Episodes
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Our first ever guest returns and becomes our first return guest! Dr. Dimos Katsis is back, and this time he's talking about Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket which is planning on launching for the first time ever next month, December 2024. New Glenn is so big, it can fit Blue Origin's current rocket - the New Shepard - inside its payload. New Glenn's never flown before, never tested multiple stages before, never tested it fairings before, never launched a satellite before, and never used explosive-launched harpoons to help land its insanely massive first stage on a boat. That's right - harpoons. Join Kovi and Benjamin for the ride as they learn about - quite literally - the next very big thing in space.
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During their last Standard Model episode Kovi said, "we really need to get an expert to talk about this." So they did! This week's guest is Ciaran O’Hare - an ARC DECRA fellow at the University of Sydney. He works on aspects of dark matter particle physics and astrophysics, including direct detection, axions, and dark matter halo models. Although Kovi and Benjamin pretty much wrapped up all you need to know about the Standard Model and quarks and neutrinos in their last episode - they thought maybe this guy could help a little. Fun sidenote : in this episode you can actually hear Benjamin's mind explode.
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Missing episodes?
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Episode 42 - the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Well, we don't actually have that answer just yet - but we're working on it - and the best we have thus far is the Standard Model. In this episode Kovi and Benjamin talk about the fundamental building blocks of matter, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, why gravity's such a jerk it can't be worked into the Standard Model, and Kovi makes the decades long process of learning, researching, creating theories, getting a massive bathtub built inside a mountain, and making a new discovery seem very simple.
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Time goes by fast when you're having fun - just like this episode! This episode goes by fast as Kovi and Benjamin have fun talking about the fastest things in the universe! Hypervelocity stars, the solar wind, supernova ejecta, fast radio bursts, neutrinos and more. They even cover the fastest manmade objects - both on purpose and by accident - and the fastest crewed vehicle in history.
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Both science and art rely on imagination and creativity to explore new ideas, solve problems, and innovate. Art helps make abstract or complex scientific concepts more accessible through visual representation (e.g., illustrations, diagrams, models). In Kovi's and Benjamin's 40th EPISODE of the Nerd and the Scientist, they talk about different way scientific theories and information is presented to the general public in a variety of ways - from data plots to paintings, from sculptures to video games, and more.
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Kovi and Benjamin like the superheroes, too! Comic books aren't exactly where one would go to learn science, but - believe it or not - a great many times they get the science right! The Flash felt more and more tired and leaded the closer he got to the speed of light. The tensile strength of Spider-Man's webbing is about 1,000 megapascals - close to the 1,200 megapascal tensile strength of an actual spider. Energy cannot be destroyed, only converted into some other form - as demonstrated by Thor's hammer hitting Captain America's shield, creating light, heat, and a shockwave. Apart from the power source, Iron Man's suit is pretty close to possible given today's technology. And don't get us started on The Atom 'picking up' a piece of white dwarf star in order to make the device needed to give him his powers.
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Stars are so hot right now. Annie Jump Cannon, Henriette Leavitt, Antonia Maury, Florence Cushman, Cecilia Payne and others began cataloging and manually classifying stars in the late 1800's - over 350,000 of them. During that time, two astronomers simultaneously discovered a pattern in all that data. Between 1911 and 1913, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung and American astronomer Henry Norris Russel plotted the stars recorded by Cannon and her team, and placed them on a diagram - the axes of which were the spectral classes devised by Cannon on one side, and their luminosity on the other. The diagram beautiful illustrated that in the randomness of the stars observed in the universe there is a clear pattern into which all stars fall. The diagram helps bring understanding to the temperatures and colors, brightness, sizes, and even the ages and lifecycles of the stars. Over 100 years later the diagram still holds true, and is a tool used in science today.
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This episode's guest, teacher and science communicator Janet Ivey-Duesnsing from Janet's Planet, has Kovi and Benjamin traveling at the speed of thought! Listen in as Janet shares her journey from music, to science, to sparking an interest in science in thousands upon thousands of kids around the world.
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Kovi and Benjamin talk about stars and planets and galaxies all the time on this show - but how do we see them? In this episode the lads discuss the evolution of the telescope - from the first lenses thousands of years ago in ancient Greece, to the curiosities of eyeglass makers in the 13th-16th centuries, to some tourist in Venice in 1609 who saw a spyglass and thought he could make a better one. That tourist was Galileo Galilei, and after he turned his own hand-made telescope skyward, word spread like wildfire. Then there were reflecting telescopes and refracting telescopes, and after a long while radio telescopes and telescopes in space!
