Science, Spoken

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Trump Wants the EPA Radon Program Cut. So Do Some Scientists Aug 08, 2017

Show notes

Woe be to the Environmental Protection Agency. If President Trump gets his way, the federal agency will lose 31 percent of its annual budget—about $3 billion. Supporters of Trump’s 2018 budget proposal call it a “back to basics” approach, carving away what they see as the agency’s regulatory overreach. Opponents are similarly pithy: The EPA’s former director labeled Trump’s proposal a “scorched Earth budget.

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The Plan to End Science’s Sexist #Manel Problem Aug 07, 2017

Show notes

In October 2016, the organizers behind a conference on the microbiome sent promo materials to some prominent scientists. Elisabeth Bik was one of them: With her nearly 12,000 followers, her tweeting could help publicize their upcoming event in San Diego. But when she scanned the lineup, she noticed that almost every speaker was a man. Add more women, she suggested—or the conference should expect backlash.

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Science Says 13 Reasons Why May Be the Public Health Scare People Thought Aug 04, 2017

Show notes

In March, when Netflix quietly dropped its original teen suicide mystery series 13 Reasons Why, it took a few days for people to start freaking out. But soon, schools started sending home notes warning parents about the show’s graphic depictions of suicide and rape. Psychologists wrote op-eds denouncing its disregard for the World Health Organization’s suicide portrayal guidelines. News outlets published more than 600,000 stories about it. And then, there was Twitter.

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The Space Junk Problem Is About to Get a Whole Lot Gnarlier Aug 03, 2017

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For a few months in the fall of 1957, citizens of Earth could look up and see the first artificial star. It shone as bright as Spica, but moved across the sky at a much faster clip. Lots of people thought they were seeing Sputnik—Russia’s antennaed, spherical satellite, and the first thing humans had flung into orbit. But it wasn’t: It was the body of the rocket that bore Sputnik to space—and Earth’s first piece of space junk.

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The Physics Behind the Magical Parallax Effect Running Your AR Apps Aug 02, 2017

Show notes

There's something sort of cool in the next version of Apple's iOS. [It's call ARKit](https://developer.apple.com/arkit/—basically, it's a part of Apple's developer package to help programmers create awesome augmented reality apps. Like, maybe a program that adds dancing hotdogs to your screen so that they look like they are there in real life. Or better yet, something useful like an app that measures distances by just looking at stuff through your phone camera.

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Darpa Wants to Build a BS Detector for Science Aug 01, 2017

Show notes

Adam Russell, an anthropologist and program manager at the Department of Defense’s mad-science division Darpa, laughs at the suggestion that he is trying to build a real, live, bullshit detector. But he doesn’t really seem to think it’s funny. The quite serious call for proposals Russell just sent out on Darpa stationery asks people—anyone! Even you!—for ways to determine what findings from the social and behavioral sciences are actually, you know, true.

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Physicists Try to Revive a Super-Safe, Decades-Old Cancer Treatment Jul 31, 2017

Show notes

In a room at Northwestern Medicine Chicago Proton Center, Robert Johnson keeps a small collection of plastic heads. At first glance, they look like they’ve been lopped off the top of department store mannequins. But they’re more lifelike than that—made of materials that mimic bone, flesh, and brain. “One of them even has a gold filling,” he says.

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Luxembourg's New Law Lets Space Miners Keep Their Plunder Jul 28, 2017

Show notes

When Etienne Schneider became Luxembourg's minister of the economy in 2012, one of his first trips abroad was to NASA’s Ames Research Center. It might have seemed strange for the tiny state's money man to solicit meetings with cosmic researchers, but Luxembourg is always on the lookout for its next big investment.

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How on Earth Did Aaron Judge Bean That Stadium Roof? Physics! Jul 27, 2017

Show notes

During a recent Home Run Derby, Aaron Judge did something that no one thought was possible. He took a swing and hit a ball so hard that it collided with the ceiling at Marlins Park. The ball hit the ceiling about 170 feet above the ground. The height of the ceiling had been designed by engineers so that balls wouldn't hit it—but clearly, they can. OK, I don't really want to talk about sports. I want to talk about physics.

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Einstein’s Little-Known Passion Project? A Refrigerator Jul 26, 2017

Show notes

Many people know that work on nuclear weapons enabled the development of the first electronic computers. But it’s no less true that the humble refrigerator, in a roundabout way, enabled the development of the first atom bomb. While reading the newspaper one morning in 1926, Albert Einstein nearly choked on his eggs. An entire family in Berlin, including several children, had suffocated a few nights before when a seal on their refrigerator broke and toxic gas flooded their apartment.

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