BBC Inside Science

By BBC Radio 4Science

Ranking
37th
on Science
Favorites
3,045
Followers
Typical duration
28 min
per episode
If it hooks
74%
finish an episode

Based on Podcast App listening data

BBC Inside Science episodes

July 04, 2019 X-Rays on Mercury, Monkey Tools, Music of Molecules, AI Drivers
The 2019 Royal Society Summer Science exhibition in London is free to enter and continues until Sunday 7th July. BBC Inside Science this week comes from the Society’s HQ in central London.
BepiColombo and the X-rays from Mercury
Prof Emma Bunce, has been part of the team that last year launched an x-ray telescope on a space probe to Mercury. It will be a long journey, not arriving until 2025. As Emma describes, the MIXS instrument, designed and built in the UK, will analyze the x-rays emitted by the different chemicals on the planet’s surface, and so build a map of the abundancies of different atoms across the terrifyingly hostile world. This is only possible because of the strength of the x-rays coming from the sun that strike the atoms on the surface, eliciting a distinctive signature re-emitted back into space.
Capuchin Monkeys and their Tools
Tomos Proffitt and colleagues announced in a recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution their study of archaeological evidence of Brazil’s capuchin monkeys using stones and anvils to smash cashew nuts for at least the last 3000 years. It is not the oldest evidence of non-human primate tool use but it is the oldest for monkeys, and suggests tantalisingly that tool use may have emerged in hominin species independently and on numerous occasions.
Molecular Music
Chemistry and music pupils at Ilkley Grammar School in the UK have been working together with The University of Bradford to create music specific to different molecules. As A-Level students Amelia Milner and Matthew Hodson describe to Adam, they took the distinctive frequencies of the bonds in certain molecules found in nature and transposed them onto the chromatic musical scale. Then the musicians composed pieces using only that set of notes that evoked some of the properties of the molecules.
AI Drivers and Machine Learning
Genovefa Kefalidou shows Adam a self-driving car circling a track at the exhibition. The technology to identify and track different objects is getting better, and machine learning algorithms can map human actions onto different scenarios to find appropriate responses, but is society ready to trust and accept the benefits they might bring?
Presenter: Adam Rutherford
Composers: Amelia Milner, Matthew Hodson (water, aspirin) and Daniel Burgess (cinnamic acid)
Producer: Alex Mansfield
35 min
June 27, 2019 Global Food Security, Reactive Use-By Labels, Origins of the Potato
On the day that the UK government launches a year long “food-to-Fork” review of food production in the UK, we present a food themed special edition.
Global Food Security
Maia Elliot is an analyst and writer for Global Food Security, who recently held a competition for young food researchers to present their work in a compelling way in less than 3 minutes. Maia and the winner, Claire Kanja of Rothamstead Research discuss with Adam the broader issues “Food Security” seeks to address, and also how best to communicate often esoteric specialized interest to a broader audience that includes food-consuming tax-payers.
A Threat to Wheat
Claire’s work is looking into a threat to world wheat harvests known as Fusarium Head (or Ear) Blight. She is trying to categorize the proteins that the fungus uses firstly to evade Wheat’s defences, and then to kill the plant cells for its own food.
Food Freshness Sensor
Meanwhile, at Imperial College, Hannah Fisher reports on new work to make cheap-as-chips gas sensitive food labels that could detect levels of gases inside a food packet that indicate it is gone off or decayed. You could even read them with the NFC chip in most smartphones.
The Origins and Adaptations of the European Potato
Talking of chips, published this week is a genetic history of the cultivated European potato. Using DNA from museum specimens going back centuries, the authors describe a very complicated to-and-froing between continents that enables modern varieties to avoid certain blights and even to form decent sized potatoes when growing in different day-lengths. Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum in London was one of the authors.
Presenter: Adam Rutherford
Producer: Alex Mansfield
33 min
June 20, 2019 Rinderpest destruction, Noise and birdsong, Science as entertainment
Rinderpest – Sequence and Destroy
Last week the UK’s Pirbright Institute announced that it had destroyed its remaining stocks of the deadly cattle virus Rinderpest. This repository was one of the biggest remaining stores of it since it was announced in 2011 that vaccines had eradicated it in the wild. Dr Michael Baron, amongst others, has been arguing for years that because we can now obtain a full sequence of such viruses, we no longer need to run the risk of such scientific samples ever being released, through accident or malice. As such, for Pirbright at least, the rinderpest virus that once killed millions of cattle and starved similar numbers of humans now only exists as a digital memory.
