SoT 260: The Planetary Protection Office

April 26, 2017

Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Jo Benhamu

[00:02:34] For the first time, an atmosphere has been detected around a nearly Earth-sized exoplanet.

[00:08:45] Results of a large study suggest that a cap that generates electric fields might successfully fight brain cancer. But there are still many doubts about this “sci-fi treatment”.

[00:27:06] There’s a radiation-resistant bacterial spore found only in spacecraft cleanrooms. To know if they might potentially contaminate other worlds, NASA needed to see if they can survive in space. So, they sent some into space!

[00:35:31] What if identifying and monitoring the 3,000 different species of mosquitoes was a simple matter of using an app on your phone? A pair of engineers at Stanford University are working on creating “Shazam for mosquitoes”!

[00:43:01] For more information, or to get in touch with us, or to donate head to scienceontop.com/260

 

This episode contains traces of Dara O’Briain talking about the War on Bacteria.