Author: BBC World Service

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CrowdScience - What Do Our Accents Say About Us?

How do we end up speaking the way we do? What's happening in our brains and mouths to make us sound so different from each other - even when we’re speaking the same language? This week on CrowdScience we return to our listener Amanda’s question of why there are so many accents, and discover more about what our accents say about us.

We visit Glasgow in Scotland, home to one of the most distinctive dialects of English, to see how social status and age affect the way we speak; and investigate another of our listeners’ questions: is there really such a thing as a ‘political accent’?

But how do babies pick up accents in the first place – and is it impossible to learn new sounds later in life? Presenter Nastaran Tavakoli-Far discovers something unexpected about her own accent, visits a voice coach to try and sound Texan, and uses ultrasound to try and get her tongue round new sounds.

And you can find out how much of an accent expert you are, by taking part in our online quiz.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk Presenter: Nastaran Tavakoli-Far Producer: Cathy Edwards

(Image: Woman holds hand near ear and listens carefully alphabet letters flying in. Credit: Getty Images)

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Limited Liability Company

Nicholas Murray Butler was one of the great thinkers of his age: philosopher; Nobel Peace Prize-winner; president of Columbia University. When in 1911 Butler was asked to name the most important innovation of the industrial era, his answer was somewhat surprising. “The greatest single discovery of modern times,” he said, “is the limited liability corporation”. Tim Harford explains why Nicholas Murray Butler might well have been right. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: LLC. Credit: Getty Images)
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CrowdScience - Could a Computer Judge My Crime?

People said they’d never catch on. Mobile phones, the internet and even robot assembly lines all once seemed like niche technologies. But today they are at the heart of the modern world.

But just how far can technology go? Could machines start to compete with humans in making complex and life-changing decisions, like those made by lawyers and judges? That’s what CrowdScience listener Zackery Snaidman from Orlando in the US wants to know and presenter Marnie Chesterton has set out to find answers.

She starts at a hackathon in London, where she witnesses the birth and design of the UK’s new online court. And in Uganda, she hears how technology and social media is filling a crucial gap left by a shortage of human lawyers. Marnie is also surprised to discover a simple algorithm that regularly out-performs human judges in making bail decisions.

But could technology bring as many problems as it solves? Could seemingly ‘unbiased’ computers hide the prejudices of their makers? And more fundamentally: With our future liberty at stake, is the world ready to leave their fate in the hands of machines?

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

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Anna Lacey

(Image: Digitized Lady Justice. Credit: Getty Images)

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Dynamo

You might think electricity had an immediate and transformative impact on economic productivity. But you would be wrong. Thirty years after the invention of the useable light bulb, almost all American factories still relied on steam. Factory owners simply couldn’t see the advantage of electric power when their steam systems – in which they had invested a great deal of capital – worked just fine. Simply replacing a steam engine with an electric dynamo did little to improve efficiency. But the thing about a revolutionary technology is that it changes everything. And changing everything takes imagination. Instead of replacing their steam engines with electric dynamos, company bosses needed to re-design the whole factory. Only then would electric power leave steam behind. As Tim Harford explains, the same lag has applied to subsequent technological leaps – including computers. That revolution might be just beginning. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Dynamo AC exciter Siemens, Credit: Igor Golovniov/Shutterstock)
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CrowdScience - Why is it so Hard to Quit Smoking?

A billion people across the world smoke cigarettes, and many would agree it’s the hardest habit to quit. One such smoker, listener Sharif, emailed CrowdScience from Uzbekistan to ask if we could find out why giving up is so difficult. Marnie Chesterton travels to San Francisco to meet addiction experts and discovers how nicotine tricks smokers into thinking tobacco’s good for them. And we meet ex-smokers at a weekly therapy session aimed at retraining the brain.

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

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Marijke Peters

(Image: Lit cigarette. Credit: Getty Images)

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Leaded Petrol

In the 1920s lead was added to petrol. It made cars more powerful and was, according to its advocates, a “gift”. But lead is a gift which poisons people; something figured out as long ago as Roman times. There’s some evidence that as countries get richer, they tend initially to get dirtier and later clean up. Economists call this the “environmental Kuznets curve”. It took the United States until the 1970s to tax lead in petrol, then finally ban it, as the country moved down the far side of the environmental Kuznets curve. But as Tim Harford explains in this astonishing story, the consequences of the Kuznets curve aren’t always only economic. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Petrol Nozzle, Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images)
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CrowdScience - Does Time really Exist?

Earlier this year Crowdscience explored the question of time. Back then we were on a mission to uncover what the real time is and how we're able to measure time to ever greater degrees of accuracy. But as ever, the programme uncovered more questions than answers so presenter Anand Jagatia is back to try and find out where time comes from, why it runs forwards and not backwards, what happens to time in a black hole and does time even exist beyond our experience of it? We speak to Claudia Hammond, author of a book that reveals the mysteries of time perception and the man who defined time for the online Encyclopaedia Britannica, tells us if time really exists or not.

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

Presenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Rami Tzabar

(Image: Abstract clock image. Credit: Getty Images)

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World Book Club - Tim Winton – Cloudstreet

This month World Book Club is talking to chart-topping Australian writer Tim Winton about his unforgettable novel Cloudstreet.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton's sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday.

Precipitated by separate personal tragedies, two poor families flee their rural homes to share a "great continent of a house", Cloudstreet, in a suburb of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united and religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.

Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try to make the best of their lives.

(Picture: Tim Winton. Credit: BBC.)

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Department Store

Flamboyant American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge introduced Londoners to a whole new shopping experience, one honed in the department stores of late-19th century America. He swept away previous shopkeepers’ customs of keeping shopper and merchandise apart to one where “just looking” was positively encouraged. In the full-page newspaper adverts Selfridge took out when his eponymous department store opened in London in the early 1900s, he compared the “pleasures of shopping” to those of “sight-seeing”. He installed the largest plate glass windows in the world – and created, behind them, the most sumptuous shop window displays. His adverts pointedly made clear that the “whole British public” would be welcome – “no cards of admission are required”. Recognising that his female customers offered profitable opportunities that competitors were neglecting, one of his quietly revolutionary moves was the introduction of a ladies’ lavatory. Selfridge saw that women might want to stay in town all day, without having to use an insalubrious public convenience or retreat to a respectable hotel for tea whenever they wanted to relieve themselves. As Tim Harford explains, one of Selfridge’s biographers even thinks he “could justifiably claim to have helped emancipate women.” Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Images: Selfridges Christmas shop window, Credit: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
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CrowdScience - Do We Think in Words?

We're always up for a challenge on CrowdScience but this week’s question, which comes from an artist, tests our limits as we investigate the nature of thought itself – something that has puzzled scientists and philosophers since ancient times. Undeterred, presenter Nastaran Tavakoli-Far heads off to the Spanish island of Ibiza to visit listener Romanie in her painting studio and attempt to peer into the workings of her mind. As we explore the relationship between thought and language, why not join in with our experiments to discover if you’re thinking visually or verbally? We find out how language can affect thinking in surprising ways – why German speakers might see a bridge differently from Spanish speakers, how being bilingual can make you a better driver and even why some languages give their speakers a remarkable sense of direction.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk Presenter: Nastaran Tavakoli-Far Producer: Cathy Edwards

(Image: The Thinker a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin. Credit: Getty Images)