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A Guest Host!, Corals Marching, Burning Coal, Nabokov’s Butterflies, Life In Space, TWIWRD, The Social Fish, 20 Moves, Remembering To Remember, And Much More…
Show Notes:
Some of the stories we discussed…
Corals get their marching orders
Hunka, hunka burnin’ coal… in the Permian
Nabokov liked butterflies, and his ideas on evolution were finally proved correct!
Life gets its left-handed start in space.
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TWIWRD – The robots will control your diet.
Social fish are better at making decisions.
Solve a Rubik’s Cube in 20 moves. No less.
Remembering to remember helps you remember.
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I'm the host of this little science show. 
Are the videos of the recordings ever available anywhere?
I would just like to comment about the social fish story (at least that is what i remember it starting from) where Kirsten commented about people starting to be more efficient at speech. I believe that this is already occurring. Unfortunately these people who are direct and to the point usually are seen as anti-social or rude. I am one of these people who are pretty direct and i find that most people don’t really carry on a conversation with me, It’s obviously a social problem with me, but i usually come off as not caring or a jerk when that is not my intention at all. Just my 2 cents.
Circular polarized light is mostly a convention. It is kind of like light that is polarized at 45 degrees to x and y, iirc, but Optics class was many moons ago.
Just a quick note on polarization and movies. RealD uses circularly polarized glasses. You should be able to tilt your head (or even stand on your head if you want) during the movie and the 3D should be undisturbed.
If you saw Tron in IMAX 3D, many IMAX theaters use old linearly polarized glasses where the 3D will degrade substantially if you tilt your head. Some IMAX theaters use active shutter LCD glasses where the lenses alternately go dark and light letting only one eye see each image (the images are projected at 48 frames per second instead of the movie standard 24 frames per second so each eye gets 24 frames per second as in a standard movie).
Although it is a little difficult to envision and understand, I can assure you that circular polarization is real and we have numerous applications that use circularly polarized light.
The last 2 seconds of the record are epic :-]