Just before 10 a.m. ET, astronauts aboard the space station successfully grabbed the capsule with a robotic arm. It was expected to take another couple hours to draw the space craft in and dock it.

NASA is webcasting, and we have embedded its feed in this post (our apologies if you’re on a device that doesn’t support the player).

We’ll update as the story develops, so be sure to hit your “refresh” button.

Earlier this week on All Things Considered, NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce reported about the historic mission. If everything goes as planned, SpaceX will have done something that only government space agencies have done before — and will kick off what’s expected to be a new era of commercial space flight.

Update at 12:10 p.m. ET. Dragon Has Docked:

Dragon has finished docking with the International Space Station. That makes SpaceX the first private company to dock a cargo spacecraft to the space station.

That happened at exactly 12:02 p.m. ET, according to NASA.

Update at 10:40 a.m. ET. “Big Moment”:

Capturing Dragon “was a big moment for SpaceX and a big moment for NASA too,” NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce said on Morning Edition a short time ago. “No private spaceship has … ever reached a station before. It’s a first for SpaceX and a first for the world.”

And in just a few years, Nell added, Dragon could be ready to take people into space, not just supplies.

Update at 10:15 a.m. ET. More Details.

According to NASA, “capture” occurred as the space station was “251 miles over northwest Australia.”

Who’s aboard the space station now? NASA has bios of the six-man crew posted here. Commander Oleg Kononenko was born in what is now Turkmenistan. The Americans on board are NASA astronauts Donald Pettit and Joseph Acaba. Other flight engineers are Andre Kuipers (from The Netherlands), Gennady Padalka (born in Russia) and Sergei Revin (also Russian).

Update at 9:56 a.m. ET: Dragon’s Been Grabbed:

The crew of the space station just grabbed the spacecraft with a robotic arm. Next up: Docking, which will take another couple hours. “Capture is confirmed,” NASA announced.

Update at 9:45 a.m. ET. Capture At 10:02 a.m. ET?

NASA now estimates the first opportunity to use the robotic arm to grab Dragon will come at 10:02 a.m. ET.

Update at 9:30 a.m. ET. OK Given To Draw Near: Controllers have given the go-ahead for the spacecraft to approach to within about 30 feet of the space station. That’s the point where astronauts on the space station should be able to reach out and grab it with a robotic arm.

Update at 9:20 a.m. ET. Ninety Feet Away: Dragon is now about 90 feet from the station. NASA is determining whether it can now close to about 30 feet — the point where grappling can take place.

Update at 9 a.m. ET. Not Quite Yet: Dragon has drawn closer, but is still going through some preliminary maneuvers. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

I was talking in my garden with a friend when I noticed what looked like a large leather satchel tossed in the strawberry bed. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a 30-pound snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) — no doubt on leave from our nearby town pond — and capable of snapping off a finger with a beak curved as close and tight as my heavy-duty pruners. Over the next couple of days, reports of turtle sightings from friends and neighbors seemed to come in every few hours.Apparently, the appearance of these uninvited garden guests was no fluke. It’s been happening a lot lately as their natural habitats shrink.

It’s nesting season, says Alexxia Bell of the Turtle Rescue League. Female snapping turtles leave their watery habitats behind once a year to lay eggs. “Basically, they like top loam, where a little sun will hit it. They’ll dig on a bit of a hill, not a valley,” she tells The Salt. In other words, from a turtle’s point of view, a recently cultivated raised garden bed looks like a pretty ideal spot.

After finding a promising site, female snapping turtles scuffle the dirt with their hind legs and lay a clutch of 15 to 50 eggs. It’s best, Bell says, to “let the turtle just do her thing. After a couple of hours she’ll leave, and she won’t come back till next year.” Between laying the eggs and returning to the site for the next clutch, “she’ll have nothing to do with her young.”

