New directions in environmental health and ecology, innovation in science and technology is waning

01/12/23 • 39 min

This episode features an interview with the scientists Michelle Bell and Scott Goetz, who are editors-in-chief of two new environmental journals from IOP Publishing.

Bell is a professor of environmental health at Yale University and has helped launched the journal Environmental Research: Health. She talks about her research on how the greening of urban landscapes and other environmental factors affect human health.

Goetz heads the Global Earth Observation and Dynamics of Ecosystems lab at Northern Arizona University and has helped launch the journal Environmental Research: Ecology. He talks about how Earth observation satellites are shedding light on how climate change is affecting ecosystems such as taiga (boreal forest).

Also in this podcast, the science writer Laura Hiscott looks at a recent study that suggests that innovation in science and technology is waning.

This episode features an interview with the scientists Michelle Bell and Scott Goetz, who are editors-in-chief of two new environmental journals from IOP Publishing.

Also in this podcast, the science writer Laura Hiscott looks at a recent study that suggests that innovation in science and technology is waning.

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Nuclear waste: how environmental radiochemistry is improving storage and site remediation

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast Katherine Morris of the University of Manchester explains how her research on environmental radiochemistry will lead to better ways of storing nuclear waste and remediating contaminated sites. She also talks about how her team uses the UK’s Diamond Light Source to better understand the chemistry of systems containing radioactive materials.

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Seeking cosmic particles using a super-pressure balloon, the physics of babies

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features an interview with Angela Olinto, who is principal investigator of the EUSO-SPB2 mission. EUSO stands for Extreme Universe Space Observatory and SPB refers a super pressure balloon, which will soon be hoisting the experiment to an altitude of 33 km. There it will spend about 100 days detecting neutrinos and ultra-high energy cosmic rays.

Olinto, who is based at the University of Chicago, talks about the challenges of operating a particle-detection system floating high above Earth and what the EUSO-SPB2 collaboration hopes to observe.

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Physics World Weekly Podcast - New directions in environmental health and ecology, innovation in science and technology is waning

Transcript

00:00:04.959

Physics World. Hello, and welcome to the Physics World weekly podcast. I'm Hamish Johnston. Coming up in this episode, the science writer Laura Hiscott joins me to talk about a recent study that concludes that innovation is on the decline in science and technology. But first, I chat with 2 environmental scientists and discover how earth observation satellites are being used to track how climate change is affecting ecosystems. And we also talk about how air pollution a