Wow, and you thought your street looked bad? Check out this NASA CGI rendering of the amount of debris and junk floating around the earth. A new study done by the National Research Council, and funded by NASA, has concluded that space junk has reached a “tipping point.” There’s so much of it now that collisions could be continual, fragmenting the debris even further and making the problem worse. Rockets, and potential passengers, the report concludes, are in danger. In this episode of The World’s Technology Podcast, We’ll hear from Darren McKnight, who was involved with the study. How much junk is there? How could it be cleaned up, and most critically, who will be responsible for the clean-up? Listen in and find out.

UPDATE: A listener has already informed me that I had some dodgy conversion math when I said 300 meters equals 900 yards. It’s 900 feet, of course. Duh.

Also in this episode, the BBC’s Lucy Williamson explores the ways South Korea is trying to tackle Internet addiction. And you’ll hear about an augmented reality app that gives you a glimpse of what the border between North and South Korea would look like without the DMZ.

Finally, journey with us to the Netherlands to hear about PlantLab, a company that feels that nature only gets in the way of plants growing to their full potential. The company wants to completely change the way we grow, sell, and consume our fruits and veggies.

Take a tour below:

A reminder that you can ignore us equally on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google +.

This week: Big storms are brewing on the Sun, and they’re sending flares of plasma towards the Earth. There’s a new book out about the science of life in space. It’s called Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. We talk to the book’s author, science journalist Mary Roach. Then, Elsa brings news about oceans, malaria and high-heeled shoes.

Packing for Mars: A trip to space isn’t as exciting as you may think. So says Mary Roach, science journalist and author of the new book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. The book paints an unromantic picture of life in space. Roach spoke with The World’s David Baron. This is a longer, podcast-exclusive version of the interview that aired on the radio program.
Guest: Mary Roach
Watch a video about space hygiene and the people who stopped bathing for science.
Follow Diego Urbina’s twitter feed from the Mars500 experiment.
More about the Mars500 simulation on Podcast 70.
Robonaut2 is tweeting. You can follow it here.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Bearded Gobies Save an Ocean Ecosystem: This is a story about a marine ecosystem that seemed to be doomed by overfishing. But an unsuspecting species – the bearded goby – revived it. The ecosystem hasn’t recovered to its original state, but is evolving in a new direction.
  The Study.
• Cases of Malaria Misdiagnosis: A new study has found that a large number of malaria diagnoses are inaccurate. Many countries don’t have the tests to determine when someone is infected with malaria parasites, leading to misdiagnoses of ordinary fevers as malaria.
  The Study.
• High Heeled Shoes Impact Your Calves: Ladies, beware! Those fashionable high-heeled shoes may be scrunching up your calf muscles permanently. That’s according to a new study that compared the leg muscles of people wearing high-heeled and flat shoes. The study was limited to 13 heel wearers. So the findings may need further confirmation from a bigger group of subjects.
  The Study.

Solar Flares & Northern Lights: The Sun is experiencing some stormy weather, and scientists say the solar storms may affect us on Earth. The World’s David Baron spoke with the U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Doug Biesecker. He says the solar flares may cause a brilliant display of northern lights. The storms are expected to continue through August 5th.
Guest: Doug Biesecker.
See video and pictures of the sun on the shownotes for Podcast 64.
Check out the the location, intensity and extent of the northern lights here.

Language Influences How We Perceive People: We may think differently of people depending on our own and their linguistic background. That’s according to a recently published study by researchers in the U.K and Israel. I spoke about the study in this week’s Language Podcast. Don’t miss it – it’s a really fun listen!
Learn more about Patrick Cox’s language podcast.

This week: We’re talking about urban raptors over at the Science Forum. Don’t forget to stop by and join the conversation with wildlife biologist David Bird. Two stories in today’s podcast are linked to this latest Forum discussion. One’s about raptors struggling to survive in Beijing. The other is about cities around the world that are providing good habitat for birds of prey. You’ll also hear about some fascinating new images of the Sun. Elsa’s back with stories about Roman ingots, neutrinos and asteroids.

