Chernobyl ’s ruins grow restless, and entangling macroscopic objects

Rich Stone, former international news editor at  Science and current senior science editor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Tangled Bank Studios, joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about concerning levels of fission reactions deep in an inaccessible area of the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Though nothing is likely to come of it anytime soon, scientists must decide what—if anything—they should do tamp down reactions in this hard-to-reach place.

Also on this week’s show, Shlomi Kotler, an assistant professor in the department of applied physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, joins Sarah to discuss the qu antum entanglement of macroscopic objects. This hallmark of quantum physics has been confined—up until now—to microscopic items like atoms, ions, and photons. But what does it mean that two drums, each the width of a human hair, can be entangled?

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This week’s episode w as produced with help from Podigy.

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Source: Science Magazine Podcast - May 3, 2021 Category: Science Authors: Science Tags: Scientific Community Source Type: podcasts