Science, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

This Giant Invasive Flower Can Give You Third-Degree Burns Jul 03, 2018

Show notes

The giant hogweed is hard to miss. The monstrous plant towers up to 15 feet tall, with a crown of white flowers the size of an umbrella. They burst into bloom between the last week of June and the first week of July—just in time to be the perfect dramatic backdrop to red-white-and-blue-themed parties. But whatever you do, don’t touch it. The giant hogweed’s toxic sap could give you third-degree burns if you don’t get out of the sun and wash it off immediately.

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DNA-Repairing Sunscreen: Legit or Not? Jul 03, 2018

Show notes

Having grown up in Tucson, Arizona, one of the sunniest cities in the world, I consider myself well-versed in the carcinogenic threat of UV exposure, the skin-sparing sanctity of shade, and the redeeming qualities of the sartorial atrocity that is the broad-brimmed hat. I am also a compulsive sunscreensplainer.

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Why (and How) California Is Destroying Mountains of Weed Jul 02, 2018

Show notes

Call it the California Marijuanapocalypse of 2018. As of January 1, recreation cannabis has been legal in the state. A black market still runs underneath it all (Northern California alone supplies perhaps 75 percent of all marijuana across the United States), but cultivators and distributors are going legit, bringing themselves up to the rigorous testing and packaging standards mandated by the state. This weekend, though, was a weekend of reckoning.

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The Physics of a Spinning Spacecraft in The Expanse Jul 02, 2018

Show notes

The Expanse should just change their post credits for each episode to include a list of homework questions. Seriously—there are so many great things to explore in this hard science fiction show. In a recent episode, one of the large spaceships (the Navoo) rotates in order to create artificial gravity (that's not really a spoiler). How about some questions and answers about this giant spinning spaceship? How do you make artificial gravity? Let me get right to it.

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One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech Jun 29, 2018

Show notes

Ruth Nell is talented talker. Always has been. As a child, her mother taught her to enunciate her words when she spoke, which she did often and at length. So wordy was she that, in grammar school, her friends nicknamed her "Yakky Roo," partly for her ace Yakky Doodle impersonation, but also for her loquaciousness.

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SpaceX Is About to Launch Its Final Block 4 Falcon Jun 29, 2018

Show notes

SpaceX is swiftly moving toward achieving its ultimate goal of rapid reusability: flying a single booster twice within a 24-hour time period. It’s a goal that Elon Musk says SpaceX will achieve later this year—but in order to make good on that promise, the company must first say goodbye to its hardest-working rocket yet. That would be the full thrust Falcon, known to SpaceX followers as the Block 4.

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Delays, Rising Costs Plague NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Jun 28, 2018

Show notes

For the past decade, astronomers have been waiting for a remarkable new instrument to enter the world. The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched to waypoint 1 million miles beyond Earth’s orbit, further than any telescope yet, where it can observe the deepest corners of the universe. From there it will unfurl a sunshield to protect special sensors that can detect images giving off faint glow of far infrared light.

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The Rise of DNA Data Storage Jun 28, 2018

Show notes

The 144 words of Robert Frost’s seminal poem “The Road Not Taken” fit neatly onto a single printed page or a 1 kilobyte data file. Or in Hyunjun Park’s hands, a few drops of water in the bottom of a pink Eppendorf tube. Well, really what’s inside the water: invisible floating strands of DNA. Scientists have long touted DNA’s potential as an ideal storage medium; it’s dense, it’s easy to replicate, it’s stable over millennia.

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These Beating Mini-Hearts Could Save Big Bucks—And Maybe Lives Jun 27, 2018

Show notes

Crack open the door of the incubator at Novoheart’s Hong Kong headquarters and you’ll find about a dozen pea-shaped, pulsating blobs submerged in a warm, salty-sweet broth. They’re 3-D human heart organoids—a simplified, shrunk-down version of the real thing—the first ever to contain a hollow chamber, like one of the four that’s beating inside your chest right now. And they’re the future of drug testing.

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A Microguide to Microdosing Psychedelic Drugs Jun 27, 2018

Show notes

Adderall, shmaderall. Certain biohackers prefer taking teeny-tiny amounts of psychedelic drugs to boost focus. But what exactly is a microdose, anyway? Here’s our semi-scientific guide. Hint: If you feel the trees breathing, you’re doing it wrong. Acid Microdose (5–10 mcg): Users claim that a microhit of LSD clears mental locks and helps with depression. It’s often taken first thing in the morning with distilled water—chlorine can kill key compounds.

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