On this week’s show: Rising waters and intense storms make siting high-performance computer centers a challenge, and matching up spider silk DNA with spider silk properties
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First up on the podcast this week, News Intern Jacklin Kwan talks with host Sarah Crespi about how and where to build high-performance computing facilities as climate cha ... Show More
Nov 20
A headless mystery, and a deep dive on dog research
First up on the podcast: the mysterious fate of Europe’s Neolithic farmers. They arrived from Anatolia around 5500 B.C.E. and began farming fertile land across Europe. Five hundred years later, their buildings, cemeteries, and pottery stopped showing up in the archaeological reco ... Show More
32m 35s
Nov 13
Solving the ‘golfer’s curse’ and using space as a heat sink
First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi for a rundown of online news stories. They talk about lichen that dine on dino bones, the physics of the lip-out problem in golf, and a brain-computer interface that can decode a tonal language (Chine ... Show More
28m 13s
Nov 2021
How Does the Invasive Joro Spider Work?
Residents of the American South may have noticed a new spider on the, er, web -- the beautiful, fascinating Joro spider. Learn about it in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/arachnids/joro-spider.htm Learn more about your ad-choic ... Show More
5m 27s
Jan 2024
Do you know about Darwin's Bark Spider? 🕷️🕸️
In this episode, we learned about spiders, especially the Darwin's Bark Spider and some questions from you, our listeners. Spiders are fascinating creatures with unique characteristics: they belong to the arachnid family and can be found worldwide in various sizes and colours. Th ... Show More
25m 50s
Oct 2023
How the internet changed the spider trade
<p>With new and exotic species available at the click of a button, the digital age forever changed the multimillion-dollar arachnid industry. What has that meant for spiders?</p>
<p>Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mixing, sound design, and origina ... Show More
33m 29s
Jan 2022
Do Spider Exoskeletons Go Out Of Style? with Dr. Maydianne Andrade
As the itsy bitsy spider crawls up the water spout, it dawns on her: her exoskeleton doesn’t fit. Is it a fashion emergency—or her moment to shine? This week, Dr. Maydianne Andrade joins Jonathan to share the ins and outs of spider growth, behavior, and reproduction.
Dr. May ... Show More
1h 7m
Sep 2022
Undead Spiders, Dandelion Drones, Dark Energy Made Light
Researchers are making small claws out of dead spiders, dandelion seeds are inspiring scientists to mimic their distribution with small sensors to be able to better track ecological information, and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is helping us create a 3D map of the uni ... Show More
11m 19s