In fact, the Turtle Rescue League encourages residents to create “turtle gardens” — what look like ordinary raised beds for flowers or vegetables, left unplanted for turtles to discover and use as nests. Although it’s best to leave the snapping turtle alone, if you must move it, first make sure no small children or pets are close by, as sudden and unpredictable movement can rile it, Bell says. They do have a mean bite.

Approach quickly but calmly from behind, and place one hand palm up under the turtle’s belly — as in this video. Lift the tail near the base of the shell with the other hand, and don’t go within two feet of the beak, she says. Snapping turtles have long and flexible necks, and can stretch their heads backward over their shells and sideways all the way to their back legs to get at you when they feel threatened.

Don’t lift the turtle off the ground by the tail, as this can dislodge the turtle’s vertebrae and sharply reduce its chance of survival in the wild, Bell says.

When I returned to the garden a couple of days after my turtle encounter to transplant some zucchini, I found a bonus under the dirt — eggs that looked like 30 or so miniature pingpong balls. I spooned them into my transplant pots and brought them inside.

I consulted with friends online, who were equally divided over whether the eggs should be disposed of, incubated or eaten.

Two suggested they be eaten either raw or barely cooked with a hole poked in the top and a bit of soy sauce or green chili drizzled in (the latter method having been sampled by a friend traveling in Nicaragua, where turtle eggs and meat are widely consumed). I considered slurping one down, but the memory of Mrs. Snapper’s reproachful, prehistoric gaze eventually proved too much for me. According to Bell, the eggs are very delicate, and the embryo within can be killed if turned or jarred. If you wait until the turtles hatch, they can be removed in a box to a lake or stream.

Some folks eat turtle stew and such — but if it’s all a little too Alice In Wonderland for you, you can contact your local conservation society to arrange for pickup and proper incubation. In the end, that’s what I did — in exchange for a promise that our family could be present when they begin to hatch. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

This talented plant is commonly known as the dodder vine. It’s a parasite; tomato gardeners know it and hate it.

Here it is at Penn State University — look for the stringy, wiggly thing on the left — sniffing. Notice as it grows from a seedling, it moves in small, lazy circles, like hands groping in the dark, and then, gradually, it leans toward the stalk of the tomato plant — which it then entwines, gouges, sucks and strangles.

Ewww, you say. (I am assuming you are pro-tomato). But how do we know the vine is “smelling” that tomato plant? Enter Dr. Consuelo De Moraes, a biologist at Penn State. With her colleagues, she put the dodder plant to the test.

The Fake Tomato Experiment

When she placed a dodder vine between an empty pot and a fake plant with no odor, the dodder didn’t lean toward either…

The Real Tomato Experiment

When she put a real tomato plant next to a dodder, it leaned in the tomato’s direction, whether the tomato was (a) well lit, (b) in the dark, or (c) out of view.

The Dodder-In-A-Box Experiment

When she had her students put both the dodder vine and the tomato plant into a box connected by a hose, like this…

…the air could blow from one box to another, and over and over again, the boxed-up vine always leaned toward the tube hole, toward the air wafting in from the tomato…

With sight and touch eliminated, it’s fair to conclude the dodder was sensing odor to find food.

But now comes the Finicky Eater part. The dodder will also eat (or suck nutrition from) wheat plants. But it prefers tomato. We know this because when Professor De Moraes & Co. placed a dodder an equal distance from a wheat plant and a tomato plant…

…the dodder consistently went for the tomato. Which is interesting, says Professor Dan Chamovitz, because at the chemical level, wheat and tomatoes, he says, “are rather similar,” but tomatoes combine three chemical smells that attract dodders, whereas wheat has only one attractant. That slightly different cocktail of odors pulls the dodder to the tomato, which means that plants can make odor distinctions that are quite subtle.

Yeah, But Is This The Same Thing As “Smelling”?

