Nick Petrichow

speaker

224 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Nick Petrichow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Nature Podcast · Briefing Chat: Sweet! Elusive sugar molecules found in space · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

I see, I see.

And I guess this is a complicated molecule that would be difficult to just randomly come about, so interesting to find if it's out there.

It's quite surprising to imagine that there's sugar out there.

Did they have any idea how it might have got there?

And you know, I'm guessing I'm veering into speculative territory here, but does this have any relationship with life and things like that? 'Cause obviously these sorts of molecules are really important for all sorts of chemistry in

Well that's certainly a sweet discovery.

And for my story this week, I have something that's got a little bit of a relationship because it's all about Mayan mathematics.

And you may know the Mayans really liked looking at the sky, making calculations about how things are moving in the sky, and making calendars as well.

It's probably one of the most famous things.

And this is a story I was reading in Nature, based on the paper in antiquity, about how one mathematician might have been a bit of a shock.

Yeah.

So the Mayan civilization spanned from two thousand BC up to the Spanish colonization in the late seventeenth century.

But this particular study is looking at some texts from around the eighth century AD.

And so this is based on analysis of a chamber in Zulten, one of these Mayan sites that was originally excavated in twenty eleven and was.

Researchers were looking at this chamber and they found some calculations that were based on astronomical calendars and they found that there was sort of playful expressions looking at the relationships between different calendar systems and one of the authors behind this, I'm gonna quote them here, said I think it was a mathematical flex.

Someone was saying, I've got this amazing pattern and it's so good it needs to be written down.

It was like boom, mic drop.

So this is a particular set of texts that are referred to as text nineteen.

And it has a bunch of hieroglyphs on it.

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