Science, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

The Confounding Climate Science of Lab-Grown Meat Feb 20, 2019

Show notes

A future in which your hamburger is grown from animal cells in a lab is rapidly approaching. The idea is that by culturing meat in a vat, you not only cut down on animal slaughter but greatly reduce emissions, on account of cattle taking a lot of energy to raise and butcher and ship. Not to mention their digestive systems pump a significant amount of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. That’s the idea anyway.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

3 Smart Things: What You Might Not Know About Attention Feb 19, 2019

Show notes

1. We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why a Grape Turns Into a Fireball in a Microwave Feb 19, 2019

Show notes

The internet is full of videos of thoughtful people setting things on fire. Here’s a perennial favorite: Cleave a grape in half, leaving a little skin connecting the two hemispheres. Blitz it in the microwave for five seconds. For one glorious moment, the grape halves will produce a fireball unfit for domestic life. Physicist Stephen Bosi tried the experiment back in 2011 for the YouTube channel Veritasium, in the physics department’s break room at the University of Sydney.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

R.I.P., Opportunity Rover: the Hardest-Working Robot in the Solar System Feb 18, 2019

Show notes

Last night, NASA reached out one final time to the Opportunity rover on Mars, hoping the golf-cart-sized machine would phone home with good news. Since June, the robot has been unresponsive, likely because a planet-wide sandstorm coated its solar panels in dust. NASA has pinged it over 1,000 times in those gloomy eight months, to no avail. Last night’s attempt was no exception: NASA has announced that Opportunity is officially dead.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Darpa Wants to Solve Science's Replication Crisis With Robots Feb 18, 2019

Show notes

Say this much for the “reproducibility crisis” in science: It’s poorly timed. At the same instant that a significant chunk of elected and appointed policymakers seem to disbelieve the science behind global warming, and a significant chunk of parents seem to disbelieve the science behind vaccines … a bunch of actual scientists come along and point out that vast swaths of the social sciences don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two Satellites Almost Crashed. Here’s How They Dodged It Feb 14, 2019

Show notes

The first alert came on January 27. Two small satellites, whirling through Earth's low orbits, had “the potential for a conjunction.” Those are the words Major Cody Chiles, spokesperson for the Joint Force Space Component Command, uses to mean "the chance of a collision." The satellites, one from a company called Capella Space and the other from Spire Global, could smack into each other.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A 6-Legged Robot Stares at the Sky to Navigate Like a Desert Ant Feb 14, 2019

Show notes

In case you’ve been envying the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis lately, don’t. Skittering around the Sahara Desert, the insect endures temperatures so brutal, it can sometimes only manage foraging runs of 15 minutes before it burns to death. Making matters worse, the heat obliterates the pheromone chemical trails that ants typically lay for each other to navigate. Get lost out here, and you’re literally cooked. Accordingly, desert ants have evolved superpowers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This Robot Debates and Cracks Jokes, but It's Still a Toaster Feb 13, 2019

Show notes

The Monolithic black rectangle on stage with luminous, bouncing blue dots at eye level was not Project Debater, IBM’s argumentative artificial intelligence. It was just something for an audience to look at while a voice—is it redundant to call an AI’s synthesized voice “disembodied”?—projected over the sound system of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A New Lab Is Brewing Microbes to Create Makeup and Medicines Feb 12, 2019

Show notes

On the third floor of a back building on Verily’s South San Francisco campus, ten white machines emit a low-pitched hum. Atop each one sits a plastic container so jammed with tubes and sensors it looks like a protein shake on life support. Inside, beige-colored broth bubbles away while tiny high-res cameras capture the frothy footage and stream it to the cloud.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Wretched, Climate-Killing Truth About American Sprawl Feb 12, 2019

Show notes

This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There might be no better monument to the limits of American environmentalism in the climate change era than a parking garage in Berkeley, California. It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture and water treatment features”—not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected