We are all Martians … or could be, if, billions of years ago, Red Plant microbes fell to Earth and eventually evolved to us. Okay, that one’s a big “if.” But microbes can survive space travel. Meet the NASA officer whose task is to keep Earth, Mars – and the entire solar system –safe from hitchhiking bacteria.
And, even if we’re not Martians (darn!), did life once thrive on the Red Planet … and does it still today?
Plus, why meteorites may be happy habitats for life.
Guests:
Catharine Conley – NASA planetary protection officer
Chris McKay – Planetary scientist, NASA Ames Research Center
Paul Davies – Director of the BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University
Aaron Burton – Astrobiologist, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center
Debbie Kolyer – Grants Manager, SETI Institute
It’s a record we didn’t want to break. The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has hit the 400 parts-per-million mark, a level at which some scientists say is a point of no return for stopping climate change. A few days later, a leading newspaper prints an op-ed essay that claims CO2 is getting a bad rap: it’s actually good for the planet. The more the better.
Skeptic Phil Plait rebuts the CO2-is-awesome idea while a paleontologist paints a picture of what Earth was like when the notorious gas last ruled the planet. Note: humans weren’t around.
Plus, our skit says NO to O2 … and a claim that climate change skeptics have borrowed from the Creationists’ playbook in challenging the teaching of established science in schools.
Guests:
Phil Plait – Astronomer, Skeptic, and author of Slate Magazine’s blog Bad Astronomy
Peter Ward – Paleontologist and biologist, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington in Seattle
Josh Rosenau – Programs and Policy Director at the National Center for Science Education
Eugenie Scott – Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education
Descripción en español
You can remember yesterday, but not tomorrow. But why is that? We consider the arrow of time and why it all traces to the Big Bang. Also, artificial blood cells and life in a deep Antarctic lake.
You’ll hear how Stephen King thinks that humankind is metaphorically living under a big dome, and what reasons Neil Tyson gives for why we really want to go into space.
And … skeptical takes on faces in cheese sandwiches and the supposedly special powers of psychics.
All this and more on this special Big Picture Science podcast.
Guests:
Jeremy Bailenson – Director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University and co-author of Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives
Sean Carroll – Theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
Helen Amanda Fricker – Glaciologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego
Jill Mikucki – Microbiologist at the University of Tennessee
Jennifer Heldmann – Research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center
Jonathan Coulton – Singer and songwriter
Joseph DeSimone – Professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chemical engineering at North Carolina State University
Stephen King – Novelist, author of Under the Dome: A Novel
Phil Plait – Astronomer, Skeptic, and author of Slate Magazine’s blog Bad Astronomy
Benjamin Radford – Deputy editor, Skeptical Inquirer magazine
Steven Novella – Physician at Yale University, host of the podcast, “Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe”
Neil deGrasse Tyson – Astrophysicst, American Museum of Natural History, and author of Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
Jim Underdown – Executive Director, Center for Inquiry, Los Angeles
Not all conversation is appropriate for the dinner table – and that includes, strangely enough, the subject of eating. Yet what happens during the time that food enters our mouth and its grand exit is a model of efficiency and adaptation.
Author Mary Roach takes us on a tour of the alimentary canal, while a researcher describes his invention of an artificial stomach. Plus, a psychologist on why we find certain foods and smells disgusting. And, you don’t eat them but they could wiggle their way within nonetheless: surgical snakebots.
Guests:
Mary Roach – Author, most recently, of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Martin Wickham – Head of Nutrition, Leatherhead Food Research, U.K.
Paul Rozin – Professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Michael Gershon – Professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University Medical Center
Howie Choset – Professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University
Descripción en español
Maybe goodbye isn’t forever. Get ready to mingle with mammoths and gaze upon a ground sloth. Scientists want to give some animals a round-trip ticket back from oblivion. Learn how we might go from scraps of extinct DNA to creating live previously-extinct animals, and the man who claims it’s his mission to repopulate the skies with passenger pigeons.
But even if we have the tools to bring vanished animals back, should we?
Plus, the extinction of our own species: are we engineering the end of humans via our technology?
Guests:
Beth Shapiro – Associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Ben Novak – Biologist, Revive and Restore project at the Long Now Foundation, visiting biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Hank Greely – Lawyer working in bioethics, director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University
Melanie Challenger – Poet, writer, author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature
Nick Bostrom – Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University
Descripción en español
Think back, way back. Beyond last week or last year … to what was happening on Earth 100,000 years ago. Or 100 million years ago. It’s hard to fathom such enormous stretches of time, yet to understand the evolution of the cosmos – and our place in it – your mind needs to grasp the deep meaning of eons. Discover techniques for thinking in units of billions of years, and how the events that unfold over such intervals have left their mark on you.
Plus: the slow-churning processes that turned four-footed creatures into the largest marine animals that ever graced the planet and using a new telescope to travel in time to the birth of the galaxies.
Guests:
Jim Rosenau – Artist, Berkeley, California
Robert Hazen – Senior staff scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory and the author of The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
Neil Shubin – Biologist, associate dean of biological sciences at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People
Nicholas Pyenson – Curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.
Alison Peck – Scientist, National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia
Descripción en español
