In ?Back to Titanic? Part 1, David Pogue told of his invitation to join an expedition to visit the wreck of the Titanic in a custom submersible. The company, OceanGate, ordinarily charges $250,000 per person, as part of a new wave in adventure travel.  

Bad weather immediately canceled the dive that Pogue and the ?CBS Sunday Morning? crew were scheduled to join?but the CEO offered a consolation dive to the Grand Banks. The sights were said to include shark breeding grounds, towering underwater cliffs, and marine species never seen before. 

Just as the sub was descending beneath the waves, the order to halt came from mission control.  

In this episode, the story concludes. 

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The wreck of the Titanic lies about 2.4 miles below sea level. Only five submersibles in the world can carry people to that depth?and four of them have been retired or reassigned. The one remaining sub is something special. First, it holds five people comfortably (instead of two or three uncomfortably). Second, it?s the only one made of carbon fiber. And third, you can buy your way onto it. For $250,000, OceanGate Expeditions will take you down to visit the world?s most famous shipwreck. Deep sea is the new outer space. So when OceanGate invited David Pogue and a ?CBS Sunday Morning? crew to join the latest expedition, they jumped at the chance. Here?s what happened during their eight days at sea.

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If you type the word ?carrot? into Google Images, you get thousands of photos of the classic root vegetable. They?re all full-length, orange, straight, and pointy. Which is a little odd, because 70% of all the carrots we buy are, in fact, baby carrots.

Or at least we think they?re baby carrots. Turns out baby carrots aren?t baby at all. And the story of their creation is twisty, uplifting, and super satisfying. It?s all about a California carrot farmer with a distaste for waste?and a frustrated ex-wife.

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People talk about greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, planes, and factories, but one source out-pollutes them all: Cows. Raising meat animals like cows generates more methane than the entire fossil-fuel industry. So Pat Brown left his job as a Stanford biochemistry professor to dedicate his life to fixing the problem. He vowed to create perfect meat replicas using only plant ingredients. His Impossible Burger is already a megahit?but can he be serious about replacing all beef, pork, chicken, and fish by 2035? 

Guest: Pat Brown, CEO and founder, Impossible Foods

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By the year 2000, the internet was already becoming a cesspool. The bad guys used software bots to sign up for millions of fake email accounts?for sending out spam.

PhD student Luis Von Ahn stopped them. He invented the CAPTCHA, that website login test where you have to decipher the distorted image of a word. Or you have to find the traffic lights or fire hydrants in a grid of nine blurry photos.

Those tests help to keep down the volume of spam, spyware, and misinformation; they advance the clarity of digitized books and the intelligence of self-driving cars; and, by the way, they made a handsome profit.

The only problem: We HATE those tests!

Guest: Luis Von Ahn, co-inventor of CAPTCHA, co-inventor and CEO of Duolingo.

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Each year, the powers that be endow our phones with about 70 new emoji. For 2022, you?ll be getting a mirror ball, a crutch, an X-ray, coral, a ring buoy, and a bird?s nest?with or without eggs in it.

But who ARE the powers that be? Why do they add the emoji they add? Why do we have a blowfish but not a catfish? Why do we have police car, police officer, and judge, but not handcuffs, jail, or prison?

In this hilarious episode, you?ll meet the shadowy figures who choose which symbols get added to the permanent set each year. You?ll hear about the Apple bagel disaster, the Android cheeseburger kerfluffle, and the floating beer-foam episode. And you?ll meet the 15-year-old whose emoji campaign changed the world?and probably got her into Stanford.

Guests: Jennifer Daniel, director of emoji at Google; head of emoji for the Unicode Consortium

Mark Davis, cofounder and president, Unicode Consortium

Rayouf Alhumedi, creator of the hijab emoji

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Over the last decade, a group of California scientists has quietly amassed the biggest sleep database ever assembled. It includes every dozing off, every wakeup, every REM-cycle, every chunk of deep sleep, from 15 billion nights of human slumber. It can tell us the average person?s bedtime, whether men or women sleep longer, and which city is really the city that never sleeps. These scientists work at Fitbit?the company that sells fitness bands. And for them, revealing your sleep patterns is only the beginning. The longer-term goal of these scientists?and the ones working on the Apple Watch, Garmins, and other wearables?is to spot diseases before you even have symptoms. Diseases of your heart, your brain, your lungs?all picked up by a bracelet on your wrist. But how?

Guests: Eric Friedman, cofounder and CTO of Fitbit. Conor Heneghan, senior research scientist, Google.

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You already knew that you can turn on subtitles for your TV show or movie?handy if you?re hearing impaired, or just want to understand the dialogue better. But there?s a corresponding feature for people with low vision: audio description tracks, where an unseen narrator tells you, in real time, what?s happening on the screen. But who creates them, and how, and when? And how do they describe the action during fast dialogue, fast action, sex scenes, and screens full of scrolling credits? A deep dive into a bizarre art form most people didn?t know exists.

