Learn about how agricultural experts make new types of apples; why the dwarf planet Ceres has a giant ice volcano; and why space matters, with some help from former NASA rocket scientist Kevin J. DeBruin. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: This Is How Ungodly Long It Takes to Breed a New Apple — https://curiosity.im/2MMbGrX Tiny Ceres Has a Great Big Ice Volcano — https://curiosity.im/2MHmjMp Additional resources from Kevin J. DeBruin: Without Space We Die” | Kevin DeBruin | TEDxGeorgiaTech — https://youtu.be/ODqGCWsYQNs Follow @kevinjdebruin on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/kevinjdebruin/ Official website — https://kevinjdebruin.com/ Follow @rocketdebruin on Twitter — https://twitter.com/rocketdebruin If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about how agricultural experts make new types of apples; why the dwarf planet Ceres has a giant ice volcano; and why space matters, with some help from former NASA rocket scientist Kevin J. DeBruin.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Additional resources from Kevin J. DeBruin:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/without-space-we-die-w-kevin-j-debruin-breeding-new-apples-and-ceres-ice-volcano
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how agricultural experts make new types of apples; why a tiny dwarf planet has a giant ice volcano; and why space matters, with former NASA rocket scientist Kevin J. DeBruin.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
This Is How Ungodly Long It Takes to Breed a New Apple — https://curiosity.im/2MMbGrX (Ashley)
Have you ever noticed how many different types of apples you can buy? There are striped ones and freckled ones and ones with names like "Jazz" and "Pink Lady" and "Honeycrisp." Well it turns out that it takes agricultural experts a LONG time to breed a new apple. As in, each variety takes more than a decade to come to — wait for it — fruition. In fact, the Honeycrisp apple took more than 30 years to create. So let’s talk apple breeding. When breeders want to cultivate a new apple, they're usually after specific traits, like juiciness, hardiness, or overall flavor. If they want to create a tasty apple with red instead of white flesh, for example, they'd start with an apple that already has red flesh, but for whatever reason doesn't have the other qualities they're after. Then, they'll cross that apple with a different apple that does have the traits they're looking for, by pollinating one variety's tree with pollen from the other. And that pollinated tree will produce apples that have seeds that will produce a new kind of apple — hopefully with the right traits of each parent. That process happens on a massive scale, often many times over. Tens of thousands of those seeds are planted, and 4 or 5 years later, they produce fruit that breeders look at to find the highest-quality apples from the crop. They repeat the cross-breeding process until they get what they’re going for, but the journey isn’t over yet. Once they have the apple they want, breeders take a cutting or a bud off of the tree and graft it onto a rootstock, the roots of another apple tree selected for its growing ability. It could take 10 years to get to this point, and even then, breeders might find something about the apple that makes it unsuitable for mass consumption. So the next time you bite into a delicious apple, remember that every bite has decades of history behind it. [ad lib]
Tiny Ceres Has a Great Big Ice Volcano — https://curiosity.im/2MHmjMp (Cody)
Wanna hear the weird story of a giant ice volcano on a tiny planet? Of course you do! So let’s talk about the dwarf planet called Ceres. It’s the largest object in the astroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but it’s not exactly huge. Ceres has a circumference of a little less than 2-thousand miles, or just under 3-thousand kilometers. For perspective, if you took a road trip down the East Coast of the United States, the same distance on Ceres would mean you’ve circled almost the entire planet. On top of that tiny little planet, there’s a relatively gigantic mountain called Ahuna Mons, and it’s almost half as tall as Mount Everest. And a new study suggests that mountain may have been formed by a special bubble. Yeah. A bubble. For some background, NASA sent a spacecraft called Dawn to collect a bunch of data on the dwarf planet between 2015 and 2018. Dawn made some neat discoveries on Ceres, including finding a bright white kind of "snow" that came from icy volcanoes. The leftovers from these eruptions were hydrogenated sodium carbonate or ammonium-containing clays, which freeze immediately after they eject. Early in Ceres' history, a bubble formed in its insides, from a combination of salt water, mud, and rock. This bubble created a pressure point at the surface, then eventually pushed through and started building up layers in space — and those layers became a huge, icy mud volcano that today we know as Ahuna Mons. And by the way: cryovolcanoes are not unique to Ceres. Several moons of Jupiter and Saturn also have these icy eruptions, and we think Pluto probably had some structures formed in this way as well. It goes to show that you can't take anything for granted when exploring space. It just keeps on surprising us.
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Listener question - Fit Rocket Scientist (Both)
ASHLEY: If you’ve ever wondered why we care so much about studying space, or why it matters that we found an ice volcano on a dwarf planet, then you’re not alone. We get plenty of questions on social media wondering why space is so important. That’s why we got in touch with today’s guest, a scientist and space educator who has some pretty great insights into why we need space. Here he is.
[CLIP 3:54]
CODY: Again, that was Kevin J. DeBruin, a former NASA JPL Rocket Scientist and space educator, AND former contestant on American Ninja Warrior. Yeah, he’s super smart AND super jacked! Hashtag squad goals, amirite? Anyway, you should follow Kevin on Instagram, at-kevin-J-debruin. He also recently gave a super-awesome TED Talk about the topic he covered today, so check that out if you want to hear him get into even more details. We’ll put links to all that and more from Kevin in today’s show notes.
ASHLEY: Special thanks to Muhammad Shifaz and Dr. Mary Yancy for being executive producers for today’s episode, thanks to their generous support on Patreon.
CODY: If you’re listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily — plus get some cool perks like shout-outs and access to our Discord server — then visit patreon-dot-com-slash-curiosity-dot-com, all spelled out.
ASHLEY: One more time, that’s Patreon-dot-com-slash-curiosity-dot-com. Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!