Welcome back where everyone comes to hear sunny quips and cloudy cuckles! Yes we at Whimsical wavelengths are amazing at precipitating a good story.

Today the pod gets into climate vs weather and the increasing extremes. It might feel odd that a general science podcast would take soooooo long to get around to a climate episode. Well it is because the data is overwhelming, humans have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere which is causing it to change.

That is an observable fact. No political beliefs or anything else in that. What to do about it? That is political. Generally (there will be caveats) I plan to NOT get into politics but perhaps I would have a lot more listeners if I did. This is one of those science topics that for some reason crosses the political line.

To show how we know what we know about our changing climate and weather extremes Jared Rennie a Research Meteorologist with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information joins us!

Useful links from the discussion

A book that came up and well worth a read: Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Dr Katharine Hayhoe

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56379758-saving-us

Organizations that also calculate Earth temperature from data separately (not exhaustive):

https://www.copernicus.eu/en

https://berkeleyearth.org/data/

https://wmo.int/

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/

https://www.csiro.au/en/

https://www.jma.go.jp/jma/indexe.html

https://www.nasa.gov/

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Today I am picking my favourite paper that I wrote. The origin of Mauna Loa's Ninole Hills - Evidence of rift zone reorganization. In geophysical research letters in 2015. It is already nearly 10 years old!

Well then a 10 year anniversary tour then?

In the past 4000 years lava has repaved 90% of Mauna Loa’s surface! Mauna Loa is huge. It is a very dynamic place. The Ninole Hills are 100,000 to 200,000 years old. Something special must have allowed for these rocks to be at the surface and not buried beneath newer lava flows. Today we are going to dive into one of my papers to figure out the the most likely candidates to explain this enigmatic feature on the slopes of Mauna Loa volcano.

Some useful show links

Hawaiian Volcano Observatory for all of your volcano updates!: https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo

Where I was when I wrote the paper:

https://www.sfu.ca/volcanology.html

The paper itself (using the link above go to Journal articles and look for the citation if you want the paper without the paywall):

Zurek, J.M., Williams-Jones, G., Trusdell, F., Martin, S. (2015) The origin of Mauna Loa's Ninole Hills - Evidence of rift zone reorganization. Geophysical Research Letters, 42, doi: 10.1002/2015GL065863.

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Part2 jumps in where part 1 left off so more about Theropods! specifically about one of Dr François Therrien's recent studies about a Gorgosaurus and what was found inside its stomach!!!!

did I forget to mention T-shirt giveaway?

incase you missed it from the notes of the last episode:

Dr François Therrien - The Curator of Dinosaur Palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller Alberta https://tyrrellmuseum.com/

Dr François Therrien's Professional Highlights (lifted from the museum's website)

• Discovered the first feathered dinosaurs from North America.
• Researched Cryodrakon boreas, a new species of pterosaur that was among the largest and oldest in North America.
• Published on a theropod site from Mongolia that reveals that colonial nesting behaviour first evolved in the dinosaurian ancestors of birds.
• Researched Thanatotheristes degrootorum

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Great discussion! Soooooooo good I split it into two parts! In Part 1 we start retro!

It's hard for me to think of 1993 as retro. But yes that is where we are going, Jurassic Park. Honestly, what a movie! It was how you say DINO -might!. Dinosaurs brought to life on the big screen in ways that had not been done previously. Not only was the movie good (the book too btw), I think it was pretty accurate to what we understood at the time. We will find out in a moment but I suspect it was like Dante’s peak which definitely had some problems but the most accurate volcano disaster movie made for hollywood?

So Today we are going to explore what we knew when Jurassic Park was created and how it has changed since! We will also talk a lot more about an evolutionary cousin to the famed T-rex the And again I have brought in a guest to get it done! Great discussion! soo good I split it into two parts!

