Science, Spoken

The Cray-1 supercomputer, the world’s fastest back in the 1970s, does not look like a supercomputer. It looks like a mod version of that carnival ride The Round Up, the one where you stand, strapped in, as it dizzies you up. It’s surrounded by a padded bench that conceals its power supplies, like a cake donut, if the hole was capable of providing insights about nuclear weapons. After Seymour Cray first built this computer, he gave Los Alamos National Laboratory a six-month free trial. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the past two and half centuries, scientists envisioning the origin of planetary systems (including our own) have focused on a specific scene: a spinning disk around a newborn star, sculpting planets out of gas and dust like clay on a potter’s wheel. But as for testing the idea, by actually spotting an exoplanet coalesce from swirling matter? No luck yet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Are superheroes real? Maybe. In this recently released video, a firefighter in Latvia catches a man falling past a window. Let me tell you something. I have a fairly reasonable understanding of physics and this catch looks close to being impossible—but it's real. Here is the situation (as far as I can tell). A dude is hanging on a window (actually, the falling human is only rumored to be a male) and then he falls. The firefighters were setting up a proper way to catch him, but it wasn't ready. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the fall of 1987, a young Canadian couple set off from their hometown of Saanich, British Columbia to run a few errands in Seattle. They never made it there; police found their bodies a few days later near Bellingham, Washington. Jay Cook had been beaten and strangled. His girlfriend, Tanya Van Cuylenborg, had been raped and shot in the head. For more than 30 years their families held out hope that police would one day find the killer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Maybe you thought my previous post on the crushing g-force of the Epstein drive from The Expanse would be the end of that. Wrong. This is such great clip, I have to do more. In case you missed it, let me tell you what's going on. This guy has a spaceship near Mars (maybe in orbit) and he is playing around with some modifications to his fusion drive, giving the spaceship super thrust while using very little fuel. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There’s no one way to describe the scent of a beached, rotting whale. See, it really depends on time and space: So long as you’re more than 20 feet away, you don’t smell a thing. But if you’re downwind, the sour stench will just about bowl you over. Its bite sits heavily instead of sharply in your throat. If a zombie wore week-old gym socks, this is what it would smell like. Then consider the time of death. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You could be excused, when you first hear Dane Rudy describe his company, for thinking that he wants to use raccoons to send satellites into space. Trash pandas, though, are not the future that Rudy is talking about. He's talking about rockoons—rockets launched from high-altitude balloons. Rockoons trace their trajectory back to the military, like the 1950s Air Force program called Farside. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The viral disease Ebola has, as of May 26, killed 25 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and sickened 31 more. In response, treatment centers have popped up (two of three people who fled one of those centers in the city of Mbandaka have died) and health care workers there are getting a still-experimental vaccine. People who’ve had contact with someone with Ebola, and their contacts, will get the shot, too. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Raquel Loreto is a zombie hunter, and a good one. But traipsing through dried leaves in a hot forest in Sanda, at the southern end of Japan, she needed a guide. Just a few months before, she’d been on the internet and come across the work of artist Shigeo Ootak, whose fantastical images depict humans with curious protrusions erupting from their heads. She got in touch, and he invited her to Japan for a hike to find his inspiration. Ootak knew precisely where to look: six feet off the ground. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The city of Richmond, Calif. juts into the San Francisco Bay like the head of a rhinoceros looking west across the water, toward San Quentin State Prison and the tony towns north of the Golden Gate. It’s a low, industrial town, and 2,900 acres of it is an oil refinery. Chevron is Richmond’s biggest employer, and through taxes contributes about a quarter of the city’s total budget. Chevron is also Richmond’s eternal nemesis. Industrial accidents are an ongoing issue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices