Science, Spoken

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How Much Energy Can You Cram Into Your Halloween Candy? Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

It's Halloween time. For many, this time of the year means there are lots of cool costumes. For others, it's all about the candy. Now, I'm not a big fan of candy—but I am a big fan of analyzing stuff. So here we go: I'm going to look at the energy density for candy. Sure, I could just look this up—but it's much more fun to determine it for myself. Let's get started by going to the store. I am going to look at a bunch of different candy options and get some data.

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Can You Figure Out What's Wrong in This Iron Man 3 Scene? Oct 30, 2017

Show notes

Late at night, I tend to flip through the channels just to see what's up. If there's a good movie on, I might watch part of it—and recently, I stumbled on Iron Man 3. I know what you're gonna say—that's a terrible superhero movie. But I disagree. Fantastic Four, now that's a terrible superhero movie. Iron Man 3 wasn't so bad. Especially not that part where Tony Stark has to go to the store and MacGyver his way into a temporary suit.

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New Science Could Sharpen Crispr's Gene-Editing Scalpel Oct 27, 2017

Show notes

Stay on target. That’s the mantra you hear in labs and biotech companies around the world as they snip away at DNA. All the techniques for gene editing—from the famous Crispr-Cas9 to the older TALENs and zinc-finger nucleases—share a problem: Sometimes they don’t work. Which is to say, they have “off-target effects,” changing a gene you don’t want changed or failing to change a gene that you do. And DNA is not something you want poorly rewired.

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Cutting Carbs Won't Save You From Cancer Oct 26, 2017

Show notes

Half-eaten doughnuts hit the bottom of waste bins around the world this week, as news feeds spread word of a new dietary danger. Yes, headlines declared, a new study shows that sugar is the favorite food of cancer. Cancer. “This link between sugar and cancer has sweeping consequences,” wrote Johan Thevelein, a Belgian biologist and co-author of the study published last Friday in the journal Nature Communications. Sweeping is right.

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The Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang But a Paperclip Oct 25, 2017

Show notes

Paperclips, a new game from designer Frank Lantz, starts simply. The top left of the screen gets a bit of text, probably in Times New Roman, and a couple of clickable buttons: Make a paperclip. You click, and a counter turns over. One. The game ends—big, significant spoiler here—with the destruction of the universe.

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How on Earth Does Aquaman Fly in the Justice League Trailer? Oct 24, 2017

Show notes

I'll be honest—I don't know as much about DC superheroes as Marvel superheroes. Still, I'm pretty excited about the upcoming DC movie Justice League. As a kid, I dressed up as Aquaman; my mother was pretty good at making stuff and so she made costumes for me and my two brothers. The other two costumes were Robin and Superman—the unifying theme being that they don't have complicated masks.

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Can We Still Rely On Science Done By Sexual Harassers? Oct 23, 2017

Show notes

The pandemic of sexual harassment and abuse—you saw its prevalence in the hashtag #metoo on social media in the past weeks—isn’t confined to Harvey Weinstein’s casting couches. Decades of harassment by a big shot producer put famous faces on the problem, but whisper networks in every field have grappled with it forever. Last summer, the story was women in Silicon Valley. Last week, more men in media.

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Could San Francisco Get the Oil Industry to Pay for Climate Change? Oct 20, 2017

Show notes

When a raindrop falls in San Francisco, it has two choices: flow east into the San Francisco Bay, or west into the Pacific Ocean. A ridgeline divides the city into two, slicing through the Presidio, hugging the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, and skirting Twin Peaks. As the land drops off in either direction, the elevation difference doesn’t just drive raindrops downhill—it also moves human waste.

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What Happens When Robots Act Just Like Humans Oct 18, 2017

Show notes

Three years later, in 2005, Ishiguro unveils Repliee Q1 Expo to the public. Modeled on a grown woman (a popular Tokyo newscaster) and produced with better funding, this version can move its upper body fluidly and lip-synch to recorded speech. Ishiguro’s lab conducts several studies with it; the results are featured in a major Japanese robotics journal; the lab is filmed for television; he hears about a copycat android in South Korea.

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In 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,' Planet Sovereign Defies Physics Oct 18, 2017

Show notes

One of the great things about movies set in space is that the writers have the opportunity to come up with some fantastically crazy situations. Just look at the planet Sovereign, revealed at the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Don't worry about why the Guardians are on this planet too much—instead, let's just focus on the planet itself. It looks something like this: It's fantastically awesome—and I'm OK with that. However, there is a small physics problem here.

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