I would encourage all fans of Pulse of the Planet to check out our latest project - the Kids’ Science Challenge. If you know any third to sixth graders - please tell them about it! Here’s a chance to turn their science ideas into realities. And there are cool prizes and free science kits, too.
I hope that by now all Pulse of the Planet fans have checked out our latest project - the Kids Science Challenge
http://www.kidsciencechallenge.com
Yesterday our team - Tim Hawkins, Brett Barry, Nicole de la Parte and I met with a number of the Kids Science Challenge (KSC) scientists in Whyville, our partner virtual world. There’s a KSC Clubhouse on Whyville, and our scientists give live chats in Whyville’s Greek Theater. A treat to see a virtual Jill Tarter - head of SETI, rubbing elbows with a virtual Paul Schmitt, godfather of skateboarding in the US. There we all were - cartoon avatars, replete with beanies - learning to “chat”. Whyville kids wandered in, figured out what was going on, and started asking Adina Paytan about water quality and Doug Vakoch about how to communicate with aliens. Michael Bream (Gravity Skateboards) was wondering how his avatar could deep-six its virtual tie. And in the midst of it all, a Whyville Sarah Palin replicant wandered through muttering Palin-drome non-sequitors like, “I can see Russia outside my backdoor window!” Doug Vakoch will give the first KSC Whyville Chat on Friday October 17th at 3 PST, (6 PM EST). Hope you can be there.
Here’s the rest of the chat schedule:
Friday, October 17: Doug Vakotch
Tuesday, October 21: Joan Harvey
Wednesday, October 22: Michael Bream
Tuesday, October 28: Adina Paytan
Wednesday, November 5: Joan Harvey
Tuesday, November 11: Seth Shostak
Tuesday, November 18: Paul Schmitt
Tuesday, November 25: Adina Paytan
Tuesday, December 2: Michael Bream
Tuesday, December 9: Joan Harvey
Tuesday, December 16: Jill Tarter
Tuesday, December 30: Adina Paytan
Tuesday, January 6: Joan Harvey
Tuesday, January 13: Paul Schmitt
Tuesday, January 20: Nathalie Cabrol
Tuesday, January 27: Adina Paytan
Collectively, they’re the biggest herbivores on the planet. Go out and try and find one, I dare you. I just spent a week trying to find caterpillars in the company of people who are very good at it - Lee Dyer, Grant Gentry and Tara Massad. A sobering experience. The trick is to look for leaf damage, which is relatively easy to find. But the caterpillars have had eons to evolve camouflage and other strategies that make quite challenging to locate - and all the more satisfying when you do.
Upcoming Pulse programs reveal a few of the secrets of finding caterpillars. If you’re interested in heading to Costa Rica on a caterpillar hunting expedition, check out Lee Dyer’s Earthwatch expedition. They actually discover new caterpillars there every trip.
http://www.earthwatch.org/expeditions/dyer_costarica.html
Here is a taste of programs to come. Recently, I spent a week on the west coast of Ireland, working with a number of scientists at the Irish Seaweed Center, part of the Martin Ryan Institute of the National University in Galway. One of these lads is Declan Hanniffy, who is searching for ways to harvest and cultivate different varieties of seaweed. In the video, you’ll see a clip of Declan gathering one of the kinds of seaweed he’s trying to cultivate.
Along the coastal areas of Ireland, seaweed has been gathered as a food, medicine and fertilizer for centuries, although for the past few decades, the practice has largely been discontinued. Now science and industry are taking a serious second look at seaweed as a source of animal and fish food, nutritional supplements, cosmetics and other uses. On the Aran Islands, just offshore from Galway, they make a pudding from carrageen moss - a kind of seaweed. And of course you can order seaweed salad in most Japanese restaurants. Whether seaweed will ever replace Irish stew is another matter.
More on seaweed science in future Pulse of the Planet Science Diary programs. You heard it here first.
Jim
This photograph was taken on St. Bees Island in northeastern Australia, in the company of Science Diarist Alistair Melzer and his Earthwatch team. Their mission was to study koalas; mine was to make sure that we got the recordings we needed for our programs. It was far easier to find spiders than koalas, by the way. But at night, you could hear the male koalas calling, and it was not the sound you’d expect from these cuddly-looking poster critters.
To listen to what koalas really sound like check out
http://www.pulseplanet.com/archive/Jun07/3981.html
The New Site – a Preview
Being “behind the microphone” suggests a life of continuously recording in remote situations like St Bees, which would be great if it were true. For the past year, it’s meant a lot of behind the scenes work for our entire production team at Pulse of the Planet, developing a new web site that is – at the time of this writing – on the cusp of being launched. It will provide lots more information on an incredible variety of material. We have, after all, been on the air for nearly twenty years, and have produced over 4000 programs. Much of what will be on the new site is in response to a survey we did almost two years ago, in which web visitors and radio listeners told us what you would like to see. One of the key questions was, “would you be willing to pay for some of the material?”, and the answer, perhaps surprisingly, was yes. We have implemented this because we are obliged to find new ways to become sustainable, self-sufficient. On the new site, all program transcripts will continue to be available free of charge, as will current month’s MP3’s. Older audio programs will be available for a nominal fee on a per program basis. And we will be offering downloadable CD’s of selections of programs, with such catchy titles as “Tooth and Claw”, “Heavy Weather” and “Turning up The Heat – 18 years of Programs on Global Warming”. There will be lots of fun, informative content on the new site as well – Audio Adventures and an in depth look at subjects of particular interest to our listeners – Pulse Picks. We’ll also be initiating our first web-based call-to-action, asking you to send us examples of Ghost Signs. What’s a ghost sign? Check out the new Listener’s Blog: Feedback Loop, when we launch the new site. As always, we welcome your responses and suggestions.
Presented by Pulse of the Planet
