We hear about a book called Logicomix, featuring Christos Papidimitriou, who is one of the world’s leaders on computational complexity theory, and what happens when he consents to be interviewed by two 10-year olds. And in the headlines, we delve into a new report published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine that indicates exercise helps kids do better in school. We fly to the moon with two GRAIL spacecraft, which stands for “Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory.” And we invite you to sign up for the free, “Mini Med-The Clinical Years,” being offered at the CU Medical Center.
Nora and Lee
Hosts: Joel Parker, Susan Moran Producer: Shelley Schlender Engineers: Tom McKinnon, Shelley Schlender Executive Producer: Shelley Schlender
We take a look at favorite holiday sci-tech gifts, including the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit, Logicomix, Manga Guide to Electricity, Lego Mindstorms, a fun new novelty for anyone on your list – giant microbes. After the show, we also voted to add yet one more item to your last-minute gifts – a mesh bag of any size, for . . . what else? Catching neutrinos.
Local author and scientist Dick Williams talks with How on Earth’s Chip Grandits about Dick’s new book: Eating Your Heart Out? Williams, with coauthors Binx Selby and Linda Fong. In his book, Dick writes, “For over a half-century, careful scientific researchers have known what a good balanced diet really means, yet most of us have largely ignored this important information. We have preferred to continue in our culturally determined ruts, eating ourselves to death. Major research projects have noted how some peoples in the world have lived healthy lives past the 100-year mark in communities, such as the Inuit living above the Arctic circle, and the traditional villages of the island, Crete, in the Mediterranean, where cardiac events are completely unknown. ”
Producer: Shelley Schlender Co-Hosts: Tom McKinnon & Beth Bartel, with special reports from Roger Wendell and Chip Grandits. Engineer: Shelley Schlender Executive Producer: Tom McKinnon
We explore the world microbes, and how they’re everywhere, and how the University of Colorado at Boulder has scientists such as Noah Fierer who are trying to track all those microbes down and figure out which ones help us and which ones don’t, and how they interact. These scientists have studied the microbes on a human hand, the microbes in the air from dog feces, and they’re lastest project is known as Miasma. That stands for Mapping and Integrated Analysis of Microbes in the Atmosphere.
Hosts: Ted Burnham and Breanna Draxler
Producer: Shelley Schlender Engineer: Shelley Schlender Headlines: Tom Yulsman Executive Producer: Susan Moran
We look at the strange rise in autoimmune diseases, allergies and asthma, with experts from the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center and with National Jewish Health Immunlogist Andy Liu in Denver. And, we explore whether genetically modified crops might be increasing our chance of getting ill, with Agricultural Scientist, Charles Benbrook of The Organic Center.
In this report, Shelley Schlender takes a look at genetically modified crops and other modern farming techniques, and how they might, or might not be, connected to the dramatic rise in immune disorders. As part of this report, she’ll look into the strange case of a bacteria in GM corn that was NOT supposed to get into human bloodstream. Recent research indicates that it does. And she’ll discuss the hygiene hypothesis with health experts who suggest that our society has become so “clean” that, in some ways, it makes us sick.
We talk with one of the nation’s leading nutrition scientists . . . whose opinions about food and health might not be popular with the American Salt Institute . . . OR with the USDA. Dariush Mozaffarian is with the Harvard School of Public Health, in the department of epidemiology. Current projects include leadership of the Nutrition in Chronic Diseases Expert Group of the Gates Foundation. He’ll explain data that indicates processed lean turkey meat and processed lean ham are a greater risk factor for diabetes and heart disease than eating an equal size serving of fresh, fat, juicy steak. Mozaffarian talks with Shelley Schlender. (and for an extended version of the interview, click here)
And we talk with CU astronomer Jason Glenn. He’s one of the principal investigators on the Z-Spec telescope, operated out of Hawaii. Recently, Glenn’s team has discovered an enormous cloud of water hanging in space—12 billion light-years away. Astronomers have never before found water from that far back into the early universe. Glenn talks about the finding with Ted Burnham.
Also in this week’s show, we talk with Janos Perczel about a new design for an invisibility cloak. (and for an extended version of the interview, click here)
Co-hosts: Joel Parker and Ted Burnham Engineer: Shelley Schlender Executive Producer: Susan Moran Producer: Shelley Schlender
This podcast provides extended version of our interview with Janos Perczel about his new Invisibility Cloak.
Background:
An undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has overcome a major hurdle in the development of invisibility cloaks by envisioning an optical device that would allow the cloak to hide things against CHANGING backgrounds. The Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, published the study today, and the lead author, Janos Perczel, spoke with us about it from Hungary, via Skype,. But first — putting aside Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility for a moment, in real life, scientists have cloaked some palm-sized objects . . . but not especially well. Here’s Janos Perczel.
Perczel It depends on what you mean by an invisibility cloak. The sort of stuff you see in Harry Potter films has never been made yet. There have been experiments to test the theory but these experiments have always featured invisibility in some reduced form.
So far, cloaking only works when an object’s against one single field of steady background wavelength, like a “blue screen.” And even that’s complicated. “Cloaking” conceals an object by bending light around it. Perczel says it’s similar to putting a rock in a river, where the water bends around and covers the rock and makes it “disappear.. But just as water must speed up in order to hurry around the rock, bending light has required accelerating the light. And super-speeded light flows too fast to allow a cloaking devices to adjust to changing backgrounds. In the new report, Perczel and colleagues offer a solution. They call it an invisibility sphere, and it buys enough time for the cloak to adjust to changing backgrounds by, well — what else? Their device slows down the normal speed of light.
Janos Perczel
Perczel So that all the light speeds that we use in our cloak will be less than the speed of light, in vacuum, so that the cloak we propose here would work for any frequency and would also work against an ever-changing background and a multiplicity of colors and, well anything.
It may be decades before this technology moves from theory to real world applications. But Perczel predicts that there will be plenty.
Perczel I’m not sure I would want to talk about the potential military applications, because that’s not something I’m terribly keen on. But, apart from those, this whole invisibility subject is based on transformation optics. That’s the key word here, and it tells us how to control light and how to guide it pretty much any way we want to guide it around. This might lead to the birth of incredible optical devices.
Perczel envisions images that are sharper than the quality of the light the first hit the lens. And who knows? Maybe someday invisibilites cloaks will lead to anti-wrinkle creams and perhaps lower production costs of future Harry Potter movies. Thanks to Shelley Schlender for doing this report. You can hear an extended version of the interview, on our website, howonearthradio.org.
We hear about a book called Logicomix, featuring Christos Papidimitriou, who is one of the world’s leaders on computational complexity theory, and what happens when he consents to be interviewed by two 10-year olds. And in the headlines, we delve into a new report published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine that indicates exercise helps kids do better in school. We fly to the moon with two GRAIL spacecraft, which stands for “Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory.” And we invite you to sign up for the free, “Mini Med-The Clinical Years,” being offered at the CU Medical Center.
