Listener Pogo wants to know why there aren’t any cabbages – or any of the other vegetables – in his local forest. Where did they all come from? And could they someday disappear? Presenter Gareth Barlow goes hunting for wild snacks in a city park and unearths the evolution of our most beloved greens. The vegetables on our supermarket shelves today were not always nicely wrapped and tasty. Humans have been selecting for specific genes in plants for thousands of years by choosing to grow those we liked the most.
Tomatoes have been transformed from a small prickly desert plant in Peru into a water guzzler with round, juicy, sweet fruits. But with breeding – and sometimes cloning – of plants we have also created genetic bottlenecks in many of the crops we rely heavily on. This has left many of our vegetables across the world vulnerable to shifts in climate, natural disasters, wars and diseases.
To find solutions to this massive breach in food security, CrowdScience heads to the Millennium Seed-bank in England. By collecting and storing our most precious seeds in vaults beneath the ground, scientists are protecting the genetic diversity that we will need to overcome the challenges ahead.
Presenter: Gareth Barlow
Producer: Louisa Field
Picture: Man holding basket of vegetables
Credit: Getty Images/valentinrussanov
While generally accepted that inequality is a bad thing, how exactly is that so? Beyond philosophical arguments, what is it about inequality that makes it bad? That’s a question that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett examined at a societal scale in their 2009 book The Spirit Level and have continued at an individual level with their newest book, The Inner Level. The volume’s subtitles help explain the evolution; Spirit’s is “Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger” while Inner’s is “How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing.”
In this Social Science Bites podcast, social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson lays out the case that inequality should be fought specifically because it fosters a litany of ill effects. (In 2013, his partner Pickett laid out the case for equality in her own Bites podcast.)
“In The Spirit Level,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds, “we showed that in more-unequal countries, with bigger income gaps between rich and poor, there is more of a whole range of health and social problems. Life expectancy tends to be lower, more obesity, higher homicide rate, more people in prison, more drug problems, more mental illness. Basically what we showed was that all the problems that have what we call social gradients, problems that are more common down on the social ladder, get worse when you increase the status differences between us.”
What’s surprising, he adds, is that these negatives don’t just punch down – while the effects are stronger among the poor in fact they affect broad swathes of the population. Being well off does not inoculate you from the malign effects of inequality.
Knowing that, Wilkinson and Pickett, armed with additional research that’s taken place in the last eight years, started to look at how that occurs. Wilkinson said at the time Spirit published they didn’t feel they had enough details to lay out the cause, but their hunch was that it revolved around status, “how inequality creates, or strengthens, feelings of superiority and inferiority.”
As he explains here, based on massive and repeated questionnaires, we know that status anxiety – and its ill effects such as worsening health -- affects everyone, the super-rich and the dirt-poor, in the most unequal countries. Status anxiety, he suggests becomes an ironic unifying characteristic across an unequal landscape, which in turn leads him to speculate that if this were recognized it could an earlier step toward creating a more equal society.
The podcast concludes with Wilkinson offering advice on creating that society by addressing income inequality by developing “economic democracy,” since an egalitarian society reduces these negative effects described above and makes us happier and healthier overall.
Wilkinson is professor emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, an honorary professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London and visiting professor at University of York. He co-founded The Equality Trust, with support from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and remains a member if the trust’s board.
Sex – for most organisms - is about meeting the right partner. But what if you and your mate are stuck far apart with no ability to travel? This dilemma could put a bit of a downer on your sex life, but is faced by plants everywhere. Presenter Anand Jagatia uncovers the happy fact that not only have plants overcome this problem, they positively excel at it. From hay fever to honey, the sexual strategies of plants affect us daily, and we couldn’t live without their success. In this episode, CrowdScience is answering the questions you sent after a previous episode entitled ‘Can plants talk?’ which explored the way plants and trees use a fungal network to communicate. This time, we explore how plants ‘feel’ bees as they fly past, and more complex communication involving the ‘wood wide web’.
Presenter Anand Jagatia
Producer: Rory Galloway
(Image: A yellow dandelion flower attracts a pollinator in the evening sunlight. Credit: Getty Images)
Some of the biggest reserves of freshwater are right under our feet and they're really important for farming as well as providing us with water to drink. However, in some areas of the world, groundwater is being slurped up quicker than it can be replenished. In fact, about 1.7 billion people live in regions where groundwater is under stress, 60% of them in India and China. This figure is set to rise as the climate changes and as the population grows.
CrowdScience listener Waheed from Afghanistan wants to know if we will run out of groundwater and what the repercussions might be. Marnie Chesterton trots around the globe to find out, starting with a row on the River Thames before hearing from Afghanistan to understand what’s happening where Waheed lives. She learns of what has happened to London, Mexico and Malta when they over pumped their aquifers. Finally, Marnie looks to Bangalore where the population is booming to understand how they’re coping with increasing demands on water.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Graihagh Jackson
(Image: Children holding their hands up - asking for drinking water. Credit: Getty Images)
What sounds heavenly to one person might sound like boring noise to another - but why are our musical preferences so different? Is it all down to what we hear growing up, or are other factors at play?
CrowdScience listener and music lover Jocelyne from Canada wants to know why she has a different song for every mood, and why she likes different music from her friends and family.
Meanwhile in Italy, composer Elisabetta Brusa asks us whether the rules of harmony align with the laws of science, and should therefore not be broken.
We talk to both musicians and neuroscientists to explore the truth about harmony and discord. We find out how age, personality and experience all affect whether we find certain songs pleasing or offensive, and learn why the search for the true universals of music pleasure is a race against time.
Hypnosis has a long and controversial history, with its roots in animal magnetism or mesmerism, the theory developed by 18th Century German doctor Franz Mesmer. He believed he had discovered an invisible natural force possessed by all living things, and that he could channel this force for healing purposes.
Popularity of hypnosis has since waxed and waned, but was largely denounced as quackery until the 20th Century, when it began to be studied scientifically. However it is only in the last twenty years or so that is has become incorporated into mainstream science and medicine.
But is it a real phenomenon, asks listener Gratian from Poland; and Anton from Ireland wants to know how it works and what happens to people’s brains and bodies under hypnosis?
CrowdScience speaks to Dr Quinton Deeley, consultant psychiatrist and senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, who has used it in practice for many years, and Dr Amir Raz, a magician-turned-neuroscientist who is shedding light on how hypnosis works. To see how hypnosis is being used clinically, CrowdScience visits the Berkeley Clinic in Glasgow, Scotland, to witness a hypnotised patient having a tooth extracted with very little anaesthesia.
Meanwhile, presenter and self-confessed arachnophobe Nastaran Tavakoli-Far takes part in the Friendly Spider programme at London Zoo, an afternoon event that uses hypnotherapy and group therapy to ease or eliminate the fear of spiders.
Presenter: Nastaran Tavakoli-Far
Producer: Helena Selby
(Image: A silver pocket watch swinging on a chain on a black background to hypnotize. Credit: Getty Images)
Electric cars are labelled as ‘zero emissions’ vehicles – but what does that really mean? Jack Stewart puts your questions about EVs to the experts. According to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, just how green your EV is compared to a petrol or diesel vehicle, depends on how the electricity powering the battery was produced, as well as how cleanly the battery itself was manufactured. Jack also explores what could be a compelling alternative to plugging in – filing up with Hydrogen, and creating nothing but water as exhaust.
Presenter: Jack Stewart
Producer: Rami Tzabar
(Image: Electric cars on charge. Credit: Getty Images)
How did humans diverge so markedly from animals? Apart from physical things like our “physical peculiarities,” as experimental psychologist Celia Heyes puts it, or our fine motor control, there’s something even more fundamentally – and cognitively -- different.
“I suppose at the broadest level,” Heyes tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “we differ from animals because we are so ultra-social, so intensely cooperative. And as a result, we’ve transformed our environments, for good or ill, more radically than any other species through things like agriculture, technology, science, but also, law, trade to the point of economies and finance, fine arts, sports, all of these things.”
Heyes, a senior research fellow in theoretical life sciences at All Souls College, University of Oxford, argues that we’ve evolved those differences, or “innate modules.” That may sound like evolutionary psychology, which suggests that many of these traits are pre-coded into humans -- “we get them for free,” as Heyes translates -- and therefore are minimally dependent on what we experience in childhood. While Heyes appreciates the evolutionary aspect of natural selection and agrees there is some sort of genetic starter kit,” but she says the locus of evolution is not genetic but cultural.
She points to things like cross-cultural differences in beliefs and behavior or the ability to read, which hasn’t had time to be genetically encoded (even if it can be observed lighting up only certain parts of the brain) but it can have evolved culturally.
Heyes’ research and theories place her all over the academic map, but she describes herself as “part biologist, part philosopher, but I am first and foremost a psychologist.” A fellow of the British Academy and president of the Experimental Psychology Society, her latest book is the brand new Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking from Harvard University Press.
For some it's a way to get closer to God, for others a tried and tested way to lose weight - but listener Amine wants to know if fasting has any other, unexpected health benefits? So presenter Marnie Chesterton cuts down on cookies and investigates the science behind low-calorie or time-restricted eating. She hears how some cells regenerate when we're deprived of food, which one researcher says could reduce breast cancer rates. And she finds out what happens in our brains when our bodies rely on our own fat reserves for fuel.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Marijke Peters
(Image: Clock on an empty plate. Credit: Getty Images)
Why is it that computers are so much faster than brains at some tasks?
Or could human brains one day be used to better effect? Listener Praveen from India was wondering how it can be that supercomputers are so very powerful compared to the human minds that created them. So CrowdScience, with the help of a small voice-activated guest presenter, is off to discover how the first computers remembered what they were told, how a million processors are being connected together to mimic a small percentage of a human brain, and how the mind-boggling speeds of modern computing is enabling the current leaps in artificial intelligence.
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Speakers:
Sarah Baines, David Lewis - Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester
James Sumner, Steve Furber - University of Manchester
Aldo Faisal - Imperial College, London.
(Photo: 3D transparent human head and brain image. Credit: Getty images)