Well, says Chamovitz, “Plants obviously don’t have olfactory nerves that connect to a brain that interpret signals…but [some plants] do respond to pheromones, just as we do. Plants detect a volatile chemical in the air, and they convert this signal (albeit nerve-free) into a physiological response. Surely this could be considered olfaction.”

Tomato plants, if they had necks, would be nodding fervently.

Daniel Chamovitz’ book is called What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who is living on the station, was talking to Houston’s Mission Control when he suddenly reported that he had spotted Dragon. “I’m looking at Dragon right now,” he said.

“We copy. Tally-ho on Dragon! That’s great,” replied Mission Control.

Images taken by the station’s cameras showed the capsule looking like a small dot as it flew along a path that took it about 1.5 miles under the outpost. NASA put video of the flyby online.

The close flyby gave controllers a chance to check out critical systems on Dragon, to make sure all is working well as NASA decides whether to proceed with a rendezvous Friday morning that could end in docking.

If that happens, it would be a historic first for commercial spacecraft, as the space station has previously only received visiting spaceships flown by government agencies from the United States, Russia, Japan, and the European Union.

During the flyby, station astronauts successfully sent a command to Dragon, telling the capsule to turn on a strobe light. That was a key milestone, because the crew will need to be able to communicate with Dragon during tomorrow’s maneuvers.

And controllers checked out the GPS systems that the spacecraft uses to determine its location relative to the station. NASA said via Twitter that the initial data was looking good.

If all continues to go well, NASA will give the go-ahead for Dragon to creep closer and closer to the station on Friday morning. It will halt 32 feet from the outpost and Pettit will use a robotic arm to grab the capsule and attach it to the station.

After that, astronauts will open the hatch and unload the capsule’s cargo, which includes food and clothing. The crew will then load the vehicle with stuff to send home, and Dragon is scheduled to depart from the station on May 31, splashing down in the Pacific.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, who made his fortune building up the internet service PayPal, and the company has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to deliver cargo to the space station now that the agency has retired its space shuttles.

So far, the company’s first attempt to reach the station has been trouble-free. And the mission has gotten a lot of attention. In a Twitter update, Musk said: “The President just called to say congrats. Caller ID was blocked, so at first I thought it was a telemarketer ”

(Nell Greenfieldboyce is an NPR science correspondent.) [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

On April 25, somewhere in the ocean off Great Britain, a remotely operated video camera mounted near a deep sea oil drill caught a glimpse — at first it was just a glimpse — of an astonishing looking sea creature. It was a green-gray blob of gelatinous muscle, covered with a finely mesh-like textured skin, no eyes, no tentacles, no front, no back. It moved constantly, floating up to the drill, then it backed off and disappeared. The camera operator tried to find it, and then, suddenly, out of the darkness, back it came.

What was this thing?

It had no mouth. It seemed to be undulating, or at least moving with intention. It looked like it was coming back to the drill to … to do what? Or maybe it was dead. Just a floating bit of tissue, a whale placenta, perhaps?

You’d figure a video like this, once it went on the Internet (which it did last month) would produce the usual wild explanations from people who know little but post madly, rumors masquerading as knowledge, a great riot of misinformation and silliness. But not this time.

Yes, for a few hours, The Thing From The Deep got passed around by hundreds of thousands of people who ooh-ed and ahh-ed, and got giddy with it. (Loch Ness monster? Return of The Blob? ) But then, up popped Craig McClain, chief editor of the Deep Sea News.

“Dr. M,” as he’s known, is a scientist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke University. He knows his deep sea critters, and very promptly he posted his guess: First of all, he said, this isn’t a whale placenta. Placentas are too tasty, too nutritious to make it 5,000 feet down without getting eaten.

Instead, he went hunting in the library and found two papers that described an animal that could be The Thing. The critter on the oil drill video has, he noticed, a sex organ, “gonads” …

Those gonads vaguely resembled a similar organ in a giant jellyfish called Deepstaria enigmatica. (Strange what marine biologists think about …) As for its shape, alone in quiet water, these big jellyfish look like you’d expect; bell-shaped tops, with dangling parts, but the motion of the video camera, pushing left, right, up, down, may have created a turbulence that caused the jelly to undulate and get all flappy.