Oi, You Singin' at My Bird?
The delightful song of the European Robin is actually a fierce territorial warning between males that functions to avoid costly mismatched conflict. In fact, the complexity of the song seems to represent the fitness of the singer. Gareth Arnott of Queen’s University in Belfast talks about his investigation into whether noise – including anthropogenic noise interferes with this life-or-death conversation. It sounds like it does.
Science as Entertainment
All this week and next BBC2 is hosting a new programme called The Family Brain Games. The games are designed not to test merely general knowledge or conventional measures of IQ, but rather a functional, communicative sort of intelligence that competing families display amongst themselves as a team. But can this sort of nuanced science be properly communicated on TV? Host Dara Ó Briain and neuroscientist Prof Sophie Scott discuss the ins and outs of making science entertaining.
Presenter: Adam Rutherford
Producer: Alex Mansfield
36 min
June 13, 2019 Net-Zero carbon target, Science Policy Under Thatcher, Screen time measures
Net-Zero Carbon Target
The UK is set to become the first member of the G7 industrialised nations group to legislate for net-zero emissions after Theresa May’s announcement this week. The proposed legislation would commit the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to ‘net-zero’ by 2050, which would mean that after reducing emissions as much as possible, any remaining emissions would be offset through schemes such as planting trees or investing in renewable energy infrastructure. Dr Jo House, from the department of Geography at Bristol University, has spent time advising the government on previous carbon budgets and was there in the build-up to the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. She talks to Gareth Mitchell about the proposal, what it means for the UK’s climate future and how realistic she thinks the targets are.
Science Policy Under Thatcher
30 years ago a new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, told her officials - in a break from the norm - that she would keep a personal eye on science policy in her government. By 1987, the relationship between government, university research and industrial research would be changed utterly. Prof Jon Agar has been scouring The National Archives and a wealth of hitherto private communications that shed light on how her approach to science policy formed. His new book is out this week and he discusses the events with Prof Dame Wendy Hall, a young scientist in the 80s but now fresh to the programme from hearing announcements at the London Technology Week regarding large investment and an industrial strategy towards Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Screen Time Measures
If you are using evidence to inform your policy, you need to make sure that evidence is as robust as you think it is. David Ellis of Lancaster University tells Gareth about his team’s recent work to evaluate a certain type of self-reporting, particularly involving studies into our well-being with regards to technology use. How much time do you spend with your device? Your answer might not be completely aligned with reality, as revealed by actual screen-time data. Unfortunately, many of the headline-grabbing papers we read regarding health and screen time are based on self-reporting questionnaires, which David suggests might require more scepticism.
Presenter: Gareth Mitchell
Producer: Alex Mansfield
31 min
June 06, 2019 CCR5 Mutation Effects, The Surrey Earthquake Swarm, Animal Emotions
Some people have a genetic mutation in a gene called CCR5 that seems to bestow immunity to a form of HIV. This is the mutation which controversial Chinese scientist Jianqui He tried to bestow upon two baby girls last year when he edited the genes in embryos and then implanted them in a mother. A paper in the journal Nature Medicine this week uses data from the UK Biobank to look at the long term health patterns associated with this gene variant. It suggests that whilst the HIV-1 immunity may be considered a positive, having two copies of the gene also comes with a cost. It seems that it may also lower our immunity to other diseases and shows in the database as a 21% increase in mortality overall. Author Rasmus Nielsen talks about how important this gene is to evolutionary biologists trying to find signs of natural selection in humans. Adam discusses the ethical implications of the research with Dr Helen O’Neill.
The Surrey Earthquake Swarm
Over the last year several small earthquakes have been detected in one part of Surrey. Many have surmised that these may be caused by oil drilling taking place nearby, but it might be simpler than that. So the British Geological Survey has been monitoring the region. Roland Pease joined Imperial College seismologist Steven Hicks out in the countryside inspecting his detectors to find out more.
