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Astronomy Cast

Weekly Space Hangout - Mar. 1, 2012

Astronomy Cast

Astronomy Cast

Natural Sciences, Science, Astronomy

4.83.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2012

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Another week, another space roundup. This week we talk about the redefinition of the term "Earthlike", salty soil on Mars, how you can participate in SETI, asteroid dust from Hayabusa, and the dangers of a warp drive.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hi, everyone. Fraser here. Sorry about this, but we lost the first

0:04.2

10 minutes of this episode. I'm not really sure why but something messed up with recording it to Google so

0:10.7

So this is where it starts in Ian is talking about how scientists are kind of concerned about the redefinition of

0:18.2

Earth-like planets. So we only lost about maybe five ten minutes of his recording. So sorry about that

0:23.7

The science media I can take a higher grant and say I'm a scientist and I'm in the media. So therefore we're not going to publish anything like that.

0:32.5

But the point is, especially online media, you have the right traffic to these articles and often

0:38.8

you know, the especially tabloid press, they don't care about science. They'll say, oh, it's been discovered here

0:44.3

and it may be super earth-orbiting outside the habitable zone. They don't care.

0:47.8

I mean, the point is it brings people in and then they might explain a little bit of the quantity of luck.

0:52.7

But the science media we have to be more careful because

0:56.9

ultimately we have to be accurate. So I

1:00.5

occasionally, perhaps one of the two articles I'll sit by when I see that the

1:04.5

Roger the article has used Earth-like to mean

1:07.8

a completely different kind of world that is nothing Earth-like Earth-like. So I have to go in and edit it.

1:12.2

But up here, because science media is like that. But whereas tabloid media, they

1:18.0

they wouldn't care. We have other means of driving traffic and yeah

1:22.4

and after your headlines is a moment.

1:27.8

Okay, cool. Well, so Nancy, you've got a story about how, oh, can you mute your mic again?

1:33.2

You've got a little bit of an echo there. So Nancy, you've got a story this week on University about how

1:40.5

Mars soil could be sucking up water from the atmosphere?

1:44.5

Yeah, there were some geologists that were working down in Antarctica in the McMurdo drivali area,

1:50.8

which is a cold polar desert. And they were finding areas of moist patches of soil,

...

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