Did Dr. M get it right? Is this a Deepstaria enigmatica? Not quite. Right away, marine biologists from all over rushed in with their own guesses, and the consensus was; yes, it’s a jellyfish, but not an enigmatica. What we have here is a very similar jelly called Deepstaria reticulum, an unbelievably weird-looking blob that eats with those little membranes in the skin, fights with bumps on its surface, has an opening (that, when lit, seems to glow). It should be a contender for The Strangest Looking Earthling On Earth.

And maybe because the truth in this case was so much more fascinating than any fiction (I mean, Nessie seems tame compared to this), the Web, even the British tabloids, went straight for the truth. Everywhere, everybody was suddenly learning about a giant jellyfish — seen 29 times previously by marine biologists, but not by your average Jane and Joe, so this, as they say on NBC, was “new to you!” What could have been another zany viral video turned instead into a global science lesson … which I hope will include you. Instead of an accidental peek at this jellyfish, I want you to see Deepstaria reticulum as it ought to be seen. If Vogue did fashion shoots of jellyfish, they would look like this.

Thanks to marine biologist Steve Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (who does the narration), here’s the supermodel version, dangerously glamorous: [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Or at least that’s the way some people look at the task force’s latest guidelines on prostate cancer screening, which say doctors should stop doing routine PSA tests on men of any age. (The task force earlier recommended an end to testing of men over 75.)

The American Urological Association pronounced itself “outraged” at the task force edict.

“It really is too extreme for them to say that all PSA testing should stop,” fumes Dr. William Catalona, a Northwestern University urologist and PSA testing pioneer. “If all PSA screening were to stop, there would be thousands of men who would unnecessarily suffer and die from prostate cancer.”

Catalona insists the evidence suggests routine PSA screening prevents as many as 40 percent of prostate cancer deaths by catching the disease when it’s early and curable.

No way, says Dr. Michael LeFevre, a task force member who is professor of family practice at the University of Missouri.

“We think the benefit is very small,” LeFevre told Shots. “Our range is between zero and one prostate cancer death avoided for every thousand men screened.” By comparison, he says, the lifesaving benefit from colorectal cancer screening is two to 10 times higher.

LeFevre doesn’t deny PSA screening saves lives. It’s just that the benefit is much smaller than screening advocates think, he says. His best case: Widespread PSA testing might avoid between 1,400 and 2,800 prostate cancer deaths among 28,000 US men who now die of the disease. That’s 5 to 10 percent.

“I don’t want to take lightly any one of those lives,” he says. “And if prostate cancer screening was harmless and nobody suffered the consequences on the opposite side, then I’d say, ‘Well, why not?’ But unfortunately, that’s not the case.”

Unintended Consequences

The task force says up to 20 percent of men screened every year for 10 years will get a result that sends them to the biopsy suite. When cancer is found, nearly 90 percent will have surgery, radiation or hormone therapy, and up to one-third will end up with urinary incontinence, impotence or bowel problems.

Death from prostate cancer is a worse harm, for sure. But the task force says most of the men treated for cancer found through PSA screening would never have had a problem with the disease if it hadn’t been found.

“A goodly proportion of men who have localized prostate cancer actually have a disease that will never kill them if left alone,” says Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer. “More than a million men were needlessly cured of their prostate cancer over the last 20 years.”

Brawley says this notion — experts call it “overdiagnosis” — is hard for most people to grasp, including cancer doctors (or perhaps especially cancer doctors). “What the Preventive Services Task Force is suggesting is contrary to all our prejudices,” he told Shots. “We’ve all been taught that the way to deal with cancer is to find it early and cut it out.”

He especially hopes the new guidelines will put a stop to mass PSA screening by mobile vans at shopping malls and hospital-sponsored “health fairs.”

