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)
This violent and repetitive involuntary constriction of the chest muscles is highly infectious, and can result in convulsions, profuse tears and a reddening of the face. People are known to clutch their chests or roll around on the floor during the more intense bouts. Buy why? It seems a particularly odd thing to do and that’s why CrowdScientists, Erin from Australia, Geraldine from Switzerland, and Musweu from Zambia wanted to find out more about laughter. In pursuit of an understanding of what laughter is, and why we do it, Geoff Marsh attempts to distinguish the sounds of friends from strangers laughing together, and explores the earliest origins of this rib-rending behaviour. In the process he discovers that we’re not alone in laughing, and uncovers the importance of this ability for making and maintaining friendships.
Presenter: Geoff Marsh
Producer: Rory Galloway
(Photo: Two young girls eating an ice-cream and Laughing. Credit: Getty Images)
E-cigarettes and vaping may only have been around for a decade or so but it's estimated more than 35 million people globally have taken it up. Marnie Chesterton heads to a vape show to discover why these gadgets are proving so popular, and hears from one expert who warns they could be damaging lung immune cells. She examines the research behind claims that e-cigarettes can help smokers quit, and finds conflicting evidence about how good they are at giving people the nicotine hit they crave. It's a research field that's in its infancy and with vaping technology constantly changing, it's little wonder some scientists say it's a struggle to keep up.
Have you ever been out driving and noticed your mind… wandering? CrowdScience listener Sian Gardiner has. When travelling to visit her parents she has to cross a very large, very obvious bridge. But there are times when she finds herself on the other side with no memory of having gone over it. How is that even possible?
Presenter Geoff Marsh buckles up to find out. He travels through the science of how driving becomes second nature, brakes sharply when he realises he’s not necessarily in conscious control at 70mph, and tries to refocus when he discovers why drivers don’t always see things that are staring them in the face. He also asks what’s happening when our mind drifts away from the road, and what can be done to help drivers pay more attention and reduce accidents.
Presenter: Geoff Marsh
Producer: Anna Lacey
Sound design: Peregrine Andrews
(Photo: A woman sits in her car, looking through window glass with rain drops. Credit: Getty Images)
Diane Reay grew up in a council estate in a coal mining part of Derbyshire in England’s East Midlands. Those working-class roots dogged her from the start of her formal schooling.
“I had to fight not to be in the bottom set; I was told that girls like me don’t go to university,” Reay, now a renowned Cambridge University education professor, tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “I think that spurred a strong interest in class inequalities and I became, like many working-class girls of my age, a primary school teacher.”
She in turn taught working-class children. Her primary motivation “was to make things better for them than it had been for me as a school pupil.”
To which, she adds, “and I failed. I failed for a whole lot of reasons, but mainly to do with poor policy and an increasing focus on performativity and competition rather than fulfilling a child’s potential.”
Those experiences in turn had a big influence on her research interests into educational inequality and embrace of social justice. Some of her specific investigations have looked at boys' underachievement, supplementary schooling of black students, access to higher education, female management in schools, and pupil peer group cultures.
One thing has become clear to her across this research - “It’s primarily working-class children who turn out to be losers in the educational system.” Whether it’s through the worst-funded schools, least-qualified teachers, most-temporary teaching arrangements or narrowest curricula, students from working class backgrounds in the United Kingdom (and the United States) draw the shortest educational straws.
Reay, under the banner of Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council, is currently directing a project explores choice in education and how that affects white, middle-class identity. Her research is qualitative, albeit at a large scale (she tells Edmonds she’s done 1,170 interviews). “I recognize that qualitative research can’t tell us the entire story in toto. That’s why I’m always very keen to use statistical data and quantitative research to support my qualitative analysis.” Using that statistical material serves a check, too, on confirmation bias she might bring to a research question.
That said, she adds, “Some very important things can’t actually be counted. They can’t be enumerated. And they’re about the quality of the learning experience, the quality of the child’s engagement with peers in the classroom, and with curriculum. I think this focus on counting means we have a very reductive curriculum.”
That policymakers see education as solely a means of preparing young people for the labor market, and not as an end in itself, as “inherently problematic.” The perceived need to measure all outputs all the time and to focus on making future employees instead of future citizens are pernicious, Reay says, but there are policy-based remedies. She suggests, for example, mixed ability teaching, delaying assessment until children reach 16, collaborative learning and teaching critical thinking skills as counteracting some of the worst problems of the current system.
In humans if you have two X chromosomes you are female and if you have an X and a Y then you are male. It is textbook science. But CrowdScience listener Du in Singapore has done some extra homework and found a piece of intriguing fish research which suggests a different outcome, at least for one species – tilapia, a popular fish on restaurant menus worldwide and as it happens, the first fish to visit space. Whilst humans couldn’t exist without an X-chromosome, tilapia apparently, can. In fact, they are happy with just two Y chromosomes. The existence of this odd breed comes down to the tilapia fish’s ability to change from male to female.
Nature has come up with an array of bizarre solutions when it comes to sex determination and what sets you on one genetic path or another. And like with the tilapia fish, the decision isn't always for life. Some species of fish, lizards and even birds sidestep the chromosome system and morph between the sexes to survive a changing environment. How can they have both genetic sex pathways latent within them? And why can’t humans do the same trick?
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Louisa Field
(Photo: A male Asian sheepshead wrasse courting a female featured in BBC’s Blue Planet II. Credit: Getty Images)
It’s the central question for the current generation of Mars missions. Since the first close-up pictures of the red planet back in 1965, decades of space missions have revealed our neighbouring planet to be cold, rocky and sterile. But there are hints of a more dramatic past; of raging volcanoes and flash floods. Could this be a planet where life existed? Could life still exist under the surface? And could humans live there, or even travel the distance to get there safely, at some point in the coming decades?
CrowdScience listeners from Australia, Ghana and Canada have been musing on all sorts of Martian matters. Presenter Marnie Chesterton visits a corner of Stevenage, UK, with a distinctly unearthly appearance and takes a virtual tour of the Martian atmosphere. She also puts listeners’ questions to the scientists designing the spacecraft and instruments they hope will unlock the secrets of Mars.
(Image: illustration of Mars shot from space. Credit: Getty Images)
The idea of creating underwater habitats has captured the imagination of writers, thinkers and scientists for decades. However, despite numerous grand visions, these dreams of aquatic metropolises have not yet come to fruition. Crowdscience listener and scuba enthusiast Jack wonders whether - given improved technology and the growing environmental pressures facing humans on land - it is time to reconsider the ocean as an alternative permanent living space for humans.
Marnie Chesterton dons her flippers for Crowdscience in search of the oceanographers and architects who have dedicated their lives to designing vessels, labs and underwater habitats. She explores whether oceanic cities remain a sci-fi dream or a realistic solution to some of our modern challenges. Can the oceans’ largely unexplored resources be harnessed to support living underwater?
(Photo: Illustration of a modern city under the sea. Credit: Getty Images)
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)