Dr François Therrien - The Curator of Dinosaur Palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller Alberta https://tyrrellmuseum.com/

Dr François Therrien's Professional Highlights (lifted from the museum's website)

• Discovered the first feathered dinosaurs from North America.
• Researched Cryodrakon boreas, a new species of pterosaur that was among the largest and oldest in North America.
• Published on a theropod site from Mongolia that reveals that colonial nesting behaviour first evolved in the dinosaurian ancestors of birds.
• Researched Thanatotheristes degrootorum

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Last time in part 1 we covered Nikola Tesla's backstory and some of his accomplishments. In part 2 we cover things that are conspiratorial or not feasible like a death ray, limitless free power and electric universe......... ie crazy stuff

Ya his legacy is complicated. ... need more proof take a listen.

Epic Rap Battles of History Nikola Tesla vs Thomas Edison: https://youtu.be/gJ1Mz7kGVf0?si=HczKueWG7xXFwmry

In case you missed it from last ep. I really need to get better at making videos as this goes on.

Demo for a Tesla Coil by me! :https://youtu.be/DQK1zZ87Gko?si=yw4C0AABspUCNTYs

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Nikola Tesla has been credited with large leaps forward like AC current and wireless transmission. Including things that are conspiratorial or not feasible like a death ray and limitless free power. Ya his legacy is complicated. So fire up the device and lets get going with this episode!

Here is a demo for a Tesla Coil by me! :https://youtu.be/DQK1zZ87Gko?si=yw4C0AABspUCNTYs

Some of the stuff I read to gather information. There was more but I forgot to write it down while doing my normal life.

Books

My inventions by Nikola Tesla

Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla is a biography of Nikola Tesla by Marc J. Seifer published in 1996.

Websites and Newspapers

https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_early.html

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a44197280/did-the-us-government-steal-nikola-teslas-research/

https://www.nytimes.com/1915/10/03/archives/nikola-tesla-sees-a-wireless-vision-thinks-his-world-system-will.html https://www.nytimes.com/1934/07/11/archives/tesla-at-78-bares-new-deathbeam-invention-powerful-enough-to.html

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This time we take a deep dive into an hypothesis The longevity bottleneck hypothesis: Could dinosaurs have shaped ageing in present-day mammals?” by João Pedro de Magalhães

https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.202300098

See our branch of the animal kingdom, mammals, first evolved around 200 million years ago. During the age of dinosaurs. To quote the paper “long evolutionary pressure on early mammals for rapid reproduction led to the loss or inactivation of genes and pathways associated with long life”

To talk about this and look at the evolution of aging, the wonderful and fantastic Dr Molly Burke agreed to talk about her research and the science of aging more generally! Her lab at the Oregon State university uses model organisms to experimentally study evolution. (https://ib.oregonstate.edu/directory/molly-k-burke).

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This episode cracks open the history and traditions of NASA (ie. Lucky peanuts) to get to the nutty goodness, which includes hard science and looking towards future missions! To explore this Dr. Morgan Cable joins the pod! Dr. Morgan Cable is a research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Science Lead for the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor concept and Co-Deputy PI of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) Instrument aboard the Mars 2020 (Perseverance) rover, also apart of the Cassini, Dragonfly and the Europa Clipper missions in various ways. Links and descriptions of things mentioned in the episode supplied by Dr Morgan Cable lightly edited:

Cassini virtual singers: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/a-farewell-to-cassini-our-friend-at-saturn/

Curiosity leaving ‘JPL’ in Morse code on Mars: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/rover-leaves-tracks-in-morse-code

Perseverance parachute hidden code: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachute-code.html

Monoliths for Europa Clipper, represent the team mascot, inspired by the monolith on Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s ironic because in the novel and the film we were told to “attempt no landing” at Europa, but in our first PSG meeting the author (Arthur C. Clarke) actually dialed in and gave us permission, which is really cool! You can hear more about that in an interview with Steve Vance (a fellow JPLer and scientist on Europa Clipper) here. So we make one Monolith and bring it to each Project Science Group (PSG) meeting. Here it is in one of our team photos, and we also have a team award called the Monolith Award and here is a twitter post about a recipient.

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