Science, Spoken

This story is part of a series on how we make time—from productivity hacks and long walks to altering the function of our own circadian clocks. Before there was electricity or the internet or screens illuminated by thousands of liquid crystals rotating polarized pulses of photons, humans mostly lived by the daily comings and goings of the yellow burning ball of gas in the sky.

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

Depending on whom you ask, the future of food is plant-based burgers that bleed. Or we should all be eating insects instead of cows. Or we need to grow hamburgers in the lab by culturing cells, thus avoiding having to feed and hydrate legions of cows burping up greenhouse gases. Or how about we mash these up a bit: What if we grew not beef in the lab, but insect meat? According to a group of researchers at Tufts, culturing bugs could be easier and more efficient than culturing cow cells.

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

When Lt. Col. Joseph Goana takes off in his T-38 Talon training jet, he flies a loop north toward the Red River, which forms a meandering border between north Texas and southern Oklahoma. For decades, the remote farming area has been an ideal training ground for Air Force pilots like Goana. But in recent years, he says there’s been a new obstacle: wind turbines that now generate a third of Oklahoma’s electricity and 17 percent of the power in Texas.

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

A missing chunk of DNA, 32 base pairs long and smack in the middle of the CCR5 gene, might be the most studied mutation in human history. The spontaneous deletion, which arose thousands of years ago, has a striking relationship with one of the worst human diseases: HIV/AIDS. People who inherit this mutation from both of their parents are naturally immune. The only two people to have ever been cured both received bone marrow transplants from people who carry the Δ32 mutation.

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

By all accounts sleeping in space is a dream. After a long day of running experiments and rigorous exercise, astronauts on the International Space Station retire to their padded sleep pods, which have just enough room to fit the astronaut, a laptop mounted to a wall, and a few practical items. To prevent themselves from drifting through the station while catching some zero-g z’s, astronauts snuggle into a sleeping bag mounted to the wall of their sleep pod.

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

Editor’s note: This is a developing story about severe weather in the Midwest. We will update it as more information becomes available. This week brings atmospheric devastation to the Midwest: nearly 200 tornadoes have torn through the region since last Friday, including Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri, on Wednesday night. All told, the disasters have left at least three dead and 25 injured.

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

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Imagine if there was a carbon-free form of energy hiding in the ground beneath you. One that we could turn to anytime, even on cloudy, windless days. There’s no need for imagination: It exists. Research suggests that geothermal energy could be the key to running the country on purely renewable power.

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

The military is decidedly not here for wind farms, Facebook busted up more fake news accounts, and we have some advice for your next poo. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines The military is locked in a struggle with wind farms Advocates say that wind power is a win-win: wind farms help struggling rural economies with a new source of revenue, while also helping wean utilities off of fossil fuels.

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

Guo Xinhua wants to teach computers to echolocate. He and his colleagues have built a device, about the size of a thin laptop, that emits sound at frequencies 10 times higher than the shrillest note a piccolo can sustain. The pitches it produces are inaudible to the human ear. When Guo’s team aims the device at a person and fires an ultrasonic pitch, the gadget listens for the echo using its hundreds of embedded microphones.

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

A little over half a century ago, chaos started spilling out of a famous experiment. It came not from a petri dish, a beaker or an astronomical observatory, but from the vacuum tubes and diodes of a Royal McBee LGP-30. This “desk” computer—it was the size of a desk—weighed some 800 pounds and sounded like a passing propeller plane.

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