Mama’s Last Hug
Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading primatologists talks to Adam about his latest book, and the difficulties we as human observers have with studying emotion in animals. Prof de Waal coins a neologism ‘anthropodenialism’ to describe the belief that emotions in animals are incommensurable with human experience. He thinks most mammals, and certainly primates, experience pretty much the same emotions as we do, for similar reasons. Feelings, however, are a different matter.
Producer: Alex Mansfield
38 min
May 30, 2019 How maths underpins science
Adam Rutherford and guests at the Hay Festival discuss how maths underwrites all branches of science, and is at the foundation of the modern world.
His guests are the following.
Professor Steve Strogatz, of Cornell University, the author of a new book on calculus, Infinite Powers. He’s worked on all kinds of problems including some biological ones such as the shape of DNA, how fireflies create light and the grandness of small world theories.
Dr Emily Shuckburgh, is a climate change scientist at University of Cambridge, who has a PhD in maths studying fluid dynamics. She is the co-author of the Ladybird book on Climate Change with Prince Charles,
Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, is President of the Royal Society, and was originally a physicist, who moved into biology, to study the 3-dimensional shape of one of the most important biological structures, the ribosome, for which he won the Nobel prize winner.
30 min
May 23, 2019 New CFC emissions, Cannabis and the Environment, The Noisy Cocktail Party, Automated Face Recognition
New CFC emissions
Researchers say that they have pinpointed the major sources of a mysterious recent rise in a dangerous, ozone-destroying chemical. CFC-11 was primarily used for home insulation but global production was due to be phased out in 2010. But scientists have seen a big slowdown in the rate of depletion over the past six years. This new study published in the Journal Nature says this is mostly being caused by new gas production in eastern provinces of China.
Dr Matt Rigby of the University of Bristol and the BBC’s Matt McGrath, who has also been following the trail, tell Gareth about the mystery.
Yeast to make cannabinoids
In California, where cannabis has become a major cash crop since legalisation there, researchers are trying to evaluate the environmental impacts of large scale agricultural planting. But, as Geoff Marsh reports, other researchers are finding other ways to produce various cannabinoids for potential future sale. Can humble yeast be modified to produce the active substances that some believe to have therapeutic benefits?
Hearing aids for cocktail parties
One of the most impressive properties of the human auditory system is the way most of us can overhear or eavesdrop on specific voices in an otherwise crowded room. Most hearing aids can’t help with that: they can sometimes filter out noises that are not human voices, but cannot do the very human trick of sorting one voice from a sea of others. Nima Mesgarani from Columbia University reports in the journal Science Advances a proof of principle for a device that might be able to do just that. Firstly, a new algorithm can separate out one voice from another. Then brain waves from the wearer could be used to recognise which of those voices they are trying to hear. Then it’s a simple case of turning that voice up, and lowering the volume of the others, all in nearly real-time.
Automatic face recognition
So called Neural Network computing techniques are revolutionising our lives. They are able to perform a host of tasks that not so long ago would be the preserve of human brains, and to process huge sets of data and “learn” very quickly. One of the things they are proving exceptional at is face recognition; being able to identify faces in a crowd, or on a street, from a set of images provided by a user. But with great computing power comes great computing responsibility. What are the implications for policing and personal privacy? Gareth discusses these issues with Stephanie Hare.
Producer: Alex Mansfield
29 min
May 16, 2019 Hubble Not-So Constant, Synthetic E. Coli, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt
The Hubble Constant
The Hubble constant is the current expansion rate of the universe but it seems to have changed over time. Hiranya Peiris, Professor of Astrophysics from University College London and Adam Riess, Professor of Physics and Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University, are both using different methods to obtain a value for the Hubble constant. But there is a discrepancy in their values. It used to be that the error bars on the two values overlapped, and so cosmologists thought they would converge as the experiments got more precise. But instead, as the error bars have shrunk, the discrepancy is getting more serious, and something must be wrong. They chat to Adam about potential reasons for this difference in calculations and what it could mean for our cosmological model of the universe. Is new physics required to evolve the description of the age of the universe as we know it to be more accurate?
A synthetic E. Coli genome
Jason Chin and Colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have published this week in the Journal Nature their latest work to completely synthesise a new genome of an E. coli bacteria. Not only was the genome designed and manufactured by human means, it was also recoded in a way not used by nature, involving some 18000 edits. In natural DNA, several different codes can do the same job. As Roland Pease reports, the new genome instead uses fewer of these duplicates, demonstrating all sorts of possibilities for future designs of synthetic cells.
