For most people the idea of chewing on a caterpillar or tucking into a tarantula is pretty unpalatable. Yet according to the United Nations, some two billion people around the world consume insects regularly. This prompted World Service listener Saman from Pakistan to ask the BBC CrowdScience team “are insects a serious food source?”
To tackle this question, we head to Burkina Faso in West Africa where shea caterpillars are an important part of the local diet in a place where food security is low and malnutrition is high.
Here we follow scientist Charlotte Payne as she tries to crack the tricky science behind the caterpillar’s life cycle and see how local entrepreneur Kahitouo Hien is trying to change lives and reduce malnutrition with edible caterpillars.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Louisa Field
(Image: Bowl of cooked Caterpillars. Credit: BBC/Anand Jagatia)
How lightly, or how tightly, do you hold your values? Are there things you hold dear, which almost automatically excite your emotions, for which you would make the costliest of sacrifices?
These are the sorts of questions Scott Atran discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast. Atran is a “classically trained” anthropologist (he was once an assistant to Margaret Mead) and is the research director in anthropology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, a research professor of public policy and psychology at the University of Michigan, and a founding fellow of the Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford’s Harris Manchester College. He is also director of research and co-founder of Artis Research & Risk Modeling, Artis International, and Artis LookingGlass.
As those associations suggests, much of his research sits at the intersection of violent acts and cognitive science, and much of his fieldwork takes place on the front lines of conflict. His findings are often acknowledged as true by policymakers – even as he ruefully tells interviewer David Edmonds, they generally then refuse to recognize the sincerity with which the other side holds its values.
And yet these spiritual values often trump physical ones. And from a policy perspective, say the attempting defeat ISIS in the Middle East, it helps to understand that a devoted actor will often outperform a rational actor when the going gets tough. This helps explain the initial successes of ISIS, and the ability of Kurdish forces to battle back against ISIS. Or even of the American colonies to defeat the British empire.
Atran explains that while there are no theories, at present, about sacred values, but there are features that he has been able to test for reliability.
For example, Atran suggests that something so valued is immune to trading, discounting or negotiating, and that offering to buy your way around someone’s sacred values can result in anger or violence.
He asked refugees in Lebanon and Jordan what was the chance they would go back to Israel if they had the right of return. Six percent – one out of 16 – said they would ‘consider it.’ But then they were asked if they would give up this sacred value, the implication being that if they weren’t going to exercise it why bother keeping it. Yet 80 percent answered no. Then the researchers asked if the respondents would support the 1967 boundaries of Israel, and accept a cash payment, in exchange for permanently ceding their right of return.
“Not only did they refuse,” Atran notes, “but it went to ceiling. We tested for support of suicide bombing, skin responses for emotion and moral outrage, it went through the roof.” But this allegiance to the intangible works two ways – Atran found that when a questioner acknowledged a refugee’s right of return, support for the peace process – even without any other sweetener – increased.
Why do we have so many accents - even when we’re speaking the same language? What's happening in our brains and mouths to make us sound so different from each other? This week’s question from listener Amanda takes CrowdScience to Glasgow in Scotland: home to one of the most studied - and distinctive - accents of English.
Along the way we visit a voice coach to try and learn a Texan accent, use ultrasound to see what different sounds look like inside our mouths and find out how a brand new dialect was formed when many accents collided in New Zealand.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Do your joints ache when it's raining? Are you blighted with headaches when the wind picks up? If the answer’s yes then you're definitely not alone. People have been linking their heath to the weather since the time of the Ancient Greeks - but is the effect real?
CrowdScience heads for the hills and gets closer to the clouds to have a go at answering this 2,500 year old question.
People who believe they’re sensitive to the weather aren’t always taken seriously. But presenter Datshiane Navanayagam hears about the latest ground-breaking experiments that show there's a lot more to it than folklore. And if you've ever wondered why you're particularly prone to aches and pains in the winter, the answer could all be in your genes.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Datshiane Navanayagam
Producer: Anna Lacey
(Image: Man looking up to grey clouds. Credit: Thinkstock)
Can we really live on Mars? Or exist in a virtual world? And why does movie science sometimes have us shouting at the screen? Our panel of scientists and sci-fi experts reveal all in this special edition of CrowdScience recorded live at the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas, USA. To tackle all of our listeners’ questions about science in film, presenter Marnie Chesterton is joined by a team of specialists.
Prof Polina Anikeeva is an MIT materials scientist and engineer whose research focuses on developing devices that work directly with the human nervous system. A sci-fi fan, Prof Anikeeva knows just how realistic brain-computer interface movies such as Avatar and The Matrix are.
Former NASA astronaut Dr Mae Jemison is a medical doctor, engineer, educator and entrepreneur, and the first African-American woman to go into space aboard the shuttle Endeavour in 1992. She is leading the 100 Year Starship Project, which aims to take humans beyond our solar system by 2112.
Prof Clifford Johnson is a theoretical physicist at USC whose work leads him to think about space-time, black holes, and extra dimensions, making him a regular contributor to documentaries about science and sci-fi films.
