How Does The Brain Control Your Every Move? July 21, 2023, Part 1
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Listener supported WNYC Studios. |
| 0:08.4 | This is Science Friday. |
| 0:10.4 | I'm John Dankoski in for Ira Flato today. |
| 0:13.6 | A bit later this hour, we're going to talk about how the brain controls movement |
| 0:17.0 | and what that means for neuroscience as a whole. |
| 0:20.6 | But first, imagine a globe that if you |
| 0:22.9 | look at it from one side, it was all land, and when you spun it around, it was all water. This week, |
| 0:27.9 | astronomers report in the journal Nature that they've spotted a white dwarf, that's the dense |
| 0:32.5 | inner core of a dying star, that's the stellar equivalent of that globe. This star has a surface that appears to be |
| 0:38.5 | all hydrogen on one face, all helium on the other. Hmm. Joining me to talk about that and some other |
| 0:45.1 | short subjects in science is Timothy Revel. He's deputy U.S. editor at New Scientist and he's right here |
| 0:50.6 | in our New York studios. Welcome back to the show, Tim. It's good to see you. It's great to see you, too. Okay, so first of all, I guess, tell us more about this star, this weird star. Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. So it was spotted about 1,300 light years away from Earth, and it rotates about once every 15 minutes. And that means we get to see it's two different sides a lot. And so there were |
| 1:12.6 | researchers at the Zwicki Transient Facility in California. They were looking at the sky, just a |
| 1:17.8 | standard observation of the sky, and then they suddenly spotted this very strange looking star. |
| 1:22.5 | And as you say, on one side, it's completely helium and on the other side completely hydrogen. |
| 1:26.8 | So they found this just on a random sky scan, but I assume that they've confirmed this with |
| 1:32.3 | some other fancy instruments by now. |
| 1:34.1 | Yeah, exactly. So they confirmed it with other telescopes, and they confirmed it using |
| 1:38.0 | spectrometry, which is a sort of chemical fingerprint of the star, and that allowed them to see |
| 1:42.4 | what chemicals were mostly composed on the surface. |
| 1:45.0 | Okay, so they can see it, they can understand basically what it is, but do they know why this has happened? |
| 1:50.0 | Yeah, we don't know why it's happened. |
... |
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