Science, Spoken

A large yet tidy refugee camp rises from the desert near the Syrian-Jordanian border. Most people wouldn’t think of this as a hub of innovation, but nevertheless, a science and technology show has arrived with cameras and microphones. They’re interviewing officials from UNICEF who describe the techniques they developed to safely remove sewage from the camp. Another week, and the cameras arrive in Stockholm to watch a new type of drone make its way through a dark tunnel.

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

The electric-blue chamber looks like a crowd of punk mohawks or the Night King’s jagged skull. In fact, this 4,306-square-foot room is where antennas are torture-tested before being launched into space. Called the Hybrid European Radio Frequency and Antenna Test Zone, or HERTZ, it’s located in Noordwijk, Netherlands. The 33-foot-high steel walls are studded with 18-inch foam pyramids that block external electro­magnetic interference.

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

They call it Herb2. It’s a dapper robot, wearing a bowtie even while it sits at home in its lab at the University of Washington. Its head is a camera, which it cranes up and down, taking in the view of a dimly lit corner where two computer monitors sit. All perfectly normal stuff for a robot—until the machine speaks: “Hello from the hackers.” Clear across the country at Brown University, researchers have compromised Herb2.

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

This is sort of awesome. It's a concrete gravity battery. What? Yup. The idea is to even out the balance between power generation and power usage; like with any battery, this one allows you to store extra energy for use at a later time when demand is higher. Or maybe you could use solar power during the day to store energy in the battery to be used at night—you know, when the sun doesn't shine.

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

Heather Potters is trying to get to the point. On a stage at Denver's Air & Space museum, a 182,000 square-foot space filled with decommissioned aircraft, she stands in front of a PowerPoint and describes her company's no-needle syringes, which can deliver vaccines by accelerating the liquid into a superfast stream that punctures the skin.

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

West Virginia is second only to Wyoming in both coal production and President Trump’s winning vote percentage in the 2016 general election. So it was no surprise that Trump flew to the Mountain State Tuesday to stump for his new plan to boost coal-fired power plants by cutting regulations on planet-warming carbon emissions.

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

As far as plant names go, the sleepy plant—or shy plant, or shameplant, known more formally as Mimosa pudica—is hard to beat. Touch one of its leaves and it curls up like it’s embarrassed, the leaflets folding in on each other. It’s hypnotic and, well, kind of a surprising response for an organism without a brain. Now, the shameplant is getting its very own robotic doppelganger.

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

One of my favorite classes to teach is Physics for Elementary Education. It's a physics class designed to address the needs of future elementary school teachers—grades 1 through 6 or so. To guide the class, I've been using a version of Next Gen Physical Science and Everyday Thinking for a long time, maybe 13 years or so, and it is super awesome.

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

Bounding around on giant hind limbs, using its giant tail to balance, the well-named giant kangaroo rat of Southern California is half Pokemon, half Mighty Mouse. It emerges at night to forage on seeds, building up underground stores. When it’s not busy foraging, it’s busy scrapping with its peers to claim territory. It dominates these grasslands, outcompeting smaller rodents while doing its best to dodge foxes and snakes. But the giant kangaroo rat isn’t invincible.

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

A river is a mercurial thing, running deep and fast in the rainy season, and low and slow when the rains fade. It can dry up completely one year, then turn into a raging flood the next. Every so often, a river disappears entirely, bringing down the communities it once nourished. You hear a lot about how climate change is fueling the rise of our seas, but not so much about how it will transform our rivers, the flooding of which currently affects almost 60 million people a year.

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