#bigpicturescience — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bigpicturescience, aggregated by home.social.
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Big Picture Science for Aug 24, 2026: Measure For Measure
REPEAT
Whether in miles or pounds, meters or kilograms, we take daily measure out our lives. But how did these units ever come to be, and why do we want to change them? From light-years to leap seconds, we look at the history of efforts to quantify our lives and why there’s always room for greater precision. Plus, we debate the virtues of staying imperial measurements vs. going metric.
Guest:* James Vincent - Author of Beyond Measure, the Hidden History of Measurement
Originally aired March 24, 2023
Download podcast at - https://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/measure-for-measure
You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/
Get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!
#Measurement #BigPictureScience #SETI #News #Podcast #Science
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Big Picture Science for July 13, 2026: Cold Comfort
REPEAT
Another scorching summer has us blasting the AC and grabbing a chilled drink. Air conditioning and refrigeration may beat the heat, but they also present a dilemma. The more we use them, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the hotter the planet becomes, and the more we require artificial cooling. Can we escape this feedback loop? We look at the origins of these chilling technologies, tour the extensive chain of cold that keeps food from perishing, and consider how a desert city like Phoenix could not exist without AC.
Guests:
* Nicola Twilley – co-host of the Gastropod podcast, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and the author of “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves”
* Erik Morrison – Chief cooling engineer at Transaera, Somerville, Massachusetts
* Stan Cox – Lead scientist at the Land Institute, author of “Losing Our Cool: The Uncomfortable Truths about our Air-Conditioned World”Originally aired September 16, 2024
Download podcast at - https://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/cold-comfort
You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/
Get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!
#AirConditioning #Refrigeration #BigPictureScience #SETI #News #Podcast #Science