Science, Spoken

Before he rocketed off to spend a year in space, one of Scott Kelly’s final acts on Earth was peeing on the back tire of a van. Not because you can’t pee in space (you can—it just requires some suction). It’s tradition: Yuri Gagarin, who made it to space first, did the same thing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's the beginning of a new semester for introductory physics students. I have a new message that might not be very popular: Read the textbook. And I don't just mean, like, here and there. Read the whole thing as as soon as possible. I know many students have different ideas about the role of the textbook in college courses, so let me go over some of the reasons that students should start reading right away. Textbooks Aren't So Bad Yes, textbooks aren't perfect. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are swaths of placid Texas prairie, wetland, and forest straddling I-10 where it hits Highway 6, about 20 miles west of downtown Houston. But that’s not how nature sees them. To nature, those two open spaces are the top of a hydrological basin that drains through the city and into the Houston Ship Channel. Most of the time the reservoirs don’t reserve any water. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1954, Italian inventor Carlo Vanoni swelled with patriotic pride when he learned that his fellow countrymen had summited K2, the second-tallest mountain in the world. He was so proud, in fact, that he started naming all his formulas after it: K2a, K2b, K2c, and on down the alphabet. K2r turned out to be his biggest hit—it became K2r Spotlifter, a household cleaner that erases greasy stains from car seat upholstery and delicate silk shirts alike. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In Gerald Grant’s line of work, there isn’t such a thing as an “average” patient. As a chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Stanford University Medical Center, the children that come into his operating room are unique, each requiring a complex surgical procedure tailored to the architecture of a young brain. But that doesn’t mean he can’t learn from what other people have done. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hurricanes are ranked according to their wind speed. But a truer measure of their destructive potential would also include their moisture level. Just before making landfall on Friday night, Hurricane Harvey jumped up to become a category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. But more dangerously, it’s also packing enough moisture to drop 20 inches or more of rain across Texas’ gulf coast. Texas has been bracing itself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Too often, letters, words, and sentences get the credit for conveying information. But the human brain also makes meaning out of pitch. Like how upspeak turns any sentence into a question? Or how emphasizing the beginning of a sentence (Tom and Leila bought a boat) helps clarify that it was in fact Tom and Leila who bought the boat, not some other couple. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

CrisprCon is not a place where spandexed, beglittered, refrigerator drawer fans come together for an all-you-can-eat celebration of unwilted produce. No. Crispr-Cas9 (no E), if you haven’t been paying attention, is a precise gene editing tool that’s taken the world by storm, promising everything from healthier, hangover-free wine to cures for genetic diseases. Like, all of them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I haven't seen The Defenders yet, but it's high on my list of things to watch. I am super excited about it, and why not? It brings Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones together to save ... oh, never mind. No spoilers! That said, I consider trailers fair game, and this one from Netflix features an amazing scene in which the four Defenders fight a horde of bad guys in a hallway. Of these four superheroes, all but Daredevil can throw a superhuman punch. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Each year, the world throws 8 billion metric tons of plastic into the ocean, about a dump truck every minute. Some washes up on beaches, some sinks, and the rest floats to the surface, where currents sweep it into giant rafts of garbage. Over time, chopping waves and beating sunlight break those plastics down into microscopic particles—which conservation groups worry pose a real threat to marine life and the people who eat it. But there are ways to pull those plastics out of the sea. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Matthieu Komorowski wanted to be an astronaut. Still does. The French-born anesthesiologist, currently getting a PhD at Imperial College London, applied to the European Space Agency in 2008. But he knows his chances are limited. “Being basically a medical resident I didn’t get very far in the selection,” Komorowski says. “But I’ve been working on building up my skills.” Among those skills: administering anesthesia for surgery. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Let's pretend that the US didn't recently pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Let's also pretend that all the other countries that scolded it for withdrawing also met their Paris pledges on deadline. Heck, let's pretend that that everyone in the whole world did their very best to cut emissions, starting today. Even if all that make-believing came true, the world would still get very hot. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Recall your favorite memory: the big game you won; the moment you first saw your child's face; the day you realized you had fallen in love. It's not a single memory, though, is it? Reconstructing it, you remember the smells, the colors, the funny thing some other person said, and the way it all made you feel. Your brain's ability to collect, connect, and create mosaics from these milliseconds-long impressions is the basis of every memory. By extension, it is the basis of you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

