Not Udder Bull

Podcast: Soy, Almond, Oat Milks: Are They Udder Bull?

By: Science Vs.



In terms of environmental impact, dairy milk is the worst compared to all other types.

Globally, dairy cows graze an area the size of Brazil.

On average, it takes 9 times more land to produce dairy milk compare to the others.

Almond milk requires a lot of water, and most of Americans almonds are produced in California where there’s already a lot of water pressure. It can take 4 times as much water as the other non-dairy types.

Rice milk production emits the most greenhouse gasses in the form of methane. Flooded rice paddies are filled with methane-creating bacteria. Also fertilizer runoff can be a big problem with rice.

Soy and oat milk both require more land than the other non-dairy types. Also a lot of Soy milk is grown near or in the Amazon.

There is no clear winner among the four non-dairy types. But they’re all very low impact compared to dairy.

If everyone in the world switched from dairy to soy, it would save half a billion hectares of land, a billion tons of greenhouse gases, and the same amount of water as if everyone in the world stopped having showers or baths for a year.


Not so fast

Podcast: Fasting Diets: What’s the Skinny?

By: Science Vs



After not eating for a period of time your body runs out of sugars to burn and starts burning more fat for energy. An example in the episode was someone who was burning around 50% fat in normal circumstances went up to 70% after fasting.

To study how much fat is being burned they use a machine that analyzes your breath and the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide that you exhale. Fat that’s been burned exits the body through exhaling.

People on fasting diets tend to lose weight. A 5 week study that controlled for calories eaten seems to indicate this isn’t a result of fasting, but that people on these diets tend to eat less calories.

Studies of worms and mice indicate that fasting increases the rate at which cells consume and recycle themselves (called autophagy) and can increase longevity. Studies in humans are mixed and much less conclusive.

Studies in mice indicate that fasting can starve cancer cells (many types of cancer aggressively consume sugar for energy) and make them more susceptible to normal cancer treatments. Studies in humans for this are ongoing.


Just in the Sputnik of time

Podcast: The Space Race | Starting Gun

By: American History Tellers



Werner Von Braun was a key part of the Nazi V-2 Rocket Program. Near the end of WW2 he and his team were deliberately captured by the Americans and settled in Huntsville Alabama to prevent their knowledge from going to the Soviets.

The thought was that rockets combined with atomic weapons would give the host nation an insurmountable lead in the years to come.

Von Braun’s potential degree of involvement with pretty horrific war crimes under Nazi rule was ignored and deliberately glossed over. Supposedly he just wanted to build rockets to get to space.

Because of his German background he wasn’t fully trusted by American politicians and military figures.

This led to his projects not being allowed to put a satellite into orbit, and allowed the Soviets to take the lead with Sputnik. This created a huge fear in America about ceding space to the Soviets.

Here’s looking at you

Video: Life on an Eyeball Planet? It’s Possible

By: SciShow Space



Eyeball planets are a nickname for planets that are tidally locked to their parent star., meaning the same side always faces the star. This name comes from the way the side facing the star would be a baked desert, the side facing away from the star would be a frozen wasteland, and there could be concentric circles of in between zones.

An example of a tidally locked celestial body is our own Moon.

This concept is pretty inhospitable to life, however it’s possible that a Eyeball planet orbiting a Red Dwarf, with a strong magnetic field, in the habitable zone, and with water and an atmosphere, could support life with temperatures between 50 and -50 celcius.

For these planets, life could exist in the area between the two sides. However, it would need to be able to deal with very little light, and very strong winds. Also, there would be no day/night cycle, something on which almost all life on Earth has some kind of reliance.

Reach out to an old friend.

Video: Loneliness

By: Kurzgesagt




46% of all Americans report feeling lonely

Loneliness can be thought of as analogous to hunger for social interaction. It’s an evolutionary product where humans who were part of social groups were much more likely to survive than those living alone.

The enlightenment and industrial revolution stressed the importance of the individual and deemphasized the importance of social groups.

In the modern world we move away from the social groups of our childhood and have more troubles forming strong bonds as adults.

Chronic loneliness is extremely unhealthy, more so than obesity or smoking.

Lord of the Rings

Video: Has Saturn Had More than One Ring System?

By: SciShow Space



Data from Cassini shows that Saturn may be losing it’s rings at a rate of 5k to 25k kilograms per second. This phenomenon is called ring rain and at that rate the rings will be gone within a 100 million years.

It’s also theorized that perhaps the rings are less than 100 million years old. This is troublesome because many theories about how they formed require them to be much older.

It’s possible that we’re seeing a cyclical behavior where the larger planets destroy and recreate ring systems.

Even after the rings have disappeared, Saturn will still have some rings that are the result of other processes.

Pancakes and Walnuts

Video: MU69 is Flat, and No One Knows Why

By: SciShow Space



MU69 is made of two bodies that are pancake and walnut shaped instead of spheres. This was unexpected as it doesn’t confirm with the current theory that planets were created by matter collecting in the protoplanetary disk and creating larger and larger spheres.

Data from Gaia shows that the Andromeda galaxy is set to collide with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years, which is 600 million years longer than the previous estimate.

It’s unlikely the two galaxies will have a direct head on collision as previously thought. They’ll go a bit past each other before circling back to form a single galaxy.