Best-selling British writer Alan Hollinghurst talks about his Booker prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty.
In the summer of 1983 20-year-old graduate Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the glamorous Notting Hill home of ambitious Tory MP Gerald Fedden. Nick’s glittering party and politics filled life is contrasted with the realities of his sexuality and gay life in London of the mid 1980s. Against a backdrop of Thatcherite politics and the emerging Aids crisis of that decade The Line of Beauty explores themes of hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness and privilege.
(Photo: Alan Hollinghurst. Credit: Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images)
People often talk about being descended from apes. But go back a bit further and we have a more unlikely ancestor – fish. Improbable as it may sound, the creature that gave rise to every bird, reptile and mammal on Earth today lived a fully aquatic life.
So how did it switch to life on land? And how hard was it to swap swimming for walking and breathing fresh air? That’s what CrowdScience listener Pierre in France wants to know, and what Marnie Chesterton is in Scotland to find out. She goes fossil hunting with members of the TW:eed Project team, as they try to uncover remains of creatures that are crucial in helping solve the puzzle of terrestrial life. She also discovers the landscape these early ancestors walked into – an alien and relatively empty world completely different to what we see today - where grass and flowers were yet to evolve.
But not everything in this story is preserved in rock. Marnie goes to see a living relic of this period of evolution, and finds out what it can tell us about possibly the most important event in the history of our species.
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: Artists impression of underwater environment of Carboniferous swamp depicting a rhizodont; a large predatory fish. Credit: Mark Witton)
Unpleasant man-made noise is something that disturbs many of us and even damages our health. But as millions more people move into crowded cities around the world, it's a cacophony that we almost unavoidably create ourselves. CrowdScience listener Diana from New York City in the USA got in touch to ask how we can temper the din and live a more peaceful life. Presenter Anand Jagatia heads to an acoustics lab at the University of Salford in Manchester, UK, to meet the researchers and engineers investigating the best ways to make cities more pleasant for our ears whilst still maintaining the ‘buzz’ of city life. And reporter Chhavi Sachdev takes us to Mumbai in India, where we discover how sound mapping is being deployed on the city’s streets as the first step to improve the life and health of its citizens.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Jen Whyntie
(Image: Children cover their ears as the truck convoy front passes. Credit: Getty Images)
Revealed – the winning 51st Thing! What won the vote to be added to our list of 50? We asked for ideas for an extra “thing” that made the modern economy. We received hundreds of suggestions. Thousands of votes were cast on our shortlist of six. Now we have a winner. Discover what it is and why it is worthy of being Number 51.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
The plough was a simple yet transformative technology. It was the plough that kick-started civilisation in the first place – that, ultimately, made our modern economy possible. But the plough did more than create the underpinning of civilisation – with all its benefits and inequities. Different types of plough led to different types of civilisation.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Ben Crighton
(Photo: Farmer ploughing field, Credit: Shutterstock)
Is there any scientific proof of an afterlife? Six months ago, CrowdScience tackled a question from a listener who wanted to know whether there was life after death. But following more listener emails, presenter Marnie Chesterton returns to the subject to investigate the world of ghosts, souls and parapsychology. She meets Professor Susan Blackmore, who studies out-of-body experiences and has spent decades hunting for scientific proof of life after death. And she visits the woman who, despite dying in the 1950s, is alive and thriving on a cellular level and helping scientists find cures for cancer, Parkinson’s and other diseases, in laboratories across the world…
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
The global supply chain that keeps perishable goods at controlled temperatures has revolutionised the food industry. It widened our choice of food and improved our nutrition. It enabled the rise of the supermarket. And that, in turn, transformed the labour market: less need for frequent shopping frees up women to work. As low-income countries get wealthier, fridges are among the first things people buy: in China, it took just a decade to get from a quarter of households having fridges to nearly nine in ten.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: Fully loaded shelves, Credit: Shutterstock)
We test the science behind parasitic therapy to answer listener Michael’s question about whether intestinal worms can help us stay healthy, and visit a deworming programme in a rural Ugandan village.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
On this month’s World Book Club British writer Jane Gardam discusses her award-winning novel Old Filth with the studio audience at Broadcasting House and listeners from around the world.
Edward Feathers is a child of the Raj. His earliest memories are of his beloved Amah, a teenage Malay girl whom he is soon torn away from when he is sent back to be educated in pre-war England, so-called Home, where he is boarded out with strangers.
A career as a successful lawyer in Southeast Asia later earns him the nickname Old Filth, FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. Yet through it all Feathers has carried the wounds of his emotionally hollow childhood, wounds he now sets out to confront as an elderly widow.
The same basic idea links every welfare state: that the ultimate responsibility for ensuring people don’t starve on the street should lie not with family, or charity, or private insurers, but with government. This idea is not without its enemies. It is possible, after all, to mother too much. Every parent instinctively knows that there’s a balance: protect, but don’t mollycoddle; nurture resilience, not dependence. And if overprotective parenting stunts personal growth, might too-generous welfare states stunt economic growth?
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: Frances Perkins, Credit: Getty Images)
