Chris Smith

speaker

241 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Aug

Chris Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Naked Scientists Podcast · Malaria drug breakthrough, and space radiation vests · 14 Aug 2026 podcast

Still to come.

Somehow a new toothpaste uses frozen smoke to relieve the pain caused by sensitive teeth.

But first, researchers have created a special vest to protect astronauts from space radiation.

Tests using the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission showed that the Astro Rad vest can significantly reduce the radiation astronauts receive during a major solar particle event or a solar storm.

Oren Milstein is the CEO and co founder of Stemrad, which is the company behind it.

He and his colleagues have used two torso models that mimic human tissue in the Orion spacecraft, and they found that their garment would have lowered radiation exposure to levels seen in two past solar particle events.

It's also flown on the International Space Station with real humans trying it.

I've been speaking to him.

What sorts of doses do astronauts get at the moment?

We tend to talk in terms of radiation exposure in terms of what we regard as a safe exposure, short term and lifetime exposure.

So if we take, say, a journey to Mars, that will be about nine months at shortest.

What do we anticipate the dose would be in terms of lifetimes worth of radiation exposures that an astronaut going to Mars would get, for example, then?

So effectively you end up looking a bit like a superhero.

You wear a suit that has extra defenses in your most vulnerable bits and it's using chemistry to soak up any incoming radiation.

Because you're you're putting something in the way of the incoming radiation and that just happens to be these polymers.

Um is this light and practical though?

Because one of the things astronauts are gonna say is I need to move around contort

my body into all kinds of spaces and space is at a premium in space.

So is it a practical solution?

though? 'Cause I know you said you're using chemistry, hydrogen, etc., to get in the path of the radiation, the the cosmic radiation, but some of these things are very penetrating, some of them have got enormous energies.

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