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Executive Director of the Israel Space Forum, Space Mission Manager for the Rakia Mission, SpaceLab mentor and Flight Operations Manager for the Ramon Foundation, and Stargate SG-1 fanatic, Melody Korman, took time out of her ridiculously busy (and all-things-space packed) schedule to talk to Kovi and Benjamin about just some of the things she's done. From helping kids get their science experiments to space, to being the one who tells astronauts what to do, these are the things Melody calls fun.
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Blazars are just quasars that are pointed at us? That's it? Yep, that's it according to our guest, PhD candidate Emily Kerrison, in our latest, 'scintillating' episode. Do you mean 'scintillating' as in 'radio scintillation'? The same! Joining us from the University of Sydney, Australia, Emily tells Kovi and Benjamin the ins and outs of AGNs (Active Galactic Nuclei). Quasars, blazars, and BL Lac objects - oh my!
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In talking about the show one day, Benjamin told Kovi a corny space pun. Kovi chuckled and told another one to Benjamin. "We should make an episode entirely us telling bad jokes!" they said to each other - and here we are. This week Kovi and Benjamin tickle your funny bone and tackle your patience as they share some of the worst space jokes in the universe. Buckle up, because these jokes are light-years from funny. Join us for an episode that's guaranteed to make you groan, cringe, and possibly question your life choices.
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Things get messy-ier in this episode as Kovi and Benjamin discuss Messier Objects, supernova remnants, nebulae, and stellar nurseries where stars are born. Tycho's Supernova is just as spectacular as the golden nose of the man who discovered it, there's a Jewel Box out there just as sparkly as the jewel boxes here on Earth, and before you Google 'Trumpler', be sure to add a 14 to it if you want to see something absolutely beautiful tucked away in the Carina Nebula.
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Kovi and Benjamin get all wibbly-wobbly as they talk about the timey-wimey scifi gadgets in scifi films and shows. Independence Day, Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. We don't have a sonic screwdriver just yet - but we're getting there, the HAL 900 was, basically, Siri and AI all wrapped up with a thirst for murder, and that goodness our phones can translate just about anything without the need of squeezing a Babel fish in our ears.
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The science between the science! Kovi put on his special science goggles as he and Benjamin discussed the Interstellar Medium (ISM). The space between the stars is massive - but not empty! Going back to the 1860's we began to learn there's something out there, in 1904 we confirmed it, and since 1909 we learned that there's gas, dust, cosmic rays, shock-heating from supernovae, nebluae and more. Where does a nebula end and interstellar space begin? What IS a nebula? Join the nerd and the scientist is they wrap up their third season (their 30th episode!) with some learnin' and laughin'!
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Astronauts go to space. Space tourists go to space. So... What's the difference? Kovi and Benjamin have a conversation this episode about when space travel switched from only sending the best of the best military trained and/or highly science educated into space to just sending anyone who could afford a ticket. A space traveler was once a young, healthy, heavily trained person who's been pushed to the physical limits in preparation for a solo flight. Nowadays anyone can go, old or young, as part of a crew just for the fun of it. Will Shatner's overview effect was a beautiful thing to watch, and so long and thanks for all the fish.
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Ever since we've been sending spacecraft out into the universe, we've sent little bits of cargo with them. Be it for hope and optimism, the preservation of our culture, or an olive branch of sorts to whomever might find it drifting out there in space, human beings have long been fans of the ultimate messages in a bottle. From the famous golden records on Voyagers 1 and 2, to an astronomer's ashes speeding past Pluto, Kovi and Benjamin take a look at messages humans have sent to space and are planning to send to space. And if you're planning a trip to Mars, watch out for Elon's car.
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Transits and microlensing and radial velocity - oh my! Are there other civilizations out there? Maybe. What there's definitely a ton of beyond our Solar System are other worlds. This week Kovi and Benjamin talk about exoplanets - from the beginning of how we first began discovering them in the 90's, to today where we not only have a catalog of thousands of exoplanets, but we know their sizes, masses, atmospheres, and have even snapped a photo of a few.
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This week Kovi and Benjamin discuss the aurorae many of us witnessed last week as a result of a particularly large solar storm. ...and not just that! They also go on to discuss how aurorae are formed, why the northern and southern lights are different, what they look like on other worlds, and mention that even some brown and red dwarf stars that have aurorae. They even discuss the proper pluralization of aurora ... aurorae. Trust us - it gets nuts.
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Getting things to space is relatively easy - just hop on a rocket - but still somewhat expensive. Once in space getting from place to place is hard - once you've launched you're either going into orbit and staying there, or on your way to a far away destination - and takes a very long time. What can we do to make space travel quicker and cheaper, can we speed up communication with these far away places, and is that a giant dinner plate standing in the desert? Kovi and Benjamin answer all these questions - and talk about their dogs - in this episode.
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