Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions around the world. The way things are progressing, one-third of the world’s population – 2.5 billion people - could need glasses by the end of the decade. And scientists are beginning to understand why: children spend too much time indoors, bent over screens and books. Marnie Chesterton travels to Singapore, where rates of myopia are one of the highest in the world and to see how the government is curbing the condition with an array of tools, from eye-drops to sunshine remedies.
She does so in the hope of better understanding whether screens are bad for children’s eyes, a question raised by a concerned Mexican father, Fernando, about his two-year old daughter.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Graihagh Jackson
(Photo: A little girl wearing headphones while using a digital tablet at home. Credit: Getty Images)
Will gravity on earth ever change? Why do insects fly towards the light? Is the plasma in a TV the same as plasma in a fusion reactor? Why are mosquito bites so itchy? What does the Higgs boson do for the Universe? In a Q+A special, Marnie Chesterton is joined by scientists Malcolm Fairbairn, Kate Lancaster and Erica McAlister to tackle a selection of questions from the CrowdScience inbox.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Alex Mansfield
(Photo: Alates insects light bulb and night. Credit: Getty Images)
Dementia affects nearly 50 million people worldwide – but doctors are still struggling to find a cure. CrowdScience investigates why this particular group of brain diseases are so hard to treat, from the difficulties around diagnosis to why the drugs just don’t currently work.
In the absence of a medical solution is it time to take a new approach? As geneticists develop tests to predict who might develop brain disease, there are others focusing on better care for those who already have it. Presenter Bobbie Lakhera visits a village in the Netherlands helping sufferers live longer independently, and hears how music projects improve non-verbal communication.
While they aren’t as unpopular as politicians or journalists, people who work with statistics come in for their share of abuse. “Figures lie and liars figure,” goes one maxim. And don’t forget, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
But some people are the good guys, doing their best to combat the flawed or dishonest use of numbers. One of those good guys is David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk in the Statistical Laboratory in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and current president of the Royal Statistical Society. Spiegelhalter, the subject of this Social Science Bites podcast, even cops to being a bit of an “evidence policeman” because on occasion even he spends some of his time “going around telling people off for bad behavior.”
There is bad behavior to police. “There’s always been the use of statistics and numbers and facts as rhetorical devices to try and get people’s opinion across, and to in a sense manipulate our emotions and feelings on things,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds. “People might still think that statistics and numbers are cold, hard facts but they’re soft, fluffy things. They can be manipulated and changed, made to look big, made to look small, all depending on the story that someone wants to tell.”
Asked at one point if he even accepts that there are ‘facts,’ Spiegelhalter gives a nuanced yes. “I’m not going to get into the whole discussion about ‘what is truth,’ although it’s amazing how quick you do go down that line. No, there are facts, and I really value them.”
Despite that policing role, Spiegelhalter explain, his methods are less prescriptive and more educational, working to get others to ask key questions such as “What am I not being told?” and “Why I am hearing this?” The goal is less to track down every bit of fake news in the world, and more to inoculate others against its influence.
One part of that, for example, is determining what communicators and organizations to trust. Spiegelhalter, acknowledging his debt to Onora O'Neill, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, argues that organizations themselves shouldn’t strive to be trusted, but to show trustworthy attributes. This goes beyond things like “fishbowl transparency,” where you lard your website with every imaginable factoid, but actively making sure people can get to your information, understand it and they can assess how reliable it is.
That ‘understanding’ part of the process is what Spigelhalter pursues as part of chairing the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, which is dedicated to improving the way that quantitative evidence is used in society. In that role he’s become a public face of honest use of numbers, as evidenced by his role as presenter of the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science ofChance and Climate Change by Numbers. His own research focuses on health-related use of statistics and statistical methods, and while that might include Bayesian inference using Gibbs samplinig, it can also encompass the focus of his 2015 book, Sex by Numbers.
Since the end of the 19th century, scientists have been predicting we would be eating a meal in a pill, but is it a serious answer to the world’s food problems? That’s what Australian listener Bridget is wondering and whether it’s possible to produce an artificial food source that can provide all the nutrients for healthy human life.
With increasing urbanisation, diets are changing and estimates suggest food production will have to increase some 60 percent by 2050 to keep up with demand. But can we provide all that extra food with limited natural resources and traditional farming methods?
First, Marnie Chesterton finds out what artificial food is currently available and whether the existing products are healthy. And while a meal in a pill might sustain our bodies, will it sustain our minds? The experience of eating involves so much more than simply taking in the right nutrients, as Marnie discovers at the Gastrophysics Chef’s Table, a restaurant and multi-sensory dining experience. On the menu is jellyfish, a possible alternative source of food for the future. It’s in plentiful supply in our oceans, but like eating insects, the thought of it may be disgusting to some, so Marnie explores how sensory-driven strategies can be used to make these food sources more appealing.
CrowdScience also visits the future of farming: A hydroponic vertical farm called Growing Underground, which is built in World War Two air-raid shelters under London. Using LED lighting instead of sunlight, leafy vegetables grow very quickly and need very little space. With higher crop yields per square metre than traditional farming, vertical farms allow fresh produce to be grown in urban centres with less impact on the environment.
