Science, Spoken

In February, the Spanish pilot Daniel González climbed into a small aerobatic plane at the Sabadell Airport outside Barcelona and fired up its single prop engine. Once he was in the air, González began a steep climb for about six seconds before entering a nosedive. The plane’s rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the cockpit and for a few seconds, González felt what it was like to be an astronaut.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thirty years from now, we’ll need to feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise provide for 2 billion more people. Human-caused global warming is going to make these tasks challenging as it produces more deserts, droughts, heatwaves, and other stresses. Even so, I believe we’ll easily meet our challenges and take better care of the people who inhabit the world of the future, without experiencing sustained shortages of food or other important resources.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every generation claims an event that defines it more than any other—winning a World War, or landing humans on the moon, or tearing down the Berlin Wall. But at this very moment, we have the dubious honor of living through an event whose impact will span generations: climate change. Never before has our kind faced such omnipresent peril, from supercharged storms to rising seas to drought to crop failure to biodiversity crises.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2021, a rocket is scheduled to lift off from French Guiana carrying the largest space telescope ever made. Known as the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers will use this beast of an observatory to study everything from habitable exoplanets to the formation of the first galaxies. JWST is the first mega-telescope of its kind to ever launch into space—and it may also be the last. The next behemoth might instead get assembled in space with the help of robots.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The old space shuttle landing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center received an unusual visitor early Sunday morning when the Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane autonomously returned from orbit after a record-breaking mission. For the last 780 days, the Air Force Research Laboratory used the space plane as an orbital platform for classified experiments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A little over a year ago, a group called The Ocean Cleanup launched an unprecedented campaign to rid the seas of plastic, complete with an unprecedented device: a 600-meter-long, U-shaped tube that was meant to passively gather debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for a ship to come along and scoop up and take back to land.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Right on cue, Northern California has plunged back into wildfire hell. This time two years ago, the Tubbs Fire was ripping through Santa Rosa and other communities north of San Francisco, killing 22 and destroying 5,000 homes. And last year on November 8, the Camp Fire virtually obliterated the town of Paradise, killing 86 and burning an astonishing 20,000 structures to the ground.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a lot of power in a rough estimate. If you’re trying to figure out whether something is worth doing, you could really go deep into the weeds trying to capture all the costs and benefits. But here’s the thing: Usually you don’t need an exact answer in order to make the right decision. For example, say you’re having a big party, a hundred people, and you want to make special decorated cupcakes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Monday evening, Maggie Guterl and Will Hayward set out for the 60th time on a four-mile loop through the hickory-covered hills of central Tennessee. It was dark and rainy on day three of the Big’s Backyard Ultra, a running race of fiendish design. There's no set distance, and no set total time, just endless laps around a four-mile course, which participants must complete once an hour. To win, you basically just have to be the last competitor still moving your legs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

College football is all about traditions, and most schools have some signature thing they do at games. Mississippi State has the headache-inducing din of cowbells. Arkansas fans summon their team to the field with a hog call. “Woooo Pig Soooie!” The Oklahoma Sooners have the Sooner Schooner. It's a little covered wagon pulled by a pair of enthusiastic ponies—you know, a prairie schooner—that careens onto the field whenever the home team scores. It’s pretty exciting.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices