Talking Science Podcast
Why Metals Conduct and Plastics Do Not
Copper carries electricity so readily that we wrap it around the planet. The plastic sheath on that same cable carries essentially none. Both are made…
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Sound – How Vibrating Air Carries Meaning
Sound is one of the more ordinary phenomena to experience and one of the more surprising to examine. Nothing travels from a speaker to your ear except…
Alloys – Why Mixing Metals Makes Them Stronger
Pure metals are, with few exceptions, disappointing materials. Pure iron is soft enough to bend by hand in thin sections. Pure aluminium is weak. Pure…
Hashing – How a Number Proves a File Has Not Changed
Downloading a file, verifying a backup, storing a password, confirming a document is the one that was signed — all of these rely on the same tool. A…
Colour – Why Your Screen and Your Eyes Disagree
Colour feels like a property of objects. It is not. It is something your visual system constructs from a very limited sample of the light arriving at…
Rare Earth Elements – The Metals Hiding in Everything
There are seventeen elements collectively called the rare earths: the fifteen lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium. They have unfamiliar names —…
What Really Happens Inside a Neutron Star
Somewhere out in the galaxy, the collapsed core of a dead star is spinning hundreds of times a second, packing more mass than the Sun into a ball you…
Quantum Computing and the Race to Save Encryption
Almost every private thing you do online is protected by a piece of mathematics. When you bank, message or shop, your data is scrambled using codes…
How 3D Printing Quietly Became a Lab Essential
When 3D printing first caught the public imagination, it was sold as a machine that would sit in every home, churning out toys and spare parts on…
How AI Is Changing the Pace of Science
For most of its history, science has moved at the pace of human patience. A chemist mixed and measured; a biologist grew cultures and waited; an…
When Telescopes Outrun Their Hard Drives
Ask most people what a telescope does and they will talk about light: gathering it, focusing it, magnifying it. That is true, but it misses the quiet…