Month: June 2017

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Tax Havens

The economist Gabriel Zucman is the inventor of an ingenious way to estimate the amount of wealth hidden in the offshore banking system. In theory, if you add up the assets and liabilities reported by every global financial centre, the books should balance. But they don’t. Each individual centre tends to report more liabilities than assets. Zucman crunched the numbers and found that, globally, total liabilities were eight percent higher than total assets. That suggests at least eight percent of the world’s wealth is illegally unreported. Other methods have come up with even higher estimates. As Tim Harford explains, that makes the tax haven a very significant feature of the modern economy. Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon Producer: Ben Crighton (Image: Huts along tropical beach, Credit: DonLand/Shutterstock)
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The Gist - Jon Ronson on Writing the Year’s Wildest Movie

The new movie Okja has pretty much everything. Car chases. Giant mutant pigs. A dystopian future. Jake Gyllenhaal with an outlandish moustache. A subtle social message. Tilda Swinton pretending to be Tony Blair. The movie is written by Korean director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer) and returning guest Jon Ronson. Ronson takes us into the craft of writing the year’s wildest movie. 

In the Spiel, why congressional comity is overrated.

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CrowdScience - Can Your Lifestyle Be Passed on to Future Generations?

Back when Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested something different - that the changes you are exposed to during your lifetime can be passed on to future generations. By this theory, giraffes have long necks because, over generations, they have stretched them, reaching for leaves.

This theory became laughable when genes were discovered as the means of heredity. Lifestyle choices cannot be passed down in your DNA, or so we thought….But recently this idea has returned and a new field of biology has emerged called epigenetics – which looks at how the genes we inherit from our parents are controlled and modified by their life experience and the choices they made.

Marnie Chesterton meets the survivors of the Dutch Famine of World War Two, whose grandchildren show health effects from that event despite being born three generations after the starvation of 1944.

As the new field of epigenetics develops, does this mean Lamarck was right all along? Can your lifestyle be passed on to future generations and does this mean we need to rethink our traditional view of evolution?

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

Presented and Produced by Marnie Chesterton

(Image: Grandmother, Mother and Daughter in a kitchen. Credit: Getty Images)

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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know - Could we still discover unknown large animals?

Experts believe that millions of undiscovered species exist in the modern day -- but most are tiny microbes and insects. What if there are much larger undiscovered creatures out there? What would they look like? Where would they be? And, if they exist, will human beings ever find them?

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