Guests: Lauren Berglund, consumer relations coordinator at the Guide Dog Foundation. Bill Patterson, founder, Audio Description Solutions. Rhys Lloyd, studio head, Descriptive Video Works. Bryan Gould, director of the National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH.

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In 2018, following a historic three-year drought, the water sources in Cape Town, South Africa ran dry. It was the first major city to face Day Zero: when you?d turn on the faucet?and nothing would come out.

The town leaders discussed expensive, environmentally disruptive projects like pipelines and desalination plants. But then an environmental nonprofit, the Nature Conservancy, proposed a radically different approach that could win Cape Town 13 billion gallons of water a year, cheaply and perpetually, using a method that worked with nature instead of against it. All they needed was a helicopter, some ropes and saws, and some of the poorest women in Cape Town.

Guests: Louise Stafford, Director of Source Water Protection in South Africa, The Nature Conservancy. Thandeka Mayiji-Rafu and Asiphe Cetywayo, Greater Cape Town Water Fund tree-cutting contractors.

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You?ve survived 2021?thanks, no doubt, to the science and tech that made your medical care, your internet, and your smartphone work. Tonight, New Year?s Eve, many podcast hosts are taking some time to reflect, to rest?and to post a re-run.

But not ?Unsung Science!? To tide you over until next week?s fresh episode, we offer a free audiobook chapter from David Pogue?s book, ?How to Prepare for Climate Change.? This is the chapter on how to prepare for wildfires, timed to coincide with the middle of the winter wildfire season in the western half of the U.S. As a New Year?s gift from us, here?s a terrifying and reassuring chapter on preparing for fires?and surviving them.

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It?s the night before Christmas?and many podcasters (and listeners) are nestled all snug in their beds. But we didn?t want to leave you without a dose of witty Pogue science writing. So here, for your listening pleasure, is a free chapter from David Pogue?s latest audio book, ?How to Prepare for Climate Change.? This is Chapter 2, ?Where to Live.?

Obviously, not everyone can afford to move just to escape climate-crisis disasters?yet 40 million Americans do move every year, and an increasing number of them are taking climate risks into account. This chapter is your guide to the best climate-haven regions in America.

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The earth?s spinning is slowing down. Any clocks pegged to the earth?s rotation are therefore drifting out of alignment with our far more precise atomic clocks?only by a thousandth of a second every 50 years, but that?s still a problem for the computers that run the internet, cellphones, and financial systems.

In 1972, scientists began re-aligning atomic clocks with earth-rotation time by inserting a leap second every December 31, or as needed. It seemed like a good idea at the time?until computers started crashing at Google, Reddit, and major airlines. Google engineers proposed, instead, a leap smear: fractionally lengthening every second on December 31, so that that day contains the same total number of seconds. But really: If computer time drifts so infinitesimally from earth-rotation time, does anybody really care what time it is?

Guests: Theo Gray, scientist and author. Geoff Chester, public affairs officer for the for the Naval Observatory. Peter Hochschild, principal engineer, Google.

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In the early 1970s, ?mobile phones? were car phones: Permanently installed monstrosities that filled up your trunk with boxes and, in a given city, could handle only 20 calls at a time. Nobody imagined that there?d be a market for handheld, pocketable cellphones; the big phone companies thought the idea was idiotic. But Marty Cooper, now 92, saw a different future for cellular technology?and he had 90 days to make it work. A story of corporate rivalry, Presidential interference?and unquenchable optimism.

Guests: Marty Cooper, father of the cellphone. Arlene Cooper, technology entrepreneur.

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Your smartphone can see, hear, and speak?even if you can?t. So it occurred to the engineers at Apple and Microsoft: Can the phone be a talking companion for anyone with low vision, describing what it?s seeing in the world around you?

Today, it can. Thanks to some heavy doses of machine learning and augmented reality, these companies? apps can identify things, scenes, money, colors, text, and even people (?30-year-old man with brown hair, smiling, holding a laptop?probably Stuart?)?and then speak, in words, what?s in front of you, in a photo or in the real world. In this episode, the creators of these astonishing features reveal how they turned the smartphone into a professional personal describer?and why they care so deeply about making it all work.

Guests: Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. Saqib Shaikh, project lead for Microsoft?s Seeing AI app. Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer, Microsoft. Ryan Dour, accessibility engineer, Apple. Chris Fleizach, Mobile Accessibility Engineering Lead, Apple. Sarah Herrlinger, Senior Director of Global Accessibility, Apple.

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It's Thanksgiving weekend, and for many podcasts, a week off. But we didn't want to sock you with some re-run?or, worse, leave you with no episode at all. So David Pogue is here to offer a free chapter from his audio book, "How to Prepare for Climate Change." You'll hear the complete Introduction, which is designed to teach you the difference between mitigation and adaptation?and convince you to keep doing the former, but start doing the latter.

