An Interview w/ Volcanologists, 2016 Nobel Prizes, Bugs R’Us, Smart Bees, Buzzed Bees, Ancient Loot Tales, Politics Of Change, The Atlantic Conveyor, Zap And Tingle, Sideways Sharks, And Much More…

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It may be too late to reverse the trend…

The trend that has been tending to be trending is that of sending discourse to its death…

That great human tradition of talking about things…

That thing that began to be recorded with the Greeks…

That culminated in the founding of a free nation…

ish…

That which can be made stronger and better with knowledge

in the time of the greatest access to knowledge in all of human history…

Our ability to talk about issues and ideas and compare them to reality has never been better…

Yet, in some of the most important arenas…

it is being dumbed down…

Worse, it’s almost being ignored entirely in the media today…

And since the following hour of programming contains scientific news

We now fear that our show may not be suitable for adult audiences…

At least not for much longer…

For the trendency of dumbing down the public discourse

is so overwhelmingly powerful at this point,

It may truly be too late to prevent the actual and unavoidable

decline of civilization world wide…

On my signal, we run for the hills…

ready?

Or, perhaps this is an opportunity…

A chance to do the casually correct thing

To simply talk about the world as it is,

The 2016 IgNobels!, Three-Parent Baby, No Direction, Psycho Shrew Brains, Spider Nightmare Juice, Symbolic Horses, Musky Marstropolis, Biological Aging, Psychic Psychology?, Socialism Development, And Much More…

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Once upon a time in a land far far away…

A human being will be born…

But no ordinary human being…

Because this human being will not be born on earth…

This child will be born on Mars…

Or the Moon…

Or on a spacecraft headed into deep space…

And while these children of the future may not be born on earth…

Are they are still earthlings?

At first there will be nationalism no doubt…

The first American born on the mars…

The first Chinese citizen born on the moon…

The first half Mongolian half Swedish twins born on the Starship deGrasse Tyson.

And, regardless of what we think,

or even what the first South Africa-born Canadian-American father to a child born on Mars thinks…

It will ultimately be up to them…

those children born off earth…

To decide what their native home is…

and if history has shown us anything,

and it has,

it has also shown us that people move on from places of origin…

They take root in new locations and new traditions with such ease…

That it would be hard to imagine the children born in these places to call anywhere else home…

And speaking of home,

welcome back,

wherever you may be,

hang your hat,

put on your thinking slippers,

Tardigrade Protection Secret, Standard Model Spin, Tectonic Life, Island Murder Mystery, Can Pigeons Read?, Bite The Cow, Camouflaged Dinosaurs, Finish This Sentence, Out Of Africa, Ciliary Stroke, And Much More…

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The best thing you can do for your brain is use it…

But that advice, however true it may seem, is not complete…

There is more to having a brain than simply taking it out for a thought once in a while…

You have to feed your brain…

and not just anything…

Good quality ideas…

otherwise your brain may become listless and gassy…

You must care for your brain…

Bathe it in oxygen rich blood…

Train it to do tricks, like math, language and art…

Teach it to get along well with other brains…

And remember…

How well you care for your brain today…

Will determine how well your brain will care for you tomorrow…

Yes the best thing you can do for your brain is use it…

But the best thing you can do for yourself, is use it wisely…

And wisely your brain has brought you here,

so that together the two of you can enjoy yet another episode of…

This Week in Science

Coming up next…

Tardigrade Protection Secret

Tardigrades have a gene that protects them from radiation. Researchers call it Dsup, and when they inserted it into human DNA it reduced radiation damage by 40%. Will future space explorers be part tardigrade to better survive ...

Gaia Mapping, Crustal Current, Semi-Synthetic Consequences, Space-Age Fabric, Ancient Jeans, Lots Of Giraffes, Roundworm Reproduction, Pluto Paints Charon, Virus Inside Us, Tiny Pterosaurs, Moon Stress, Sleepy Lemurs, Drunk People, And Much More…

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The wisdom that comes from a life well lived is worth its weight in years…

And living life well,

as subjective a subject as this may be…

Must in this humble opinion,

be a life lived in inquiry…

An examined existence…

Not just in the know thy self sort of way…

But in a

– know the world around you –

scenario…

Because if you don’t understand anything beyond your own shadow…

If you know nothing of the world beyond your cave walls…

What can you claim to have lived?

