Chip Fraud, Space Station Future, Neutron Star. Mar 2, 2018, Part 1

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Life Sciences, Natural Sciences, Wnyc, Friday, Science

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Currently, the International Space Station is the only destination for astronauts traveling into lower-earth orbit. It’s also the only way for scientists to conduct experiments in microgravity. After two decades, it’s still proving to be incredibly useful to researchers. But time is running out. President Trump has indicated he wants to defund the station as scheduled by 2025, it’s nearing the end of its expected lifetime, and private companies have indicated that they, too, want to invest in the space station market. What does the future hold for science’s single biggest asset in lower earth orbit? Plus, researchers investigating mysterious X-ray sources in other galaxies are finding something strange: neutron stars that burn hundreds of times brighter than they should be able to. And new research published in Nature Astronomy suggests that the answer has to do with a magnetic field 10 billion times stronger than the strongest one ever generated on Earth by human physics experiments. It’s been about two years since U.S. retailers and lenders began converting to chip-based credit card technology—all in an effort to fend off the kind of fraud and hacks that stole millions of credit card numbers from big retailers like Target, Home Depot, and Michael’s a few years ago. Has it made a difference? And Gizmodo's Ryan Mandelbaum tells Ira about the biggest science stories this week in the News Round-up.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato.
0:03.2	Scan your radio on the FM dial, and you might come across a familiar sound.
0:13.1	No, not waves. Sounds like it's static. Yeah, to you and I, there's nothing there to listen to.
0:19.0	But astronomers report this week that a radio telescope in Australia has found something in the FM static that could be a signal from some of the earliest stars formed in our universe.
0:31.2	Here to tell us about that story as well as other short subjects in science as Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer for Gizmodo.
0:37.8	Good to have you back, Ryan.
0:38.9	Hey, Ira, great to be here.
0:40.2	So we're learning about the secrets of the universe over the radio waves, and I mean that's true every week on Science Friday, of course.
0:46.4	But tell us what you mean.
0:47.6	What did scientists discover here?
0:49.2	Right.
0:49.5	So using that small radio telescope, it's essentially a shadow from the hydrogen gas that used to
0:56.3	diffuse across the universe about 100 million years after the Big Bang that's being cast across
1:02.1	over the cosmic microwave background, the earliest light that we can detect in the universe.
1:07.0	So this shadow signifies the beginnings of the first stars being formed, but it also,
1:13.6	what was crazy was it was twice as cold as expected, which when you have these unexpected
1:21.0	things in physics, that means we don't know something, and in this case it might be dark
1:24.5	matter.
1:25.5	So the shadow should be warmer because it's sort of heat left over from the Big Bang theory.
1:31.7	But it's colder than you expect it?
1:33.9	Well, since it's a shadow, it's absorbing light.
1:36.3	And then it's absorbing twice as much light than you expect.
	...

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