Brawley has been beating that drum since 1997, when an especially candid hospital marketing director bragged to him about the financial advantages of his institution’s free PSA screening sessions. He recounts the story in his recently published book, How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America.

“The marketing guy was really proud of his prostate-cancer-screening business plan,” Brawley told Shots. “If they screened 1,000 men at the mall … they got 135 guys coming in [to the hospital's clinics] to figure out why they had an abnormal test. And they would end up collecting an average of $3,000 per guy off of that.”

From there, many biopsies would reveal prostate cancer, and nearly all of them would have surgery or radiation, he says. The ones who got radiation, the marketer told Brawley, “reimbursed at almost $80,000 a guy.”

“I asked him, ‘How many lives will you save if you screen a thousand guys?’ ” Brawley recalls. “And he took his glasses off and looked at me as if I was a fool and said, ‘Don’t you know, nobody knows if this stuff saves lives? I can’t give you an estimate on that.’ “

Brawley says some PSA screening fairs are sponsored by the makers of diapers for incontinent adults, apparently because they know many men with abnormal PSAs will eventually suffer treatment-related urinary problems. “I don’t know if screening saves lives, but I sure know it sells diapers.”

A Matter Of Semantics?

Brawley is himself an expert in prostate cancer treatment. And as opposed as he is to indiscriminate mass screening, he says he’s not against PSA testing if doctors and patients go into it with open eyes, after a frank discussion of potential harms and benefits.

But while he thinks the Preventive Services Task Force “got it right,” he says it needs to do a better job of explaining itself. As in the mammography screening controversy of 2009, the task force’s analytical language leaves it open to the charge that it’s unsympathetic to men’s prostate cancer fears and diagnostic dilemma — coldhearted even.

“I wish the task force’s wording were a little bit more user-friendly,” Brawley says.

Instead of saying that doctors should stop doing PSA “routinely,” he says, maybe it should have said they shouldn’t do them “automatically.”

That leaves the door open to a doctor-patient discussion about the pros and cons. And that’s exactly what the task force says it wants to do.

[Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

And yet — in the hands of filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (whose movie, Catfish was about hustling on the Internet), as narrated by Tom Waits, script by Gabriel Nussbaum — there is something of the flimflam man in John Baldessari. His work, says Wikipedia, combines “the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language” — which means — I don’t know what.

‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’

His works include people with colored dots on their heads, oddly composed photographs, large trumpet sculptures. Some of his pieces feature him promising, “I will not make any more boring art, I will not make any more boring art,” which suggests that he often thinks he is making boring art, and that maybe he’s a little bit amazed that people want to buy and buy and buy what he’s making.

That is why I liked this video: it’s commissioned by a museum to proclaim a great talent, but watching it, I have this sense that instead Mr. Baldessari & Co. are slyly winking at us, saying, (as he does at the end) that if you’ve got some ability and you’re crazy enough to put in the hours, what an artist really needs is “to be at the right place at the right time.” In other words, art is a business like any other, and the key is timing, to hit the market when the market is ripe.

If Baldessari weren’t such a charmer, if the edits weren’t so pitch perfect, if Tom Waits didn’t have the best gravelly-wonderful voice in the world, I wouldn’t be recommending this film.

But I am. It’s an homage to art or to commerce or to mischief, I don’t know which. And it’s short. So take a look and decide for yourself. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

For as Kurlansky tells it, when Clarence Birdseye figured out how to pack and freeze haddock, using what he called “a marvelous new process which seals in every bit of just-from-the-ocean flavor,” he essentially changed the way we produce, preserve and distribute food forever.

Today, tiger shrimp from Thailand, Japanese edamame and blueberry cheesecake outshine the plain white fillets in the freezer case, but those packs of haddock launched the freezer revolution: They embody the magic combination of size, shape, and packaging.