Throw yourself out of your self…

Get up and get out there…

where the people are…

the makers and the doers are busy making and doing…

Where the investigations are,

where the experiments are,

where the learning is happening now…

Turn on,

tune in,

open the door and have a look around…

See what’s out there…

Or…

at the very least just listen for the sound of…

To This Week In Science,

Coming up Next…

It’s HUUUGE!

The Gaia star-mapping mission has discovered 400 million more stars in the Milky Way Galaxy with the potential...

Interview w/ Dr. James O’Donoghue, EmDrive Rumors, FDA Finally Bans, Magnets In Brains, Milky Pockets, Core Carbon Concerns, Conservation Balance, Social Neurons, Philae Found, Maya codex, Bad Early Spring, And Much More!!!

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Space…

The final frontier…

Or so it may have once seemed,

But we now find it to be just one of many frontiers that science finds before it…

With rovers and probes and telescopes investigating the solar system and beyond…

We have other frontiers we are pursuing much closer to home

Like understanding the inner workings of matter,

which when considering distances of scale,

is a much more distant journey than anywhere in our galaxy…

And how our ancestrally allocated assortments of DNA and RNA help to make us who we are…

And understanding the fundamental role bacteria play in our health…

And understanding how the changing climate will make living on our own planet seem as foreign as a new frontier…

And of course…

Space…

We are at the forefront of our knowledge in every category of science…

Boldly going where no scientists have gone before…

With a few exceptions of really brilliant scientists

who got there before we were really sure there was a there to be boldly going towards…

But like a scientist ahead of their time,

you will be in the knowledge before it is common…

Because you are boldly going to listen to yet another episode of…

This Week In Science

Coming up next!

Interview w/ Carl Zimmer, A Signal, Solar System Bodies, Monkey Guts, Blood-Thirsty Brains, Tasmanian Evolution, Whisker Feels, counting Cuttlefish, Oldest European, Oldest Tree, Toxo V. Cancer, And Much More…

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The wonderful thing about being alive is that it’s happening now…

Yes yes yes, it’s great that great-great gramps and nana lived lovely lives,

but no matter how you look at it,

they are long since departed,

and even that which passed through the belly of a worm has long turned to dust…

But not you, oh no… you are alive now…

in the moment in which you can do…

And what wonderful life living things you can do!!!

It almost doesn’t matter what it is you are doing…

Being alive is an amazing thing all by itself…

Certainly we can rate quality of life…

good, better best day vs the occasional worst day ever…

But always remember to step outside your day to day, push pull, ups and downs and focus…

Even if just for a few fleeting moments…

On the wonder it is to be alive, here and in the now…

And while every moment may not be as incredible as the one that passed before…

Having another moment with which to do something…

is always the best place to be…

And what better way to spend the next moments of your incredible existence than with

This Week In Science,

Coming up next…

Interview with Carl Zimmer about his recent series on STAT<...

Interview w/ NASA Scientist Walt Meier, Plan-et B!, Getting There, Cool Your Buffer Gas, Gay Termites, Acid Sperm, Patent Settlement, Possum Panic, Octobot!!, And Much More…

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Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer!

Historic perspective is against us!!!

And I don’t mean to suggest that people of bygone olden ages would judge us harshly…

It’s possible they would…

We wear revealing clothes, rarely kill wild animals with tools we made ourselves,

and spend far too little time sacrificing sheep…

But when we introduce them to the little things our modern ways have contributed to the day to day being on the planet…

Like Indoor light, the mobile phone, the dishwasher and toilet paper…

It’s likely they’d give up whatever god of hunting gathering and dishwashing they had invented and would be overjoyed even with single ply…

What I do mean to suggest is that at no point of looking backwards do we see a time in which people looking forward really knew what the future would bring…

We humans are eternally optimistic and pessimistic, hopeful and apathetic…

But the lesson from the ages is that regardless of what we think we know,

time will transform our understanding…

and one day the day will come where much of what we believe about the future will turn out not to be the future…

So a Historic perspective should make us leery of any concrete belief in things to come,

having seen so many of them crumble…

However… there are exceptions…

despite the fact that the historic perspective is against us,

Hawking Radiation Evidence?, Force Of Nature, Contrails Not Chemtrails, Gutting Ahead, Choosy Fish, Bully Fish, Fish Pee, Marsupial Lion Elbows, Talking About Life, Salty Beaches, Precision Targeting, The Light!, And Much More…

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The world you are living in has NOT,

I repeat NOT been all figured out yet.

