Science friday program

A once-common food staple, this giant tree has essentially disappeared from American forests. Can we bring it back—and should we? Science Friday. Latest Episode.

Want To Support Science Friday? Doctors report transplanting a heart from a genetically-modified pig into a human. There is this regular survey that the US Forrest Service does of all representative forests in the country.

And what the Air Resources Board was they took that raw data, and they generalized a lot of it in groups or buckets. So they would take a large geographic area across northern California and average the carbon stored in all the trees there as one type of regional average.

That is possible. It is not the only possible way that you could recalculate these numbers, but it does offer a blueprint for what the Air Resources Board could do if they chose to. We did send the Air Resources Board the study weeks before publication. We also sent them a lot of questions and offer to talk on the phone for months beforehand. So the existence of these carbon offsets must cause the landowner to change their behavior. Those trees were never in danger.

And in this situation, Mass Audubon said in its paperwork that it could have cut down a lot of its trees and seriously depleted the carbon stored in its forest. And now, with the carbon offset program, they enrolled about 9, acres of its land and would keep all the trees standing. Again, this is a situation where the landowner followed all of the rules. It just requires you to state that you could have cut down those trees. So do you place any blame with Mass Audubon? Or is the issue more about the rules?

Mass Audubon certainly was following the rules, but Mass Audubon is also staffed by a bunch of smart people who understand science and understand climate change.

On this particular issue of those regional average calculations, that is something that can definitely be changed in the rules if the regulators want to. Other people have criticized this forest offset program for issues like how it judges whether someone would have cut down the trees. You can read their full statement up on our website at ScienceFriday.

All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Previously, she was a senior editor at Popular Science. But companies can buy these offsets to justify polluting more anyway. Science Friday. And he read it, and our Nixon impersonator was not great.

And luckily, we do not ever have to air this video. So no one will ever see it, we hope. In the movie, you introduce us to your astronauts, but you also introduce us to your favorite building materials. Like plywood. Plywood is a sandwich. A delicious, wood sandwich. Plywood is more flexible, and generally stronger than lumber of the same species and dimension.

You have to be a wood person to understand, and you obviously understand plywood. We all appreciate plywood and what it can do. Tyvek, which is a flash spun, non-woven fabric, and super strong stuff. Nothing that we use is exotic, everything is from Home Depot. We had a thermal cooling layer, because the astronauts would tend to overheat. And when the cooling layer failed, and it does fail in the movie, our astronauts would get very cranky.

And that was always something we were trying to avoid, keep them cool. Did they get it? My NASA guys totally got it. They said to me, they knocked on the door.

And I said, well, sure, how are we going to do that? And he said, well, for example, your lunar space program is— your moon is a ball gray duct tape. If you take red duct tape and cover that gray ball, now you have Mars. And we will help you, philosophically, figure out the details. And we wound up having a fantastic exchange program, a residency, where they came to my studio. And then I would go to Pasadena, back and forth. He joins us from JPL today. Welcome back to Science Friday, Kevin.

This is Biolab. Please confirm that you see a clear image of what we think is a second sample of life in our universe. So there is life on Mars. And then I just find a lot of inspiration, scientifically, in art. Tom and I discovered we were kind of kindred spirits. When I first met Tom and was introduced to his art, I was like, what is going on here?

You played a little bit of the plywood video. I love that video. Tom is all about process, and the discipline of process and craft. So everything he does is so meticulous. But there is this incredible balloon of creativity on top of that. But out of that comes these amazing achievements. What did you take away from that experience?

But specifically, or philosophically, I was a D- student who did ninth grade twice, unlike Kevin, who got to go to the best schools in the known universe. But I learned that scientists ad artists have kind of the same job.