Protecting Beijing’s Raptors: Birds of prey still streak Beijing’s skies. But their numbers are dwindling. Thankfully for these birds, some people are watching out for them.
Report by: Ari Daniel Shapiro.
See photos for the long-eared owls and other birds in Ari’s story.
Beijing Raptor Rescue Center.
World Center for Birds of Prey.

Raptors Elsewhere are Adapting to City Life: Urban life isn’t always bad for birds of prey. In fact some species are flocking to cities around the world. What do cities have to offer? Listen to this interview to find out. And don’t forget to join our online conversation with wildlife biologist David Bird over in our Science Forum. The conversation is open until May 7th.
Guest: David Bird.
Stop by the Science Forum discussion with Professor Bird.
Watch live videos of the Peregrine family at Université de Montréal.

Elsa’s Favorite Stories:

• Frosty Asteroid: Astronomers have spied evidence of water ice on an asteroid. Most asteroids seem to have dried up already, but this one harbors water that’s probably billions of years old. Researchers think a similar body could have crashed into the early Earth and filled the oceans.
  There are two studies, here and here.
  BBC coverage.
• Roman Ingots: Lead bricks from a 2,000-year-old shipwreck will shield a high tech particle detector in Italy. The lead on board the ship is so old that it is no longer radioactive, making it the perfect barrier to keep stray radiation away from sensitive experiments. One such experiment aims to clarify the nature of subatomic particles called neutrinos.
  Nature News coverage.
  The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events.
  A report about neutrino science, from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
• Bat Flowers: Bats are important pollinators for flowers in deserts and the tropics. Bat flowers make more pollen than their hummingbird-pollinated relatives–but it’s not because the bats waste it. A new study suggests a rather counter-intuitive explanation for the flowers’ heavy load.
  The study.
  Pictures of bat-pollinated flowers.
  The researchers’ website.

New Images of the Sun: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in Tucson Arizona has been taking pictures of the Sun. And they recently released a set of fascinating new images. Don’t forget to check them out through links below. And you MUST watch (below) this movie of an explosion on the sun’s surface.
Guest: John Leibacher, an astronomer at the National Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
See more images taken by NASA’s SDO here.
Watch this video of an eruption on the surface of the Sun.

This week’s music provided by Cut Chemist. The track is called Metrorail Thru Space.

This week’s podcast kicks off with an extended version of an interview from the radio show. Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired.com’s Danger Room blog, is just back from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Noah got a close-up look at the drones that are currently flying over the region. On the radio, this interview only gets about four and half minutes, but here in the podcast, we can run a longer version that will hopefully satisfy a few more of your burning questions over who is controlling the drones, and how they’re being controlled.

From airspace, we go a bit higher. We hear about the roll-out of SpaceShipTwo, the craft that Virgin Galactic hopes will one day carry tourists (well heeled tourists, mind you) into space. You can see a BBC video tour of the spacecraft here. We follow that up with a great story about a new telescope that NASA is preparing to launch. It’s called, and you’ll love this, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. And we’ll end our journey in space, well, here on Earth. Japanese brewer Saporro has announced that next month, it will offer up “Space Barley” beer. Yep — the barley seeds that eventually grew and went into the beer once spent five months on the International Space Station. You can watch a BBC report on the launch of the intergalactic brew here. We decide to take a less scientific approach, speaking with Lisa Morrison, “The Beer Goddess.”