Unlike Kurlansky’s book on cod, here he focuses on the man behind the fillet. And Birdseye’s remarkable life uniquely prepared him to lead the world into its frozen future.

Born in 1886, he had a naturalist’s curiosity, a love of food, and a strong entrepreneurial streak. At the age of ten, he was hunting and exporting live muskrats and teaching himself taxidermy. He studied science in college, but had to drop out for financial reasons. Forced to support himself, he joined various scientific expeditions that took him to remote places, including Labrador, where he spent several years in the fur business.

On all these trips he liked to experiment with whatever fresh food was on hand. In the Southwest, he ate slices of rattlesnake fried in pork fat. From Labrador, he wrote letters home that described exotic meals like lynx marinated in sherry, porcupine, polar bear meat and skunk.

The long Labrador winters also taught him what it was to crave fresh food, and introduced him for the first time in his life to frozen food that tasted good.

Up until the 1920s in America, it was the food of last resort. “When it thawed it was mushy and less appealing than even canned food,” writes Kurlansky. But in Labrador he learned from the Inuit how to fish trout from holes in the ice and watch it freeze instantly in the air, which registered at 30 degrees below zero. And when it was cooked, it tasted like fresh trout.

It was the same with their meat and game, which they kept fresh for months in hard-packed snow.

He soon figured out that the key to success was to freeze food fast, and at very low temperatures. This prevented large ice crystals from forming. These large crystals could damage cells and were responsible for giving much frozen food an unpleasant mushy texture.

But it took a while for Birdseye to see where all this would lead him. He and his family returned to the US in 1917 and he took a series of jobs before joining the U.S. Fisheries Association in Washington — a lobbying group. It was while working with them that the “big Birdseye idea,” as Kurlansky calls it, first began to take shape.

Packaging Matters

Birdseye realized that the way to expand the market for fish was to develop the means to pack and transport it over long distances, “in compact and convenient containers” and distribute it to individual customers with its “intrinsic freshness” intact.

He experimented with his own containers to chill food at first, but when that failed, he started thinking about what he learned in Labrador. And the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that quick freezing had huge potential.

In 1922 he left his job at the Fisheries Association and set out to “create an industry, to find a commercially viable way of producing large quantities of fast frozen fish.”

Even if he didn’t pioneer actual freezing, Kurlansky points out, that Birsdseye he had “to pioneer most everything else in his process.” This included everything from the boxes he packed the fish in to the machine that froze them and everything in between — from waterproof inks and glues to scaling and filleting machines.

The fish had to be frozen in small portions both for speed and because he wanted to sell it to individual customers. He was also concerned with eliminating the little air pockets that in whole fish could harbor bacteria and lead to decomposition. So a key part of his original 1924 process called for filleting the fish — which was an unusual thing to do in 1920s. It had to be done by hand. But it allowed them to be packed tightly into rectangular fiberboard boxes.

At first, Birdseye put these boxes into a long metal holders that was immersed in freezing calcium chloride, but three years later, in 1927, he applied to patent his multiplate freezing machine.

Large Scale Fast Freezing

This invention, along with the process which went with it, became the basis of the new frozen food industry, says Kurlansky, and “remained the basic commercial freezing system for decades.”

In essence, the machine squeezed waterproof cartons holding two inch blocks of fish between freezing plates that were kept between 20 and 50 degrees below Farenheit, for 75 minutes.The cartons never came into contact with the refrigerant and the neat packages were suitable for marketing to individual customers. And with a few tweaks, this new machine could be used to freeze anything from berries to pork sausages.”

By now, Birdseye’s own ambitions had soared way beyond fish fillets, but it didn’t happen quite as Birdseye had imagined.

His haddock fillets were slow to catch on. Kurlansky explains that people distrusted frozen food, railroads worried that they might be sued if the fish thawed in transit, public health officials fretted about bugs and germs. Stores had nowhere to store the frozen fillets and customers had no way to keep them frozen.