Hydroponic farming is something the European Space Agency is also experimenting with as part of Project Melissa, which is developing a closed loop ecological system - using rats instead of astronauts - aimed at one day helping us grow fruit and vegetables on Mars. Listen to the podcast version of the programme to hear this interview.
Listener Nikolai sends CrowdScience hunting through space and time with his deceptively simple question. Can we find perfect stillness? You are probably reading this sentence whilst standing or sitting still. So is it a daft question? We discover that there are no simple answers as we unravel the science of motion, which tells us that we cannot always trust our senses to tell us ‘the truth’ about the natural world.
The ancient Greeks believed it was the sun that rises and sets each day and this idea remained until the 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus showed us that this an illusion – that we are the ones in motion, orbiting the Sun. Later, through the work of Isaac Newton and then Albert Einstein, scientists came to the conclusion that nothing in the universe can ever be truly still. Except perhaps, the fastest thing in the universe – light.
Confused? Don’t worry, so is Marnie Chesterton who sets out to explore not just the science of stillness but also the physics of stopping. To satisfy listener Nikolai’s curiosity about motion in space, CrowdScience also travels to ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. Here we find out how you stop a space craft and hear the story of when things got prickly for astronaut Tim Peake and his crew when docking at the International Space Station.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Louisa Field
(Photo: Astronaut wearing pressure suit against a space background. Credit: Getty Images)
Are you the master of your own decisions? Independent-minded? A free spirit? Like it or not, the answer is probably no - as we are profoundly influenced by the people around us. But why do humans follow the crowd? CrowdScience listener Cath Danes wants to know and this week we are going to be giving her answers at the BBC’s Free Thinking Festival in Gateshead.
Marnie Chesterton is joined by a crack team of neuroscientists and psychologists, who reveal the secrets behind our inner sheep. We also run an experiment to find out whether you should trust the wisdom of the crowds with life’s big decisions.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Anna Lacey
(Photo: A flock of sheep being herded in a pasture. Credit: Getty Images)
Unlike nuclear fission power stations, which leave harmful radioactive waste to be stored or disposed of for thousands of years, a nuclear fusion power plant would create precious little burden on future generations. The fuel source would be seawater, and the energy created limitless.
Back in the 1950s, the technology to “tame the hydrogen bomb” seemed just a few decades away from practical deployment, and governments across the divide of the cold war shared the challenges, costs and laboratories.
But to the outsider, it might look like progress has been slow. In 1997 the Joint European Torus at Culham in the UK set the world record for energy released from a controlled fusion reaction, but even that was less than the energy was put in.
Keeping the plasma – the super-hot atoms of exotic types of hydrogen – at temperatures many times the temperature of the sun safely in place inside a magnetic field is not a trivial task.
Last year construction of the International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor, ITER, reached its halfway point at its huge home in France, and if all goes to plan it should produce its first plasma by 2025. The hope is that operational fusion reactions will take place within a decade after that, paving the way for its successor DEMO - which would actually generate electricity - to be built sometime before 2050.
But in parallel with the big intergovernmental roadmap, in recent years a number of small commercial startups have joined the race to achieve commercial fusion energy. With their various different approaches and more ambitious timelines, will the private sector beat the publicly funded science to the goal?
Presenter: Bobbie Lakhera
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Humans have used dogs' excellent sniffing talents ever since our ancestors figured out that canine companions could help them track down their next meal.
But what about other animals? Can they take us beyond the limits of our own senses? That's what CrowdScience listener Beth wants to know, so we obligingly try to sniff out some answers.
After immersing ourselves in the world of insect senses at our local zoo, we visit an insect lab in Germany to find out whether sniffer bees could take over from sniffer dogs. And could ants help us fly the drones of the future? We meet the scientists trying to turn ant vision into computer code, to send robots into places GPS can't reach.
Use social media for any amount of time and eventually you will come across something that’s designed to both appeal to the angels of your better nature and asking to make a (small) effort to support or propagate this appeal. The prime example of recent years is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
When these charitable appeals take off, that’s when social psychologist Sander van der Linden perks up. He studies ‘viral altruism,’ and in this Social Science Bites podcast he details to host David Edmonds how he studies this phenomenon.
“The idea,” van der Linden says, “is that you can ‘catch’ altruism in a behavioral way. When someone acts altruistically online, you catch that behavior as a social contagion, which then causes you to adopt that behavior and encourage other people in your network to also engage in that behavior, which then spreads quickly and rapidly.”
Van der Linden observes and describes the mechanics of these processes using something he calls SMArT, breaking down the online altruistic efforts by their social influence, moral imperative, affective reactions and translational impact.
This yardstick allows van der Linden to draw conclusions from what can be a smallish data set of unique events. SMArT allows van der Linden to find shared similarities that create body of data and which can be tracked. For example, van der Linden, is currently looking at the #MeToo movement to see if it fits into his scope of inquiry.
Van der Linden is a social psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge where he directs the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory. He is also a Fellow in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Churchill College, Cambridge and an affiliated researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University.
