Science, Spoken

Last week, SpaceX realized a decade-long dream of successfully launching the most powerful rocket in the world. The Falcon Heavy’s achievement, marked resoundingly with thunderous sonic booms following twin booster touchdowns at Cape Canaveral, was only upstaged by Starman—a doomed mannequin at the wheel of Elon Musk’s Roadster With the Heavy’s test flight complete, SpaceX is back to business as usual. Or maybe not. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I don't know very much about bobsleds—but I know quite a bit about physics. Here is my very brief summary of the bobsled event in the winter Olympics. Some humans get in a sled. The sled goes down an incline that is covered in ice. The humans need to do two things: push really fast to get the thing going and turn to travel through the course. But from a physics perspective, it's a block sliding down an incline. Just like in your introductory physics course. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the glam metal band Cinderella once said, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. I’m relatively certain they weren’t talking about snow, but let’s pretend they were anyway: Global warming threatens to wreak havoc on snowpack. The American west in particular already has a snowpack problem, which means less water for drinking and powering hydroelectric plants. Unfortunately you can’t just force snow to fall out of the air. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In a China Global Television Network video from 2003, taikonaut Yang Liwei leans back in his orbital capsule, the overstuffed stripes of his spacesuit legs filling the frame. His helmet shield is up, so the viewer can gaze into his eyes as he speaks: “Greetings to people around the world!” His eyes move leftward, out of the frame. “Greetings to my colleagues in space!” he says. Liwei was China’s first astronaut, reaching orbit decades after US and Soviet space-farers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A jump with the exact proportions of the launch ramp for snowboarding’s big air event, which will make its Olympic debut in Pyeongchang, does not exist in nature. It must be built. And so, fewer than a dozen times a year, at venues ranging from ballparks to parking lots, impeccably orchestrated teams of engineers, ice suppliers, snowmakers, crane operators, up riggers, down riggers, scaffold designers—you get the picture—do exactly that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Peter Diamandis’ ambitions have always been too big for the measly planet onto which he was born. The serial entrepreneur built his first dozen companies as technological launch pads for future space colonies. But in more recent years, the founder of the X Prize Foundation has become increasingly interested in helping humans live their healthiest, longest lives right here on Earth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, also known as Lady Neidpath, sits cross-legged on a bench on a tiny island at the center of an artificial pond in her English country estate, a 15-minute drive outside of Oxford. At her feet is a tiny pure-white cloud of a dog, which traipses around chewing on the grass, only occasionally coughing it up. Feilding is 75 years old. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Dave McGillivray is an improbable advocate of virtual exercise. The race director of the Boston Marathon for 30 years, McGillivray estimates he's logged more than 150,000 miles in his lifetime, the overwhelming majority of them outside, and a formidable number of those in Forrest-Gumpian feats of endurance. In 1978, he ran from Medford, Oregon to Medford, Massachusetts—a distance of 3,452 miles—for charity. In 2004, he did it again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It seems like I have been slightly obsessed with flashlights for quite some time. Perhaps it started when the Maglite lights became popular in the '80s. It was that mini Maglite that ran on 2 AA batteries that I really liked. It was small enough that you could carry around and bright enough that it could actually be useful. When I was a bit older, I would even build and modify my own flashlights. One of my favorites was an underwater light I used for cave diving. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Scott Wiener, the California state senator representing most of San Francisco, has a pretty good idea for how to save the world. In fact, sitting in a coffee shop in his city’s Financial District, Wiener seems downright perplexed that anyone would be against it. Here’s the idea: Build more housing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices