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Unsung Science

Unsung Science

CBS News

Hear the untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in science and tech. “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent and six-time Emmy winner David Pogue takes you behind the scenes into the creation stories of the world’s greatest advances and the people behind them. From transportation, food, space, internet, and health, creators reveal their inspirations and roadblocks they encountered in bringing their breakthroughs to the public. Hear all-new episodes of the award-winning Unsung Science podcast every other Friday.

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Top 10 Unsung Science Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Unsung Science episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Unsung Science for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Unsung Science episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Unsung Science - Genetics, Votes, and Colin Firth
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11/10/23 • 37 min

The U.S. has fallen into polarized, partisan, political bickering. Online, liberals and conservatives seem to despise each other. But nobody seems to stop to ask: How did we get our liberal and conservative views in the first place? We formed our opinions by carefully weighing the issues and thoughtfully choosing a stance, right? Well, no; turns out over half of our political leanings are determined, incredibly, by our genes. In this episode: How we figured that out, and what it means for our future.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Unsung Science - NASA Redirects an Asteroid
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03/17/23 • 31 min

65 million years ago an asteroid struck the earth. In the ensuing planetary darkness, the dinosaurs went extinct. But the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program! Now we can spot incoming asteroids with steadily improving confidence. If we see one on a collision course with the Earth, we know from the movies that the solution is to nuke it...Right? Actually, NASA has a better idea. If you can just nudge an asteroid slightly off its current path, maybe 25 or 50 years before it hits us, it won’t hit the earth. It will sail harmlessly past us. In 2022, NASA put that idea to the test. It sent a tiny spacecraft 7 million miles into space, for the express purpose of crashing into a known asteroid—to see if we could bump it into a different path. We quickly found out. This is the story of the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission.

Hear from Dr. Richard Binzel, MIT professor. Dr. Elena Adams, lead engineer for NASA’s DART mission, and Dr. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Unsung Science - Audio Deepfakes and the End of Trust
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10/29/21 • 42 min

The media is plenty freaked out about “deepfakes”: Computer-generated videos of famous people saying things they never actually said. But only the video is faked; the audio parts, the voices of those fake celebrities, were supplied by human impersonators. But now, software exists to mimic anyone’s voice, opening a Pandora’s Box of fraud, deception, and what one expert calls “the end of trust.” Fortunately, a new coalition of 60 news organizations and software companies think they have a way to shut down the nightmare before it begins.

Guests: Ragavan Thurairatnam, Dessa. Nina Schick, author and deepfakes expert. Joan Donavan, Harvard Kennedy School. Charlie Choi, CEO of Lovo. Dana Rao, chief counsel, Adobe.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Unsung Science - Inside the Lost Titanic Sub: An Update
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06/23/23 • 44 min

The lost OceanGate submersible has captured the world’s attention. In the summer of 2022, “CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent and "Unsung Science" host David Pogue was invited to join an expedition to visit the Titanic wreck with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as well as Titanic dive veteran P.H. Nargeolet, aboard the one-of-a-kind sub. David covered his adventure in a two-part episode in December 2022. Today, we know that the sub and its creator met a tragic end. Pogue looks back at the experience, with his commentary in the wake of the loss.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Unsung Science - The Man Who Invented QR Codes
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07/07/23 • 33 min

In 1994, Masahiro Hara got tired of having to scan six or seven barcodes on every box of Toyota car-parts that zoomed past him on the assembly line. He wondered why the standard barcode from the 70s was still used...Why couldn’t someone invent a barcode that used two dimensions instead of one that could work from any angle or distance, even even if it got smudged or torn?

And so, studying a game of "Go", he dreamed up what we now know as the QR Code — the square barcode you scan with your phone. It shows up on restaurant menus, billboards, magazine ads — even tattoos and gravestones. But even that, says Hara-san, is only the beginning.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Perseverance, NASA's latest Mars rover, is a one-ton, $2 billion marvel. The plan was for it to enter the Mars atmosphere going 12,000 miles an hour. The problem: How do you slow it down enough to set it down gently on the surface? You can't use retro rockets, because they'd stir up so much dust, the rover’s cameras and instruments would be ruined. You can’t deliver Perseverance inside a larger spaceship, because the rover wouldn’t be able to drive out of the landing crater. You can’t even control the descent from Earth, because it takes so long for our signals to reach Mars; by the time the rover received a course-correction instruction, there’d be nothing left of it but a smoking wreck. Yet NASA pulled it off—with a nutty, Rube Goldberg-y, multi-stage, seven-minute-long, completely automated system involving a parachute, an airborne launch platform, and a cable.

