Big Picture Science

They were pioneers in their fields, yet their names are scarcely known – because they didn’t have a Y chromosome. We examine the accomplishments of two women who pioneered code breaking and astronomy during the early years of the twentieth century and did so in the face of social opprobrium and a frequently hostile work environment.Henrietta Leavitt measured the brightnesses of thousands of stars and discovered a way to gauge the distances to galaxies, a development that soon led to the concept of the Big Bang.Elizabeth Friedman, originally hired to test whether William Shakespeare really wrote his plays, was soon establishing the science of code breaking, essential to success in the two world wars. Also, the tech industry is overwhelmingly male. Girls Who Code is an initiative to redress the balance by introducing girls to computer programming, and encouraging them to follow careers in tech. Guests: Jason Fagone – Author of “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies” Lauren Gunderson – Playwright of Silent Sky, which is being performed all over the world, form the First Folio Theatre to the Repertory Philippines Reshma Saujani – Founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, and the author of "Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder” Originally aired April 1, 2019  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world is a colorful place, and human eyes have evolved to take it in – from vermillion red to bright tangerine to cobalt blue. But when we do, are you and I seeing the same thing? Find out why color perception is a trick of the brain, and why you and I may not see the same shade of green. Or blue. Or red. Also, platypuses and the growing club of fluorescent mammals, and the first new blue pigment in more than two centuries.  Guests: Paula Anich – Associate Professor of Natural Resources, Northland College Michaela Carlson – Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Northland College Rob DeSalle – Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and co-author of “A Natural History of Color: the Science Behind What We See and How We See It” Mas Subramanian – Professor of Materials Science at Oregon State University   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We present a grab bag of our favorite recent science stories – from how to stop aging to the mechanics of cooking pasta. Also, in accord with our eclectic theme – the growing problem of space junk.  Guests: Anthony Wyss-Coray – Professor of neuroscience at Stanford University Oliver O’Reilly – Professor of mechanical engineering, University of California Berkeley. Moriba Jah – Professor of aerospace and engineering mechanics, University of Texas   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay you animals, line up: stoned sloths, playful pandas, baleful bovines, and vile vultures. We’ve got you guys pegged, thanks to central casting. Or do we? Our often simplistic view of animals ignores their remarkable adaptive abilities. Stumbly sloths are in fact remarkably agile and a vulture’s tricks for thermoregulation can’t be found in an outdoors store. Our ignorance about some animals can even lead to their suffering and to seemingly intractable problems. The South American nutria was brought to Louisiana to supply the fur market. But the species got loose and tens of millions of these rodents are destroying the environment. It literally has a bounty on its tail.Hear about research that corrects a menagerie of misunderstandings about our fellow furry, feathered, and scaly animals, and how getting over ourselves to know them better can have practical benefits. Will you still recoil from termites if you learn that they are relevant to the future of robots, global warming, and smart design?Guests: Lucy Cooke – Zoologist, broadcaster and author of “The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife” Chris Metzler – Co-director and producer of the film Rodents of Unusual Size Lisa Margonelli – Journalist and author of "Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology"  Originally aired October 8, 2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Diversity or die” could be your new health mantra. Don’t boost your immune system, cultivate it! Like a garden, your body’s defenses benefit from species diversity. Find out why multiple strains of microbes, engaged in a delicate ballet with your T-cells, join internal fungi in combatting disease. Plus, global ecosystems also depend on the diversity of its tiniest members; so what happens when the world’s insects bug out?Guests: Matt Richtel – Author, most recently, of “An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of The Immune System” Rob Dunn – Biologist and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University. Author of “Never Home Alone” David Underhill – Professor of medicine, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles, California Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson – Professor in conservation biology at the Institute for Ecology and Nature Management at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Author of “Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects” Originally aired August 12, 2019  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earth invades Mars in February. In a historic trifecta for space exploration, spacecraft of three countries will arrive at Mars, and for two of those it will be their first time at the Red Planet. We talk to the science lead for the Emirates Mars Mission, a NASA engineer piloting the first helicopter on Mars, and a British space expert – all to learn how these spacecraft may bring greater understanding of this rusty world – including whether Mars ever supported life.Guests: Sarah Cruddas - Space journalist, broadcaster, and author of “Look Up: Our Story with the Stars” Sarah Al Amiri - United Arab Emirates Minister of State for Advanced Sciences as well as science lead for the Emirates Mars Mission Håvard Grip - Chief Pilot and Flight Control Lead for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maybe you don’t remember the days of the earliest coal-fired stoves. They changed domestic life, and that changed society. We take you back to that era, and to millennia prior when iron was first smelt, and even earlier, when axe-handles were first fashioned from wood, as we explore how three essential materials profoundly transformed society. We were once excited about coal’s promise to provide cheap energy, and how iron would lead to indestructible bridges, ships, and buildings. But they also caused some unintended problems: destruction of forests, greenhouse gases and corrosion. Did we foresee where the use of wood, coal, and iron would lead? What lessons do they offer for our future?Guests: Jonathan Waldman – Author of Rust: The Longest War. Ruth Goodman – Historian of British social customs, presenter of a number of BBC television series, including Tudor Monastery Farm, and the author of The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything. Roland Ennos – Professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull and author of The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the many shocking aspects of the Capitol attack was that it revealed how thoroughly the nation had cleaved into alternate realities. How did we get to this point? How did misinformation come to create beliefs embraced by millions? In this episode, experts in social media, cults, and the history of science join us for a discussion about how these alternative realities formed, why people are drawn to them, and the benefits of a shared reality. Guests: Joan Donovan – Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and leader of the Technology and Social Change Project. Lee McIntyre – Research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School, and author of “Post – Truth.” Steven Hassan – Mental health counselor who has written on the subject of mind control. Former member of the Unification Church, and author of “The Cult of Trump.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have a hard-to-answer question? The Summit, Sierra, Trinity, Frontier, and Aurora supercomputers are built to tackle it. Summit tops the petaflop heap – at least for now. But Frontier and Aurora are catching up as they take aim at a new performance benchmark called exascale.  So why do we need all this processing power? From climate modeling to personalized medicine, find out why the super-est computers are necessary to answer our biggest questions. But is the dark horse candidate, quantum computing, destined to leave classical computing in the dust?Guests: Katherine Riley - Director of Science, Argonne National Laboratory Jack Wells - Director of Science, Oak Ridge National Laboratory National Center for Computational Sciences Katie Bethea - Communications Team Lead, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Jeffrey Hawkins - Technologist and neuroscientist. Co-founder of Palm, Handspring and Numenta Eleanor Rieffel - Mathematician, NASA Ames Research Center, and co-author of “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor,” published in Nature magazine Originally aired November 4, 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Psychics may not be able to predict the future or sense your thoughts. Nonetheless, they rake in hundreds of millions of dollars every year. But the harm from pseudoscience can go far beyond your wallet – especially when it promotes unscientific treatments for serious disease. Find out what alarming discovery led one naturopath to quit her practice and why scientific ignorance is not bliss. It’s our regular look at critical thinking, but don’t take our word for it.Guests: Robert Palmer – Member of the Guerilla Skeptics on the Wikipedia editing team and columnist for the Skeptical Inquirer on-line magazine Lee McIntyre – Research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and lecturer on ethics at Harvard Extension School Britt Marie Hermes – Former naturopath doctor; now doctoral student in evolutionary genetics at the University of Kiel, Germany Originally aired November 25, 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices