CrowdScience

CrowdScience goes interstellar this week to answer listeners’ questions about the future of space travel.

Marnie Chesterton heads to Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, where she hears about the engineering challenges of creating a spacecraft that could eventually take us all the way to Mars. Then there are the challenges of engineering the humans for that momentous journey. In space, no-one can hear you scream, which is probably a good thing if you’re going to be trapped in a metal box for two years with the same people, as you cruise through the void on your way to the red planet. So how do astronauts prepare for the physical and psychological impacts of long-term space travel? We also discover how space travel can be made greener and cleaner as the European Space Agency implement the next phase of their plan to tackle the millions of pieces of space debris floating around our planet that potentially, could impact a mission before it even leaves Earth orbit.

(Image: An astronaut in outer space. Credit: Getty Images)

Wouldn’t it be great if you could lose weight and stay fit just by exercising your brain? Trouble is everything takes so much effort - from burning off excess weight to powering our cars. But why?

Presenter Marnie Chesterton rummages through the CrowdScience inbox to tackle all your energy-expending queries. Is the entire universe spinning? How much energy do we expend when sleeping? Can I think myself thinner? Scientists Helen Czerski, Andrew Pontzen and Andrea Sella join listeners from around the world to discover how effort and energy affect our lives.

(Image: A young boy sits at an office desk searching for successful ideas using a homemade thinking cap with a lit up light bulb. Credit: Getty Images)

Loving someone who doesn’t love you in return makes us feel wretched – can science explain why we must suffer? Parental love makes perfect evolutionary sense but romance just seems to have it in for us time after time. CrowdScience listener Leja wants to know why we fall in and out of love.

Marnie Chesterton discovers the irrational things, the impulsive things and the financially ruinous things BBC World Service listeners have done in the name of love and meet the rapper who turned herself into a science subject in an effort to flush out thoughts of her ex-boyfriend.

We delve into our ancestral past and into our brains to find out why romantic love is so central to the human experience.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

Producer: Louisa Field

(Image: A loving couple hugging each other, the woman holding a rose. Credit: Getty Images)

From Russia to Rwanda, women live longer than men and have done so for over 100 years. But why? Is it encoded in our genes or is it something to do with the way we live? This is something CrowdScience listener Michelle from England has been wondering about.

From cradle to grave, Marnie Chesterton examines the complex web of factors that are involved in how men and women age differently. It seems that, right from the word go, male embryos are already in the firing line because of their genetics. Marnie hears how women’s genetics are configured so that they have a backup copy of some of their genes, whereas men only have one copy. Not only does this make male embryos less resilient (and therefore more likely to miscarry), men are also at risk of a set of genetic diseases later in life like haemophilia.

Puberty is an important component in this story too when a surge of hormones changes girls' and boys’ bodies into adults. But something in the way a boy develops sets them up for diseases late in life. They may be fitter, faster and stronger - all traits that were evolutionary important to make a man the alpha of the group - but this comes at a cost. For instance, the way that a man’s cardiovascular system is ‘configured’ means that they’re far more likely to have a heart attack than women. But it’s not just this, behaviour is also a really important factor and it’s why the gender gap in mortality differs from country to country. In Russia, the gap is nearly 13 years (the highest in the world) and it’s thought that a culture of heavy drinking and smoking is why women outlive men by more than a decade.

...which got Marnie thinking - could men change their destiny and outlive women?

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

Producer: Graihagh Jackson

(Photo: A group of ladies having coffee in modern café. Credit: Getty Images)

Removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere - and stopping it getting up there in the first place - is becoming increasingly urgent if we want to prevent catastrophic climate change. There are some seriously high tech machines being developed to try and tackle this problem, but could an equally powerful solution be found in the dirt under our feet? Prompted by New Zealand farmer and CrowdScience listener Kem, we dig deep to see how effectively plants and soils soak up CO2 from the air; and what that means for how we should farm the land around the world. And we visit a Scottish forest to find out how the ancient art of making charcoal is staging a comeback in the fight against climate change.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

