Research Road EP 58

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Belle of the Ranch 10 min 4 chapters transcribed

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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0:00

Well, howdy there, Internet people. It's Dana again, and today you're at Research Road. This is a weekly series where we go through science and tech news with a bit of dry humor. Then we do a dive into a science topic, and we close out by answering some questions from y'all. Today is the 26th of August, 2025, and on this date in 1968, the Beatles' song, Hey Jude, was released. Today is Women's Equality Day. So starting off with tech news, the U.S. has taken a 10% stake in Intel. Trump seems to have used money approved by Congress through Biden's legislation as leverage. The development is raising all kinds of legal and financial questions. The secretive X-37B space plane is heading up again. This time it's testing out a quantum inertial sensor.

0:54

It's for GPS-denied environments. Yeah, that Star Trek sounding term is for replacement navigation system. In other words, the U.S. military is concerned about conflict scenarios so extreme that GPS ceases to function. That's comforting. And now on to space. It looks like NASA found a small moon circling Uranus. The new moon is apparently small enough to walk around. Now it's time to talk about the developing climate crisis. Democrats are demanding Trump allow work to restart on an offshore wind project off the coast of Rhode Island. The hundreds of workers involved also have questions about the termination of the project. In another find out moment for rural Republicans, Trump pulled about $62 million from solar grants in Utah.

1:45

Looks like he also pulled more than $100 million from West Virginia and $125 million from Alaska. Executives are warning that his moves against solar will cause an energy crisis and raise prices on consumers. The world's first commercial carbon storage facility has started operations. It's injecting carbon deep under the seafloor in the North Sea. The carbon is being captured from smokestacks in Europe.

What significant tech news is discussed in this episode?

2:13

In the world of animals, great white sharks are spending more time further north around Maine and Nova Scotia. The shark has really never lived down the impression left by the movie Jaws on viewers, but experts are reminding everybody that attacks are rare. The Trump administration is now apparently opposed to the endangered species list. The administration seems to be upset that species don't often leave the list, which, I mean us too. We're actually bizarrely curious where this goes. In health news, a genetically modified pig lung has been transplanted in a human patient who is brain dead. A California resident has tested positive for plague after camping. It's believed they were bitten by a flea.

2:59

Reporting says that Texas health officials requested help from Trump's CDC to deal with measles, but didn't get the help they needed, and that inaction reduced the effectiveness of the response. The bizarre bruise on Trump's hand has continued to persist. It's gotten to the point that large outlets are now questioning Trump's health status. A new study is suggesting that heat waves accelerate aging in humans. Now let's dig up the past a little. Divers and archaeologists off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt are pulling ancient artifacts off the seafloor. A tooth from a cow found near Stonehenge suggests the stones have a Welsh origin. And now on to oddities. A new paper from a Nobel Prize-winning economist suggests that addressing declining fertility rates requires more supportive men who can assure their partner that parenting would be a shared responsibility.

3:59

A new study suggests reading for fun has fallen by 40% in the U.S. And now on to a little explainer for this week about time dilation. Time dilation is a concept from Einstein's theory of relativity that describes how time is not experienced at the same rate for everyone. Instead, the passage of time depends on relative speed and gravity. According to Einstein's special relativity, when an object moves close to the speed of light, time for that moving object slows down relative to someone at rest. For example, if astronauts traveled near light speed, their clocks would tick more slowly compared to clocks on Earth.