The Last Show with David Cooper
Jesse Rogerson: Rogue Waves, Flu Expectations, And Cryogenics - January 23, 2026
24 Jan 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Keep listening to The Last Show with David Cooper. Because the alien invasion can wait. The Last Show with David Cooper. Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of Jesse Rogerson, a professor of astrophysics at York University. We are talking science news and we're going to talk his wheelhouse. Let's go into space and get some updates from our orbit and beyond.
Jesse, welcome to the show.
Hey, David. It's always good to be here.
Artemis?
Artemis. Tell me about it. Okay, so this is a big deal. And for some reason, it feels like the news has not covered it. I watch the news. I don't know. Maybe that means that tells you how old I am. But the news is not really focusing on it yet. But the Artemis 2 rocket has rolled out to the launch pad. It's launching no earlier than February 2nd, but that's soon or shortly thereafter.
And this is a mission that's going to the moon. It's the first time we've sent humans to the moon since 1972. four astronauts are going to fly to the moon, one of which is a Canadian, the first person who's not American to fly to the moon. This is a big deal. Jeremy Hansen, our Canadian astronaut, is going to be flying there.
I'm pretty pumped about this, and I have not heard enough talk about it.
Of all the reasons, the political stories of the day that are petty, that are disheartening, that are dysfunctional, that we hear about, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, talking about all the time. I'm glad we're covering them. But one of the great downsides is stories like this get buried.
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Chapter 2: What updates are there on NASA's Artemis 2 moon rocket?
And this is a great disappointment to me because this is exciting. We're going back to the moon.
It's been decades, right? And so much great progress was made in the 70s, and then it just got put on the back burner for a variety of reasons. And this is like that exactly. It's a wholesome story. It's got really good science to do, really great engineering demonstrations to do. We have international collaboration between NASA and the CSA. We have our own Canadian, Jeremy Hansen.
We have the first woman to go, the first person of color to go. It's a great crew with a lot of experience. It's... We're going to fly high for like it's going to be like a two week mission, like a 10 day mission. And we're going to have a good 10 days of hopefully tons of coverage of it. But right now it's flying under the radar. I hope it starts, you know, getting traction in the mainstream.
Now, are they bringing, you know, technical scientific equipment to sequence the DNA and analyze the matter of the moon rocks to check if there is definitively cheese in them?
Yeah.
You know what the funny thing is, is that they're not actually landing. So perhaps I should have said that. You know, I'm saying, but they're going to the moon to orbit the moon. So when this is part of the Artemis project.
So they won't know if it's cheese quite yet. No, I'm kidding. What kind of experiments will they be doing?
They get close enough where they can get a whiff of it. So if it's hard cheese, you know, they'll be able to. Anyway, the kind of experiments they're doing. So they're going to be ranging. They're going to be bouncing radar off the ground. They were going to take a high resolution photos.
They're also doing a full suite check of all of the instrumentation on board, all of the engineering on board, because the next mission, Artemis three, which will be in the next two or three years, will be landing on the surface.
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Chapter 3: What happened during the recent medical evacuation from the International Space Station?
Scientists are saying they bite us more. They're feeding from us more these days. But they're also saying it's all of our fault. Why? This is the question.
This story, this is from Brazil. In Brazil, they went to an area where they had just experienced deforestation nearby in the area. and they took some mosquitoes, and they looked at the mosquitoes' blood that they had sucked out of animals, and they were looking at all the different types of animals that it had been sucked out of, and they found that humans were the number one.
And they think what is happening here is that As you deforest, then you are taking away food supply, right? That's the basic idea, obviously. A mosquito is going to be feeding on whatever mammal it can find, whatever blood it can find, it's going to feed on that.
But if you destroy that habitat, and then humans move in, and humans are the only ones in the area, then mosquitoes are just going to naturally start, they're going to go for you. So... The study they did was looking at these various, there was like 50 different species of mosquitoes, and sequencing the DNA of the blood inside them, finding that they're chewing on humans more.
So I think the overall idea here is that we should stop deforestation. But this is a bigger, the more health-related part of this story is that You may have heard this before, David, but the number one most deadly animal on the planet is mosquitoes. Shark.
Oh, tarantulas. No, for sure the number one most deadly animal on the planet is us. Come on.
Yes, but the mosquito is really good at spreading disease. And I guess we are too. But mosquitoes are responsible for just a variety of viruses and diseases that spread from human to human. They spread it
really really fast and in a really dangerous way so having a sense of how they're feeding on us is a is good to have and seeing that they are now increasing their at least in this one place this one place in brazil they're they're now increasing it this is something we need to think about for the future so the next time you want to fly down to brazil with your axe listener to chop down the rainforest maybe don't do that it's my advice to you see practical takeaways for people we're having on this show you've ruined my weekend plans
Every week we take science questions from our listener, singular intended, and anyone can call in with whatever science question they have. The number is 1-888-505-6644. Jesse will do his best to answer it. This week, the question kind of involves space, but also another weird biology field that maybe isn't a real field of science. So let's listen to it. This comes from a listener named Mike.
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