What is light and can we trap it in a box? On this edition of CrowdScience, Marnie Chesterton brings you a kaleidoscope of colourful questions from listeners around the world, from Kampala to Chicago. Shireen asks why people have a favourite colour and whether other animals show colour preferences too. Marnie heads to the zoo to see what the birds, bees and butterflies think. There, she meets a colour-changing chameleon to find out how and why it does because of a question from Dramadri in Uganda.
Meanwhile, Paul in Melbourne is interested to know more about colour blindness. And finally, Feroze asks why we only see a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and wants to know if we might, one day, hack our vision to see beyond the seven colours of the rainbow.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Graihagh Jackson
(Photo: Stardust and magic in a woman hands on a dark background. Credit: Getty Images)
Hedgehogs are the UK’s favourite British mammal. They have cute furry faces, a snuffly nose and the ability to gobble up garden slugs. What’s not to like? Answer: quite a lot if you live in the Outer Hebrides. Hedgehogs were introduced to South Uist in the 1970s as garden pest controllers, but are now serious pests in their own right – munching their way through the eggs and chicks of globally important wading bird populations. This emblem of cuteness is really a killer. So what’s to be done?
That’s the quandary facing this week’s CrowdScience thanks to a question from Juan Carlos in Cuba. He wants to know how different parts of the world are dealing with invasive species – one of the biggest threats to global biodiversity. Presenter Anand Jagatia heads to the Uists to hear how having an invader that’s loved by millions can cause a whole host of problems. He also discovers how various warring parties eventually came together to solve this very prickly problem.
Also in the programme, Anand travels to South Africa to find out how researchers are coping with invasive trees by introducing another non-native species. While in the Caribbean, we hear how people are dealing with invasive fish by eating them.
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Anna Lacey
(Photo: A European hedgehog. Credit: Getty Images)
Explicit statements of prejudice are less common than in the past (even if they are still easily found). “I see that as a mark of progress,” says social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. But peer a little below the surface, she adds, “even though you might reject an explicit bias, you actually have the implicit version of it.”
“The brain is an association-seeking machine,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It puts things together that repeatedly get paired in our experience. Implicit bias is just another word for capturing what those are when they concern social groups.
“So, when I see that my mom puts out butter when she puts out bread, the two are associated in some way. But I also see other things in the world. I see as I walk down the street who the poor people are and who the rich people are, and where the one lives and where the other lives.”
Banaji explains her work on implicit bias and the efforts she and her colleagues made in creating the widely recognized implicit association test, or IAT, which helps ferret out this "thumbprint of the culture on our brain.” (See and take the test here.)
That thumb imprints on Banaji herself. She relates a time when she was scheduled for surgery and just assumed the young woman next to her wouldn’t be her anesthesiologist and must instead be a nurse – even though Banaji if asked would readily say that young women absolutely could be any sort of doctor. Still, she asked the “nurse” to relay a message to the anesthesiologist, only to learn the “nurse” was the anesthesiologist. “As I always tell my students when I came back from surgery, these stereotypes are not good for us: you do not want to be in surgery with an angry anesthesiologist working on you!”
She credits the genesis of the IAT with a “stroke of genius” by her colleague Anthony Greenwald (with whom she wrote 2013’s Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People). “It’s based on the idea that two things that are routinely thought of as linked together will be easier to pair as a result, while things that aren’t commonly – or ever -- linked will require longer to pair them. The pairing in the initial implicit association test was with a deck of cards that include four suites – two with sets of faces, dark- and light-skinned, and two with words, positive and negative. In the classic result, test-takers can pair the white faces with positive words faster, as they can the peoples of color faces with negative words. Switch it up – people of color with good words, say – and there’s a measurable delay. It’s also been applied to many societal concerns, such as biases related to gender, body size, age, sexuality, and others.
The IAT has shown some predictive power about how biases translate into action in individuals, but it’s no ‘test for racism,’ she stresses.
“I would be the first to say that you can never use the IAT and say, ‘Well, we’re going to use it to hire somebody,’ or ‘We’re going to use it to put someone on the jury.’ One can have these implicit biases and also have a big fat prefrontal cortex that makes us behave in ways that are opposed to the bias.”
Banaji’s contributions to society have been widely recognized in a number of notable fellowships, such as the Society for Experimental Psychologists, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and in 2016, the Association for Psychological Science’s (APS) William James Fellow Award for lifetime contributions to the basic science of psychology. (She was president of APS in 2010-11.)
Teenagers are known for ignoring their parents’ advice, but is this reputation for rebellion well-founded? If so, is rejecting the advice of previous generations and treading our own path an important part of what it means to be human? Are we successful as a species precisely because of our questioning natures?
Listener Hans started pondering these questions after his own adolescent children repeatedly ignored his nagging. Many animals simply follow in their parents’ footsteps – so what makes human children different?
Marnie Chesterton and a panel of experts look at the science of taking advice and making decisions, finding out how human curiosity and exploration compare to other animals, learning the best ways to give and take advice, and seeing whether we’re more likely to trust artificial intelligence than the wisdom of our elders. Finally, we give listener Hans some expert advice on whether or not to keep nagging his kids.
This deceptively simple question from listeners Andy, Mike and James is actually one of the hardest questions CrowdScience has ever tackled. Why? Because even scientists struggle to explain the true nature of the magnetic force and to do so in a way that even presenter Marnie Chesterton can understand is a serious challenge. What is a magnet? And just what is going on when magnets exert a force?
With the help of Melanie Windridge, Sean Giblin, Steve Bramwell, Charlotte New and Peter Morris we attempt to navigate the oddities of one of the most fundamental phenomena in the universe.
(Image: A horseshoe magnet attracting some hammer nails. Credit: Getty Images)
Anand Jagatia heads to the rainbow nation of South Africa, to answer listener Lucy’s deceptively simple question. He follows the path of early human migration to understand the relationship between light skin and latitude, and find out how the world become more multi-coloured as people ventured further away from the equator. And he learns how our genes have helped us adapt to less sunny environments, hearing from the remote KhoeSan tribe in the Kalahari desert, who took part in a massive study aimed at giving scientists a better understanding of pigmentation.
Producer: Marijke Peters
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
(Image: Four diverse women’s arms holding each others wrists in a circle. Credit: Getty Images)
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)
