Science, Actually Presents : The Nerd and the Scientist

Sure this episode starts with talk about sausages, but how else does one segue their conversation to talking about salp? And you need to talk about salp to talk about jellyfish, right? Which, of course, is the best way to talk about crabification. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Whales can't poop under pressure - the pressure achieved in great depths of water, not the pressure of pooping i...

Kovi and Benjamin got together for slice at Jupiter Pizza. They loved the menu - some wood fired pizza options were the Cassiopeia, the Io, Galileo, Gaia, Mercury, Ares, and Triton. As fun as those names are, they pissed off Benjamin something royal. You see, the names are all spacey, yes, but pick a theme! We've got some planets (Ares was the Greek name fo the planet we now call Mars), random moo...

Tree lines are moving both toward the poles and uphill, as they try to reach cooler temperatures. Flowers in Japan that have been blooming at precisely the same time for hundreds of years are suddenly off schedule by a full week. This week's guest, plant ecologist Inna Osmolovsky, explains how this and more are due to climate change. Plus, as Kovi and Benjamin are primarily space nerds, she easily...

Kovi and Benjamin were delighted to have the host of the Talking Ass podcast, Daniel Orvomaa, on their show. Or were they guests on his show? Someone was a guest on someone's show, we remember that. We do know that this is Part One of a two hour conversation that was had - and if you'd like to listen to Part Two, you need to track down the Talking Ass. It's the podcast with a tie-dye donkey as its...

On this quantum episode of The Nerd and The Scientist, your quatum hosts Kovi and Benjamin have a great quantum conversation with quantum guest, quatum physicist Chris Ferrie. From his humble quantum journey from a small town in Canada to being a professor of quantum physics in Australia, Chris also tell us how he got into writing quantum physics books for babies, and why people put 'quantum' in f...

Kovi and Benjamin finally get a moment to themselves without having to entertain yet ANOTHER amazing guest. "What should we talk about, Kovi," Benjamin asked. "Bugs," Kovi snapped back. He wasn't serious, but Benjamin was. So now we have an episode about bugs in space - both living critters brought up for experiments, or software bugs that either almost, or did, bring on an early end to many a mis...

Benjamin was crushed when he learned that 'starquakes' weren't actual ground-shaking events on a star's surface that shook little star buildings and cracked little star roads. Kovi's colleague, astroseismologist Courtney Crawford, explains how asteroseismology is the study of stellar oscillations - rhythmic pulsations in a star’s brightness - that help astronomers understand a star's internal stru...

We like big shuttles and we cannot lie... Kovi and Benjamin double up their guest payload this episode, as they speak with space historians and authors Emily Carney and Bruce McCandless III. Emily and Bruce just released their new book 'Star Bound' about the evolution of the space program - from the very first person to build a little rocket all the way to astronauts today. They share how their ex...

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Kovi laughed as Benjamin's mind was blown when hearing this knowledge nugget from this week's guest, researcher for the SETI Institute, Dr. Chenoa Tremblay. Who, you asked? Let's put it this way - if there are alien civilizations out there, Chenoa is the person who's going to find it. Seriously. Name a radio telescope - chances are she's used it...

Before we could even press record, astrobiologist Dr. Graham Lau was already explaining to Kovi and Benjamin how advanced alien civilizations have already discovered, and been taken over by, their own version of AI - and they're coming to get us. If that's not a reason to give this episode a listen we don't know what is. Tune in to our milestone 50th episode as the gang discusses possible life on...

Kovi got an astrophysics degree because he wanted to do astrophysics and then just kind of fell into this SciComm game. Benjamin got a film degree because he wanted to do film and then just kind of fell into this SciComm game. This week's guest, Rayner the Explainer, got both science AND arts degrees (at the same time!) specifically for SciComm, and has dazzled and sparkled her way across the scic...

From record-breaking rockets to stranded astronauts, 2024 was one hell of a year for space exploration. In this episode, Kovi and Benjamin take a look back at the most exciting, bizarre, and groundbreaking moments in space science and technology. They break down SpaceX's relentless launch streak and Starship's ambitious test flights, Boeing's Starliner drama, two astronauts' unexpected extended st...

