Happy St. Patty's Day!
With a little luck of the Irish we actually made it all the way through the show. Today we talked about potential purposes of prions. Justin brought up snakes in Greenland. Then the insects made a splash. Justin gave a pop-quiz, and made America feel dumb. Fermi Lab is catching up to the Higgs. Then we talked controversies like geocentrism and global warming. Check out Carl Zimmer's comments. Female robots are taking over the catwalk. Is dark matter keeping us together? Oh, and then there are the sand worms.
Here is the Question of the Month: From Steve: Giant insects, such as Meganeura (a dragonfly with a more than 2 foot wing span) appeared around 300 million years ago. Allegedly insects could grow to these sizes due to the higher oxygen content of the atmosphere at that time (I've heard it was around 30%, instead of today's 21%). How did this increase in oxygen content happen, could it happen again – and (here's the scary bit) could anything bring about a decrease in oxygen content? Here I'm thinking crazy stuff like cutting down all the rainforests, polluting the oceans and other stuff no sane person would ever dream of doing to their own planet.
Answer it in our forums!
Music on this week's show is thanks to The National Pool, Film Extras, The Exhibits, and Phil Thompson.
Listen to it all here.
Next week, we will interview Dr. Charles Langmuir about his interesting ideas of planetary evolution.
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current science news posted by Kirsten at 3/17/2009 03:48:00 PM
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