Why Michael Abandoned Ink
5/27/202647 min
What can be revealed about a person by their choice of…lead? In this gloriously nerdy episode of Field Notes, Michael Stevens arrives armed with an entire collection of mechanical pencils, sparking a series of passionate debates about graphite, the merits of ink, and whether the perfect pencil will ever really exist. Plus: what happens to fizzy drink bubbles in zero gravity? Why did early scientists believe sperm contained tiny pre-formed humans? Are gravitational waves the most beautiful thing in the cosmos? And are modern scientific discoveries becoming too complicated for any one person to fully understand?
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsHannah Fry· Host0:01
Welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.
Michael Stevens· Host0:02
And I'm Michael Stevens. Today, on this episode of Field Notes, I've brought some very cool things that are important to me, and I'm going to just ask that you indulge me- [laughs] ... as I nerd out about mechanical pencils.
Hannah Fry· Host0:16
[laughs] This is a kind of nerding out I can get behind, Michael Stevens.
Michael Stevens· Host0:20
I try to nerd out to everyone I meet about this, and by everyone I meet, I mean my wife and daughter. [laughs] My daughter's into it. My wife is just done with all the little things that I need to say about mechanical pencils, but today I'm gonna get it out of my system.
Hannah Fry· Host0:34
Okay. Uh, should... Do we need to make this into a two-parter, three-parter, seven-parter, or are you gonna- I think it's gonna be a new podcast. Okay [laughs] well, yeah, or we just have a third episode every week, you know, for the, for the rest of time.
Michael Stevens· Host0:48
Hopefully not. My, my goal is to get to a point where I'm exactly happy with all the, the, the features. It's exactly what I want, and I'm think I'm gonna have to make it myself.
Hannah Fry· Host0:57
Okay. All right. Well, th- this is, this is something for us to look forward to.
Michael Stevens· Host1:00
Yeah.
Hannah Fry· Host1:01
Let's get on with it. [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.
Michael Stevens· Host1:11
Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA, and for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses