Wunderdog

Robert Revell’s grandfather was a poet who fled Mao’s China - and Robert tells the story of how he went back to find his family’s house, still untouched after fifty years. Robert is a film and TV composer with a side gig: The band Blood Money, and reflects on the state of film music and the difference between work-for-hire and work that nourishes the heart. We get the story of how his father, Grae...

"Extreme trans-Neptunian Objects" - or chunks of rock that orbit the sun on average 250 times further away from the sun than Earth does - are moving in strange ways. They seem to be clustered somewhat, and Brown / Batygin suggested in 2016 that an explanation could be a hidden ninth planet in our solar system, around 5-10 earth masses. Terry Long Phan, astronomy graduate student at National Tsing...

Noland is an affable Arizonian with an advanced piece of tech in his skull: A Neuralink. With it, Noland can see his own brainwaves and control his computer ... somewhat. Often his powers are not very much more than what anyone with a hand could do ... but as he mentioned on Joe Rogan two weeks ago, he has one crazy power: He has an aimbot in his head. How does this work? Why is his precision so h...

 NASA JPL intern Maya D. Yanez has recently defended her Ph. D. on acetylenotrophy. This is the ability to extract energy from acetylene, and only a few species of bacteria (that we know of here on Earth) have it. They aren't very studied, and there's never been astrobiology studies specifically about this - so Maya's Ph. D. represents a whole new possibility for life to exist on other worlds...

Blockchain is a mystery to me, so I don't usually talk about blockchain projects. But Vinay Gupta is awesome. He thinks about climate refugees ALL THE TIME, and many of his projects, from the current most used housing system for Burning Man participants, the Hexayurt, to his ambitious website http://myhopeforthe.world/ are made to give climate refugees more tools. On top of these practical ideas,...

Note my NEW FORMAT: 10 minutes of quick questions first, then a deeper talk about ideas, motivation and process after. "I don't think it really matters if our profound connection happens with a digital or a physical intelligence" says Kevin Fischer, quantum physics pHd turned OpenSouls Ai CEO. And ... as offputting as this statement felt to me in the beginning, our conversation quickly got very sp...

At 3 in the night at Starmus 2017 I finally managed to get ten minutes with astrophysicist, science communicator, director of the Hayden Planetarium. At it's purest, Wunderdog digs into one or two topics and goes deep, like Vinay's refugee cities, Casey's carbon capture, Ana's cosmic bullet holes, and Eugene's star-based life. This isn't that! This is, me grabbing hold of someone very smart and tr...

Ein kommentar på nettsida www.barnebokkritikk.no vart illustrert med bilete genererte av Microsoft Ai Copilot. Eit bortimot samla korps av norske illustratørar og teikneserieskaparar hoppa inn på Barnebokkritikk sine facebooksider for å skjelle ut valget, deriblant eg. Ansvarleg redaktør Ingvild Bræin tok kontakt for å få lufta litt kva ho hadde tenkt, og sidan eg også hadde tankar å lufte, og tem...

Vinay Gupta: Mattereum, giving our things a trackable identity layer. Bonus: Climate refugees! Vinay has a plan!  Vinay used to work at Ethereum. Now he's trying to develop Mattereum, a digital identity layer (based on blockchain technology) that can tell us with more precision where a product is in its lifecycle, and how safe it is to buy. The intention: To make us reuse stuff more, with hig...

"One of the most original thinkers in the world" (list of people who have said this at the bottom) is BACK for a second visit! Robin Hanson explains his "grabby aliens" idea. This episode has a new jingle, by @trop1ce - who I found on Twitter. It contains a sample from a certain black hole sound published by NASA. Than...

Anders Sandberg talks volcano engineering, Freeman Dyson's computer at the end of everything, moving planets, how transparent society should get after quantum computers, and what is the best type of geoengineering!  Anders is a futurist and transhumanist, but also deeply concerned with the ethics and risks of all the wild technology he believes will happen. He works at Nick Bostrom's Future o...

Casey Handmer: On leaving Hyperloop One and NASA to bet on cheap, giga-scaleable carbon capture. First he took a PhD in gravity waves, then he got a position at Hyperloop One because of some truly shocking problem-solving skills (as far as I can tell, just listen to the episode and see if you agree), and THEN he worked at NASA JPL, where the literal rocket science happens. Every single one of thes...

The second part of the Jesse Moynihan interview! Jesse Moynihan went from incredibly weird underground cartoonist to "household name" when his friend and colleague Tom Herpich suggested Pendleton Ward hired Jesse to join as a storyboarder/writer/artist/art director at the end of the first season of the soon-to-be legendary animated show Adventure Time. On the side of the enormous body of work that...

For the first non-space related episode of Wunderdog, I have a MASSIVE nugget of artistic GOLD. Jesse Moynihan went from incredibly weird underground cartoonist to "household name" when his friend and colleague Tom Herpich suggested Pendleton Ward hired Jesse to join as a storyboarder/writer/artist/art director at the end of the first season of the soon-to-be legendary animated show Adventure Time...

In 2020, the esteemed physics professors Eugene Chudnovsky and Luis Anchordoqui published thatr describes a theoretical form of life unlike anything else. Eugene and Luis suggested that a combination of cosmic strings and magnetic monopoles could perform the tasks of DNA at a subatomic level.  Eugene Chudnovsky received his undergraduate, graduate, and postd...

While studying the stellar stream GD-1, Harvard astronomer Ana Bonaca made a literally enormous discovery: Cosmic "bullet holes" in our galaxy, several light years across. Something with around a million times the mass of our sun has punched enormous holes in our galaxy. What is the "bullet" here? Is it a supermassive black hole, of the kind we only see in the center of a galaxy? Or is it a cluste...

Jupiter's moon Europa is the most exciting place in the solar system to look for life. Cynthia Phillips from NASA tells us why. Cynthia Phillips is a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where she serves as the Europa Clipper  mission’s project staff scientist and project science communications lead. She is also the deputy project scientist for the Europa Lander miss...

Professor James Fallon talks psychology and space travel for "psychopaths" with psychologist and former coach of the Norwegian MMA national team, Jakob "the striking viking" Løvstad.  This podcast is a collaboration with Nitro studio, Oslo. Theme song: Jan Krey aka Jkreyzy Extra material and my art for p...

Robin Hanson on how mind uploads could make space irrelevant. The Fermi paradox is the mysterious lack of traces of alien civilized life. Professor Robin Hanson invented a term to describe that something may doom all civilizations to die before they go interplanetary (and become visible from earth). He coined this unknown factor "The Great Filter". Today, the term Great Filter has become quite mai...

NASA professor Philip Lubin and his potentially asteroid-deflecting and planet-saving laser, Breakthrough Starshot. Stephen Hawking's last speeches were often about his gigantic dream project, funded by physichist and billionaire Yuri Milner: The Breakthrough Initiative. It is mindblowing in scope and ambition. Professor Philip Lubin is one of the minds that inspired one p...