Science, Spoken

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The Controversial Link Between Epic Storms and a Warming Arctic Mar 14, 2018

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It’s that time of the year again, when massive winter storms lash the eastern United States and your uncle posts on Facebook about how it proves climate change is a hoax. After all, why would you still need a good coat on a warming planet? The fallacy is, of course, that weather is not the same as climate—though the two are intertwined in sometimes surprising ways.

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Please Stop Building Houses Exactly Where Wildfires Start Mar 13, 2018

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Built well, a city should provide a bulwark against disaster. Fundamentally, all cities are fortresses. Or at least they should be. If a city is a fortress, where’s the wall? The edges of North American cities today aren’t edge-like at all. Most of them, especially in the West, ooze outward in a gradient, urban to suburban to exurban to rural to wild.

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The Physics of the Speeder Chase in Solo: A Star Wars Story Mar 13, 2018

Show notes

I make it my job to hunt through all the best trailers and find some cool physics thing to explore. In this case, it's the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story—the Han Solo-led movie, scheduled to come out in May, that takes place some time before Episode IV: A New Hope. Right at the beginning, we see Han driving some type of speeder in a chase scene, taking a super-sharp turn with another speeder in pursuit.

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Can Machine Learning Find Medical Meaning in a Mess of Genes? Mar 12, 2018

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“We don’t have much ground truth in biology.” According to Barbara Engelhardt, a computer scientist at Princeton University, that’s just one of the many challenges that researchers face when trying to prime traditional machine-learning methods to analyze genomic data.

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The Transformer of Autonomous Farmbots Can Do 100 Jobs on Its Own Mar 12, 2018

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The first fully autonomous ground vehicles hitting the market aren’t cars or delivery trucks—they’re robo-farmhands. The Dot Power Platform is a prime example of an explosion in advanced agricultural technology, which Goldman Sachs predicts will raise crop yields 70 percent by 2050. But Dot isn’t just a tractor that can drive without a human for backup.

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No Refrigeration Necessary: New Tech for Everlasting Shelf-Life Mar 09, 2018

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There’s hope for a tastier, healthier, more robust tomorrow: high-tech new food preservation methods that fend off the bad stuff (bacteria, spoilage) while protecting the good (flavor, texture, nutrients). Scientists are experimenting with everything from microwave sterilization to blasts of plasma to ensure food stays appetizing longer—even without refrigeration. That salmon dinner you bought on Monday? It’ll taste just as fresh a week later.

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Can Humans Survive on Water Vapor Alone? Mar 09, 2018

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The world is full of water, flushing down our toilets and flowing from our taps. And yet where I live, in the American Southwest, and quite possibly where you live, the kind of water people need to survive is getting harder to come by. Across the region, temperatures are rising and droughts are getting more severe, and in the coming decades the West will struggle to supply the water its residents and businesses demand.

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Apparently We Can Let the Stock Market Fight Climate Change Mar 08, 2018

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Fixing the effects of climate change on Earth isn’t complicated. When you get down to it, all we humans need to save the world is ingenuity, grit, cooperation, and $53 trillion. Where is humanity supposed to come up with that kind of cash at this time of night? The International Energy Agency says Earth needs those trillions invested in energy supply and efficiency by 2035 to keep global warming below 2 degrees C.

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Sea Level Rise in the SF Bay Area Just Got a Lot More Dire Mar 08, 2018

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If you move to the San Francisco Bay Area, prepare to pay some of the most exorbitant home prices on the planet. Also, prepare for the fact that someday, your new home could be under water—and not just financially. Sea level rise threatens to wipe out swaths of the Bay's densely populated coastlines, and a new study out today in Science Advances paints an even more dire scenario: The coastal land is also sinking, making a rising sea that much more precarious.

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The CDC Can't Fund Gun Research. What if that Changed? Mar 07, 2018

Show notes

America doesn't have good data on guns. Blame the Dickey amendment. First introduced in 1996, the legislation didn't ban gun investigations explicitly (it forbade the use of federal dollars in the advocacy or promotion of gun control), but Congress that year also cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the exact amount it had previously devoted to firearm research. It's had a chilling effect on the field ever since.

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