Science, Spoken

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Wildfire Smoke Is Smothering the US—Even Where You Don't Expect It Aug 14, 2018

Show notes

America is on fire … again. More than a million and a half acres are burning in 15 states, from Arizona to Alaska. More than 3,000 firefighters are working to contain the Mendocino Complex Fire 100 miles north of San Francisco, now the largest in California history, and over the weekend, lightning strikes sparked dozens of new wildfires across the state of Washington. Near Mount Shasta, the deadly Carr Fire has so far incinerated 1,077 homes, forced mass evacuations, and killed eight.

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Star-Swallowing Black Holes Reveal Secrets in Exotic Light Shows Aug 14, 2018

Show notes

Black holes, befitting their name and general vibe, are hard to find and harder to study. You can eavesdrop on small ones from the gravitational waves that echo through space when they collide—but that technique is new, and still rare. You can produce laborious maps of stars flitting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way or nearby galaxies. Or you can watch them gulp down gas clouds, which emit radiation as they fall. Now researchers have a new option.

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How Engineering the Climate Could Mess With Our Food Aug 13, 2018

Show notes

On June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew its top in an eruption of staggering proportions. It sent an ash cloud 28 miles high, filling surrounding valleys with deposits 660 feet thick and destroying almost every bridge within 18 miles. Over 800 people lost their lives. The volcano also ended up affecting humans all over the world. Its aerosols circled the Earth, reducing direct sunlight by 21 percent.

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What Termites Teach Us About Robot Cooperation Aug 13, 2018

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At a glance, a single worker of the genus Macrotermes is not a very complex creature—less than half an inch long, eyeless, wingless, with an abdomen so transparent you can spot the dead grass it ate for lunch. Put it in a group, though, and it may pile up pinhead-sized balls of mud, one after the other, until a complex mound takes shape. By the time that mound is 17 feet tall, it will be equivalent in scale to the Burj Khalifa.

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This Solar Probe Is Built to Survive a Brush With the Sun Aug 10, 2018

Show notes

Early Saturday morning, the skies above Cape Canaveral will light up with the launch of the Parker Solar Probe. Its mission? To sweep through the sun’s infernal outer atmosphere, studying the gaseous fireball at the center of the solar system at closer range than any man-made object ever before. Despite being the nearest star to Earth, the sun’s extreme environment has stymied scientists for decades.

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Native Tribes Are Taking Fire Control Into Their Own Hands Aug 10, 2018

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Sometimes Vikki Preston is inching her way through the forest when she comes across a grove of tan oak trees that feels special. The plants are healthy, the trees are old, and their trunks are nicely spaced out on the forest floor. “You can feel that the grove has been taken care of,” she says. “There’s been a lot of love and thoughtfulness.

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The Unknowability of the Next Global Epidemic Aug 09, 2018

Show notes

Disease X n. A dire contagion requiring immediate attention—but which we don’t yet know about. In 2013 a virus jumped from an animal to a child in a remote Guinean village. Three years later, more than 11,000 people in six countries were dead. Devastating—and Ebola was a well-studied disease. What may strike next, the World Health Organization fears, is something no doctor has ever heard of, let alone knows how to treat. It’s come to be known as Disease X.

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Scientists Take a Harder Look at Genetic Engineering of Human Embryos Aug 09, 2018

Show notes

The distant future of designer babies might not seem so distant after all. The last year has been full of news about genetic engineering—much of it driven by the the cut-and-paste technique called Crispr. And at the top of the list: news that Crispr could modify human embryos, correcting a relatively common, often deadly mutation.

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You Can Learn Everything Online Except for the Things You Can't Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

I've seen several quotes that say something like this. Everything I learned in college can now be found online for free. Is this true or false? Well, it of course depends on what you did in college—but I hope it's false. Let's start with some examples that seem to support this idea. I will use the area of physics since I'm a physics professor.

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How Much Power Does It Take to Fly in a Real-Life Jet Suit? Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

This isn't actually a real Iron Man suit. But it does fly. It's a flying suit made by Gravity Industries, a young British startup that builds what they call 'jet suits.' The system uses six kerosene-powered jet thrusters to let a human fly around. Honestly, it just looks cool. This tweet states that it takes 1,000 horsepower to fly—how about an estimation to check this number? The Physics of Flight Let's start off with some fundamental physics.

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