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PODCAST

Science, Spoken

Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.

science

All Episodes

6:26

R.I.P., Opportunity Rover: the Hardest-Working Robot...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/18

Last night, NASA reached out one final time to the Opportunity rover on Mars, hoping the golf-cart-sized machine would phone home with good news. Since June, the robot has been unresponsive, likely because a planet-wide sandstorm coated its solar panels in dust. NASA has pinged it over 1,000 times in those gloomy eight months, to no avail. Last night’s attempt was no exception: NASA has announced that Opportunity is officially dead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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8:33

Darpa Wants to Solve Science's Replication Crisis...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/18

Say this much for the “reproducibility crisis” in science: It’s poorly timed. At the same instant that a significant chunk of elected and appointed policymakers seem to disbelieve the science behind global warming, and a significant chunk of parents seem to disbelieve the science behind vaccines … a bunch of actual scientists come along and point out that vast swaths of the social sciences don’t stand up to scrutiny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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7:53

Two Satellites Almost Crashed. Here’s How They Dodged It

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/14

The first alert came on January 27. Two small satellites, whirling through Earth's low orbits, had “the potential for a conjunction.” Those are the words Major Cody Chiles, spokesperson for the Joint Force Space Component Command, uses to mean "the chance of a collision." The satellites, one from a company called Capella Space and the other from Spire Global, could smack into each other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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7:48

A 6-Legged Robot Stares at the Sky to Navigate Like a...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/14

In case you’ve been envying the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis lately, don’t. Skittering around the Sahara Desert, the insect endures temperatures so brutal, it can sometimes only manage foraging runs of 15 minutes before it burns to death. Making matters worse, the heat obliterates the pheromone chemical trails that ants typically lay for each other to navigate. Get lost out here, and you’re literally cooked. Accordingly, desert ants have evolved superpowers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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9:54

This Robot Debates and Cracks Jokes, but It's Still a...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/13

The Monolithic black rectangle on stage with luminous, bouncing blue dots at eye level was not Project Debater, IBM’s argumentative artificial intelligence. It was just something for an audience to look at while a voice—is it redundant to call an AI’s synthesized voice “disembodied”?—projected over the sound system of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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7:37

A New Lab Is Brewing Microbes to Create Makeup and...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/12

On the third floor of a back building on Verily’s South San Francisco campus, ten white machines emit a low-pitched hum. Atop each one sits a plastic container so jammed with tubes and sensors it looks like a protein shake on life support. Inside, beige-colored broth bubbles away while tiny high-res cameras capture the frothy footage and stream it to the cloud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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10:58

The Wretched, Climate-Killing Truth About American...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/12

This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There might be no better monument to the limits of American environmentalism in the climate change era than a parking garage in Berkeley, California. It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture and water treatment features”—not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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12:24

Now You Can Join the Search for Killer Asteroids

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/11

If you want to watch sunrise from the national park at the top of Mount Haleakala, the volcano that makes up around 75 percent of the island of Maui, you have to make a reservation. Being at 10,023 feet, the summit provides a spectacular—and very popular, ticket-controlled—view. Just about a mile down the road from the visitors’ center sits “Science City,” where civilian and military telescopes curl around the road, their domes bubbling up toward the sky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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8:29

The Green New Deal Shows How Grand Climate Politics...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/08

If it’s hard to imagine the sweeping changes proposed in the “Green New Deal” actually happening, don’t blame the Green New Deal. It’s just that it has been so long since any politician suggested something so grand. The wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and sea level rise that climate scientists have long promised are here, but we could get accustomed to that. We could forget that the world of five years ago or a decade ago was any different. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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8:41

This Jagged Little Pill Could Make Diabetes Easier to...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/08

Given the choice between tossing back a dose of medicine and pushing it through your flesh inside a cold, steel needle, most people pick the pill. Convenience, portability, and lack of skin-stabbiness have made pills the most popular way to administer drugs for the better part of medical history. But not all drugs can survive the corrosive, churning trip from the stomach into the intestines and across to the bloodstream. Antibodies, proteins—these molecules are too fragile. Learn more about your ad

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6:55

SpaceX's Starship, Meant for Mars, Prepares for a...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/07

