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," we take you to the SF Exploratorium.

Consider a snail without a shell. Is it still a snail? I think its a slug. Luckily, this isn’t a quiz ... it’s from a new art installation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco – an exhibit that’s all about questions. Brother/sister reporting team Seth and Molly Samuel went to get some answers.

Research has begun to show the potentially devastating effects of foreclosure on the health of homeowners and their families. KALW’s Casey Miner went to San Jose to see how one family is recovering from foreclosure stress.

As part of our Oakland Fault Lines Project, which looks at the causes and solutions to violence, reporter Sarah Gonzalez went out to deep East Oakland to learn more about guns in the community. She started with the beginning of a gun’s life on the streets: the purchase.

Right off the I-5 freeway nearly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles sits a unique facility in California’s Central Valley. It’s Coalinga State Hospital – a hospital with a unique set of patients. The patients at the hospital have been classified as “Sexually Violent Predators;” they’re convicted rapists and child molesters – sex offenders who the state has determined are simply too dangerous to be released after completing their prison sentences. So they’re committed for psychological treatment inside the walls of Coalinga.

Unlike California’s state prisons, Coalinga isn’t overwhelmed with inmates – since 1997, only 2% of incarcerated sex offenders have ended up in the Central Valley hospital – so there are around 900 in the facility built for 1,500. But for sexually violent predators, their stay at Coalinga is indefinite.

KALW teamed up with a group of eight students from Mills College to look into the forces driving kids out of school in Oakland. These student reporters spent months in the schools the result is this documentary.

Imagine for a moment that you could go back in time and talk to your younger self, say at about age nine. What would have been your biggest dreams? Favorite color? Best friends? What would you hope to never forget as a grown up? These are just a few of the questions that KALW’s Martina Castro posed to three 4th grade girls, all friends and classmates at the Park Day School in Oakland. They attend an after school art and mindfulness class at Honey Moon Studios. Martina collaborated with their teacher, Emily Frost, to record a little time capsule for each of them – an interview that would capture this moment in their lives. Here’s a bit of what they each had to say.

In San Francisco, in the early ‘90s, city planners proposed a new light rail line for the city. The city dubbed it “the most significant capital investment project in generations.” The first phase was the T-Third train line, which runs above ground about five miles along the southeastern part of the city, from the football stadium up to the baseball stadium. That line’s been open since 2007. The second phase is the Central Subway, which will continue that line underneath downtown, through to Chinatown. It’s ambitious, and controversial. The subway is only four stops, but by the time it opens it will have been in the works for 15 years. It’s supposed to cost $1.6 billion, at a time when MUNI is already facing more than a billion-dollar deficit over the next 20 years. So is this project really what winning the future looks like? KALW’s Chris Hoff and Casey Miner crisscross the Bay to find out why it’s so hard to build San Francisco a new subway.