California is on fire again. CalFire, one of the agencies charged with putting those fires out, is tracking upward of two dozen conflagrations up and down the state at the moment—Detwiller, Grade, Bridge, Wall, Alamo, Garza, on and on—ranging in size from a couple hundred acres to nearly 50,000. And it’s not just the Golden State. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month, Phoenix enduring a blistering heat wave, with temperatures so high that airport officials had to cancel dozens of flights. The reason was two-fold. First off, some jet engines risk catching on fire in extreme heat. And when air gets hot, it expands and becomes less dense—so an airplane’s wings can’t generate enough lift to get off the ground. Planes either need to speed up during take-off or use a longer runway. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Suppose someone builds a wall. A great and tall wall that is both impenetrable and beautiful. Who knows—maybe it's even solar powered. This wall stands 10 meters tall and goes on and on and on. Now suppose someone wants to toss a bag of stuff over that wall. A big bag with a mass of, oh, 60 pounds. (I will say 27 kilograms, because kilograms are better. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The first semester of an undergraduate physics course invariably spends a lot of time on two big ideas: The momentum principle and the work energy principle. Both deal with forces acting on an object, which often leads students to think they are similar. In a way, they are, and they play a huge role in almost everything you learn during an introduction to physics. Before I give you a great physics question that uses these ideas, I will go over them in a super-brief physics lesson. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

E. coli might best be known for giving street food connoisseurs occasional bouts of gastric regret. But the humble microbial workhorse, with its easy-to-edit genome, has given humankind so much more—insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs, biofuels, synthetic rubber, and now: a place to keep your selfies safe for the next millennium. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elon Musk is the closest thing this world has to a real-life Tony Stark. Think about it. He builds cool cars. He builds cool rockets. He builds cool tunneling machines. He wants to fire people through pneumatic tubes. He built a ginormous battery factory in the desert, and how he's building the world's largest battery. OK, technically, Elon Musk isn't building it. Tesla is. But same difference, because Tesla is his company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Planet Earth is getting hotter. One of the more confusing aspects of this global trend is the persistent, undeniable discomfort of winter. Even more confusing is when that chilly weather continues into April, May, or godforbidpleasenot June. This might clear the confusion (but probably not the frustration): Those colder temperatures in the first half of the year might be due to warmer weather in the Arctic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Five years ago, Daniel MacArthur set out to build a massive library of human gene sequences—one of the biggest ever. The 60,706 raw sequences, collected from colleagues all over the globe, took up a petabyte of memory. It was the kind of flashy, blockbuster project that would secure MacArthur a coveted spot in one of science’s top three journals, launching his new lab at the Broad Institute into the scientific spotlight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When I get excited about a movie, my only way of calming down is to do a little physics. That explains why I found myself pondering Hooke's law and Young's modulus while watching a trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming. Oh, wait. Before going further, I should provide a spoiler alert, just in case you're the type who doesn't even watch trailers. I consider trailers fair game. You have been warned. I'm not sure just what's happening in this scene, but it looks exciting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Add marijuana to humans, and you get some fairly predictable results: euphoria, hunger, introspection, anxiety, and a whole panoply of other effects. Also known as being high. Most of that complicated reaction is thanks to a single cellular structure known as cannabinoid receptor 1. Your body has CB1 receptors lacing the surfaces of cells in the brain, liver, lungs, fat, uterus, and sperm. And whenever your . Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In December 2016, three generations of women astronomers joined me for a phone call. Debra Fischer, Natalie Batalha, and Margaret Turnbull have dedicated their careers to comprehending planets beyond the solar system, the signs of microbial life that might be on those planets, or both of those out-there topics. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In my family, I grew up knowing that my parents would support me no matter the mistakes I made. Bad grades, underage drinking, becoming an English major? All could be forgiven. Unless, of course, I put ketchup on a hot dog. Then I’d be out on my ass. In advance of the Fourth of July holiday, I emailed my dad to see if his opinions on hot dogs and ketchup had changed at all. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the late 1960s, a Pennsylvania man named Alan Litman fretted that his wife wouldn’t be safe coming home late on the mean streets of Pittsburgh. So he did what any doting husband would do—he figured out a way to fill a portable, easily deployed spray can with tear gas. Then he started marketing the product to law enforcement. Today his invention is known as Mace, a brand now synonymous with private citizens packing a ton of heat. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Scientists and the military have often tussled over who calls the shots in space. The first astronauts were military test pilots. NASA made the space shuttle extra big to accommodate the spy satellites Pentagon planners wanted to launch. And it took 15 years for the Defense Department to release topographical maps gleaned during a classified shuttle mission so scientists could use them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

By now, “Here Are Some Stupid Things on the Internet of Things” has become a full-on article genre. There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to the idea: “We Put a Chip in It,” it’s called. In some visions of the future, smart devices capture, quantify, and control most aspects of daily life. The oven knows you forgot about your cookies and cools them off for you at peak crisped-edginess. The fan knows you have entered the room and desire a breeze. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google just placed yet another bet on the idea that artificial intelligence will remake the world—and throw off wild profits. The company disclosed today that it has created a new venture fund dedicated to investing in AI and machine learning companies. The initiative's first public investment: lead investor in a $10.5 million funding round for Seattle startup Algorithmia, which has built a kind of app store for algorithms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most sci-fi TV is more about action and spectacle than anything thoughtful, but one show that really did the intellectual side of science fiction justice wasPrisoners of Gravity, which aired on TVOntario from 1989 to 1994. On the show,host Rick Green used science fiction to explore far more serious topics. “You’re talking with people who are really imaginative,” Green says in Episode 261 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices