Episode 8 – Special Perihelion Edition

LASER: Materials Science Podcast

1) aphelion 2) perihelion 3) sun (Not to scale) source: WIkipedia on Apsis

This is our special perihelion edition, where we celebrate being closest to our sun by reviewing some of the best science and engineering stories of 2013. Today we’re a whopping 4% closer to the sun than at the furthest point. This episode spans many different subject areas, but is extremely disorganized, so please don’t take this as a representative of usual episodes. We’ll be back to better shows next week.

1:30 introducing Chris, our new co-host! Chris is a grad student at Michigan State studying organic photovoltaics. He studied at ASU for his undergrad degree in Materials Science & Engineering with many of us other hosts.

7:35 The first story on our list is “creating false memory in mice”

15:02 a paper that suggests a certain fungicide makes bees more susceptible to a gut pathogen that might be contributing to colony collapse disorder. (LINK)
Chase also says “bees” for the rest of the episode, after watching a youtube video of Dr. BEES

26:40 “towards practical high capacity low density information storage in synthesized DNA”

36:37 “Natural Gold particles in Eucalyptus Leaves and their relevance to exploration for buried gold deposits.”

37:00 replace “predict” with “detect”

41:34 “Using 40 Million year-old amber to test the super Arrhenius behavior of glass-forming systems“.

The final story is about Elon Musk’s Hyperloop project

Song 1: NWA- Fuck Tha Police
Song 2: Fake Problems – Busy Bee
Song 3: Jonathan Coulton – That Spells D.N.A.
Song 4: The Black Keys – Gold On the Ceiling
Song 5: Gang of Four – Glass