South Asia has experienced a heatwave where the monsoon has been delayed and temperatures have reached over 50 degrees. Despite this the extreme heat has led to far fewer fatalities than previous heatwaves; we look at why that is.
Research into the origins of almonds shows they were domesticated in Asia before spreading worldwide. It’s a bitter sweet story, with sweet varieties being selected over bitter ones. In fact the bitter ones contain poisons which can kill..
As with almonds cannabis as a drug seems to have spread via silk routes. The discovery of ancient burnt wooded bowls suggests it was smoked millennia ago in China – as part of funeral rituals.
And we investigate California’s cannabis farming industry, there are concerns over the environmental impact of this now legal cash crop.
(Photo: Indian boatman walks amid boats on the dried bed of a lake at Nalsarovar Bird Sanctuary. Credit: Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty Images)
Singing can lift our spirits, but research suggests it could also benefit our health, improving breathing for people with lung conditions and helping us cope with dementia. Could it even have a preventative effect?
CrowdScience heads to Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK county of Gloucestershire - one of the first places to pioneer this kind of “social prescribing” - to find out. Presenter Anand Jagatia teams up with panellists Dr Daisy Fancourt, Senior Research Associate in Behavioural Science, Dr Simon Opher, family doctor and Clinical Lead for Social Prescribing, and Maggie Grady, Director of Music Therapy at charity Mindsong to learn more. They’re joined on-stage by their Breathe In Sing Out and Meaningful Music volunteer singing groups to find out what this much-loved musical pastime can do for us.
Producer: Jen Whyntie
(Photo: Students singing in a choir with their teacher. Credit: Getty Images)
The US has withdrawn funding for scientific research involving foetal tissue.
Scientists point to the lack of feasible alternatives to using foetal tissue – which comes from embryos donated to scientific research via abortion clinics.
They say the move to halt this kind of research will have a negative impact on the ability of US medical institutions to develop new treatments for a range of diseases from diabetes to cancer.
More controversy from the ‘Crispr babies ‘ scandal – with a new analysis showing the modified gene may have a wide impact on the health of the children it was claimed to have been implanted into.
A reassessment on North Korea’s Nuclear tests using cold war methodology suggest the last explosion was more powerful than previously thought.
And we investigate a small British Earthquake south of London.
(Picture: Donald Trump, Credit:SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Is education, by itself, the great equalizer? Will having the same education erase the benefit someone from a higher class has over someone from a lower class? “Education,” says sociologist Sam Friedman, “doesn’t wash away the effects of class background in terms of allocating opportunities. That’s quite profound – I believe there are a lot of people who believe quite strongly that these sorts of educational institutions can and do act as sort of meritocratic sorting houses.”
Friedman, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, doesn’t deny education has some role – and some successes – in this role, but believes that education is not sufficient to achieve the goal of unbinding Britain’s class system.
Friedman tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast that “it’s a very long and protracted discussion that we could have about the meaning of class.” He sees two ways to discuss it in sociological terms: the dominant model of what work do you do, and the Pierre Bourdieu-influenced idea of what resources -- or economic, cultural and social capital -- can you draw upon.
Friedman’s work tends to use that first definition: “What’s the nature of that work in terms of both your level of autonomy at work as well as your earnings potential, and what is that work’s nature.” In turn, he focuses a lot on elite professions, as suggested by the title of the book he co-authored with Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged.
“You know, a lot of the emphasis in terms of understanding social mobility has tended to be on this ideas of ‘access to the professions,’” he explains. “These are traditionally an area that have been the preserve of people from fairly privileged backgrounds and there’s been a sort of enduring policy emphasis on opening them up, making those areas accessible to all based on merit, based on talent. I suppose we wanted to interrogate that in a way that was new and fresh and brought to bear new evidence.”
The goal, he adds, is to answer that question always lurking in the background of discussions by Britons about Britain: What sort of society do we live in?
One where class still affects outcomes. While that might seem intuitive, Friedman’s research has helped unpack exactly what’s going on here, even when opportunity at the educational level evens out. His metric for measuring the residual disparity in classes is the pay gap – stubborn and measurable – in which people from working-class backgrounds who do score ‘elite’ jobs make 84 percent of what their coworkers from privileged backgrounds do.
In this podcast, Freidman describes some of the reasons he’s found for the persistence, including the ability of the well-off to draw from ‘The Bank of Mum and Dad’ throughout their lives, a financial lifeline which often gives them the flexibility to take chances that poorer colleagues fear. He also describes how sponsorship opportunities often go to not to the top performers but to people who share a cultural affinity with their potential mentor, or how behavioral codes tend to push down on people who weren’t raised to be conversant in them.
In addition to The Class Ceiling, Friedman has written widely on these issues of social mobility and inequality, including the 2014 book Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour. In 2015 he co-wrote Social Class in the 21st Century for Penguin. In the public sphere, he sits on the government’s Social Mobility Commission. He’s currently working with Aaron Reeves on analyzing the data contained in the 120 years of British Who’s Who listings.
