Episode description

This summer, the Bureau of Land Management approved seven herbicides to fight invasive plants in the West. Also, when scientists analyzed the swirls in the famous painting, they found Van Gogh depicted forces of nature with startling accuracy.

Invasive plants are a big problem across the western US.

Cunning interlopers like cheatgrass, leafy spurge and red brome can outcompete native vegetation, crowd habitats and steal water and other vital soil nutrients.

Of the 245 million acres controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, harmful non-native plants have already infested 79 million acres—an area larger than the states of Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina combined. That’s why the federal agency felt the urgency to approve seven new herbicides to kill invasives on its land nationwide, said Seth Flanigan, a BLM senior invasive species specialist based in Idaho.

“If we don’t remove this now, what is it going to look like 10 years from now?” he said.

Read the rest of this article on sciencefriday.com.

One of Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous creations is “The Starry Night,” an oil painting of a quaint French village at night with a blue night sky that dramatically swirls around the yellow stars and moon.

It’s easy to admire this painting as a casual viewer, but if you research fluid dynamics, one thing in particular stands out: those iconic swirls in the sky. To a physicist, they look an awful lot like the swirls that atmospheric turbulence produces. And some researchers have been wondering if Van Gogh’s swirls actually match the mathematical models of turbulence theory.

Well, a team of researchers from China and France set out to analyze all the swirls in “The Starry Night,” and it turns out that Van Gogh had a knack for depicting the forces of nature. Their results were published in the journal Physics Of Fluid.

Guest host Anna Rothschild sits down with Dr. Francois Schmitt, research professor in physics at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and co-author of the recent study, to talk about the hidden physics in this famous painting.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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