Science, Spoken

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Explore the Moon Using Augmented Reality Aug 22, 2017

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For a brief, non-shining moment on Monday, August 21, the moon will be the most important object in the daytime sky. Not that you’ll get a good look at much besides its backlit outline. And sure, it is uncanny and cool that the moon sits at just the right distance from the Earth to blot out the sun. But real lunatics—er, luna-philes? Let’s go with moon fans—know the moon’s real calling card is its wild topography, visible almost nightly with the right telescope.

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What a Border Collie Taught a Linguist About Language Aug 21, 2017

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Tansy was not into sports. The little border collie, a rescue, didn’t care for agility trials or flyball. But her adopted family—with two other border collies already in the house—did them all the time. Border collies are working dogs, the elite athletes of the canine universe. They go a little nuts without something to do. After a little consternation, Tansy's new owner Robin Queen, a linguist at the University of Michigan, got some advice: sheep.

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NASA's Rocket to Nowhere Finally Has a Destination Aug 18, 2017

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On a Thursday afternoon in June, a 17-foot-tall rocket motor—looking like something a dedicated amateur might fire off—stood fire-side-up on the salty desert of Promontory, Utah. Over the loudspeakers, an announcer counted down. And with the command to fire, quad cones of flame flew from the four inverted nozzles and grew toward the sky. As the smoke rose, it cast a four-leaf clover of shadow across the ground.

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Buried in a Gold Mine, a Particle Accelerator Searches for Stellar Secrets Aug 17, 2017

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In August 2015, scientists from the University of Notre Dame went west, the disassembled pieces of a particle accelerator secured in the back of their U-haul. Over 1,000 miles later and nearly a mile down, they started installing the machine in a new home: deep within an old mine in the town of Lead, South Dakota. Miners first excavated the Homestake gold mine in the 1880s.

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View the Eclipse With This Simple Homemade Gadget Aug 16, 2017

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You've surely heard by now that the moon will pass between Earth and the sun on August 21, creating a total solar eclipse that will cast a shadow over much of the US. Jimmy Carter was president the last time this happened, so you definitely don't want to miss it. The best way to observe this astronomical event is to be somewhere in the path of the totality that will experience total darkness in the middle of the day.

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Veritas Genomics Scoops Up an AI Company to Sort Out Its DNA Aug 15, 2017

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Genes carry the information that make you you. So it's fitting that, when sequenced and stored in a computer, your genome takes up gobs of memory—up to 150 gigabytes. Multiply that across all the people who have gotten sequenced, and you're looking at some serious storage issues. If that's not enough, mining those genomes for useful insight means comparing them all to each other, to medical histories, and to the millions of scientific papers about genetics.

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The US Won't Pay For the World's Best Climate Science Aug 14, 2017

Show notes

The most formal manifestation of the scientific consensus on climate change is an organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Headquartered in Geneva, under the aegis of the United Nations, it coordinates the volunteer efforts of several thousand scientists, industry experts, nonprofit researchers, and government representatives into reports issued every five to seven years.

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Want a Diagnosis Tomorrow, Not Next Year? Turn to AI Aug 11, 2017

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Inside a red-bricked building on the north side of Washington DC, internist Shantanu Nundy rushes from one examining room to the next, trying to see all 30 patients on his schedule. Most days, five of them will need to follow up with some kind of specialist. And odds are, they never will. Year-long waits, hundred-mile drives, and huge out-of-pocket costs mean 90 percent of America’s most needy citizens can’t follow through on a specialist referral from their primary care doc.

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How Color Vision Came to the Animals Aug 10, 2017

Show notes

Animals are living color. Wasps buzz with painted warnings. Birds shimmer their iridescent desires. Fish hide from predators with body colors that dapple like light across a rippling pond. And all this color on all these creatures happened because other creatures could see it. The natural world is so showy, it’s no wonder scientists have been fascinated with animal color for centuries. Even today, the questions how animals see, create, and use color are among the most compelling in biology.

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It's Past Time for You To Ditch That Fancy Scientific Calculator Aug 09, 2017

Show notes

Bruce Sherwood, the author of Matter and Interactions, had a question for me when I saw him at the American Association of Physics Teachers conference not long ago: "What calculator do you use?" If this seems odd, well, it was a conference of physics teachers. I responded with something along the lines of "I don't actually use a calculator." Of course, Bruce probably knew I'd say that. He absolutely agrees with me. I don't remember the last time I use a traditional calculator.

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