This time it is all about insects and their respiratory systems?! They represent so much of the biomass on earth.

Depending on the study and methods used there is more weight on earth within insects than humans. With over 8 billion humans and each of us weighs a lot more than an insect…… There are a lot of them. They form the backbone of many ecosystems.

Today though we will specifically focus on their respiratory system. How do they breathe? It is not like they have lungs like we do. Or gills like fish. I vaguely remember grade school biology and going over the number of legs and like.

You know what? I have never given it much thought. But now that I have …… I am intrigued!

Stealing the words from todays guest “With over 1 million identified species of insects, they’re a great vehicle for studying evolution There are all kinds of new things coming out of it, probably the most significant of which is flight”

So lets get into it! Time to follow the buzz to see if the Ant-ticipation i am chirping about is going to fly over our heads.

Please welcome Dr Hollister Herhold a Research Associate in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, and Research Scientist in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City!

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There is so much we don’t understand about the early universe. Or any part of the universe not nearby. Part of the reason for this is time and distance. The universe as we understand/see it today started ~13.8 billion years ago.

So how do we test something that we cannot view or experience? The evolution of galaxies takes place over billions of years. We cannot track its changes over the eons because human history is in the thousands of years and observations of the deep cosmos can be measured in decades. Yes we can see many snapshots of different galaxies at different points on their evolution but how to connect them on their journey?

One way is to model physics or physical processes. Put everything in as we understand into a mathematical framework. Run the code or the “model” and see if it matches what we see in our observations. We do this type of exercise with many many different scientific disciplines including my own (geophysics).

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The Earth is dynamic. All of it. Plate tectonics, weather, ocean currents, biosphere, cryosphere, extraterrestrial like solar events, meteorites, nearby supernovae

And on and on and on

But the seas are constant right? I mean that they exist. They have almost always existed. No I am not going back to Porto oceans some 4 billion years ago! I am referring to the mediterranean! I hope you are up for a salty tale of disappearing sea.

This episode is all me. Because I like this topic, I have enough background to tell the story after digging through the literature, and wanted to spin this whimsical yarn in a different way than an interview.

Why is the Mediterranean Sea so confident?

• Because it’s always making waves!

But there was a time where nearly the whole mediterranean basin dried up! Called Messinian salinity crisis.

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Welcome back to Part 2 of Gravitational lenses on Whimsical Wavelengths. In part 2 we finally get to the real star of the show, strong gravitational lensing and the paper that was underlying the topic.

“Euclid: A complete Einstein ring in NGC 6505 “

A lot less to setup this time. No need to stretch this out like gravity stretches time.

But.....

How did gravity stop the reckless driver?

It pulled some strings… mainly the ones holding the car to the road.

Before everything gets pulled downhill, time to jump in Please welcome back Dr Georgios Vernardos!

Paper at the center the this episode:

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/02/aa53014-24/aa53014-24.html

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Whimsical wavelengths is here again to show that it is useless to fight gravity.

Every time I have, it has brought me down.

To begin I'll mention Newtonian mechanics of gravity here in the show notes as it works really well for nearly all things within our solar system. But there are things that does not fit. Mercury’s orbit is one famous example. It gave the wrong prediction for the precession of Mercury's closest point to the sun.

Then Einstein developed a theory about space…

And it was about time!

It was a leap forward changing how we viewed the universe and how we would measure it.

It can be argued that this seminal work together with observations from Hubble on Galaxies existing outside of the Milky Way and expanding universe was the beginning of the modern age of cosmology .

Today we are going to get into one topic from relativity directly, gravitational lensing. To be fair to history, the idea that light traveling close to massive objects bends was actually first postulated by Newtonian mechanics of gravity.

And to get out from that enormous weight Dr Georgios Vernardos (Assistant Professor in Physics & Astronomy at Lehman College) has volunteered to come on the podcast. To get from relativity to gravitational lens and to tell the story correctly is hard to do in one episode. So I have planned this one as a pair! So no it is not time dilation due to the weighty subject

Paper at the center the this and the next episode:

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/02/aa53014-24/aa53014-24.html

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Today the topic should do more then whimsically tickle your ears, Today I have a guest to get the slobbering sensor in your mouth working. Yup buckle in for a flavorful ride!

So I guess definitions first. Food Science is a discipline that investigates food chemistry, food microbiology, physical, sensory, and nutritional properties of food. The discipline also gets into the process of making the food with respect to the manufacture, preservation, quality assurance, and development of food products.

If your favourite snack food is ummmm bet you can’t eat just one? It is practically guaranteed that a food scientist has been involved at some point of the process.

Dr Bryan Le joins the podcast to help us on this falvourful ride of whimsical wavelengths.

The papers discussed talking about Unami and how to get ingredient to be Kitchen Chemistry ready:

1. Hartl, Daniela M., Oliver Frank, Victoria S. Hänel, Vinzenz Heigl, Corinna Dawid, and Thomas F. Hofmann. "Isolation and Identification of Novel Taste-Modulating N 2-Guanosine 5′-Monophosphate Derivatives Generated by Maillard-Type Reactions." Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 72, no. 25 (2024): 14284-14293.

2. Suess, Barbara, et al. "Human taste and umami receptor responses to chemosensorica generated by Maillard-type N 2-alkyl-and N 2-arylthiomethylation of guanosine 5′-monophosphates." Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 62.47 (2014): 11429-11440.

There is lots you can do in science!! Including food science!

Dr Bryan Le's website: https://www.mendocinofoodconsulting.com/

Also check out his Book!:

150 Food Science Questions Answered Cook Smarter, Cook Better

By Bryan Le · 2020 ISBN:9781646118342, 1646118340

Thanks again Bryan for sending one to me! It's a good read (wish I had it before the episode!)

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Today the pod shows its fitness with im-peck-able wordplay. That's right, today's episode is for the birds. At least those which have a raven-ous appetite for knowledge.

Our guest, PhD candidate Miranda Zammarelli (Dartmouth College) has research that takes place in what I guess can be best described as the closest we can get for lab conditions in the natural world. The site for her work is the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest - located in New Hampshire.

The forest is her laboratory and this discussion does its best to get at how and why it happens!

For thoses that want to get involved in Citizen Science (PLEASE DO!) check out these apps for your smartphone

Merlin: https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

ebird: https://ebird.org/home

Also don't forget about the future when its time for the Christmas Bird Count (https://www.audubon.org/community-science/christmas-bird-count)

Or the Great Backyard Bird Count !

(https://www.birdcount.org/)

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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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