Big Picture Science Podcast: A Real Gas

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Did you know, some gasses have a colour (like chlorine), many are invisible and have have no taste or smell (such as oxygen and nitrogen), and yet others are totally unreactive—the noble gasses, such as neon, argon and xenon? Also steam is an invisible gas. The stuff we see coming out of a kettle is condensed steam, but close to 100 degrees Celsius.

In this episode, Mark Miodownik – Professor of materials and society at the University College London and the author of It’s a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World, talks with executive producer of BPS, Molly Bentley.

Big Picture Science Podcast — Vroom!

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In this episode, astronomer Seth Shostak and co-host of BPS, Molly Bentley take a ride in a Waymo self-driving car. Seth also talks with Witold Rybczynski, professor emeritus of architecture and design at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book, The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car.

Big Picture Science Podcast — Your Mind on Movies

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Apparently your blood coagulates when you watch a horror movie, preparing you for bleeding. In this podcast episode, we hear why.

Big Picture Science Podcast — Sceptic Check: Drone Panic

The bright planet Venus is often misidentified as a UFO. If you look SW, you can see it in the evenings at the moment. In the latest podcast, astronomer Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute (a regular on the epic 80s space documentary Cosmos) and science journalist Molly Bentley talk to various experts about UFOs, or as they're now known, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

Science Friday Podcast — Mars Sample Return Mission. It is Rocket Science

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On the program this week, the team discuss the retrieval of the Mars samples collected by the Perseverance rover. Some are ready for collection on the planet's surface and 30 samples in total will be returned to Earth. The return probably wont happen until late in the next decade. It's a difficult and complex project with many parts that have to work perfectly. A launch system has to be landed on the planet first (called the Mars Ascent Vehicle). An ESA spacecraft called the Earth Return Orbiter will then capture the launched sample capsule from orbit and transport it back to Earth where the samples can be analysed. The Perseverance rover has multiple analysis instruments on board, including two types of spectrometers (an instrument that can determine the chemical makeup of a substance). However more sophisticated analysis can only be done back on Earth.

More info on the retrieval project on the NASA website here.

Big Picture Science Podcast — Beyond the Periodic Table

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Directly after the Big Bang, there were no elements as we know them today. So no hydrogen, helium, copper, gold, mercury, chlorine or any of the other 94 or so naturally occurring elements. There were just sub-atomic particles such as quarks and electrons. A few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, these aggregated to form protons and neutrons. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, simply because there's a greater probability of a single electron and proton coming together to form a hydrogen atom. Other elements are more complex, consisting of various arrangements of protons, neutrons and electrons in their atoms. For instance, the total number of protons and neutrons in a gold atom's nucleus is 197 and there are an additional 118 electrons in its outer shells. It's much less likely for over 300 random particles to come together to make up that arrangement, that's why gold is so relatively rare.
In this episode of Big Picture Science, the team discuss the history of the periodic table and how we're making new elements, some useful and others purely for research purposes (The radioactive isotope Americium 241 is commonly used in smoke alarms, others are used for radiotherapy). Guests include Jennifer Pore – Research Scientist of Heavy Elements at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Mark Miodownik – professor of materials and society at University College London and the author of “It’s a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World.”

BPS Podcast - Not Just a Phage

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We don't really know what life is. The best scientists can do is describe the attributes of living organisms, the most obvious and superficial being that they seem to have purpose in their actions, they eat or absorb nutrients from their environment and they reproduce.
Are advanced AI systems or even your phone "alive"?
Robots of the future will probably be incredibly complex and already some robots are autonomous meaning they can be given a general task and can go off and work out how to do that themselves. The Perseverance rover on Mars is semi-autonomous and has purpose, its task being to search for evidence of past microbial life. While not reproducing biologically, future robots may be capable of replicating themselves using raw materials they source. But does that make them alive? Single celled organisms like bacteria "feed" by absorbing nutrients through their outer walls or cell membranes. Bacteria are thought to be living because they satisfy the criteria for life. However the jury's out for viruses as they can't do anything useful on their own and simply consist of virus particles called virions, made from strands of RNA or DNA. To reproduce, they must infect a host cell, causing the machinery of the cell to make thousands of copies of the virus which then emerge to infect more cells. Bacteriophages or simply phages are types of viruses that infect bacteria and archaea (single celled organisms without a nucleus). Treatment of diseases with phages that could destroy infectious bacteria was a practice once used in the early part of the 20th century but the development of new antibiotics over the decades meant that phage treatment was sidelined. However the appearance of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (something predicted by Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin in 1928) in the late 20th century and the slowdown of discovery of new antibiotics prompted the WHO in 2017 to highlight the need for new approaches to treating disease.
In this Big Picture Science podcast from the SETI Institute, the team investigate bacteriophage treatment to combat the antibiotic crisis.

Big Picture Science Podcast — Nuts and Bolts

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SETI Astronomer Seth Shostak and producer Molly Bentley talk to Roma Agrawal about her book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way in which she explores fasteners, pumps and some of the other inventions which shaped our world.

You may remember Seth Shostak from the epic 80s documentary series about space, Cosmos, written and presented by astronomer Carl Sagan. Seth occasionally featured in discussions about life on other planets and the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

Rust, "the pervasive menace" From the Big Picture Science Podcasts

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"Should the Iron Age really be called the “Rust Age”? When using iron, the benefits seem to outweigh the risks—especially if we embrace good maintenance, but the defense department considers rust a huge threat." This podcast from the Big Picture Science team delves into the problem of corrosion.