Science, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

Does Your Doctor Need a Voice Assistant? May 01, 2018

Show notes

“Siri, where is the nearest Starbucks?” “Alexa, order me an Uber.” “Suki, let’s get Mr. Jones a two-week run of clarithromycin and schedule him back here for a follow-up in two weeks.” Doesn’t sound that crazy, does it? For years, voice assistants have been changing the way people shop, get around, and manage their home entertainment systems. Now they’re starting to show up someplace even a little more personal: the doctor’s office.

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How a Soviet A-Bomb Test Launched US Climate Science May 01, 2018

Show notes

This storyoriginally appeared on Undarkand is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. On March 23, 1971, the Soviet Union set off three Hiroshima-scale nuclear blasts deep underground in a remote region some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, ripping a massive crater in the earth. The goal was to demonstrate that nuclear explosions could be used to dig a canal connecting two rivers, altering their direction and bringing water to dry areas for agriculture.

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Fukushima’s Other Big Problem: A Million Tons of Radioactive Water Apr 30, 2018

Show notes

The tsunami-driven seawater that engulfed Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has long since receded. But plant officials are still struggling to cope with another dangerous flood: the enormous amounts of radioactive water the crippled facility generates each day. More than 1 million tons of radiation-laced water is already being kept on-site in an ever-expanding forest of hundreds of hulking steel tanks—and so far, there’s no plan to deal with them.

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The Terrifying Technological Tactics Behind BattleBots Apr 30, 2018

Show notes

It's hard not to like BattleBots. It is essentially a modern technology-based sporting event in which teams build remote controlled robot-like things that fight in an arena. Two robots enter, one robot leaves—and on May 11, the eighth season of the showdown begins. Of course, there are many engineering aspects of these bots—but underlying every bit of technological terror is some very fundamental physics. Let's go over some of the physics-based tactics used in the game.

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Chemists Orchestrate the Molecular Union of Two Single Atoms Apr 27, 2018

Show notes

The main act of Kang-Kuen Ni’s experiment could fit on the tip of a needle—and it happens in a fraction of a second. The Harvard chemist takes two individual atoms, a sodium and a cesium, each about 10,000 times smaller than a bacterium. Then, very carefully, she brings them together to become a single molecule: sodium cesium. It’s an unlikely pairing.

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A New Startup Wants to Use Crispr to Diagnose Disease Apr 27, 2018

Show notes

In 2011, biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a landmark paper introducing the world to Crispr. The arcane family of bacterial proteins had a talent for precisely snipping DNA, and one of them—Cas9—has since inspired a billion-dollar boom in biotech investment. Clinical trials using Cas9 clippers to fix genetic defects are just beginning, so it will be years before Crispr-based cures could potentially reach the world.

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The Lab Making Robots Walk Through Fire and Ride Segways Apr 26, 2018

Show notes

Benefits of robots: 1. They never get tired. 2. They can lift very heavy things. 3. They can walk through (controlled) conflagrations on college campuses. At least, that is, the robots in and around roboticist Jessy Grizzle’s lab at the University of Michigan. Specifically, Grizzle is working with a remote-controlled biped called Cassie, a research platform that roboticists are using to master bipedal locomotion.

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Lyft Delivers Carbon-Neutral Rides Apr 26, 2018

Show notes

This storyoriginally appeared on CityLaband is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. Over the years, John Zimmer, the co-founder and president of Lyft, has often pointed to a class he took as an undergraduate as the source of his ideas about environmental sustainability—and by extension, Lyft’s goals to create greener transportation options. The class at Cornell University was called “Green Cities.

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What Happens When Science Just Disappears? Apr 25, 2018

Show notes

Kay Dickersin knew she was leaping to the front lines of scholarly publication when she joined The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. Scientific print-publishing was—and still is—slow and cumbersome, and reading its results sometimes required researchers to go to the library. But as associate editor at this electronic peer-reviewed journal—one of the very first, launched in the summer of 1992—Dickersin was poised to help bring scientists into the new digital age.

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Delivery Bots Have Awkward Sidewalk Interactions, Too Apr 25, 2018

Show notes

Self-driving cars have it rough. They have to detect the world around them in fine detail, learn to recognize signals, and avoid running over pets. But hey, at least they’ll spend most of their time dealing with other robot cars, not people. Now, a delivery robot, on the other hand, it roams sidewalks. That means interacting with people—lots of people—and dogs and trash and pigeons. Unlike a road, a sidewalk is nearly devoid of structure. It’s chaos.

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