In 2022 the Space Case Sarah Show was already quite the popular podcast, and Sarah knew if she wanted it to reach levels of awesomeness that broke the Karman Line there was only one thing she could do. She brought on Kovi and Benjamin to give her show that extra boost of science knowledge and whatever it is Benjamin does. Sadly the show ended in 2023, but that was a good thing. It brought The Nerd...

Kovi brings science to the troops - scout troops, that is! Ever wondered why Pluto got kicked out of the planet club? Or how close we are to mining asteroids like sci-fi heroes? In our latest episode, Kovi takes on the cosmos in a special scout-led Q&A with Boy Scout troops 175 and 4175 from Foster City, California. From what makes a radio telescope work to escaping black holes, no question is...

This week's guest, Rowina Nathan, joins Kovi and Benjamin to talk about pulsar timing, the gravitational wave background, and what it means to be the Pink Astrophysicist! While there are many pulsars to work with, she only works with 'the best ones' - some of them, well, they have quirky personalities that make them difficult to work with. What led Rowina to study gravitational waves? Why does she...

Our first ever guest returns and becomes our first return guest! Dr. Dimos Katsis is back, and this time he's talking about Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket which is planning on launching for the first time ever next month, December 2024. New Glenn is so big, it can fit Blue Origin's current rocket - the New Shepard - inside its payload. New Glenn's never flown before, never tested multiple stages b...

During their last Standard Model episode Kovi said, "we really need to get an expert to talk about this." So they did! This week's guest is Ciaran O’Hare - an ARC DECRA fellow at the University of Sydney. He works on aspects of dark matter particle physics and astrophysics, including direct detection, axions, and dark matter halo models. Although Kovi and Benjamin pretty much wrapped up all you ne...

Episode 42 - the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Well, we don't actually have that answer just yet - but we're working on it - and the best we have thus far is the Standard Model. In this episode Kovi and Benjamin talk about the fundamental building blocks of matter, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, why gravity's such a jerk it can't be wor...

Time goes by fast when you're having fun - just like this episode! This episode goes by fast as Kovi and Benjamin have fun talking about the fastest things in the universe! Hypervelocity stars, the solar wind, supernova ejecta, fast radio bursts, neutrinos and more. They even cover the fastest manmade objects - both on purpose and by accident - and the fastest crewed vehicle in history. Follow us...

Both science and art rely on imagination and creativity to explore new ideas, solve problems, and innovate. Art helps make abstract or complex scientific concepts more accessible through visual representation (e.g., illustrations, diagrams, models). In Kovi's and Benjamin's 40th EPISODE of the Nerd and the Scientist, they talk about different way scientific theories and information is presented to...

Kovi and Benjamin like the superheroes, too! Comic books aren't exactly where one would go to learn science, but - believe it or not - a great many times they get the science right! The Flash felt more and more tired and leaded the closer he got to the speed of light. The tensile strength of Spider-Man's webbing is about 1,000 megapascals - close to the 1,200 megapascal tensile strength of an actu...

Stars are so hot right now. Annie Jump Cannon, Henriette Leavitt, Antonia Maury, Florence Cushman, Cecilia Payne and others began cataloging and manually classifying stars in the late 1800's - over 350,000 of them. During that time, two astronomers simultaneously discovered a pattern in all that data. Between 1911 and 1913, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung and American astronomer Henry Norris R...

This episode's guest, teacher and science communicator Janet Ivey-Duesnsing from Janet's Planet, has Kovi and Benjamin traveling at the speed of thought! Listen in as Janet shares her journey from music, to science, to sparking an interest in science in thousands upon thousands of kids around the world. Follow us everywhere! Find Benjamin at Science, Actually : https://www.scienceactually.com/ &am...

Kovi and Benjamin talk about stars and planets and galaxies all the time on this show - but how do we see them? In this episode the lads discuss the evolution of the telescope - from the first lenses thousands of years ago in ancient Greece, to the curiosities of eyeglass makers in the 13th-16th centuries, to some tourist in Venice in 1609 who saw a spyglass and thought he could make a better one....

Executive Director of the Israel Space Forum, Space Mission Manager for the Rakia Mission, SpaceLab mentor and Flight Operations Manager for the Ramon Foundation, and Stargate SG-1 fanatic, Melody Korman, took time out of her ridiculously busy (and all-things-space packed) schedule to talk to Kovi and Benjamin about just some of the things she's done. From helping kids get their science experiment...