Communicating quickly, accurately and, ideally, in a way that's well-received is no easy feat, wherever you live in the world. For this week's listener, who lives and works in several different countries as a member of the armed forces, good communication can be a matter of life or death. And this doesn’t just affect military life – anyone who flies on aeroplanes may be interested to hear how clear use of language is crucial for airline safety.
But what do we mean by an efficient language – it is the fastest and most accurate speech, or most widely understood in multiple countries? Maybe there’s even some technology – a machine out there that can do the communicating more efficiently than we can? Presenter Marnie Chesterton attempts to apply science and evidence to the art of speech, in a quest to discover what language is the most efficient on Earth.
Produced by Jen Whyntie
(Image: A group of people holding up speech bubbles sitting on a bench. Credit: Getty Images)
From IVF to premature babies we explore what science we would need to make a baby outside the body in a pursuit to answer a question from Nigerian listener, Aminu asking: Can we make an artificial womb?
To find out, presenter Nastaran Tavakoli-Far gets very close to a uterus transplant operation, peers at the earliest cells of a placenta, and sees a disembodied womb being kept alive in a box full of artificial blood. She asks how close current reproductive medicine brings us to gestating babies in a lab.
How should we tackle the biggest clean-up job in history? Listener Michelle from Ireland sends CrowdScience to investigate what to do with years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel. Most of the highly toxic waste is a by-product from nuclear power production and the stockpiles across the world continue to grow. “Could we blast it into the sun? Dilute it across the continent? Or should we bury it?” Michelle asks.
We travel deep into the Finnish bedrock to visit what could be its final resting place and speak to the scientists who are securing the facility many ice-ages into the future. The nastiest stuff in the waste soup needs to stay put for thousands of years before it becomes safe. No man-made structure has ever before lasted so long. The Finnish solution is not easy to replicate in other countries as communities oppose nuclear waste being permanently buried in their backyard.
Presenter Marnie Chesterton discovers that scientists have come up with solutions that could let us recycle the spent fuel more effectively, but it costs more than the industry is willing to spend. The clean-up job of the century comes down to dollars and not science.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Louisa Field
(Photo: a man in protective workwear in waste factory. Credit: Getty Images)
Fake news, whether truly phony or merely unpalatable, has become an inescapable trope for modern media consumers. But apart from its propagandist provenance, misinformation and disinformation in our media diets is a genuine threat. Sociologist Nick Adams, in this Social Science Bites podcast, offers hope that a tool he’s developed can improve the media literacy of the populace.
That tool, known as Public Editor, allows trained volunteers to do one of seven assessment tasks within 15 minutes of looking at passages from a news article. Several volunteers will answer a series of questions based on the passage that’s meant to elicit information about the passage’s logical accuracy and critical thinking, and a ‘credibility score’ to be posted on the article results.
Public Editor, Adams tells interview David Edmonds, will display “article labels that will show and point out for a news reader, as they are reading, inferential mistakes, argumentative fallacies, psychological biases.” And because this will all be done within 30 minutes of the article arriving at Public Editor – and hence before readers can allow their biases to cement around what they’ve read -- “this is going to change how people read the news and raise their media literacy.”
While there will be naysayers, Adams defends Public Editor’s intent and structure. “This whole endeavor is about building legitimacy, building trust, through a social process. We’ve codified that social process, and substantiated it, in code, in software, in a way that’s totally transparent.”
Adams’ wider interests dovetail with Public Editor – his interest in social science technology and on social issues. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, where he founded the Computational Text Analysis Working Group at the university’s D-Lab and the interdisciplinary Text Across Domains initiative at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He is currently the CEO of Thusly, Inc, which developed TagWorks, a web-based content analysis software for researchers.
“Right now,” he tells Edmonds, “we have more words to analyze than we’ve ever had in the history of history. That’s because we’re generating so many every single day but also because we’re digitizing ancient records going back millennia. As a social scientist,” he adds, “I’m really excited to get my hands on that data and get rich information out of it.”
Explaining that “rich data” can – but doesn’t have to be – “big data,” Adams drew an example from his own work.
“So I might be looking at something like trying to understand police and protester interactions by looking at the Occupy movement. And I can look at 8,000 news articles, which is not very much – it’s not even going to tax your laptop to process that amount of data. But when you start to put sociological concepts into the data as labels that you can count and then put into time series, multi-level models, you’re starting to talk about very rich data that afford you the ability to understand social processes like we couldn’t before.”
Mohammed is from India and he’s blind. He emailed CrowdScience because he wanted to know more about new technologies that could help him see again. Specifically, he was interested in artificial vision - what is it and what does it look like?
Bobbie Lakhera travels to Germany to find out. There, she meets a blind patient called Manuel. He’s about to have a major operation. A computer chip will be implanted into his eye and his surgeon, Florian Gekeler, believes that it will restore some of Manuel’s sight.
But what happens if you have no eyes for a chip like this to be inserted into? Bobbie speaks to Dr Nader Pouratian about his brain prosthesis. Because the implant is attached directly to the visual cortex of the brain, it means you could have no eyes or no optic nerve and you could still see with this type of therapy.
Whilst both these technologies are limited to black and white vision, Bobbie asks whether one day we may be able to develop systems that give those living with blindness 20/20 vision.
Presenter: Bobbie Lakhera
Producer: Graihagh Jackson
(Photo: A female iris, bionic eye concept. Credit: Getty Images)
When it comes to speed, humans have got nothing on cheetahs - or greyhounds, kangaroos or zebras for that matter. It’s over long distances we really come into our own: when running for hours or even days, our body structure and excellent sweating skills make us able to outpace much faster mammals.