Von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a celebrated Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer. He influenced Darwin and was the first person to describe human-induced climate change, based on his observations from his travels. Yet he has slipped into relative obscurity, at least in the English-speaking world.
Andrea Wulf is an acclaimed author who has previously written about Alexander von Humboldt and is now back with another book about the explorer: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt. It’s a graphic novel (illustrated by Lillian Melcher) that celebrates the 250th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth and depicts his adventures on his 5 year expedition through South America. Adam Rutherford chats to Andrea about her book, why she chose to make it a graphic novel and how Humboldt’s views on the environment can be interpreted today.
Producer: Alex Mansfield
35 min
May 09, 2019 Forensic science provision, optimal garden watering strategy, and a mystery knee bone
A damning House of Lords' report into the provision of forensic science in England and Wales makes for uncomfortable reading for some but is broadly welcomed by those in the field. Prof. Niamh Nic Daeid, one of many who gave evidence to the Science and Technology Committee, gives her reaction and suggests how a combination of unsatisfactory regulation, profit and austerity pressures in a uniquely commercialised sector, and some surprising gaps in the science knowledge base has lead to a sorry situation.
Spring has sprung and it's probably not too late to get the tomato plants in, but should you water them little and often, or more but less often? Madeleine Finlay reports from Wisley, where The Royal Horticultural Society's Janet Manning has set up a new experiment this year to answer that question. Janet is the first Garden Water Scientist at the RHS, and hopes to demonstrate that giving plants less frequent, but more generous, bouts of hydration encourages deeper root growth, building in resilience for those periods when water is harder to come by whilst also allowing gardeners ultimately to use less.
Do you have a fabella? Or maybe two fabellae? Michael Berthaume, "Anthroengineer" at Imperial College London tells us about a curiously under-studied bone that some people have in their knees. Present in certain primates and quadruped mammals, but thought to have disappeared from human anatomy, it seems to have made a bit of a comeback in certain populations around the world over the last century or so. Quite why, quite how, and quite what it's for, seems something of a mystery.
29 min
May 02, 2019 Sex, gender and sport - the Caster Semenya case and the latest Denisovan discovery
In 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) introduced new eligibility regulations for female athletes with differences in sex development (DSDs). These regulations are based on the contention that women with high levels of endogenous testosterone and androgen sensitivity have a performance advantage over their peers. South African middle distance runner, Mokgadi Caster Semenya, who won two Olympic gold medals in 2012 and 2016, and Athletics South Africa, are contesting the legality of these new regulations. The basis of their objection, at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, is that there is a lack of scientific evidence showing that endogenous testosterone concentrations substantially enhance sports performance. Caster, who is DSD herself, has lost her case and Adam turns to expert in sport, exercise and genomics at Manchester Metropolitan University, Dr. Alun Williams to explain the implications.
Less than a decade ago, an entirely new branch of the ancient human tree was discovered. These new hominins were named the Denisovans, after the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia where fragments of finger bone and teeth were discovered, and genetic sequencing of a finger bone revealed that they were a new hominin group, an extinct sister group to Neanderthals. This exciting find contained a tantalising puzzle. Traces of Denisovan DNA are found in modern-day population groups like Sherpas, Tibetans and some other neighbouring populations and this includes genetic variants which help them to survive at high altitudes where the oxygen levels are low. The original Denisovan cave is only around 700 metres, so why would such an adaptation be necessary at these altitudes? This week a new paper in Nature slots a big piece into the puzzle. Teams from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have found another Denisovan fossil – this time a mandible, a lower jawbone, still containing teeth – from the vast Tibetan plateau in China. At 2.3 Km above sea level, it’s very high and the air is thin, and 160,000 years ago, which is when the fossil has been dated to, it would have been a very challenging place to live indeed. In fact this jawbone is the earliest known hominin fossil found on this enormous plateau. Adam calls in Professor Fred Spoor, from the Centre for Human Evolution Research at the Natural History Museum in London, to examine the facts and to see if we can work out how far and wide these hominins travelled.
Producer: Fiona Roberts
28 min