In 1876 John Warne Gates described the new product he hoped to sell as “lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust”. We simply call it barbed wire. The advertisements of the time touted it this fence as “The Greatest Discovery Of The Age”. That might seem hyperbolic, even making allowances for the fact that the advertisers didn’t know that Alexander Graham Bell was just about to be awarded a patent for the telephone. But – as Tim Harford explains – while modern minds naturally think of the telephone as transformative, barbed wire wreaked huge changes in America, and much more quickly.
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: Barbed wire and sun, Credit: Getty Images)
In the mid 1940s, no one would publish Kurt Vonnegut’s stories. But when he gets hired as a press writer at General Electric, the company’s fantastical science inspires some of his most iconic--and best-selling--novels.
Every snowflake is unique—except they all have six sides. In ice, water molecules arrange themselves into hexagons.
(Courtesy MiSci Museum)
Imagine the Earth has been turned into a frozen wasteland. The culprit? Ice-nine. With a crystalline structure that makes it solid at room temperature, ice-nine freezes every drop of water it comes into contact with, and (predictably) ends up destroying the world. This is the fantastical plot of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. But the science that inspired the fiction came from the real-life research his older brother and team of scientists at General Electric conducted just after World War II.
General Electric might be best known for manufacturing refrigerators and light bulbs, but in the 1940s, the GE scientists joined forces with the military and set their sights on a loftier project: controlling the weather.
Controlling the weather could mean putting an end to droughts and raining out forest fires. But the GE scientists’ military collaborators have more aggressive plans in mind. Kurt, a pacifist, closely watches GE’s saga unfold, and in his stories, he demands an answer to one of science’s greatest ethical questions: are scientists responsible for the pursuit of knowledge alone, or are they also responsible for the consequences of that knowledge?
Vincent Schaefer of the General Electric Research Laboratory demonstrates his method for making snow in a laboratory freezer, circa 1947.
Vincent Schaefer, colleague of Bernie Vonnegut, makes man-made snow in a freezer at General Electric.
(Courtesy of MiSci Museum)
Vincent Schaefer gives a demonstration of the team’s cloud seeding research to Signal Corps at GE laboratories in 1947.
(Courtesy of MiSci Museum)
(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)
GUESTS
Ginger Strand, author of The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic
Cynthia Barnett, author of Rain: A Natural and Cultural History
CREDITS
This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Elah Feder and Annie Minoff. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Archival material was provided with help from Chris Hunter of miSci in Schenectady, as well as Scott Vonnegut and Jim Schaefer. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Voice acting by Charles Bergquist, Christie Taylor, Luke Groskin, and Ira Flatow. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.
The economist Gabriel Zucman is the inventor of an ingenious way to estimate the amount of wealth hidden in the offshore banking system. In theory, if you add up the assets and liabilities reported by every global financial centre, the books should balance. But they don’t. Each individual centre tends to report more liabilities than assets. Zucman crunched the numbers and found that, globally, total liabilities were eight percent higher than total assets. That suggests at least eight percent of the world’s wealth is illegally unreported. Other methods have come up with even higher estimates. As Tim Harford explains, that makes the tax haven a very significant feature of the modern economy.
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
Producer: Ben Crighton
(Image: Huts along tropical beach, Credit: DonLand/Shutterstock)
After a senator calls her research a waste of taxpayer dollars, biologist Sheila Patek heads to Capitol Hill to prove what her science is worth.
In December 2015, the fight over science funding got personal for biologist Sheila Patek. She discovered that a U.S. Senator, Jeff Flake of Arizona, had included her research on mantis shrimp in his “wastebook”: a list of federally-funded projects he deemed a waste of taxpayer money. So what did Patek do? She headed to Capitol Hill to make the case to Senator Flake—and to Congress—that blue-sky science is worth the money.
Read Sen. Jeff Flake’s 2015 Wastebook "The Farce Awakens," and his science-themed 2016 Wastebook “Twenty Questions.”
Watch two mantis shrimp duke it out!
Read Melinda Baldwin’s article on the grand-daddy of the modern waste report: Sen. William Proxmire.
Read about Congressman Jim Cooper’s answer to Sen. Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece Award”: the “Golden Goose Award."
Read the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2014 report Furthering America’s Research Enterprise, detailing the benefits of federal science investment (and the difficulty of measuring them).
Learn more about Restore Accountability and read their response to the episode.
Watch Sheila Patek’s PBS NewsHour essay about her meeting with Sen. Flake, and read about current research at the Patek Lab.
How much does the federal government spend on R&D? Here’s how much!
CREDITS
This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.
Not every baby has a mother who can breastfeed. Indeed, not every baby has a mother. In the early 1800s, only two in three babies who weren’t breastfed lived to see their first birthday. Many were given “pap”, a bread-and-water mush, from hard-to-clean receptacles that teemed with bacteria. But in 1865 Justus von Liebig invented Soluble Food for Babies – a powder comprising cow’s milk, wheat flour, malt flour and potassium bicarbonate. It was the first commercial substitute for breastmilk and, as Tim Harford explains, it has helped shape the modern workplace.
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
Producer: Ben Crighton
(Image: Baby lying down drinking from bottle, Credit: Lopolo/Shutterstock)
Are you just six handshakes away from every other person on Earth? Two mathematicians set out to prove we’re all connected.
You have probably heard the phrase “six degrees of separation,” the idea that you’re connected to everyone else on Earth by a chain of just six people. It has inspired a Broadway play, a film nerd’s game, called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”...and even a No Doubt song! But is it true? In the ‘90s, two mathematicians set out to discover just how connected we really are—and ended up launching a new field of science in the process.
Annie holds one of Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings sent to June Shields in Wichita, Kansas. Accessed at the Yale University archives.
(Credit: Elah Feder)
A version of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings. “Could you, as an active American, contact another American citizen regardless of his walk of life?” Milgram and his team wrote. They asked for recipients' help in finding out. Accessed at the Yale University archives.
(Credit: Elah Feder)
(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)
GUESTS
Duncan Watts, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
Steven Strogatz, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, author of SyncAndrew Leifer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University
FOOTNOTES
Read Duncan Watts’ and Steven Strogatz’s breakthrough 1998 Nature paper on small-world networks.
Read Stanley Milgram’s 1967 article about his letter experiment in Psychology Today.
Watch Duncan and Steve discuss the past and future of small-world networks at Cornell.
WatchC. elegans' brain glow! And read more about the brain imaging work happening in Andrew Leifer’s lab.
Browse the small-world network of C. elegans’ 302 neurons at wormweb.org.
Read Facebook’s analysis of Facebook users’ “degrees of separation.”
Just for funsies, a network analysis of Game of Thrones.
CREDITS
This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Additional music by Podington Bear and Lee Rosevere. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Story consulting by Ari Daniel. Engineering help from Sarah Fishman. Recording help from Alexa Lim. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.
80-year-old Ralph DeMasi is known throughout New England as both a prolific armored-car robber and a dedicated family man. After decades in prison, he thought he would live out his last years in freedom. Then the police made a break in a cold case, and now Ralph has a new charge on his long rap sheet: murder.
For a full list of credits, and more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com.
When researchers publish a new study on chronic fatigue syndrome, a group of patients cry foul—and decide to investigate for themselves.
A landmark study on chronic fatigue syndrome sets off a multi-year battle between patients and scientists. On one side, we have a team of psychiatrists who have researched the condition for decades, and have peer-reviewed studies to back up their conclusions. On the other, a group of patients who know this condition more intimately than anyone and set out to expose what they think is bad science.
(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)
A note to our listeners:
This episode references studies that are both controversial and complex. Our interest is always to provide accurate and complete information to our listeners, and to provide context in which the science we cover can be understood. To that end, we’d like to share additional information on the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy and graded exercise therapy as treatments for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). Two systematic reviews (studies of studies) by The Cochrane Collaboration examine cognitive behavioral therapy and exercise as treatments for ME/CFS. These may help contextualize the findings of the PACE trial and aid our listeners in drawing their own conclusions.
GUESTS
Julie Rehmeyer, author of "Through the Shadowlands"
Michael Sharpe professor of psychological medicine at Oxford University
David Tuller, journalist and visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley
Ivan Oransky, journalist and co-founder of Retraction Watch
This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Elah Feder and Annie Minoff. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky.
Tally sticks were made from willow harvested along the banks of the Thames in London. The stick would contain a record of the debt. It might say, for example, “9£ 4s 4p from Fulk Basset for the farm of Wycombe”. Fulk Basset, by the way, might sound like a character from Star Wars but was in fact a Bishop of London in the 13th century. He owed his debt to King Henry III. Now comes the elegant part. The stick would be split in half, down its length from one end to the other. The debtor would retain half, called the “foil”. The creditor would retain the other half, called the “stock”. (Even today British bankers use the word “stocks” to refer to debts of the British government.) Because willow has a natural and distinctive grain, the two halves would match only each other. As Tim Harford explains, the tally stick system enabled something radical to occur. If you had a tally stock showing that Bishop Basset owed you five pounds, then unless you worried that Bishop Basset wasn’t good for the money, the tally stock itself was worth close to five pounds in its own right - like money; a kind of debt, which can be traded freely.
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
Producer: Ben Crighton
(Photo: Medieval tally sticks, accounts of the bailiff of Ralph de Manton of the Ufford Church Northampton. Credit: National Archives)
