Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea

When you walk out your door today, it may be sunny, it may be windy, the waves may be crashing against the shores with an awesome fierceness. Or, you know, none of those things might be happening.

And therein lies one of the fundamental issues with renewable energy, its unpredictability.

But one thing that won’t happen when you go out there this morning is that you won’t float off into the air. Gravity is reliably keeping your feet on the ground and it will continue to do so ad infinitum.

So couldn’t we use this persistent force in some way to solve our energy woes?

Jill MacPherson is Senior Test & Simulation Engineer with Gravitricity - she joins Jonathan to discuss.

Jonathan is joined by Karen Bakker, Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and author of 'The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants' to explore the sounds in nature that we cannot hear.

Andrea Maier, Oon Chiew Seng Professor in Medicine, Healthy Ageing and Dementia Research, Co-Director at the Centre for Healthy Longevity, National University of Singapore, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam joins Jonathan to discuss what we can take to help us live longer.

Dr. Shane Bergin & Dr. Lara Dungan also joined Jonathan to run through the week's science news for Newsround.

As well as trying to sell you products you’ve just been talking about but don’t want, and beating humans at chess or Go or Mario cart, AI can actually do some real good in the world.

One field in which AI could really have a profound effect is medical diagnostics for instance.

Dr. Nikolas Pontikos is the Principal Investigator and Group Leader of the Pontikos Lab at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital - he joins Jonathan to discuss.

Physics, while absolutely fascinating, can be impenetrable.

And it isn't just cutting-edge ideas that can melt our brains, often we accept basic principles and ideas without really knowing how they work or even what they are.

This week, Jonathan is joined by Sean Carroll, physicist, and author of 'The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion', to explain some of the fundamental aspects of science we thought we knew.

Pain is a deeply subjective thing.

When it’s with us it’s all we can think about.

So, what is life like then for someone for whom pain never leaves?

Haider Warraich, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of 'The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain' joins Jonathan to discuss.

It can be easy to think poorly of humans.

When we're not destroying the planet or starting wars, we're likely off somewhere making fools of ourselves on social media.

We're not all bad though, as some people dedicate their spare time, and even their lives, to helping others.

But can we say the same about other animals? (We're looking at you, cats.)

Bob Pitman is a Marine Ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. He joins Jonathan to discuss.

Yiddish author and playwright Sholem Aleichem; the man whose stories formed the basis for 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof once proposed that “life is a dream for the wise but a game for the fool”. So, is modern technology and more specifically “Gamification” making fools of all of us?

Adrian Hon - CEO of Six to Start and author of You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All joined Jonathan on the show to discuss.

We have covered the lives and behaviors of bees a few times here on the programme. So much so we thought we’ve seen and heard it all.

Well, we may have been wrong about that…in particular, with something to do with the dance they perform in the hive and how it relates to their ability to communicate and navigate.

Prof. Jürgen Tautz is a bee expert, animal behaviorist and Emeritus Professor at the Biozentrum, University of Würzburg and author of ‘Communication Between Honeybees: More Than Just a Dance in the Dark’ and he joined Jonathan on the show.

Average adults' heart beats 72 times a minute. In a lifetime it creates enough energy to drive the truck to the moon and back and generates astonishingly 2,5 gigajoules of energy. Yet, cardiac arrests and heart diseases are major causes of death worldwide, despite decades of research.

How much further we'll have to go before we solve this problem? To discuss Jonathan was joined by Sian Harding, Emeritus Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, and author of The Exquisite Machine. The New Science of the Heart.

Drug development is notoriously slow and expensive to bring a new compound from the lab bench to market. A major cause of this inefficiency is the traditional reliance on testing drugs in animals before they are tested in humans. Animal models often do not accurately reflect human physiology, meaning that drugs that appear to be safe and effective in animals frequently turn out to be harmful or ineffective in humans.

The solution could come from computer microchip manufacturing methods to create “Organs-on-Chips", microfluidic culture devices that recapitulate the complex structures and functions of living human organs.

Dane Gobel, the Co-Founder and Operations Director of Methuselah Foundation joins Jonathan to discuss.