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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.