But what are the limits of human endurance? Can we run ever further and faster, and what’s the best diet to fuel such ambitions?
This week’s questions come from two CrowdScience listeners in Japan who already know a fair bit about stamina, having run several marathons and long-distance triathlons between them. We head to Greece, legendary birthplace of the marathon, to witness an even more arduous challenge: hundreds of athletes following in the footsteps of the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides, to run an astonishing 246km across the country. The ever-so-slightly less fit CrowdScience team do our best to keep up, and try to discover the secrets of these runners’ incredible endurance.
Would you willingly break a mirror, walk under a ladder or cut up an image of someone you love - or might you be worried about tempting fate – even if you don’t believe in supernatural forces?
Anand Jagatia enters the world of magical thinking on behalf of CrowdScience listeners to explore why - even in this era of scientific rationalism – superstition, magic and belief in concepts like the evil eye and luck appear deeply entrenched in our cultures and psyche.
Meeting historians and psychologists, Anand sets out to reveal the enduring lure of superstition and explore the biological factors that can influence us, like how our brains have evolved to look for connections and find patterns in seemingly random events.
Is it possible that some people are ‘lucky’ and can we enhance our own ‘luck’? Experimental evidence is thin on the ground but finger’s crossed, CrowdScience can find some.
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Melanie Brown
(Image: A handmade Voodoo Doll with pins. Getty Images)
As the US reaches the end of another hurricane season listener Kelly wants to know if it’s possible to prevent these devastating storms? She lives in Florida, the hurricane capital of the world, and has survived 100mph winds whipping through her home. But could science hold the solution to these extreme weather events?
Marnie Chesterton had the unique opportunity to fly into hurricane Florence with the weather scientists gathering data that helped forecasters predict its path, and reports from on board a plane near the eye of the storm. She hears from one researcher who wants to ‘whiten’ clouds to lower sea temperatures and reduce hurricane formation but learns others fear interventions like this could have unintended consequences elsewhere.
Andrew Leigh would take a daily a multivitamin, he says, until he learned that a randomized controlled trial, or RCT, found no increase in lifespan linked to taking them. So he stopped. Leigh isn’t a nutritionist, he’s an economist. But more to the point, Leigh is also an unrepentant ‘randomista,’ which is what he calls researchers who use RCT’s to tackle thorny issues of public concern. (Leigh is also a politician, 2010 sitting since as the member of Australia’s Parliament for the Division of Fenner, a Canberra suburb.)
The word ‘randomista,’ Leigh tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcasts, was coined by Nobel laureate Angus Deaton (also a Bites alumnus) “as “a term almost of abuse – but I’ve turned it into a compliment!” (It’s also the title of his new book, Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World.)
“Deaton had noticed that there were randomized trials proliferating across development economics,” Leigh explains, “and felt that in some areas they were becoming almost theory-free. I think it’s perhaps a reasonable criticism in some parts of development economics, but certainly for most questions, I think we’re doing too few randomized trials instead of too many.”
For Leigh, the proper definition of a randomista is “someone who believes we can find answers to important questions by tossing a coin and putting people into a treatment and control group, comparing the outcome, and then using the randomization to get a true causal effect.”
Randomized controlled trials have been used for years in drug testing, but are increasingly being used in business, crime prevention, education and social science. The origin of RCTs is a matter of some dispute, but Leigh uses the scurvy trials of James Lind, whose apples-to-apples comparison of various anti-scorbutic therapies in vogue in the 18th century allowed the Royal Navy to beat its most deadly enemy – yes Bonaparte, but in reality scurvy itself.
These days, RCTs are used as much to kill bad policies as they are to save lives. Leigh offers a litany of popular social programs that actual research demonstrated had the opposite effect of what they intended. For example, trials showed the Scared Straight program not only didn’t keep nonserious juvenile offenders from committing more serious crimes, it may have increased the odds they would. Other RCTs showed that while microcredit has some benefits, it doesn’t seem to improve household income, keep kids in school or improve women’s lot in life.
“Randomized trials are where scientific literacy meets modesty,” Leigh quips.
There are, of course, success stories, too, and Leigh cites drug courts and restorative justice as two public safety wins endorsed by RCTs. Leigh even used an RCT himself in naming his book, buying ads with various titles on Google to fine which resonated most. Total cost? About $50 and an hour of effort.
“I am aware that I look a little bit like a man with a hammer ranging around hoping to find nails. If you want to know about the impact of denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, a randomized trial is probably not your best way of working it out. But there are surprising areas in which you can figure things out.”
Before Leigh ran for Parliament Leigh was a professor at the Australian National University. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. His books include Disconnected (2010), Battlers and Billionaires (2013), The Economics of Just About Everything (2014), The Luck of Politics (2015), and Choosing Openness: Why Global Engagement is Best for Australia (2017).
As the show that takes your questions and turns them into audio adventures reaches its 100th episode, Marnie Chesterton revisits a few of our most liked, talked-about, and inbox-filling programmes to find out how science is getting on with the answers. Marnie heads to a place where important queries have been tackled for hundreds of years - the University of Cambridge in the UK - to chase down some burning follow-ups on topics that have piqued your interest. She finds out what the future holds for the next generation of batteries as they're expected to power everything from smart phones to your car and even your house. Then she scrubs up to tackle your tough questions on the best ways to keep clean.
Finally, Marnie visits a memory laboratory at Cambridge University to discover whether the very process of asking questions might be one way to help us remember more.
(Photo: A woman from a group raises her hand to ask a question. Credit: Getty Images)
