Category: Retired

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Dynamo

You might think electricity had an immediate and transformative impact on economic productivity. But you would be wrong. Thirty years after the invention of the useable light bulb, almost all American factories still relied on steam. Factory owners simply couldn’t see the advantage of electric power when their steam systems – in which they had invested a great deal of capital – worked just fine. Simply replacing a steam engine with an electric dynamo did little to improve efficiency. But the thing about a revolutionary technology is that it changes everything. And changing everything takes imagination. Instead of replacing their steam engines with electric dynamos, company bosses needed to re-design the whole factory. Only then would electric power leave steam behind. As Tim Harford explains, the same lag has applied to subsequent technological leaps – including computers. That revolution might be just beginning. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Dynamo AC exciter Siemens, Credit: Igor Golovniov/Shutterstock)
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Leaded Petrol

In the 1920s lead was added to petrol. It made cars more powerful and was, according to its advocates, a “gift”. But lead is a gift which poisons people; something figured out as long ago as Roman times. There’s some evidence that as countries get richer, they tend initially to get dirtier and later clean up. Economists call this the “environmental Kuznets curve”. It took the United States until the 1970s to tax lead in petrol, then finally ban it, as the country moved down the far side of the environmental Kuznets curve. But as Tim Harford explains in this astonishing story, the consequences of the Kuznets curve aren’t always only economic. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Petrol Nozzle, Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images)
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Department Store

Flamboyant American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge introduced Londoners to a whole new shopping experience, one honed in the department stores of late-19th century America. He swept away previous shopkeepers’ customs of keeping shopper and merchandise apart to one where “just looking” was positively encouraged. In the full-page newspaper adverts Selfridge took out when his eponymous department store opened in London in the early 1900s, he compared the “pleasures of shopping” to those of “sight-seeing”. He installed the largest plate glass windows in the world – and created, behind them, the most sumptuous shop window displays. His adverts pointedly made clear that the “whole British public” would be welcome – “no cards of admission are required”. Recognising that his female customers offered profitable opportunities that competitors were neglecting, one of his quietly revolutionary moves was the introduction of a ladies’ lavatory. Selfridge saw that women might want to stay in town all day, without having to use an insalubrious public convenience or retreat to a respectable hotel for tea whenever they wanted to relieve themselves. As Tim Harford explains, one of Selfridge’s biographers even thinks he “could justifiably claim to have helped emancipate women.” Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Images: Selfridges Christmas shop window, Credit: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
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Undiscovered - Mouse’s Vineyard

Martha’s Vineyard has a Lyme disease problem. Now a scientist is coming to town with a possible fix: genetically engineered mice.

An island associated with summer rest and relaxation is gaining a reputation for something else: Lyme disease. Martha’s Vineyard has one of the highest rates of Lyme in the country. Now MIT geneticist Kevin Esvelt is coming to the island with a potential long-term fix. The catch: It involves releasing up to a few hundred thousand genetically modified mice onto the island. Are Vineyarders ready?

Kevin Esvelt makes the case for engineered mice, at a public meeting at a Vineyard public library. (Photo: Annie Minoff)

 

Kevin Esvelt takes questions from the Martha’s Vineyard audience. (He’s joined by Dr. Michael Jacobs and Dr. Sam Telford. (Photo: Annie Minoff)

 

Bob, Cheryl, and Spice (the lucky dog who gets a Lyme vaccine). (Photo: Annie Minoff)

 

No lack of tick-repelling options at a Martha’s Vineyard general store. (Photo: Annie Minoff)

 

(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)

 

GUESTS

Kevin Esvelt, Assistant Professor, MIT Media Lab

 

FOOTNOTES

    Read Kevin Esvelt’s original paper describing the gene drive mechanism in eLife. Less technical descriptions available here via Scientific American, and here via Esvelt’s Sculpting Evolution Group. Watch Kevin’s July 20, 2016 presentation on Martha’s Vineyard (Unfortunately there is no direct link. Search “7.20.16” to find the video, titled “Preventing Tick-Borne Disease.”) Listen to Kevin Esvelt talk about gene drive on Science Friday. Read about Oxitec’s proposed mosquito trial in Key West, and watch the public meeting excerpted in this episode. Learn more about Kevin’s lab, the Sculpting Evolution Group. Looking for more information about Lyme disease? Here are resources from the CDC.

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.

 

Special thanks to Joanna Buchthal, Bob Rosenbaum, Dick Johnson, and Sam Telford.

 

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Barbed Wire

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)
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Undiscovered - Kurt Vonnegut and the Rainmakers

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.

 

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Tax Havens

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)
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Undiscovered - The Wastebook

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.

 

GUESTS

 

FOOTNOTES

    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.