Guest: Alan Chen, NASA Entry, Descent, and Landing Lead for the Mars 2020 mission.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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The first time you heard “Star Trek” characters speak Klingon, or the “Game of Thrones” characters speaking Dothraki and High Valyrian, you might have assumed that the actors were just speaking a few words of gibberish, created by some screenwriter to sound authentic. But these are complete languages, with vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and even made-up histories. There’s only one person on the planet whose full-time job is creating them—and these days, he’s swamped with requests. No doubt about it: Conlangs (constructed languages) are the new special effect. Me nem nesa!

Hear from David Peterson (author, linguist & full-time language maker), Mark Okrand (author, linguist & creator of Klingon), and Angela Carpenter, (linguistics professor at Wellesley College).

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Unsung Science - Back to Titanic Part 2
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12/19/22 • 34 min

In “Back to Titanic” Part 1, David Pogue told of his invitation to join an expedition to visit the wreck of the Titanic in a custom submersible. The company, OceanGate, ordinarily charges $250,000 per person, as part of a new wave in adventure travel.

Bad weather immediately canceled the dive that Pogue and the “CBS Sunday Morning” crew were scheduled to join—but the CEO offered a consolation dive to the Grand Banks. The sights were said to include shark breeding grounds, towering underwater cliffs, and marine species never seen before.

Just as the sub was descending beneath the waves, the order to halt came from mission control.

In this episode, the story concludes.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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The earth’s spinning is slowing down. Any clocks pegged to the earth’s rotation are therefore drifting out of alignment with our far more precise atomic clocks—only by a thousandth of a second every 50 years, but that’s still a problem for the computers that run the internet, cellphones, and financial systems.

In 1972, scientists began re-aligning atomic clocks with earth-rotation time by inserting a leap second every December 31, or as needed. It seemed like a good idea at the time—until computers started crashing at Google, Reddit, and major airlines. Google engineers proposed, instead, a leap smear: fractionally lengthening every second on December 31, so that that day contains the same total number of seconds. But really: If computer time drifts so infinitesimally from earth-rotation time, does anybody really care what time it is?

Guests: Theo Gray, scientist and author. Geoff Chester, public affairs officer for the for the Naval Observatory. Peter Hochschild, principal engineer, Google.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Unsung Science - How We Almost Blew the Vaccine
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10/22/21 • 38 min

It may seem as though we got the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines incredibly quickly. But Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó had been trying to make mRNA vaccines work for 30 years while fighting scientific gatekeepers who thought her idea was absurd. Her grants were denied, her papers rejected, her speaking invitations withdrawn; eventually, the University of Pennsylvania demoted her. But she still refused to quit, and in 2005, she and collaborator Drew Weissman cracked the code. They figured out how mRNA could direct our own cells to manufacture medicines to order. Their breakthrough saved the world from the worst of the pandemic—and opened a new world of medicines and vaccines for a huge range of diseases.

Guests: Katalin Karikó, senior VP at BioNTech. Drew Weissman, Perelman School of Medicine, U Penn. Derek Rossi, co-founder of Moderna.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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FAQ

How many episodes does Unsung Science have?

Unsung Science currently has 48 episodes available.

What topics does Unsung Science cover?

The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts, Technology, Science and Cbs.

What is the most popular episode on Unsung Science?

The episode title 'Genetics, Votes, and Colin Firth' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Unsung Science?

The average episode length on Unsung Science is 35 minutes.

How often are episodes of Unsung Science released?

Episodes of Unsung Science are typically released every 13 days, 16 hours.

When was the first episode of Unsung Science?

The first episode of Unsung Science was released on Sep 27, 2021.

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