The boxes piled up in the factory. Birdseye ran out of money and sold his company to the Post company.

But Birdseye, now a newly minted millionaire, continued to work for the new Birds Eye Frosted Foods division of the Post company. It shared Birdseye’s vision that this was the food of the future.

Convincing The Public

To win over customers, the company started with ten stores in Springfield Massachusetts in March 1930. They gave them display freezers, put their staff through a three-day training course, and offered the food on consignment.

These included 27 different frozen items: The original haddock fillets, porterhouse steak, spring lamb chops, loganberries and raspberries, spinach and June peas advertised “as gloriously green as any you will see next summer.” Gradually, the world came to realize that frozen food was safe, and could provide an appealing and often more nutritious alternative to canned, salted and smoked foods. It overcame the limitations of local and seasonal food in unprecedented ways.

Stores and domestic kitchens began to acquire freezers, and after World War II, frozen food got a huge boost, because it made it possible to put entire meals on the table without women having to spend hours in the kitchen. It even helped shaped current school lunch programs. as Allison Aubrey reported. There was no going back.

Kurlansky argues that “by modernizing the process of food preservation, Birdseye nationalized and then internationalized food distribution… facilitated urban living and helped to take people away from the farms… and greatly contributed to the development of industrial -scale agriculture.” Birdseye, he says, would have seen all these as positive things.

Not everyone would agree with that verdict of course, but it’s harder to disagree with Kurlansky’s claim that “Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Left in medicine cabinets, those drugs can end up in the hands of children or others who really shouldn’t be taking them. Proper and timely disposal can avert those problems. Flushing or trashing drugs has been the norm for decades, but take-back programs have been springing up at pharmacies and police departments lately.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has organized four nationwide take-back events since 2010. The most recent, in late April, collected more than 500,000 pounds of unwanted medications.

Of course, any disposal method has environmental consequences. Flushing, for instance, has fallen out of favor for all but a handful of drugs because of concerns about water contamination. And researchers at the University of Michigan, writing this week in Environmental Science and Technology, say they’ve determined that trashing drugs, paradoxically, may be the most environmentally-friendly option.

“It’s surprising to find out that even though there’s this push towards take-back, trash seems to be the best option for several different reasons,” lead author Sherri Cook, of the University of Michigan department of engineering, tells Shots.

The researchers looked at the overall environmental impact of three disposal methods — flushing, trashing and incineration. They included how much of the drugs would enter the environment, but also looked at emissions impacts from transportation, water treatment, and burning of waste materials.

Their results show that flushing allows the highest levels of drugs to enter the environment by far, and creates more air pollution than trashing.

Drugs collected by take-back programs are incinerated, which means none of the medicines themselves enter the environment. But the programs produce much greater emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants than either flushing or trashing. That’s due in large measure to travel: people have to travel to a drop-off point, and then the collected drugs are shipped somewhere for incineration.

Cook says one benefit of home disposal is that we already have an infrastructure for collecting household trash. There’s also evidence from Sweden, which has had a drug take-back program for decades, that participation stagnates at around 40 percent of consumers.

At those rates, Cook’s research suggets the drugs getting into the environment would be about the same as if everybody threw them out at home, while producing three times as much pollution.

But Barbara Carreno, a DEA spokeswoman, says collection programs bring in people who otherwise might never have disposed of their old drugs. “People brought medicines to our [April] take-back that had been sitting in drawers, I kid you not, for 40 years,” she says.

The FDA and the Office of National Drug Control Policy provide guidelines for safely disposing of drugs at home, which will be useful to those who don’t want to wait that long – or who just like feeling green. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

If all goes well, the unmanned capsule will rocket up on a mission to deliver food and other supplies to the International Space Station, becoming the first commercial spacecraft to visit the outpost.

The highly-anticipated mission could mark the beginning of what some say could be a new era in spaceflight, with private companies operating taxi services that could start taking people to orbit in just a few years.