Sure a lot of the major hurdles have been handled…

We can control electricity…

Harness it to do work and that work produces amazing advantages to being on the planet…

Like the light bulb, the computer, and the greatest of all inventions…

the dishwasher…

We have solved complex riddles of living things…

Giving us protections and treatments that manage disease and prolong our life spans…

We have delved into the atomic world that once seemed so small,

only to delve deeper and discover an even tinier world of subatomic particles…

We can manipulate this world to great effect despite having hands that are too large and clumsy for the job…

We have been to the moon and Mars and all the major bodies in our solar system…

Sent probes hurtling outside our solar system,

And have taken photos of other solar systems by the billions with Hubble…

These terrestrial eyes of ours have gazed upon galaxies that never could be seen or even imagined without our scientific advancements…

And despite all this…

The world we are living in has NOT been all figured out…

There are still greater mysteries out there…

Far further depths to delve into

IT’S NOT ALIENS, Canyons On Titan, Old Tool News, Breathy Bees, Sharing Spiders Die, Firefly Buzzkill, Iceworm!!!, Back to Behavior, A Whale Ears, A Lotta No, DNA Everywhere, X-Prize AI, And Much More…

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The world of man is the world of stories…

Stories forge our religions, form our ethics, frame our political leanings and foster our imaginations…

It is how we read and write our history.

Story telling is the power behind the urban and the legend, from Gilgamesh to camp fire ghosts.

It is the fuel our media runs on…

Books, movies, music, news, poetry, paintings, photographs, social media posts, sports, video games and even 20 second commercials…

are all telling us a story of the world…

In many ways each of us is living in a fable,

Stitched together by the stories that surround us…

And then, there are some stories that speak to us about a world beyond…

Beyond the ideological barn yard,

Past the pools of poetry and pontification,

Trending lightly over the latest hashtag hill,

And sitting there just outside the gates of fairytale town…

There is Science.

And the stories told by science can not only teach us our history beyond the fortunes and failings of its human inhabitants…

But teach us the history of our planet, our solar system and our universe…

As well as teach us ways we can write our own future…

And righting the course of future human history is exactly what we’ve come to expect from

This Week In Science…

Coming Up Next.

Plants And Parasites, Malarial Mechanisms, Zika Update, Orangutan Mimic, Sea Lion Beats, Wolfie Questions, Oily Palms, Frost On Io, First Private Moon, New Lasers, Neurons Line Up, Don’t Smoke ‘Em, Challenge Success, Theranos Still Going, ISS Design Challenge, Fungus Lichens Yeast, Junco Telomeres, And Much More…

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There is possibility

And then there is probability

It is possible to win the lottery…

But if you buy the ticket you will most probably lose…

It’s possible to jump off the golden gate bridge and survive…

But a large majority of those that launch themselves off most probably end up as lunch for all manner of fishy eaters…

It is possible to be struck by lightning while hitting a hole-in-one on the 7th at Pebble Beach…

But your golf buddy probably just said he saw it go in because that’s what buddies do when riding in ambulances with friends who have just been struck by lightning…

It is possible that the government is secretly working with a an alien race of dinosaur people

To first enslave and later to eat all of mankind

in order to take over the planet… which would explain global warming

and the chem trails and why the show firefly was canceled

and why there is always somebody, whenever you are out in public, who seems to be watching you… following you… and how else would they know that you alone have figured it all out…

Why, they even know your name is Ed… Run Ed, run for the hills, they’re on to you!

But unless your name is Ed… this is most probably not true...