CrowdScience

CrowdScience listener Nyankami, from Kenya, has a friend with dementia. Despite memory loss and no longer knowing his way around, his friend has no problem communicating. So what’s the connection between memory and language?

Caroline Steel discovers how dementia affects our speech. In most cases the illness does have an impact on our ability to speak but it can depend on many factors, including the type of dementia and even how many languages we speak.

She meets George Rook, diagnosed with vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s, who’s a passionate campaigner for people with dementia and talks to dementia nurse Helen Green, who explains how the illness can affect our behaviour.

She discovers that speaking more than one language can actually protect our brains from decline and finds out about cutting edge research that is helping people with dementia to improve their memory and capacity to speak.

Featuring:

Image Credit: Emma Innocenti

Presenter: Caroline Steel

It may seem like a simple question but could you explain why the earth revolves around the sun? That is what listener Josh from New York wants to know. For much of human history we thought everything revolved around us, literally. So how did humans come to the conclusion that we're not the centre of the universe? And how did the scientific process help us uncover the true order of things?

Looking through telescopes from the vantage point of Australia, host Caroline Steel speaks with astronomers and physicists about the bumpy scientific journey to arrive at this discovery that we now take for granted. Delving into Indigenous astronomy with researcher Peter Swanton, Caroline questions whether Western scientists were really the first ones to grasp this understanding of our solar system.

And at the Sydney Observatory, stellar astrophysicist Devika Kamath and Sydney Observatory host Nada Salama show Caroline some of the clues up in the sky that astronomers in the 1600s used to deduce that there was something wrong with earlier models of our solar system.

Rhett Allain from Southeastern Louisiana University helps break down the physics concepts at play when it comes to the motion of our planets and the sun.

Through her exploration of a seemingly simple question, Caroline asks some big questions as she looks up to the stars – about life, the universe, and the nature of science itself.

Producer: Sam Baker

Featuring:

(Photo: Caroline and Devika, Sydney Observatory)

Anyone who has ever enjoyed a beach holiday will know there’s something special about being by the seaside. But does sea swimming actually have tangible health effects? This week’s listener Holly is a self-confessed water baby, and says her regular surf sessions on Sydney’s iconic Bondi beach make her feel happier and look younger. But could we get some of the benefits from the beach without getting our feet wet?

At the Plymouth Marine Lab, researchers have shown that the smell of the sea makes most people feel happier. They’re measuring sea spray aerosols containing natural compounds derived from algae, that dial down the inflammatory response in lung cancer cells. Other scientists in the region have investigated the use of virtual reality to simulate being by the coast, which is proven to reduce the experience of dental pain during treatment. Finally, we visit Teats Hill in Plymouth to find out how a waterside amphitheatre and an urban beach are helping residents feel safer and more connected to one another.

Producer: Marijke Peters

Editor: Richard Collings

Contributors:

Dr Frances Hopkins, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

Image credit: David Sacks | The Image Bank | Getty Images | 164241179

Created for the #BBCWorldService.

Lazy. Unmotivated. Procrastinating. If those are words you’re used to hearing from your inner critic, you are not alone. Take CrowdScience listener Laurie. On her days off she loves to relax on the sofa, watch TV, put off chores and generally do as little as possible. Meanwhile she sees other family members and colleagues apparently buzzing with energy: going the extra mile at work, taking up hobbies, going to the gym. Why, she asks, is she so lazy?

CrowdScience turns to experts to find out whether or not so-called ‘laziness’ is a fundamental part of biology or psychology; why some people have more energy than others; and we offer a few tips for boosting energy and motivation. Or maybe Laurie is just being a bit too hard on herself?

With psychologists Professor Fuschia Sirois and Dr Devon Price, anthropologist Professor Herman Pontzer and start-up entrepreneur Akhil Aryan.

Presented by Dr Alex Lathbridge

Image: Asleep under a book (Credit: RichVintage via Getty Images)

Meet the ostrich, one of nature’s most unusual creatures: a two-metre-tall, flightless bird that struts about the African savannah. CrowdScience listener Pat found herself entranced by seeing them on a wildlife documentary, where two ostriches were exhibiting some bizarre behaviour. According to her, the female was sitting on her eggs in a ‘nest’ that was barely a dent in the ground, while the male was just flapping his feathers around her. So Pat came to us to ask: what are ostriches for?

Anand receives an ostrich egg in the post and manages to cook it using a very specific and British process. Finally, designer Pascale Theron tells us about the history of the ostrich farming industry. It’s a classic rags-to-riches-to-rags tale, a manic boom at the start of the 20th Century all based around feathers that were worth their weight in gold.

Editor: Richard Collings

Production Co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris

Image credit: Phil Sansom & Anand Jagatia

Inside our gut lives an entire ecosystem of bacteria and microbes, called the microbiome. In fact, the human body contains trillions of microorganisms, which outnumber our cells by ten to one. This means that technically we are more microbe than human. But not only do these microbes rely on us to survive, we also rely on them for some vital bodily functions. So what impact do these trillions of microbes have on our health? That’s the question that’s been bothering CrowdScience listener Russell, from Canada.