SpaceX and NASA have been working hard to make this launch happen — and that has meant navigating the cultural differences between this small, young start-up and the huge veteran space agency.

“I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA,” says Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 after making a fortune with the internet firm PayPal.

Musk says he runs his rocket company like a Silicon Valley tech firm. “That’s the operating system that I have in my head of how to run an organization. And that’s how I’ve created SpaceX,” says Musk. “NASA is obviously coming from a different heritage.”

For five decades, NASA was American spaceflight. Now, the space shuttles are going to museums — Discovery is already in the Smithsonian. And the government wants NASA to focus on deep space exploration, while relying on private space taxis to take cargo and people back and forth to the nearby space station.

NASA has been working with companies to make sure that vision of the future will happen. It has a cargo delivery contract with SpaceX worth $1.6 billion. And the space agency has also been handing out plenty of advice.

Musk says so far, their collaboration has worked well: “No relationship is perfect, certainly. But on balance, it’s really good.”

The relationship involves daily calls and emails between people who live in two different worlds.

For example, the workforce at NASA is generally older. Many top managers cherish their childhood memories of watching the Apollo astronauts on TV.

Not so at SpaceX, where Musk says the average age is around 30. “At age 40, I’m relatively old,” says Musk, who notes that he was born after the moon landing.

Like other tech companies, SpaceX tries to have a flat organizational structure, says Musk. The idea is that everyone can talk to everyone else, without having to go through chains of command.

“We really try to minimize any unnecessary paperwork or any bureaucratic elements,” says Musk. “I think it’s also easier if you are a smaller organization than if you’re a larger organization to be more nimble.”

SpaceX and NASA also have deeper cultural differences as well. People at NASA feel the weight of the space agency’s long history, which includes heart-breaking tragedies.

Wayne Hale, a former space shuttle program manager who recently retired from NASA after working there for more than 30 years, notes that “you go through life and you have experiences and bad things happen and from those experiences you learn perhaps to be more contemplative when you have to make choices.”

For engineers, that contemplation means running more tests and doing more analysis. To a certain extent, that’s a good thing, says Hale, but it costs both time and money.

“And to build a lower cost system, you need to perhaps draw the line back and not do so much,” says Hale. “And that’s what we’re seeing with the commercial space people.”

Michael Horkachuck, a NASA official who has been managing work with SpaceX, has noticed cultural differences.

“They’re a little bit different in that they like to build the hardware and test it and, if it doesn’t work and breaks then they’ll build another piece with a little change and test it again, and not do quite as much documentation and detailed analysis as necessarily NASA would typically do,” says Horkachuck, who notes that it reminds him a bit of how the Russians approach space technology.

But he says sometimes SpaceX sees the wisdom of NASA’s ways.

“SpaceX is learning how we do things and why we do things,” says Horkachuck, “and I think they are pulling some of the best ideas and methods that NASA has had and applying those to their program.”

One thing that makes this give-and-take go a bit more smoothly is the fact that a fair number of the approximately 1,700 people working for SpaceX used to be employed by NASA — Musk estimates that’s true of about 10 to 15 percent.

Jon Cowart, a NASA manager assigned to partner with SpaceX as it develops a vehicle that can carry astronauts, says that having former NASA colleagues at meetings can really help when agency officials and SpaceX are trying to relate to each other.

“It makes it a lot easier to find that common ground as we struggle to find the right answer on a way they plan do to something that we may or may not be comfortable with,” Cowart says.

Despite their differences, NASA and SpaceX share a set of core convictions. They both have an almost religious belief in the need for humans to venture forth into space, a geeky love for rockets, technical know-how — plus, they both need each other to succeed.

Some people even say SpaceX reminds them of NASA, back in the good old days.

“I would characterize them as almost being like back during Mercury, and Gemini and Apollo,” says Cowart. “That kind of youthful, you know, young enthusiasm that you have when you’re first starting something.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]