Rick Loverd is Program Director of The Science & Entertainment Exchange at the National Academy of Sciences, which inspires better science in Hollywood by introducing entertainment professionals to scientists and engineers. The Exchange has consulted on movies including Star Trek: Into Darkness, Iron Man 2 and Thor.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Jen Whyntie
Audio clip from Gravity
Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Audio clip from Interstellar
Warner Bros. Pictures and Paramount Pictures
Director: Christopher Nolan
(Image: Matt Damon in The Martian. Credit: Getty Images)
(Image: Zoe Saldana in Avatar. Credit: Getty Images)
(Image: Matthew McConaughey in Gravity. Getty Images)
The Communist Manifesto. Novelist Don DeLillo’s account of a big moment in baseball. Works by Wittgenstein and Focault. And a famous –and shocking – behavioral experiment. These are a few of the supremely inspiring works which have influenced some of the leading social scientists at work today.
During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? And now, in honor of the 50th Bites podcast to air, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three separate montages of those answers. The second appears here, with answers – presented alphabetically – from Bites’ guests ranging from Sarah Franklin to Angela MacRobbie.
Their answers are similarly diverse. Sociologist Franklin, for example, who studies reproductive technology, namechecked two greats – Marilyn Strethern and Donna Haraway -- who directly laid the foundation for Franklin’s own work. “I would hope,” she reflected, “that I could continue toward those ways of thinking about those issues now and in the future.”
David Goldblatt meanwhile, who studies the sociology of football, picked influencers whose contributions are apparent in his work but less academically straightforward. He chose The Communist Manifesto (“the idea that history was structured and organized has never left me”) and the first 60 pages of American novelist Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which describes ‘the Shot Heard Round the World,” a famous home run from baseball’s 1951 World Series. Goldblatt terms it the “greatest piece of sports writing ever.”
Other guests in this 15-munte podcast recall important studies that set the scene for their own work, or important figures that left them wanting to emulate their scholarship. And not everyone cited academics in their own fields. Witness Peter Lunt citing Ludwig Wittgenstein and MacRobbie Michel Focault, while Jennifer Hochschild named an historian, Edmund Sears Morgan. She called his American Slavery, American Freedom “a wonderful book, everyone should read it – including the footnotes.” The book’s thesis, that “you had to invent slavery in order to be able to invent liberalism,” sticks with her to this day.
Other Bites interviewees in this podcast include Jonathan Haidt, Sarah Harper, Rom Harre, Bruce Hood, Daniel Kahneman, Sonia Livingstone, Anna Machin and Trevor Marchand. To hear the first montage, click HERE.
***
Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE Publishing. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts,click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100
The human race is getting fatter. But is it our fault? There are a whole host of factors influencing our weight - how many of them can we control?
CrowdScience discovers how factors like our environment and our genes can tip the scales in the wrong direction.
We visit an apartment complex originally designed for Olympic athletes, to see if people can get fitter just by living there. And from a brand new menu plan for overweight Mumbai police, to hormone injections that stop you getting hungry, CrowdScience asks the experts what we can do if we’ve been dealt a bad hand when it comes to our weight.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Trees take in carbon dioxide but they also convert some of the toxic gases in our air. How much help can trees give us in fighting air pollution and could where we plant them make an even bigger difference? Crowdscience reports from the side of some busy roads on how canopy coverage may be part of the answer. At a lab in Louisiana one scientist is putting oak leaves through their paces to find out how effective they are at cleaning our air.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
It’s said that in the last two years, more data has been created than all the data that ever was created before that time. And that in two years hence, we’ll be able to say the same thing. Gary King, the head of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, isn’t certain those statements are exactly true, but certain they are true in essence. And he’s even more certain that the growth in the amount of data isn’t why big data is changing the world.
As he tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, roughly 650 million social media messages will go out today. So to someone trying to make statements about what those messages contain, he posited, would having 750 million messages make anything better? “Having bigger data,” King says, “only makes things more difficult.”
Or to be blunter, “The data itself isn’t likely to be particularly useful; the question is whether you can make it useful.” Which leads to King’s real passion: the analysis of big data. It’s not the ‘big’ or the ‘data’ that really turns the screw; it’s the analysis.
In this conversation, King, uses text analysis as an example of this big data analysis. He notes that some of the tools that text analysis uses are “mathematically similar” to another project he worked on, trying to determine health priorities in the third world by figuring out what’s killing people there. In both cases, the individual, whether someone with a disease or someone with a viral tweet, is less important than the trend.
That, explains King, spotlights the difference between computer scientists’ goals and social scientists’ goals: “We only care about what everybody’s saying.” He then talks about work examining social media and censorship in China. While the work clearly falls into an area that King, a political scientist, would be interested in, the genesis was actually as a test case for the limitations of the text analysis program. But it nonetheless gave useful insight into both how the Chinse government censors material, and why.
King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard. He’s been elected a fellow or eight honorary societies, including the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. King also has an entrepreneurial bent – he mentions the company Crimson Hexagon that was spun out of the text analysis work during this interview – and has founded or invented technology for companies like Learning Catalytics and Perusall.
And here’s some, if not ‘big’ data, at least ‘bigger’ data, to consider: This interview marks the 50th Social Science Bites podcast produced by SAGE Publishing. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
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