Presenter Caroline Steel investigates. She visits the only museum in the world dedicated to microbes to ask exactly what they are, what they do and why we have so many of them inside our bodies. And she visits a microbiology lab filled with model guts to find out what impact the microbiome has on our physical health and if there is anything we can do to help our microbes function better.

Caroline finds out what impacts our microbiome, what we can do to improve our inner ecosystem, and how our microbes can take a disturbing turn on us after we die.

Produced by Hannah Fisher and presented by Caroline Steel for the BBC World Service.

Contributors:

Professor Glenn Gibson – Professor of Microbiology, University of Reading

Jasper Buikx – Microbiologist and Head of ARTIS Micropia

David Good – Doctoral Candidate at the University of Guelph

Image Credit: Microbiota of the human intestine/CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

CrowdScience listener Marie, in Sweden, has always had difficulty with her sense of time. She often thinks that events that happened years ago took place recently or that a holiday coming up is happening sooner than it is. So she wants to know if time is a sense, like the sense of taste or touch, and if it’s something she can learn.

Anand Jagatia talks to scientists who’ve studied time, memory and how our brains process and store the events in our lives to find an answer to Marie’s question.

Along the way he discovers why time speeds up as we get older, how our bodies register time passing and how our brains put everything that happens to us in order.

Featuring:

Dr Marc Wittmann, Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany

Presenter: Anand Jagatia

Sound Design: Julian Wharton

Production Co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris

Image credit: Peter Cade/ Stone/ Getty Images

What are the actual chances of finding alien life? The idea of meeting an extra-terrestrial has ignited imaginations for hundreds of years, and it has also inspired real science: the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - or Seti - is an organisation that brings together researchers across the world in pursuit of distant life forms. This same dream is on the mind of listener Andrew in Yorkshire in the UK, who has been looking into the sheer size of the universe, and wants to know: how many stars are there in existence, how many planets, and how many planets that could harbour life?

Presenter Marnie Chesterton sets off on a space odyssey to answer these questions. She starts at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, where University of Manchester astrophysicist Eamonn Kerins tells her the number of stars in the universe, and explains the Drake Equation - the mathematical formula that underpins SETI’s work. It is a series of seven numbers that combine to give you the probability of making contact with an alien civilisation. The next step after stars is the number of planets; Michelle Kunimoto of MIT, who works on Nasa’s TESS mission, explains the transit technique for finding distant worlds. Supposedly anyone can learn to use this technique, so Michelle puts Marnie to a test of her planet-hunting prowess.

Distant planets are a huge leap forward - but not all of them will be hospitable to life. Eamonn breaks down how scientists define a habitable planet, as well as how to determine habitability using telescope observations. Marnie speaks to Mary Angelie Alagao from the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand about a cutting-edge piece of optical kit designed to block out the light from stars so you can take direct images of the planets next to them. Finally, it is time to put everything together and get some actual numbers for listener Andrew - as well ask how long it could take to find proof of alien life.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

(Photo credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)

Compared to the entirety of human existence, our history of flying in aeroplanes is very short indeed. So what does this fast form of travel do to bodies that have evolved for land-based living? That's what listener Sofia wants to know after working as a flight attendant for over a decade.

What effect does working at 35,000 feet have on one's health? How disruptive to your circadian rhythms is hopping across ten time zones in less than 24 hours? What's happening in our stomachs if a crisp packet blows up to the point of popping as the cabin pressure changes? And why do we feel so darn dehydrated when we get off a plane?

Host Caroline Steel not only talks to the experts about everything from swollen ankles to what we should eat and drink on planes, she also records her own journey from London to Australia. She does just about everything wrong along the way, but the experts sort her out with some top tips for her next long-haul flight on how to avoid blood clots and even, how to avoid jet lag all together!

While in Australia, Caroline also visits a sleep lab where researchers can simulate jet lag to learn how to improve flight safety and the wellbeing of flight attendants and pilots.

Join Caroline on her journey as CrowdScience takes to the skies to find out what frequent flyers need to know when it comes cosmic ionising radiation and what we can all do to make that next flight a little more pleasant.

Produced by Sam Baker for the BBC World Service.

Featuring:

(Photo: Getty Creative # 1432221653)

How do we hear a sound and immediately know where it’s coming from?

That’s the question that CrowdScience listener Chiletso asked himself one day as he heard his son bounce a ball and instantly knew its direction. In this ear-opening episode, presenter Anand Jagatia sets out to discover what makes left, right, up and down, sound so different.

First, Anand gets blindfolded, so that Alan Archer-Boyd, former auditory scientist and lead engineer at BBC R&D, can put his sound localisation skills to the test. It turns out that having two ears and pinnae, those flappy bits of cartilage on the side of your head, help a lot.

Professor Eric Knudsen shares how the barn owl’s asymmetrical ears allow it to hunt mice, even in complete darkness.

And Anand uncovers how far he can push his own spatial hearing. Blind activist and researcher Thomas Tajo teaches him how to echolocate like a bat, and Dr Lore Thaler explains what is going on in the brain of experienced echolocators.

If you can, listen on headphones!

Presented by Anand Jagatia

Image: Boy with hands at his ears