Jurassic World, Rhino Comeback, Uranus Collision. July 6, 2018, Part 2

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🗓️ 6 July 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

It’s the 25th anniversary of the debut of Jurassic Park. And with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom currently at the top of the summer movie food chain, its progeny continue to dominate the box offices. But even as the original Jurassic Park gave viewers the latest in paleontological science in dino looks, the research has progressed to include feathers and wildly different body shapes for old favorites like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. Even newer research into dinosaur vocalization suggest they would have sounded more like modern birds than roaring lions. Paleontologists Julia Clarke and Ken Lacovara join John Dankosky to discuss. After the death of the last surviving male northern white rhino, the future looked dim for the endangered subspecies, which now numbers two infertile females. But scientists have been working on a number of methods to rescue the rhino after all. Collections of sperm and DNA could allow southern white rhinos, which are a closely related but a separate subspecies, to carry lab-created embryos to term. The icy planet Uranus is an odd place. It spins on an axis almost perpendicular to its orbit, with one pole pointed straight at the sun for much of the year. It’s also colder than expected and has an unusually-shaped magnetic field. One theory for how Uranus became such an oddball in our space neighborhood involves a massive impact strong enough to tip a young planet onto its side. A group of researchers ran the numbers on such a collision and simulated what the results might be if a planet one, two, or three times the size of the Earth were to strike Uranus in the early days of our solar system.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about
0:05.8	efforts to save the endangered white rhino. Plus, science goes to the movies with a look at Jurassic
0:10.6	World, Fallen Kingdom, and we want your questions about dinosaurs. You can call us at 844-724-8-255. That's
0:18.2	844 Sci-Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFry. But first, the icy planet Uranus is
0:24.6	an odd place. It spins on an axis almost perpendicular to its orbit, with one pole pointed
0:30.6	straight at the sun for much of the year. It's also colder than expected and has an unusually
0:35.6	shaped magnetic field.
0:41.3	Now, one theory for how Uranus became such a standout in our space neighborhood involves a massive impact strong enough to tip the young planet onto its side.
0:45.9	In research published this week in the Astrophysical Journal, a group of researchers runs the
0:50.3	numbers on such a collision.
0:51.7	Jacob Kegaris is one of the authors of that report and a
0:54.2	researcher in the Institute for Computational Cosmology and the Department of Physics at Durham
0:59.0	University in the UK. Jacob, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. So this idea of
1:05.7	an impact causing the urinus tilt isn't new, is it? No, that's right.
1:11.4	So it's very hard to imagine, like you said,
1:14.8	what could cause this odd tilt that Uranus has.
1:18.1	And by far the most obvious idea is that something huge hit it and knocked it over.
1:25.1	So this is not a new idea,
1:26.7	but what we've been able to do with this
1:28.6	research is use large supercomputers and new modeling techniques to try and understand
1:36.2	more of the details of how this happened and some of the other consequences that this huge
1:41.0	violent event might have had on the planet. Before we get into more details about that violent event, I said some of this up front,
	...

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