Highlighting three fabulous new CDs by The Chieftains, Loreena McKennitt, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops.  In the first hour of Folk Music & Beyond, a concert recording by Loreena McKennitt and her trio from her new CD "Troubadours On The Rhine." 

Chuck Finney is joined by attorneys James Coy Driscoll and John Zanghi to discuss Landlord/tenant laws and disputes.

Volunteerism fills in the gaps that budget have made in Pinole, CA; the pitfalls of success for black men, the upcoming full solar eclipse and urban astronomers, and exploring sound at the Exploratorium.

With just a ten millimeter wrench and a screwdriver, Brian Simmons has built and sold more than 100 motorized bicycles in Oakland, CA, under the label Rebelbikes. The company has been around for three years. The two-man shop based out of the comfort of his living room.

Simmons’ two wheeled creations are motorized pedal assisted bicycles that can go up to 35 mph. His ultimate goal is to see bicycles replace cars, and while he knows it’s a stretch, he is taking his dream on one bike at a time.

This article was originally published on TurnstyleNews.com on May 14, 2012.

On a May evening, the Pinole Seals Swim Club hits the water for their first night of practice in the season that almost wasn’t. This is a popular pool, that Pinole resident Kiki Kaski says hundreds of people use every year.

“All the camps in the area send their kids to this pool, the YMCA, Special Olympics uses this pool,” says Kaski. “You go there and you get this feeling like, ‘It’s summer!’ And it feels good.”

That feeling of summer costs about $65,000 a year to maintain. Right now, that’s money that the city doesn’t have. So last fall, when the Pinole City Council was looking for ways to balance this year’s budget, cutting the swim center was on the list.

So far in KALW News’ series of conversations about sound, we’ve taken you to the planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences, and to the unique San Francisco sound theater called Audium.

For this segment of “Audiophiles,“ where we talk with the most creative minds working in sound, we want you to close your eyes and imagine you've walked into a diner…

MARTINA CASTRO: You go up to the jukebox, throw in your quarter and pick a random song. It sounds like a pretty cool song, but listen closely…

PAMELA WINFREY: I'm sure we've all had days like that, haven't we?

Okay, so this is clearly not a regular jukebox, and we're not in a diner. The woman you just heard is…

Older generations often want to impart lessons learned to those that follow, but one Oakland-based project doesn't want to leave that exchange up to chance. Question Bridge: Black Males is a video art installation that features over 150 black males from eleven American cities and towns. The men of all ages, classes, and sexual orientations, take turns asking and answering questions on big life topics, such as love, family, and violence. The project aims to promote constructive dialogue between black men and the rest of the nation, but also to break down limiting stereotypes about black male identity.

Google announced a big change in its approach to search today.

The search giant said the move was the first step in transitioning from an "information agent" to a "knowledge agent."

"The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about — landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more — and instantly get information that's relevant to your query," Amit Singhal, a senior vice president at Google, wrote.

Paul Salazar is a member of the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers and keeps a regular astronomy blog called the Urban Astronomer. He sat down with KALW’s Ben Trefny to talk about the upcoming solar eclipse. He also explained what he calls a "spectacular solar event" that only happens twice every hundred years. It's called the Transit of Venus and it's happening on June 5. Listen to find out where and when to watch.

To listen to the full interview aired on Crosscurrents, click here. 

President Obama and congressional leaders lunched at the White House Wednesday on sandwiches the leader of the free world purchased during a visit to a Washington, D.C., eatery where he met earlier in the morning with a group of small-business people.

Descriptions of the White House lunch meeting from those on the opposing red and blue teams aware of the details of the discussion made it sound like yet another meeting featuring the nation's top policymakers that you could have accurately described beforehand.