Science, Spoken

Billions of years ago, an unknown object sent a seriously bright burst of radio waves into space. They traveled across the universe, past galaxies and clouds of gas and who knows what else. And in 2012, the burst arrived at the Arecibo radio telescope when astronomers happened to be watching. They kept searching that same spot in the sky. In 2015, they found 16 additional flashes. Then, in August and September 2016, nine more appeared. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

California is having a notably wet winter. Since October, a succession of weather systems has greened the Golden State’s valleys, whitened its mountains, and washed its rivers and reservoirs in rippling blue-green. The state is currently between storms. The one that just ended was cold. It dropped snow as low as 2,500 feet in California’s highlands. The successor storm, expected to hit on Saturday, will be warmer—forecasters are calling for snow levels to rise up to 9,000 feet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If your resolution for the coming year is to spend less time on your commute scrolling through Twitter or playing “Puzzler on the Roof,” there’s no shortage of fantastic and fantastical new books you can use to take a break from mindless screen time. Curating this year’s new arrivals was tough, but we managed to narrow the list down to our top-ten favorites. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's been a long timesince I've skied. Of course, the fun is in going down the mountain, not going up. But you have to go up to get down, so what's the best way of doing that in terms of energy and power? Let's examinea few options inan excellent example of physics in action. I can't believe I just said that-it sounds like it's straight out of a middle school textbook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Monday is shipping day at MatTek. A truck pulls up to its red brick lab outside of Boston to load box after box, all kept at a cool 39 degrees. The precious, perishable cargo is human skin—thousands of dime-sized pieces in plastic dishes that add up, altogether, to about two whole adult humans’ worth. Every week. It’s not harvested from people, though. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

2016 is coming to a close so know it's time to look back on the volcanic action of the year. Take a moment and vote for your top 3 volcanoes that you think deserve the honor of Volcanic Event of the Year - the coveted Pliny Award. If you need some refreshers, check of the Atlantic's review of some cool eruptions, browse through the Global Volcanism Program's Weekly Volcanic Activity Reports or flip back through the posts here on Eruptions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Maybe 2016 wasn’t your year. Buck up, at least your $60 million dollar rocket bearing a $200 million dollar payload didn’t explode on the launchpad. Or, perhaps your year was great. Again, some perspective: Did you land four rockets on ocean barges after inserting satellites into orbit around the Earth? No? Neither? Then lay off the superlatives, because SpaceX probably had both a better, and worse, 2016 than you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Randy is 62 years old and stands tall at six foot one. He grew up on a farm in Glasford, Illinois, in the 1950s. Randy was raised with the strong discipline of a farming family. From the time he was five, he would get out of bed at dawn, and before breakfast he’d put on his boots and jeans to milk cows, lift hay, and clean the chicken coops. Day in and out, no matter the weather or how he felt, Randy did his physically demanding chores. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This should be an officially labeled time of the year. I suggest we call it Maker Time-it's that time after kids get out of school, but before all of the holiday festivities begin. This is the perfect time for kids (and adults) to make something. This is what I tell my own children (I probably heard it from someone else). Don't just be a consumer, be a creator (or the rhyming version-be a maker, not a taker). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Something was wrong with the Jackson Pollock. For one thing, 3-D images from a stereomicroscope revealed that the signature was traced with a needle—forged. And, working with a hyper-precise Raman microscope, a tool capable of analyzing sample areas as small as a thousandth of a millimeter across, Jamie Martin identified the presence of Red 170, a pigment that wasn’t widely available until decades after Pollock’s death. Yep. The painting was a fake. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices