Category: ScienceNews

Our listener Joseph’s question might sound more sci-fi than science show. But as Marnie Chesterton discovers, robots have already entered the realm of medicine and are likely to become more important in the future. A visit to the operating theatre at the University College Hospital in London together with surgeon Caroline Moore reveals that robots take the scalpels out of surgery by letting surgeons treat patients with prostate cancer without having to make a single cut. And chatting to Molly the robot alongside Dr. Praminda Caleb-Sully at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Marnie discovers that robots could be the helping hand we need to look after a growing elderly population.

Machines win when it comes to data-processing. But what about empathy and intuition? Such characteristics would require machines to reach a level of artificial intelligence (AI) which critics say is decades away. The sceptics insist humans will always play a key role in healthcare. But others suggest that not only will AI change everything – but technology will one day eliminate the need for us to go to the doctor ever again.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

(Image: Three Robots on Display at the Science Museum in London. Credit: Carl Court/Getty Images)

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Louisa Field

A few weeks ago, CrowdScience asked if it pays to be nice. We found that the answer is yes – if you’re a human. But if being social is so great, why aren’t all animals doing it?

That’s what our US listener Tony wants to know. After listening to ‘Does it Pay to be Nice?’ he rightly pointed out that cats lead mostly solitary lives - but don’t seem any worse off for it. So why have they taken this path? And are they any less advanced than a social species as a result?

Presenter and naturalist Tim Cockerill heads to the rainforests of Madagascar in search of answers. After lots of trekking through the undergrowth, he finds out why so many animals choose group living and what’s different about cats to make them go it alone.

But does it matter which way of life an animal takes? Tim discovers that for humans at least, being social has given us much more than we imagine.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Tim Cockerill Producer: Anna Lacey

(Photo: Cat lying on floor. Credit: Getty Images)

Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you?

This question has been posed to every interview in the Social Science Bites podcast series, but never made part of the audio file made public. Now, as we approach the 50th Social Science Bite podcast to be published this March 1, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three separate montages of those answers.

In this first of that set of montages, 15 renowned social scientists – starting in alphabetical order from all who have participated – reveal their pick. As you might expect, their answers don’t come lightly: “Whoah, that’s an interesting question!” was sociologist Michael Burawoy’s initial response before he named an éminence grise – Antonio Gramsci – of Marxist theory for his work on hegemony.

The answers range from other giants of social, behavioral and economic science, such as John Maynard Keynes and Hannah Arendt, to living legends like Robert Putnam and the duo of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (and even one Social Science Bites alumnus, Stephen Pinker). Some of the answers involve an academic’s full oeuvre, while others zero in on a particular book or effort. John Brewer, for example, discusses his own background in a Welsh mining town and how when he went to college he encountered Ronald Frankenberg’s Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country. “That book made sense of my upbringing and committed me to a lifetime’s career in sociology,” Brewer reveals.

And not every answer is a seminal moment. Danny Dorling, for example, names a report by his Ph.D. adviser, computational geographer Stan Openshaw, who took two unclassified government reports to show the futility of nuclear war. And not every answer is even an academic work. Recent Nobel laureate Angus Deaton reveals, “I tend to like the last thing I’ve ever read,” and so at the time of our interview (December 2013), named a journalist’s book: The Idealist by Nina Munk.

Other Bites interviewees in this podcast include Michelle Baddeley, Iris Bohnet, Michael Billig, Craig Calhoun, Ted Cantle, Janet Carsten, Greg Clark, Ivor Crewe, Valerie Curtis, Will Davis and Robin Dunbar.

Death is one of life’s few certainties – or is it? To answer listener Pratibha’s question from New Delhi, India, presenter Marnie Chesterton asks medical and scientific experts if there is any evidence that humans could somehow come back into existence after their demise. We start at the end, by asking just what death is – and it turns out to be perhaps surprisingly complicated, especially if cold temperatures are involved. As another listener, Camilla, from Washington DC, USA points out, there are some animals that can become totally frozen over winter and return to life in spring. How does this happen, and could it have implications for the idea of deep-freezing humans – known as cryogenic preservation? Alternatively, if entire bodies might prove difficult to save, could we download our brains’ contents for later reboot instead? It sounds like science fiction, but a global network of scientists are pursuing the goal of cybernetic immortality: uploading our minds to an artificial brain in a robot avatar. Marnie heads to a brain-computer interface lab where she gets wired up to control a computer game by thinking, and discovers just how difficult it is to export thought, and how much we still have to learn about our brains. Could the way to cheat death ever be digital?

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Jen Whyntie

Earth’s surface may be 70 percent water but many places are struggling to access it. We look at a range of water supply options including delivering it by tanker. In Malta we meet a man trying to solve its water problems, with a clever contraption to recycle sewage.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Produders: Cathy Edwards and Marijke Peters

(Image: Tanker ship. Credit: Getty)

Human beings are social animals, notes economist Michelle Baddeley, and as such the instinct to herd is hardwired into us. And so while this has changed from (in most cases) physically clumping into groups, it does translate into behavior linked to financial markets, news consumption, restaurant-picking and Brooklyn facial hair decisions.

