peter Palese, a microbiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, discusses whether unseasonably warm winter weather may be to thank.

The standard picture of the moon is of a long-dead object, geologically speaking. But using observations from cameras on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Thomas Watters and colleagues say in the journal Nature Geosciencesthat there are signs of more recent tectonic activity on the moon, within the last 50 million years.

Director Wim Wenders created the 3-D documentary "Pina," in tribute to German choreographer Pina Bausch. When the two met over 20 years ago, they started planning a film that would capture her unique style of modern dance. Bausch died of lunch cancer just days before filming started.