Science, Spoken

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You Can Do Physics Even When You're Goofing Off Dec 13, 2017

Show notes

Sometimes, when I'm proctoring an exam, I end up with a little too much time on my hands. So I play with stuff—whatever I've got on hand. In this case, it was one of those clicky pens. It had stopped writing, so I assumed it was out of ink. Of course it might not be out of ink, so I took it apart to look at the ink cartridge and check. That's when I discovered the fun stuff: If I push the empty ink cartridge down into the top of the pen, it compresses a spring.

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To Fix the Space Junk Problem, Add a Self-Destruct Module Dec 12, 2017

Show notes

Humans have gotten pretty good at launching stuff into space—but way less good at getting stuff back down. Up in lower Earth orbit, along with a thousand-plus productive satellites, there are many more slackers: space junk, cosmic trash, garbage of the highest-orbiting order.

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Climate Change Could Take the Air Out of Wind Farms Dec 12, 2017

Show notes

Big offshore wind farms power Europe’s drive for a carbon-free society, while rows of spinning turbines across America’s heartland churn enough energy to power 25 million US homes. But a new study predicts that a changing climate will weaken winds that blow across much of the Northern hemisphere, possibly leading to big drops in clean wind energy.

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The US Flirts With Geoengineering to Stymie Climate Change Dec 11, 2017

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Google Is Giving Away AI That Can Build Your Genome Sequence Dec 08, 2017

Show notes

Today, a teaspoon of spit and a hundred bucks is all you need to get a snapshot of your DNA. But getting the full picture—all 3 billion base pairs of your genome—requires a much more laborious process. One that, even with the aid of sophisticated statistics, scientists still struggle over. It’s exactly the kind of problem that makes sense to outsource to artificial intelligence.

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The Physics of the Invisible Box Challenge Dec 08, 2017

Show notes

Humans dance. It's what they do. Everyone always wants to get some cool new dance move. First there was the electric slide. Yeah, that was cool—but then there was the moonwalk. That was really cool. And now we have the invisible box. OK, maybe it's not exactly a dance move, but more like a trick. The basic idea of this move is to make it seem like the dancer is stepping on a block—a block that's invisible. It's an impressive move, but how does it work? https://twitter.

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The Firestorm This Time: Why Los Angeles Burns Dec 07, 2017

Show notes

The Thomas Fire spread through the hills above Ventura, in the northern greater Los Angeles megalopolis, with the speed of a hurricane. Driven by 50 mph Santa Ana winds—bone-dry katabatic air moving at freeway speeds out of the Mojave desert—the fire transformed overnight from a 5,000-acre burn in a charming chaparral-lined canyon to an inferno the size of Orlando, Florida, that only stopped spreading because it reached the Pacific.

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Will Russia's Olympic Ban Shred the Culture of Doping? Dec 07, 2017

Show notes

It took a while, but Russia finally got body-checked out of the Olympic Games. The road to ruin began in 2015, when two Russian track athletes-turned-whistleblowers raised suspicion about widespread state-sponsored doping at the 2012 London Games, followed by an independent report about problems at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

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The AI Company That Helps Boeing Cook New Metals for Jets Dec 06, 2017

Show notes

At HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, materials scientist Hunter Martin and his team load a grey powder as fine as confectioner’s sugar into a machine. They’ve curated the powder recipe—mostly aluminum, blended with some other elements—down to the atom. The machine, a 3-D metal printer, lays the powder down a single dusting at time, while a laser overhead welds the layers together. Over several hours, the machine prints a small block the size of brownie.

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