In this latest Social Science Bites podcast, Baddeley – a professor in economics and finance of the built environment at University College London -- tells interviewer David Edmond how modern herding often follows from an information imbalance, real or perceived, in which a person follows the wisdom of crowds. The decision to join in, she explains, is often based an astute reading of risk; as she quotes John Maynard Keynes, “It’s better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right.” As a real world example of that, she points to the plight of the junior researcher, whose career is best advanced by serving up their innovative insights along conventional lines.

Apart from reputational damage control, there are pluses and minuses to human herding, Baddeley notes there are advantages to finding safety in numbers: “It’s a good way to find a hotel.” But there are pernicious outcomes, too, like groupthink. In that vein, the economist says she finds partisan herding “more prevalent in a ‘post truth age,’” as individuals join thought groups that reinforce their existing world-view. And it doesn’t help, her research finds, that people are more likely to herd the less well-informed they are.

This has also had dire consequences in financial markets (Baddeley was principal investigator on a Leverhulme Trust project focused on neuroeconomic examination of herding in finance), where pushing against the grain makes for a short career for anyone other than the luckiest professional stockpicker.

Baddeley’s early education was in Australia and her first professional work was as an economist with the Australian Commonwealth Treasury. She then completed masters and doctorate work at Cambridge. Her most recent book is 2013’s Behavioural Economics and Finance  and other works include Running Regressions - A Practical Guide to Quantitative Research (2007) and Investment: Theories and Analysis (2003).

It sounds like a simple question – what is the time? But look closer and you realise time is a slippery concept that scientists still do not fully understand. Even though we now have atomic clocks that can keep time to one second in 15 billion years, this astonishing level of accuracy may not be enough. The complexity of computer-controlled systems, such as high-frequency financial trading or self-driving cars which rely on the pinpoint accuracy of GPS, could in future require clocks that are even more accurate to ensure everything runs ‘on time’.

But what does that even mean? As Anand Jagatia discovers, time is a very strange thing. He visits the origins of modern time-keeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and meets scientists at the National Physical Laboratory who have been counting and labelling every second since the 1950s. He meets Demetrios Matsakis, the man who defined time and visits the real-life ‘Time Lords’, at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris to find out how they co-ordinate the world’s time and why the leap second is ‘dangerous’.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

From Chihuahuas to Great Danes, Mexican Hairless to Afghan Hounds, dogs are the most diverse mammal on the planet. There are currently over 500 recognised breeds worldwide with almost every conceivable combination of size, shape, coat, colour and behaviour.

But why are there so many different kinds of dog?

That's what listener Simon St-Onge in Quebec, Canada wants to know – and CrowdScience has taken up the challenge.

Presenter Marnie Chesterton heads to Sweden, a world-class centre of canine research, to sniff around for answers. She finds out how the grey wolf morphed into the vast variety of dogs we have today, and heads out on a moose hunt with one of Scandinavia's most ancient breeds.

But are dogs really as different as they seem on the surface? The dog genome is revealing more about man's best friend than ever before – and could now be the answer to understanding both dog and human health.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

(Image: Tika, the Russian-European Laika)

Modern Martian hunting involves looking for the tiniest evidence of life. But when presenter Marnie Chesterton found out that a scientist she was meant to be chatting to about cleanliness had previously worked for NASA, the topic of space bugs turned out to be too intriguing to ignore, especially when a CrowdScience listener asked us a question on a similar theme. Could Earth's microbes hitch a ride on our missions to Mars and colonise the Martian soil? As the European Space Agency's ExoMars venture gears up to launch a rover in 2020 that aims to find out whether there is, or has ever been, life on Mars, we head to the programme's clean rooms and Mars Yard - a giant planet-simulating sandpit - to find out. Marnie meets space engineers whose job is to prevent microbial contamination of Mars whilst creating robots that can find signs of life on the Red Planet. And she discovers that planetary protection is not all about remote aliens: Could tiny Martians have already arrived here on Earth via a meteoric hitch hike?

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Jen Whyntie

(Picture: Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA)

To be healthy you need to be clean – or so we’ve thought throughout human history.

The dazzling array of antibacterial products that exploded onto the scene in the 20th century took things to the next level, with their promises of eliminating 99.9% of germs.

But could an obsession with cleanliness actually be bad for us? There’s a whole world of microbes out there: some make us sick, but others are essential for our health.

How do we tell the difference? Listener Younes’s question gives CrowdScience the chance to sift the good dirt from the bad, with the help of hygiene expert Professor Sally Bloomfield. Along the way we soap up our hands with schoolchildren in Mumbai, get knee deep in mud on an English farm, and find out why snuggling up to a cow might be a good idea.

Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Cathy Edwards and Marijke Peters