Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchEl Nino Explained: Walker Circulation, Teleconnections, and Famine
Episode 12512
Peruvian fishermen named El Nino after the Christ child because the coastal water turned warm and the anchovies vanished around Christmas. The El Nin…
6 hours ago
Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup: Snapped Booms, Towed Nets, River Interceptors
Episode 12511
In 2012 teenager Boyan Slat took a TED stage with a sketch of a passive barrier that would let ocean currents sweep plastic into its arms, delighting…
6 hours ago
Scrimshaw: Whalers' Sperm Whale Tooth Art, Tobacco Ink, and Ivory Law
Episode 12510
Scrimshaw began on 19th century whaling ships, where men endured months of empty horizon between hunts. Carved from sperm whale teeth, bone, baleen, …
6 hours ago
Outrigger Canoes: Crab Claw Sails, Shunting, and the Channel of Bones
Episode 12509
When Spanish galleons entered the Pacific, a priest aboard called them sluggish lead weights beside local boats that flew across the water like birds…
6 hours ago
Scuba Diving Physics: Fleuss's 1878 Rebreather to Trimix and Heliox
Episode 12508
In 1878 engineer Henry Fleuss built the first commercially practical closed-circuit rebreather: a rubber mask, a breathing bag, pure oxygen from a co…
6 hours ago
Great White Sharks: 33 Years to Breed, Splash Fights, and Orca Threats
Episode 12507
In 1554 French physician Guillaume Rondelet labeled the great white Lamia, after a child-eating monster of Greek myth, centuries before Peter Benchle…
6 hours ago
Giant Kelp Forests: Two Feet a Day, Urchin Barrens, and the Kelp Highway
Episode 12506
Kelp is not a plant. It is a brown macroalga in the kingdom Protista with no roots and no vascular plumbing: the holdfast only anchors it, the flexib…
6 hours ago
HMS Dreadnought: From Armada Galleon to Nuclear Deterrent Submarine
Episode 12505
Dreadnought means fear nothing, and following the name through the Royal Navy traces 500 years of naval technology. The first was a 40-gun ship of 15…
6 hours ago
Drunken Sailor: How a Whaling Work Chant Became Disco and Propaganda
Episode 12504
Roud Folk Song Index number 322, the shanty about what to do with a very inebriated sailor early in the morning, was built as a tool, not a song. Its…
6 hours ago
The Compass: From Han Dynasty Lodestone Spoons to Gyro and GPS North
Episode 12503
The compass began as a fortune-telling device, not a navigation tool. Lodestone, naturally magnetized magnetite, fascinated the ancient Greeks, who c…
6 hours ago