In episode 97 of Parsing Science, we’ll talk with Alexander Puzrin from ETH Zurich about his research into a 62-year-old mystery over the deaths of 9 hikers in the freezing Russian wilderness, a tragedy that’s been attributed to everything from a yeti to military weapons testing, and an avalanche.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves., which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
When Martin Sweeting was a student, he thought it would be fun to try to build a satellite using electronic components found in some of the earliest personal computers. An amateur radio ham and space enthusiast, he wanted to create a communications satellite that could be used to talk to people on the other side of the world. It was a team effort, he insists, with friends and family pitching in and a lot of the work being done on his kitchen table. Somehow he managed to persuade Nasa to let his microsatellite hitch a ride into space and, after the first message was received, spent more than a decade trying to get a good picture of planet earth. The technology that Martin pioneered underpins modern life with thousands of reprogrammable microsatellites now in orbit around the earth and thousands more due to launch in the next few years to bring internet connections to remote parts of the world. The university spin-off company, Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited (SSTL) that Martin set up in the 1980s with an initial investment of £100 sold for £50 million a quarter of a century later. If his company had been bought by venture capitalists, he says he would probably have ended up making TVs. Instead he developed the satellite technology on which so much of modern life depends.
Producer: Anna Buckley
Photo Credit: SSTL
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Geraldine Fitzpatrick, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Whitney Mason, a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Microsystems Technology Office, explains how she became smitten with the science and technology of imaging. Even as a child, Mason was curious about the world, wondering about everything, she says, from why the sky is blue to what makes concrete hard. But what ended up inspiring her most and cementing in her professional trajectory was the fantastic ways that animals see, including the ability to see in the night using infrared light. “A soldier needs to see at night,” Mason says. “Or see through dust. Or find homemade explosives. Or find things really far away. Or track things.” That list of warfighters’ sensory needs explains a lot about the bold portfolio of projects Mason oversees at DARPA. She is out to provide warfighters with some of the smartest, most discerning, most versatile imaging sensors ever devised. As she explains in the podcast, this will require designing into the sensors brain-like functions of identifying what really requires attention in a complex scene of mostly benign features, preprocessing huge amounts of data the ways eyes do before sending information brainward via the optic nerves, and purging raw sensor data of extraneous portions that can be confusing to both people and computers. One of her programs, which aims to shrink otherwise unwieldly infrared imaging systems into much smaller and lighter packages, challenges materials researchers with a task equivalent to reforming a brittle ceramic dinner plate into the shape of cup. That’s just a taste of the tough problems her projects’ research teams are working on. Challenging as her job might be, Mason seems to be just where she wants to be. “I have had very fun jobs,” Mason says, “but this is the funnest.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from DARPA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
How did the earliest and largest clusters of galaxies form? In episode 88, Arianna Long from the University California – Irvine discusses her research into the emergence of massive dusty star-forming galaxies which developed billions of years ago.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves., which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Few professions outside of medicine and research have played as pivotal of a role in the events of the past year as teachers have. In today’s episode, we’ll hear two stories — one from a Chicago Public Schools teacher and another from a New York Public Schools teacher — about how the challenges and triumphs they’ve experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Part 1: Jenny DeLessio-Parson has always prided herself on being a super teacher — until the challenges of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic begin to add up.
Part 2: As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, Amanda Geduld begins to feel that she and her fellow teachers aren’t receiving the support and respect they need to do their jobs.
Jenny DeLessio-Parson was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After studying Public Policy in college, she worked in various roles serving Chicago students and families before returning to school to become a teacher. Jenny has been an educator with Chicago Public Schools for 8 years and currently serves as a middle school Social Studies teacher and staff delegate to the Chicago Teachers Union. She was introduced to storytelling through Lily Be, which later led her to become co-host of The Stoop, a Chicago-based storytelling show.
Amanda Geduld received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. She went on to study English education at Boston University where she received her M.Ed. Now serving as an 11th and 12th grade ELA teacher in the Bronx, she is deeply passionate about approaching education reform through a social justice lens. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post and CNN.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Steven Strogatz and Quanta Magazine, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Two projects aimed at boosting female representation in STEM have won the second Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and Innovating Science, in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies.
Jean Fan spent a year volunteering at a science club for high school students during her PhD programme at Harvard University and was struck by how many of them dismissed the idea of becoming scientists themselves.
“A lot of my students would make remarks like ‘I’m not quite a maths person,’ or would not see themselves as future scientists,” she tells Julie Gould.
“I really wanted to leave them with some type of gift to encourage them to continue developing their interest in science.”
As a result Fan, who was the sole female graduate student in her PhD bioinformatics programme, launched cuSTEMized, a non-profit that uses personalised educational storybooks (which she writes and illustrates) to inspire girls about scientific careers.
This week, at a ceremony in London, she won the 2019 Inspiring Science Award, one of two offered by Nature Research and the Estée Lauder Companies.
The second award, Innovation in Science, goes to Doreen Anene, a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, UK.
In 2017 Anene launched The STEM Belle, a non-profile based in Nigeria, her home country. The STEM Belle also works in Ghana and Pakistan.
As its website says, The STEM Belle is “focused on levelling up the female representation in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics fields by attracting, retaining and advancing more girls and young women to STEM subjects and fields.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nature Careers, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
