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The BrainFood Show

The Final Frontier Part 5: Are the Odds of Successfully Navigating an Asteroid Field Really Approximately 3,720 to 1?

The BrainFood Show

Cloud10

Education, History

4.91.6K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2018

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we begin by discussing the real origin of Tang and what that has to do with Pop Rocks and how they work. We then move on to the interesting story behind the invention of Velcro and how it works. Next up we look at whether NASA really spent many millions of dollars developing the famous “space pen” instead of just using a pencil like the Russians. Moving on from there we discuss the fascinating reason why only one side of the moon faces the Earth and how this happened and is still happening, with the Earth itself slowing down such that in theory at some point only one side of it will face the moon. Moving on, we look at what the actual odds of navigating a typical asteroid field in space would be and whether the depictions in movies here are actually accurate. Finally, we respond to some user feedback, including on initial attempts listeners of the female persuasion have made to pee standing up without peeing all over themselves (which sounds even weirder to write, but is in reference to a previous space episode ;-)), and the interesting phenomenon of people using the show to fall asleep every night and whether we should take that as a good thing or a bad thing… Also for reference, here is a picture of the two sides of Velcro under a microscope and another of the burdock plant seeds mentioned. On another note, if you could do us a huge favor and rate and review this show in whatever podcasting platform you’re using (including hopefully giving us some feedback related to the new format), we would be extremely grateful. Thanks! (You can also discuss this episode and view references on The BrainFood Show forum here.) Don’t miss future episodes of this podcast, subscribe here: iTunes | Spotify | Google Play Music | Stitcher | RSS/XML You can also find more episodes by going here: The BrainFood Show The post The Final Frontier Part 5: Are the Odds of Successfully Navigating an Asteroid Field Really Approximately 3,720 to 1? appeared first on Today I Found Out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

All right, welcome to another episode of the Rain Food Podcast.

0:05.0

This is another one in our ongoing series of, which we're calling the Final Frontier, the

0:11.4

working title is the epic space series just

0:13.7

to confuse me and you apparently this is part five today I think last week we

0:19.3

promised a lot of bonus facts right yeah I decided to do that next week, but so that the next

0:26.3

week will be the final of the space series. This one will be the second final

0:29.7

and this is I mean this is kind of like a bonus fact but more of like a it's bonus fact

0:34.0

e I know I was kind of reading through it it feels a bit yeah they're we're

0:37.2

hitting a lot of different things yeah so so we're in a lot of different

0:41.3

things but mostly just debunking some myths.

0:43.9

There was kind of a theme on some of these to just debunk a lot of myths, so I decided to put it all together

0:49.2

to do with certain things with space that people think.

0:51.7

So space myths, what have we got coming up?

0:53.2

Yeah so we got concerning primarily concerning Tang, Velcro pens, the moon and the

1:00.8

odds of successfully navigating through an asteroid field.

1:03.0

Oh, that's, uh, judging by movies incredibly difficult, but I think that's probably just for dramatic effect or something, right?

1:10.5

Yeah, we'll get into that.

1:12.0

Space is big, right? Yeah, we'll get into that. Space is big, right? Yeah, and why, and why they're wrong?

1:16.0

I will spoil no more. I'll just leave that for later in this episode. Yeah, this is, I, I like these ones where we tackle a few topics.

1:24.0

As mentioned in last week's episode, we are changing up the format slightly,

1:28.0

so now we have the kind of the content at the beginning and then we will do follow-up on previous episodes and all sorts of, you know,

1:34.4

extra podcasty things once we're done with that. So we're just going to crack on but before we do just let me say that

...

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