Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea

In the time between putting our head down to rest at night to when we wake up in the morning, how far do we travel in space without us knowing it? If the boiling point of water is 100°C, then how is it that the clothes we put out on the line dry at all? And, if I can see a flea, can a flea see a bacteria? There might be more profound questions to ask in the name of science, but the simplest questions can often uncover the most fascinating answers about the world around us. In this special episode of Fasterproof, Jonathan seeks to find the answer to as many of these questions as he can, and in doing so reveal the simple beauty of the everyday, as well as the profound scale of our place in the universe. Listen and subscribe to Futureproof with Johnathan McCrea on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.    Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.    You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

What’s happening when you listen to this podcast?  Jonathan has exhaled air and by moving parts of his mouth and throat, changed the sounds that the air makes as it exits his lungs and flows out into the atmosphere around him.  Forgetting the microphone, the radio and whatever other middlemen that are involved in between for a moment, you are then receiving and interpreting this sound that he has made. How? James Hudspeth is a Biophysicist and Neuroscientist in The Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University.

We’ve a very special episode coming up next week in which we’ll be answering your sometimes ingenious, more often than not bizarre, questions. We’ve had a huge response to this and the fact of the matter is that we just couldn’t fit all of the questions into next week’s show. One of the questions we couldn’t fit in was actually one of our favourites. There was just too much in it to only spend a few minutes at it so we’ve decided to do a full feature interview on it this week. And so Professor of Biology from Georgetown University; Martha Weiss joined us to answer the question “Does a butterfly remember being a caterpillar?"

Remember when you were in school and you learned that there were 9 planets in the solar system? Then there was all that unpleasantness with Pluto in 2006.  Well good news! Thanks in part to our next guest you can essentially forget that that ever happened. Sort of... Mike Brown is Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and one of the scientists at the forefront of the search for Planet 9.

Scientists say that it’s most likely that Covid-19 originated in Bats.  If that is the case, you can add it to a list which features the likes of SARS in China 2003, Rabies in Peru in 2006 and Ebola in West Africa in 2013. So what is it about Bats that results in them transmitting so many deadly viruses to humans and what can we do about it? Dr. Daniel Streicker is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine in the University of Glasgow, he joined Jonathan to discuss. Image: flickr.com Futureproof with Johnathan McCrea Listen and subscribe to Futureproof with Johnathan McCrea on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.    Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.    You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.