Nuclear powered aircraft - In the 1950/s the United States Airforce and Navy considered nuclear powered aircraft. Instead of burning fuel to heat air and provide thrust, a nuclear-powered jet engine would heat the air from the heat generated by a nucl...

Blast me to the moons! - Once you’ve learned how to tap nuclear energy, what can you do with it? One proposal was to take a couple thousand nuclear bombs, drop them behind a spacecraft, and set them off to push the craft from the Earth’s surface,

Nuclear alchemy - The medieval alchemists wanted to change lead into gold. It was, by the methods they were attempting to use, impossible, but modern physics might be able to turn gold into lead. it is possible to change one chemical element into anot...

Isotopes and enrichment - A given element can have different numbers of neutrons. While the protons determine an elements chemical properties, the different number of neutrons can have different nuclear properties.

Let’s relax with nuclear physics - I’d like to thank john peacocke for giving me the idea for the next few episodes. We’ve been chatting via email, and he told me about molten salt nuclear reactors. That reactor and the general subject are interesting...

Pulling the bone over their eyes - The fossil record contains, at best, only a few percent of any given ecology during any given time. To complicate the picture, some of the fossils are fakes. From money to reputation to jokes,

Digging for coal and fossils - In the mid 1800/s some fossils were found in a tributary of the Illinois river, called “Mazon Creek.” They had simply weathered out of the ground, but it wasn’t until coal mining moved in,

Yesterday, I got email from the relevant companies. The smart glasses I ordered are on the way, actually shipped this time. This marks the end of a long, and quite Ludacris saga. I wondered just how long it really has been,

Fossil casts and molds - When a creature dies and becomes buried, sometimes its remains can completely rot and dissolve away, leaving a hollow space within the rock called a mold. If that mold becomes filled with sediment and water,

Doctor Frankenstein’s favorite beer - The semiprecious stone amber is fossilized tree resin. Sometimes, insects and other small critters are trapped by sticky tree sap, and become encased in amber. Sometimes, microorganisms are found inside amber.