Producer: Cathy Edwards for BBC World Service

(Photo: A young plant in soil, in the morning light. Credit: Getty Images)

We may take our ability to smell for granted but it’s a far more complex sense than many people realise. Listener Annabel wants Crowdscience to investigate why perfume makes her queasy, so Anand Jagatia sets out to discover why we can’t all agree when we follow our noses. He gets a whiff of the world’s stinkiest flower - and finds some people enjoy it – then asks what’s happening in the brain when we love or hate a scent. But could our different perceptions about this under-appreciated sense actually come down to a lack of words to describe it? He hears about one culture which has developed its own language for smell.

Presenter: Anand Jagatia

Producer: Marijke Peters

(Image: A woman smelling roses. Credit: Getty Images)

Communicating quickly, accurately and, ideally, in a way that's well-received is no easy feat, wherever you live in the world. For this week's listener, who lives and works in several different countries as a member of the armed forces, good communication can be a matter of life or death. And this doesn’t just affect military life – anyone who flies on aeroplanes may be interested to hear how clear use of language is crucial for airline safety.

But what do we mean by an efficient language – it is the fastest and most accurate speech, or most widely understood in multiple countries? Maybe there’s even some technology – a machine out there that can do the communicating more efficiently than we can? Presenter Marnie Chesterton attempts to apply science and evidence to the art of speech, in a quest to discover what language is the most efficient on Earth.

Produced by Jen Whyntie

(Image: A group of people holding up speech bubbles sitting on a bench. Credit: Getty Images)

From IVF to premature babies we explore what science we would need to make a baby outside the body in a pursuit to answer a question from Nigerian listener, Aminu asking: Can we make an artificial womb?

To find out, presenter Nastaran Tavakoli-Far gets very close to a uterus transplant operation, peers at the earliest cells of a placenta, and sees a disembodied womb being kept alive in a box full of artificial blood. She asks how close current reproductive medicine brings us to gestating babies in a lab.

Producer: Rory Galloway

(Photo: A human fetus. Credit: Getty Images)

How should we tackle the biggest clean-up job in history? Listener Michelle from Ireland sends CrowdScience to investigate what to do with years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel. Most of the highly toxic waste is a by-product from nuclear power production and the stockpiles across the world continue to grow. “Could we blast it into the sun? Dilute it across the continent? Or should we bury it?” Michelle asks.

We travel deep into the Finnish bedrock to visit what could be its final resting place and speak to the scientists who are securing the facility many ice-ages into the future. The nastiest stuff in the waste soup needs to stay put for thousands of years before it becomes safe. No man-made structure has ever before lasted so long. The Finnish solution is not easy to replicate in other countries as communities oppose nuclear waste being permanently buried in their backyard.

Presenter Marnie Chesterton discovers that scientists have come up with solutions that could let us recycle the spent fuel more effectively, but it costs more than the industry is willing to spend. The clean-up job of the century comes down to dollars and not science.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

Producer: Louisa Field

(Photo: a man in protective workwear in waste factory. Credit: Getty Images)

Mohammed is from India and he’s blind. He emailed CrowdScience because he wanted to know more about new technologies that could help him see again. Specifically, he was interested in artificial vision - what is it and what does it look like?

Bobbie Lakhera travels to Germany to find out. There, she meets a blind patient called Manuel. He’s about to have a major operation. A computer chip will be implanted into his eye and his surgeon, Florian Gekeler, believes that it will restore some of Manuel’s sight.

But what happens if you have no eyes for a chip like this to be inserted into? Bobbie speaks to Dr Nader Pouratian about his brain prosthesis. Because the implant is attached directly to the visual cortex of the brain, it means you could have no eyes or no optic nerve and you could still see with this type of therapy.

Whilst both these technologies are limited to black and white vision, Bobbie asks whether one day we may be able to develop systems that give those living with blindness 20/20 vision.

Presenter: Bobbie Lakhera

Producer: Graihagh Jackson

(Photo: A female iris, bionic eye concept. Credit: Getty Images)