Ant Scans, Lunar Chickpeas, Hidden Galaxies & Superconductivity (EP 40)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this rundown episode covers four new science stories at a high level: a huge new 3D ant imaging database built with synchrotron X-ray microtomography, a lunar agriculture experiment that grew chickpeas in simulated moon soil using fungi and worm waste, AI-assisted discovery of strange objects in the Hubble archive, and a new programmatic roadmap for room-temperature superconductivity. There is also another round of Are You Smarter Than a Scientist? in the middle.

Summary

Particle accelerators meet biodiversity — researchers built a massive high-resolution ant imaging resource, covering nearly 800 species and thousands of specimens, with AI-assisted 3D reconstruction.

Moon farming gets weird — chickpeas were grown in lunar regolith simulant with help from mycorrhizal fungi and worm-derived compost, a first step toward sustainable off-world agriculture.

AI found hidden anomalies in Hubble’s archive — AnomalyMatch sifted through roughly 100 million source cutouts in just days and surfaced new candidate lenses, mergers, and other rare objects.

The superconductivity long game — a new PNAS perspective argues that room-temperature superconductivity is not ruled out by physics, and calls for a coordinated push to get there.

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Show Notes

High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity — Nature Methods

Bioremediation of lunar regolith simulant through mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbioses enables chickpea to seed — Scientific Reports

Identifying astrophysical anomalies in 99.6 million source cutouts from the Hubble legacy archive using AnomalyMatch — Astronomy & Astrophysics

The path to room-temperature superconductivity: A programmatic approach — PNAS