Blue Streak Science Podcast

On This Week’s Show A weird star just rapidly dimmed and we don't know why Trump administration doubles down on anti-science Study of marathon runners reveals a ‘hard limit’ to human endurance Science News with Chris MacAlister, and JD Goodwin Crazy Star Chris MacAlister Little green men were being given the credit for some brief and irregular dips in luminosity of a star in the Cygnus constellation: the fetchingly named KIC 8462852. Maybe I should call it Kate for short.  Whilst we don’t know for sure what caused these dips, the leading theory is that some interstellar dust may have been the culprit. Which is slightly more probable than extraterrestrial spacecraft. But it seems that Kate hasn’t finished bamboozling astronomers just yet. Anecdotal accounts of this star dimming between 1890 and 1989 lead Josh Simon and Ben Montet of Carnegie and Caltech to perform a review of data from this star using a series of Kepler calibration images that had not previously been used for scientific measurements. What