Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This week’s music provided by Cut Chemist. The track is called Metrorail Thru Space.
This week’s podcast kicks off with an extended version of an interview from the radio show. Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired.com’s Danger Room blog, is just back from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Noah got a close-up look at the drones that are currently flying over the region. On the radio, this interview only gets about four and half minutes, but here in the podcast, we can run a longer version that will hopefully satisfy a few more of your burning questions over who is controlling the drones, and how they’re being controlled.
From airspace, we go a bit higher. We hear about the roll-out of SpaceShipTwo, the craft that Virgin Galactic hopes will one day carry tourists (well heeled tourists, mind you) into space. You can see a BBC video tour of the spacecraft here. We follow that up with a great story about a new telescope that NASA is preparing to launch. It’s called, and you’ll love this, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. And we’ll end our journey in space, well, here on Earth. Japanese brewer Saporro has announced that next month, it will offer up “Space Barley” beer. Yep — the barley seeds that eventually grew and went into the beer once spent five months on the International Space Station. You can watch a BBC report on the launch of the intergalactic brew here. We decide to take a less scientific approach, speaking with Lisa Morrison, “The Beer Goddess.”
And we end with some audio that I just had to play for you. It’s Oscar Pistorius, the South African athlete known as the Blade Runner. Pistorius is a double amputee who runs on carbon-fiber blades, and he wants to compete in the Olympic Games in 2012. Sometime this weekend, the BBC program The Interview will feature a much lengthier interview with Pistorius. I’m really looking forward to listening to that. Oscar Pistorius’s website is here. Check out this video:
Remember, The World’s Tech Podcast is on Twitter and Facebook.
Discussion
No comments for “Tech Podcast 270: Drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan”