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Unexpected Elements

Factual: Science & Nature

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

The news you know, the science you don’t.

The news you know, the science you don’t. Unexpected Elements looks beyond everyday narratives to discover a goldmine of scientific stories and connections from around the globe. From Afronauts, to why we argue, to a deep dive on animal lifespans: see the world in a new way.

The Science Hour

Unexpected Elements: Dating the Moon, Mission to Mars, Wiki houses

moon.jpg

05/04/2014

Dating the Moon, Mission to Mars, Wiki houses

BBC World Service - Unexpected Elements, Dating the Moon, Mission to Mars, Wiki houses

A new way to date the moon, Europe’s first mission to Mars, building a house from scratch

A new way to date the moon, Europe’s first mission to Mars,  Wiki kits to build  a house from scratch.

Dating the Moon
New work by planetary scientists from France, Germany and the US, has given the most accurate date yet for the birth of the moon. The Moon is believed to have formed out of debris from a massive collision with another Mars-sized planet. The date of this event has always been controversial as radioactive decay readings have produced wildly different results. But this clock uses a different approach, and rules out an early-forming moon. The later the moon formed, the less time for life to evolve.

WikiHouses
WikiHouse is an online, open-source construction kit that lets people design and build a house from scratch in a few days.  It’s easy, you download a pattern, cut out the parts in plywood and start building – that is the plan being worked on in Christchurch New Zealand, a city that was devastated by a series of earthquakes in 2010.  Its early days for the global WikiHouse movement, but two local designers have started business to make the WikiHouse a reality.  Simon Morton met Danny Squires and Martin Luff in Christchurch.

Placebo Sleep
A team of psychologists investigate the power of placebo on the effects of sleep. They wondered if simply by making people think that they had slept badly, or soundly, they could influence their mental performance as a result. The experiment they came up with involved tricking some students into thinking they had either slept poorly or well, and they used an ingenious set of impressive sounding tests to convince them.

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Dating the Moon, Mission to Mars, Wiki houses

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