Science, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

Sunscreen in Your Bloodstream, Google’s Conference, and More News May 08, 2019

Show notes

Sunscreen chemicals are slipping through your pores, Google has big conference coming, and Game of Thrones made an "oopsie." Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. PSA: Sunscreen chemicals can seep into your bloodstream A new clinical trial from the FDA suggests that, contrary to what sunscreen manufacturers have been saying, the UV blocking chemicals in sunscreen do, in fact, seep into your bloodstream.

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Sunscreen Chemicals Soak All the Way Into Your Bloodstream May 07, 2019

Show notes

By now, you’ve probably been taught to gird your sun-starved skin for battle with cancer-causing cosmic rays every time you go outside. Choose a spray, choose a lotion, but by heavens, choose something! Legions of doctors, parents, and YouTube beauty influencers are unanimous on this point.

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Legendary Haight Street Gets a New, Legal King of Weed May 07, 2019

Show notes

This past Valentine’s Day, Shawn Richard stood before the San Francisco Planning Commission and made the case for why the board should let him open the first cannabis dispensary in the city’s legendary Upper Haight neighborhood. Given the Haight’s legacy as the epicenter of the weed-fueled counterculture movement, his shop would be historically significant.

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SpaceX Is Launching 'Organs on a Chip' to the ISS May 06, 2019

Show notes

Last month, a journal published an n-of-one experiment of unusual origin. It was the study comparing astronaut Scott Kelly’s physiology to that of his Earthbound identical twin brother, Mark. During his time on the International Space Station, Scott gathered reams of data on his own health and took hundreds of samples of his own stool, urine, and blood, for comparison later to those of Mark.

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How to Build, and Keep Building, a Cathedral Like Notre Dame May 06, 2019

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The roof of Notre Dame Cathedral wasn’t just a roof. Sure, it kept the rain out. But what burned away in Paris last April was a technical marvel, the height—literally—of 12th- and 13th-century engineering.

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A Programmer Solved a 20-Year-Old Forgotten Crypto Puzzle May 03, 2019

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In early April, 1999, a time capsule was delivered to the famed architect Frank Gehry with instructions to incorporate it into his designs for the building that would eventually host MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, or CSAIL. The time capsule was essentially a museum of early computer history, containing 50 items contributed by the likes of Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee.

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Women May Soon Start Using AI to Tell Good Eggs From Bad May 02, 2019

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Millennials are increasingly making time in their busy schedules to put their eggs on ice. More effective flash-freezing technologies, micro-optimized ad targeting, and a growing willingness among companies to follow Silicon Valley’s lead of including fertility treatments in benefit packages, have made the practice more attractive to would-be parents.

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These Super-Precise Clocks Help Weave Together Space And Time May 02, 2019

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The world’s most precise clock sits on a table in Jun Ye’s lab in Boulder, Colorado. A tangle of electronics, fiber optic cables, and laser beams, the clock is still a prototype, so no one actually uses it to tell time. Ye, who is a physicist at the research institute JILA, and his team have demonstrated that the clock can produce a second with precision in the parts per quintillion—that’s 10-19, some hundred billion times more precise than a quartz wristwatch.

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The Grid Might Survive an Electromagnetic Pulse Just Fine May 01, 2019

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Over the past few years, speculation has risen around whether North Korea or any other nation could detonate a nuclear weapon over the United States that would create an electromagnetic pulse, and knock out all electricity for weeks or months. This doomsday hypothesis has been promoted by a former CIA director , a commission set up by Congress, and a book by newsman Ted Koppel.

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RIP, Anki: Yet Another Home Robotics Company Powers Down May 01, 2019

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Today brings sad news in the world of consumer robotics. Anki, maker of Vector, a toy-like autonomous countertop robot, is shutting down, and hundreds of people are losing their jobs.

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