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The first time you heard ?Star Trek? characters speak Klingon, or the ?Game of Thrones? characters speaking Dothraki and High Valyrian, you might have assumed that the actors were just speaking a few words of gibberish, created by some screenwriter to sound authentic. But these are complete languages, with vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and even made-up histories. There?s only one person on the planet whose full-time job is creating them?and these days, he?s swamped with requests. No doubt about it: Conlangs (constructed languages) are the new special effect. Me nem nesa!

Guests: David Peterson, author/linguist/full-time language maker. Mark Okrand, author/linguist/creator of Klingon. Angela Carpenter, linguistics professor at Wellesley College.

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Perseverance, NASA's latest Mars rover, is a one-ton, $2 billion marvel. The plan was for it to enter the Mars atmosphere going 12,000 miles an hour. The problem: How do you slow it down enough to set it down gently on the surface? You can't use retro rockets, because they'd stir up so much dust, the rover?s cameras and instruments would be ruined. You can?t deliver Perseverance inside a larger spaceship, because the rover wouldn?t be able to drive out of the landing crater. You can?t even control the descent from Earth, because it takes so long for our signals to reach Mars; by the time the rover received a course-correction instruction, there?d be nothing left of it but a smoking wreck. Yet NASA pulled it off?with a nutty, Rube Goldberg-y, multi-stage, seven-minute-long, completely automated system involving a parachute, an airborne launch platform, and a cable.

Guest: Alan Chen, NASA Entry, Descent, and Landing Lead for the Mars 2020 mission.

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Tornadoes are nasty and dangerous. They appear and disappear so fast, there?s usually no time for evacuation?and the United States gets 75% of all the world?s tornadoes, about 1,300 of them a year. They occur all year ?round, in all 50 states, but the biggest swarm forms in Tornado Alley, in the southern Plains states like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. In 2018, storm chaser and meteorologist Victor Gensini made a startling discovery: Tornado Alley has been shifting eastward. Their growing frequency in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee is a deadly development, because more people live in these areas, often in flimsy housing. And because there are more trees and buildings, it's much harder to see the devastation coming.

Guest: Victor Gensini, storm chaser and meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University.

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The media is plenty freaked out about ?deepfakes?: Computer-generated videos of famous people saying things they never actually said. But only the video is faked; the audio parts, the voices of those fake celebrities, were supplied by human impersonators. But now, software exists to mimic anyone?s voice, opening a Pandora?s Box of fraud, deception, and what one expert calls ?the end of trust.? Fortunately, a new coalition of 60 news organizations and software companies think they have a way to shut down the nightmare before it begins.

Guests: Ragavan Thurairatnam, Dessa. Nina Schick, author and deepfakes expert. Joan Donavan, Harvard Kennedy School. Charlie Choi, CEO of Lovo. Dana Rao, chief counsel, Adobe.

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It may seem as though we got the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines incredibly quickly. But Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó had been trying to make mRNA vaccines work for 30 years while fighting scientific gatekeepers who thought her idea was absurd. Her grants were denied, her papers rejected, her speaking invitations withdrawn; eventually, the University of Pennsylvania demoted her. But she still refused to quit, and in 2005, she and collaborator Drew Weissman cracked the code. They figured out how mRNA could direct our own cells to manufacture medicines to order. Their breakthrough saved the world from the worst of the pandemic?and opened a new world of medicines and vaccines for a huge range of diseases.

Guests: Katalin Karikó, senior VP at BioNTech. Drew Weissman, Perelman School of Medicine, U Penn. Derek Rossi, co-founder of Moderna.

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Mosquitoes are the deadliest creatures on earth; they kill 500,000 people a year?and as the planet warms, more species are spreading North from the tropics. In 2013, a nasty new type, called Aedes Aegypti, arrived in Fresno, California. But traditional tactics, like spraying insecticide and genetic modification, have ugly side effects. So one genius programmer from Google thought up a better solution?that doesn?t involve insecticide; doesn?t mess around with genes; doesn?t require irradiating; makes it impossible for the mosquitoes to develop resistance; can?t affect any other species; and costs less than what governments spend now on treating their citizens for Dengue fever. A lot was at stake in the Fresno experiment; if it worked, the technique could save lives around the world. (Spoiler: It worked.)

Guests: Linus Upson, VP of Engineering at Verily. Leslie Vosshall, professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller University. Jodi Holeman, Fresno Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District. Peter Massaro, Google director of automation. Jacob Crawford, senior scientist, Verily.

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The untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in science and tech. Host David Pogue takes you behind the scenes into the worlds of the people who?ve built the best in transportation, entertainment, food, Hear the untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in science and tech. Host David Pogue, five-time Emmy winner and ?CBS Sunday Morning? correspondent, takes you behind the scenes into the worlds of the people who?ve built the best in transportation, entertainment, food, internet, and health. Creators reveal their inspirations and roadblocks they encountered in bringing their breakthroughs to the public.internet, and health.

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