Science, Spoken

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Incredibles 2 Asks: What's the Right Way to Solve a Math Problem? Apr 17, 2018

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Everyone knows I like to analyze the trailers of upcoming movies—in particular, movies that I'm excited about. In this case, it's Incredibles 2. I have high hopes for this one since the first Incredibles was really great. In the trailer, we see Mr. Incredible doing his job—helping out with math homework (that's one of the things dads do). Here is how that goes down. Dash: "That's not the way you're supposed to do it, dad. They want us to do it this way." Mr.

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AI Learns a New Trick: Measuring Brain Cells Apr 17, 2018

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In 2007, I spent the summer before my junior year of college removing little bits of brain from rats, growing them in tiny plastic dishes, and poring over the neurons in each one. For three months, I spent three or four hours a day, five or six days a week, in a small room, peering through a microscope and snapping photos of the brain cells. The room was pitch black, save for the green glow emitted by the neurons.

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Exploring the Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds Apr 16, 2018

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Twenty-seven years ago, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed a strange correspondence: Numbers emerging from one kind of geometric world matched exactly with very different kinds of numbers from a very different kind of geometric world. To physicists, the correspondence was interesting. To mathematicians, it was preposterous.

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Quantum Mechanics Could Solve Cryptography’s Random Number Problem Apr 16, 2018

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Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an entire building. Its lasers, mirrors, and lenses are split among three laboratories, two of them at opposite ends of the L-shaped building. The whole thing is strung together with almost 900 feet of optical fiber. “It’s a prototype system,” the mathematician explains.

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How the March For Science Became a Movement Apr 13, 2018

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In January 2017, what started as a subreddit thread about the new White House scrubbing all mention of climate change from its official government website became, just three months later, the single biggest pro-science demonstration in the history of humankind. On April 22, more than a million people across all seven continents took to the streets (and dirt roads and snowfields) to declare themselves, not dispassionately, for the fundamental political value of science.

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Space Oddities: We Need a Plan to Stop Polluting Space Before It’s Too Late Apr 13, 2018

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There is a lot of junk floating out in space, and it’s a problem we’ve been talking about, in fits and spurts, since the 1960s. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Amy Webb (@amywebb) is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, D.C. Space junk was the topic of my middle school futurists' society challenge.

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The Case of the Evaporating Exoplanets Apr 12, 2018

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Until recently, Fergal Mullaly worked for the science office of the Kepler space telescope, the planet-hunting satellite that has verified more than 2,600 planets so far. “We have this really strong emotional desire to be able to point to a place in the sky and say, ‘That star there has a planet around it,’” he says. For the four years of its main mission, from 2009 to 2013, Kepler fixed its gaze on one region of the sky and watched the light from its stars.

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Want to Fight Sea Level Rise? Look to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach Apr 12, 2018

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Most mornings when I step out of my San Francisco apartment, I hear the waves, the seagulls, and occasionally kids yelling out the window across the street. But over the past few weeks, the murmur of Ocean Beach has been cut with a low mechanistic rumble.

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How Many G's Will the Hyperloop Pull in Its Next Test? Apr 11, 2018

Show notes

Is Elon Musk crazy or just awesome? This week, the serial CEO (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink) posted on Twitter about yet another one of his ventures, the super fast tube-based transportation system called hyperloop. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/982826517443915776Is this even possible? Let's do some quick calculations. First, what is the speed of sound? I am assuming that Elon is referring to the speed of sound at sea level (and not speed of sound in a low pressure tube).

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What Random Walks in Multiple Dimensions Teach You About Life Apr 11, 2018

Show notes

The last time I looked at random walks, I used them to calculate the value of Pi for Pi Day. But what is a random walk, really? A mathematician will tell you that it's a stochastic process—a path defined by a series of random steps. It's a pretty abstract concept, but I want to show you how it can reveal something fundamental about life itself—the proteins that make up you and me and everything around us. So let's start with the simplest random walk, in one dimension.

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