ResearchPod

Welcome to ResearchPod - a science communications podcast connecting you to research from across disciplines and across the world. Stay tuned for interviews, articles, exposés, and all the latest from academia.

Find our episodes and more at researchpod.org, and follow us on your podcast player of choice.

40 years ago, the Alexander L Kielland oil platform suffered a catastrophic structural failure and sank into the North Sea, with 123 of the crew onboard losing their lives. Today, Dr Edwin France brings his decades of experience in welding engineering to bear on the report into the cause of the collapse, and describes his different conclusions.

Read Dr Frances paper on the platform collapse here, and visit his website here.

What makes a great work of music what it is? What integrates a given piece as one coherent whole? It may help to step back and ask what makes any given thing essentially itself. Fortunately, Aristotle can help us understand this question and its surprising ramifications.

John MacAuslan’s research explains this search for a thing’s essence and how philosophy can help us gain further understanding of our thinking about music.

Read more about his work in the Journal Of Essence and Context

Air pollution directly contributes to a host of health concerns, and is of increasing concern in highly industrialised cities. For insights beyond air quality sensors installed by local government, Dr Andrew May has engaged with citizen scientists and STEM students to  gather vast quantities of data. Dr May and colleagues at Ohio State University are teaming up with local teachers and students to deploy low-cost air quality sensors throughout Central Ohio. They aim to identify areas for much needed air quality control, whilst integrating scientific learning within the local school curriculum.

Read more about the project at Research Outreach , with the original research paper available here.

Despite best efforts, the origin of life on Earth remains an open mystery. In a recent analysis bridging physics, evolutionary biology and the philosophy of just what life is, Prof Stuart Kauffman suggests autocatalytic sets of energetically favourable molecules making each other, and in turn themselves, as the building blocks of life as we know it.

His interview touches on the limits of Newtonian and quantum physics, philosophical definitions of life and self, and the Anthropocene era of resource scarcity on a changing planet.

Find out more about Prof Kauffmans work at the Institute for Systems Biology, and read his recent paper here.

Dr Nanette Boyle leads a lab which uses genetic engineering to design photosynthetic organisms capable of producing sustainable fuels and chemicals .

Her most recent work has been the creation of powerful computer modelling tools which are able to predict the growth and production of these organisms. This will ultimately speed up the development of the industrial scale algae-based biofuels.

Read more about her work at Research Outreach. The original research is available here.

Many toddlers and infants go through a phase of picky eating – this won’t come a surprise to anyone, and is probably an intimately familiar story to many listeners – however, what kind of effect does picky eating at so young an age have on later health and habits? How is that affected by changing diets? And what’s the best way to encourage children to try something new?

Read more about the research from Dr Caroline Taylor and Dr Pauline Emmett here, and follow their project at the Bristol University website.
The original research paper is available here.

Many of us will have heard the phrase "To err is human, to forgive divine", but personally internalising and scientifically measuring that forgiveness between people and as religious experiences is an ongoing field of research. Prof Frank Fincham has spent the last few years working on that field, looking at the relationship those who seek forgiveness, those who grant it, and those seek forgiveness from a higher power.

Read more about Prof Finchams work at Research Outreach, and through his own academic archive. Read his recent publication on divine forgiveness here.

The melt and recession of glaciers has been an environmental concern since the early 1900s, and make up a large part of the measurement and communication of climate change today. The study of biogeochemistry and microorganisms on arctic and alpine glaciers requires specialised sensors and inventive approaches to data gathering, which Dr Liz Bagshaw of Cardiff University has just returned from testing in the field.  Today, we’re talking about how glaciology combines physics, engineering and biology, and the importance of climate communications.

Follow Dr Bagshaws work through her staff page at Cardiff University, and find her lab on Twitter: @CardiffColdClim.

Her recent publication is available here.

Professor Jack Gallant from the University of California, Berkeley, tells us how his team are building an atlas to the semantic system and revealing how our cerebral cortex turns language into meaning.

Read more about this research at Research Features
Original research available here