How to Make Gold, Flamingo Food Tornado, and Kosmos-482 Lands

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Soviet-era spacecraft Kosmos-482 lands, though no one is certain where. Physicists turn lead into gold. Overdose deaths are down, in part thanks to the availability of naloxone. Flamingos make underwater food tornadoes. Chimps use leaves as a multi-tool. Recommended reading: A New, Deadly Era of Space Junk Is Dawning, and No One Is Ready https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dropped-space-junk-on-my-neighbors-farm-heres-what-happened-next/ Physicists Turn Lead into Gold—For a Fraction of a Second https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/large-hadron-collider-physicists-turn-lead-into-gold-for-a-fraction-of-a/ Overdose Deaths Are Finally Starting to Decline. Here’s Why. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overdose-deaths-are-finally-starting-to-decline-heres-why/ E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by associate mind and brain editor Allison Parshall. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:36.2	Happy Monday listeners. For Scientific American Science Quickly, this is Allison Partial, filling in for Rachel Feltman.
0:54.1	Let's kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news. Let's kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.
0:58.4	First, an update on that doomed Soviet-era spacecraft Rachel mentioned last week.
1:03.2	After spending more than half a century orbiting Earth, the Cosmos 4-82 probe made a crash landing on May 10th.
1:15.6	According to a post on the app Telegram from Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, the spacecraft crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, which is the capital of Indonesia.
1:21.6	Space.com reports that other space agencies have estimated different landing spots for the probe,
1:26.6	from locations on land in South Asia
1:28.6	to stretches of the eastern Pacific.
1:31.3	We may never know exactly where Cosmos 4-8-2 finally came to rest, and in any case,
1:36.8	we haven't heard any reports of falling space junk causing harm to humans, so it seems likely
1:41.2	that the object crashed somewhere pretty out of the way.
1:44.8	Now for some accidental alchemy.
1:47.3	Despite the wishes of medieval scholars, there's no way to just turn lead into gold, right?
	...

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