Medical intervention has disrupted natural selection in humans as many more children survive into adulthood than did a few centuries ago. And as our DNA continues to evolve, in order to adapt to our environment, how might human beings of the future be different from us? Anand Jagatia explores how some humans, over just a few thousand years, have adapted genetically to live at high altitudes of the Tibetan Himalayas or in the cold climates of Inuit Greenland.
Several Crowdscience listeners got in touch to ask about the ways in which humans might evolve in future but understanding how we’re adapting to modern ways of living is much harder to measure. So what adaptions do evolutionary biologists expect for the human race? How will IVF, gene-editing, mass migration and our constantly changing culture affect how we evolve?
Presenter: Anand Jagatia. Produced by Dom Byrne and Melanie Brown for BBC World Service
(Photo: People in a crowded street. Credit: Getty Images)
A new undersea volcano has appeared off the coast of East Africa. The sea floor between Madagascar and Mozambique has become increasingly seismically active in the last year. As well as the appearance of this active volcano, local islands are now experiencing frequent earthquakes.
The causes of Indonesia’s Palu Bay tsunami last year are being examined thanks to social media. Videos taken as the tsunami hit have been analysed to determine wave heights and speeds and suggest possible causes.
Scientists at a massive underground physics research facility in Italy are to stand trial over safety risks. The facility uses poisonous chemicals. There are concerns these could leak into drinking water supplies in the event of an earthquake.
As scientists keep finding ever more fascinating facts about the invisible housemates that share our homes, we investigate what might be lurking in quiet household corners or under our beds.
We head out on a microbial safari with expert tour guide Dr Jamie Lorimer from the University of Oxford to find out what kind of creatures are living in our kitchens, bathrooms and gardens - from bacteria normally found in undersea vents popping up in a kettle, to microbes quietly producing tiny nuggets of gold. For so long this hidden world has been one that we’ve routinely exterminated - but should we be exploring it too?
(Image: Multibeam sonar waves, reflecting off the sea floor near the French island of Mayotte, reveal the outline of an 800-meter-tall volcano (red) and a rising gas-rich plume. Credit: MAYOBS team (CNRS / IPGP -Université de Paris / Ifremer / BRGM)
As scientists keep finding ever more fascinating facts about the invisible housemates that share our homes, we dust off our episode on what might be lurking in quiet household corners or under our beds.
Marnie Chesterton reminds us how dust can contain all sorts of secrets about our habits and everyday lives, and Anand Jagatia bravely ventures into parts of our homes that are usually overlooked. He heads out on a microbial safari with expert tour guide Dr Jamie Lorimer from the University of Oxford to find out what kind of creatures are living in our kitchens, bathrooms and gardens - from bacteria normally found in undersea vents popping up in a kettle, to microbes quietly producing tiny nuggets of gold. For so long this hidden world has been one that we’ve routinely exterminated - but should we be exploring it too?
Presenters: Marnie Chesterton and Anand Jagatia. Produced by Jen Whyntie for BBC World Service.
(Photo: A woman using a damp sponge to clean dust collected on a window sill. Credit: Getty Images)
Where the conditions are right, life can arise. But what might the ‘right’ conditions be? Could the dark sector of our Universe be inhabited? That’s what Gautam from Delhi, India has been wondering. He points out that dark matter and dark energy make up around 95% of the Universe and the remaining segment is normal matter - the stuff we’re all made up of. Given that there’s so much of this dark material, could dark life have evolved? Marnie Chesterton investigates with Dr Matt Middleton, Dr Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil and Dr Renato Costa.
Together, they unpick what dark matter and dark energy are and test out some listener theories as to what these mysterious mediums might be. For instance, Yoseph from Ogden, USA questions whether black holes could account for the missing matter and it turns out, he might just be on to something…
Presented by Marnie Chesterton. Produced by Graihagh Jackson for BBC World Service.
(Photo: Arrangement of Nebula, Stars and a colourful galaxy. Credit: Getty Images)
Our bodies are made of cells, tens of trillions of cells. They all have particular roles and functions in the body, from digesting food, to producing hair, to hunting down pathogens. But all of this incredible complexity started as just a single cell.
Gila, from Israel, asked CrowdScience to find out how the development of incredible structures, and systems in the body are coordinated by the cells. Are cells communicating? How do cells know what they should be doing?
To find out, Geoff Marsh meets a Cambridge researcher uncovering the first cell division in our lives, and peers into a fertile chicken egg to see the developing embryo as it grows a limb. CrowdScience finds out why scientists like Dr Megan Davey use chickens to understand the development of human fingers and investigates how individual cells with the same DNA manage to choreograph a dance of cell replication, movement and communication to create our bodies in all of their complexity.
Many of us enjoy cooking – but when did we switch from eating our food raw, to heating it? Listener Logan enjoys his beef burgers rare, but wants to know why he still feels compelled to grill them? Presenter Anand Jagatia travels to a remote South African cave where our ancestors first used fire at least a million years ago, which one man says could help prove when our species started cooking.
And he talks to a scientist who shows how the composition of food changes when it’s cooked, to allow us more access to give us more access to calories - and hears how a completely raw food diet could have disastrous consequences for health.
Producer: Marijke Peters
Presenter Anand Jagatia
(Image: A large pan held over an open fire. Credit: Getty Images)
