SoT 354: They Smacked It With A Shovel

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely 00:03:36 NASA's Mars InSight probe has finally managed to drill into the Martian rock and soil - thanks to a traditional repair technique! 00:13:04 The idea that glass is a liquid that flows is largely a myth.... sort of. It's an amorphous solid, so it does flow but very very slowly. Now an analysis of amber has shed some light on the disordered molecules that make glass a "liquid in suspended animation". 00:26:36 When our fishy ancestors slithered onto land nearly 400 million years ago, they had hands and feet. But fingers and toes took a little longer to develop. The discovery of a complete skeleton of a fish from around that time gives some clues about the evolution of fingers. Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely is a planetary scientist working at ANSTO, Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. She is the co-author of the children's book I Love Pluto. This episode contains traces of the panel on Have I Got News For You discussing an astrophysicists attempts to make a device to stop you touching your face.