Last Sunday, as much of the country tuned into the Super Bowl, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and a crew of engineers were gathered in McGregor, Texas, the small city where the company maintains a rocket test site. For a few seconds in the early evening, the sound of a new engine roared across the flatlands. "First firing of Starship Raptor flight engine!” Musk tweeted along with video footage of the test fire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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6:44

China’s Moon Lander Wakes Up From Its Long,...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/07

We already know it’s chilly on the moon. A lunar night lasts 14 Earth days, and its temperatures can dip into a cold so punishing it makes the polar vortex look like a hot tub. But yesterday, China’s space agency announced that the frigidity of the lunar night is even more intense than we’d thought: The country’s Chang’e 4 spacecraft recorded an icy low of –310 degrees Fahrenheit (–190 degrees Celsius). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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5:29

January Was Unusually Warm—Yes, Warm!—Despite That...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/05

This story originally appeared on Grist on Jan. 31 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. This January should be remembered for its unusual warmth, not its cold. Yes, it’s so cold right now that even hardy Minneapolis is shutting down schools, but even with these few days of extreme cold, Minnesota should end up with a near “normal” month thanks to weeks of unusual warmth. It was in the 70s and 80s as far north as Maryland on New Year’s Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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6:06

Ditch the Super Bowl for a Who's Who of Superb Owls

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/04

This Sunday, the subreddit /r/superbowl will host a gathering of hoo-ligans. They’ll be fans of the Nocturnal Flying League. Real birds of a feather. Starting at 6 pm ET, the Superb Owl community will kick off an Ask Me Anything with biologist James Duncan, who has spent his entire adult life studying owls and a mere three weeks playing football. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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5:48

The Punishing Polar Vortex Is Ideal for Cassie the Robot

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/04

This is not a story about how the polar vortex is bad—bad for the human body, bad for public transportation, bad for virtually everything in its path. This is a story about how one being among us is actually taking advantage of the historic cold snap: Cassie the bipedal robot. While humans suffer through the chill, this trunkless pair of ostrich-like legs is braving the frozen grounds of the University of Michigan, for the good of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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8:59

Don't Save the Planet for the Planet. Do It for the Beer

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/01

What beer wants to know is, why do you hate America? How can you just sit in front of the game on Super Bowl Sunday, ice cold domestic lager close to hand, and not consider the future of that great institution? No, not the Super Bowl—the beer. Beer is America. Americans drank 2.9 billion cases in 2017, more than any other alcoholic beverage. It’s true, sales look to be going down, and prices look to be going up. But beer has an even more existential problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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7:51

A Robot Teaches Itself to Play Jenga. But This Is No...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/02/01

Global thermonuclear war. The slight possibility that a massive asteroid could boop Earth. Jenga. These are a few of the things that give humans debilitating anxiety. Robots can’t solve any of these problems for us, but one machine can now brave the angst that is the crumbling tower of wooden blocks: Researchers at MIT report today in Science Robotics that they’ve engineered a robot to teach itself the complex physics of Jenga. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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6:10

An Underwater Skin Sensor Lets Swimmers Track Their...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/01/30

Sports teams collect sweat to analyze athlete performance, while companies market sweat replacement drinks and sweat-removal clothing to help keep sprinters, cyclists and tennis players happy. But so far, swimmers have been left high and dry. Today a team of researchers announced they have built a small, flexible, wireless sensor that sticks to a swimmer’s skin, allowing athletes to measure how much they need to drink during a workout or race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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6:39

SpaceX Revs Its Engines as It Gets Closer to Crewed...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/01/30

Last Thursday, a shiny new SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sat perched atop NASA’s historic Pad 39A, at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, waiting to briefly fire its engines. The exercise was part of a routine pre-launch test. What wasn’t routine was the presence of a Crew Dragon capsule atop the slick black-and-white Falcon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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8:27

And Now, the Weather: Mars-like, With a Chance of...

Science, Spoken ·

2019/01/29

Depending on who you are and what you’re into, Earth isn’t particularly habitable. OK, sure, if you’re some kind of polyextremophile microorganism, the world is your oyster. Even oysters are your oyster. You can manage temperatures down to -10 degrees and up to 250 degrees, high salt levels, no light, and a local pH—a measurement of acidity—of zero. That is sour. But then, if you’re a polyextremophile microorganism, you’re probably not a reader. No offense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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