030: Baby carrots, prime numbers, and invisible planets

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If you are a scientist, then I know a little something about your personality.  Almost by definition, you are curious about the world.  And I’ll bet that extends beyond your particular laboratory or field of research.  If there’s something intriguing and knowable, you want to know it.

Well, we are scientists too, and sometimes we get carried away.

 

Food for Thought

This week on the show, we round up a smorgasbord of bite-sized stories, discoveries and games to share with the Hello PhD audience.  Why?  Because it’s in the news and on our minds!

We start with the ethanol, of course.  This week, it’s the Dogfish Head Brewing Company’s Namaste White Ale.  It’s got lemongrass, peppercorn, and a strange hominid with jazz hands and a pig tail.

 

Carrots and Codenames

Then it’s a rapid-fire roundup of science in the news.

The “Big Game” is coming up in a few weeks, but did you know one NFL player is earning a PhD in mathematics and machine learning from MIT?

Not to be outdone, a computer in Missouri discovered the latest, largest prime number way back in September, only to have its human overlords notice the result in January!  We can’t print the number here due to length (it’s over 22 million digits long) but we can give you the formula in case you’re itching to fry a calculator: 2^74,207,281 − 1.

Don’t forget the minus 1 part!

And the same scientist who killed Pluto is back in the news to tout his discovery of an invisible planet orbiting our sun.  He’s got the best one-line, drop-the-mic, argument-ender that you can use in your next laboratory debate.

Along the way, we find out precisely where baby carrots come from and Josh reviews Codenames, a board game that’s fun to play with a group of your closest conspirators.  Just watch out for the assassins!

 

So buckle up and prepare for a random break from our regularly scheduled inanity.