And we end with some audio that I just had to play for you. It’s Oscar Pistorius, the South African athlete known as the Blade Runner. Pistorius is a double amputee who runs on carbon-fiber blades, and he wants to compete in the Olympic Games in 2012. Sometime this weekend, the BBC program The Interview will feature a much lengthier interview with Pistorius. I’m really looking forward to listening to that. Oscar Pistorius’s website is here. Check out this video:

Remember, The World’s Tech Podcast is on Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve said it before, and you keep forcing me to say it again: the technology podcast listeners are, without much doubt, one of the most interesting, passionate and engaged group of folks I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with. The show, as I am fond of saying, is as much yours as it is mine. Over the past few months, I have realized that you, the listeners, are quickly becoming the stars of the show. We had Vicente, who draws GPS Atari art by riding his bikes through the streets of San Francisco, and we had Brett, who set me straight on the computing history behind Vicente’s art. A number of you have written in to tell me about the crazy, and wonderfully mundane, places you’ve listened to the podcast. Remember Dave, who put WTP in his earbuds as he cycled (motor) across South America? Or Gabor, who gave us the great idea about the Embrace thermoregulator? So, I think it’s official — this is now an ongoing part of the show. And it should be. And so this week, WTP listener Eric Zimmermann, an inventor who came to inventing after, literally, a near-death experience, talks about his latest invention: Trongs!

Here’s a taste:

We’ve also got great stories on NASA’s LCROSS mission to search for water/ice in the craters of the moon, and about efforts to harvest water in Peru using fog nets. And we’ll also give a technological nod to Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith; Kao for his work with fiber-optics, and Boyle and Smith for their work on the imaging semi-conductor circuit, or CCD.

Remember, the Tech Podcast is on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.

This week we focus on malaria, which sickens hundreds of millions of people a year, mostly in developing countries in Africa and Asia. The disease is caused by a parasite that is spread by mosquitoes. The World Health Organization says a key anti-malaria drug may be losing its power. We travel to Cambodia, where the malaria parasite seems to be developing resistance to the drug.

We also have a malaria story from the United States, which eradicated the disease in the 1940s. We take a historical look at how the U.S. accomplished that feat. The story originally ran as part of a fantastic series in 2005.

We check in on the Mosquito Barcode Initiative. It is trying to catalogue the DNA of every mosquito species in the world. Researcher Yvonne-Marie Linton is leading the project. It’s a rough job—often, researchers catch the mosquitoes by using themselves as bait.

In astronomy news, last October scientists spotted an asteroid hurtling through space on a collision course with earth. It wasn’t big enough to cause mass extinction, but it offered a rare opportunity for scientists. Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, tells us about his effort to recover pieces of the meteoroid from Sudan.

For years there’s been a debate over which animal is the closest living relative to whales. The top two contestants have been hippos and pigs. New research out this week from the University of Calgary and Georgia Southern University gives the edge to hippos. This rebuts a study of prehistoric bones done two years ago by another group of researchers. The latest work focused on DNA.

Music:
Ros Serey Sothea, I’m Sixteen

President Obama has signed an executive order that lifts a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The ban was put in place by President Bush eight years ago. Stephen Minger, a senior lecturer in stem cell biology at King’s College, London, talks about how the new policy will affect research in the U.S. and abroad.

The EU will soon adopt much tougher controls on pesticides. Those who make and use pesticides argue the plan will hurt Europe’s food supply.

NASA has launched the Kepler Space Telescope. Astronomers hope the mission will find other habitable planets in our galaxy. We take the opportunity to remember Johannes Kepler.

Hundreds of scientists gathered this week in Copenhagen for a major climate conference. Some experts there said the latest research on global warming doesn’t bode well for the future of our planet. They urged diplomats to draft a strong climate treaty at another meeting to be held in Copenhagen later this year.

Archaeologists now believe that horses were domesticated a thousand years earlier than previously thought. Exeter University researchers have found evidence in Kazakhstan that people were riding horses as early as 5500 years ago. Dr. Alan Outram, one of the researchers, explains the findings.

For decades, historians suspected that on July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their children were shot by their Bolshevik captors in Yekaterinburg, Russia, yet rumors have circulated that two of the family’s five children had escaped. Results of new DNA testing now confirm that all five children were killed.

Music:
Laid Back, Ride the White Horse
Echo and the Bunnymen, Bring on the Dancing Horses

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