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Science in Action is at the UK's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, hunting for dark matter, melting ancient ice, cleaning up disused mines and looking for the batteries of the future.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Pile of used batteries ready for recycling. Credit: Mindful Media via Getty Images)
Do policies built around social and behavioral science research actually work? That’s a big, and contentious, question. It’s also almost an existential question for the disciplines involved. It’s also a question that Megan Stevenson, a professor of law and of economics at the University of Virginia School of Law, grapples with as she explores how well randomized control trials can predict the real-world efficacy of interventions in criminal justice. What she’s found so far in that particular niche has echoed across the research establishment.
As she writes in the abstract of an article she saw published in the Boston University Law Review:
"This Essay is built around a central empirical claim: that most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back towards the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context-dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another."In this Social Science Bites podcast, Stevenson tells interviewer David Edmonds that “the paper is not saying ‘nothing works ever.’ It’s saying nothing works among this subset of interventions, and interventions, as we talked about, are the type of interventions that get studied by randomized control trials tend to be pretty limited in scope. You can randomly allocate money, but you can’t randomly allocate class or socioeconomic status.”
Despite this cautionary finding in her research. Stevenson hasn’t despaired about her career choice or that of other social and behavioral scientists. “Many of us are in this line of work because we care about the world,” she notes. “We want to make the world a better place. We want to think about the best way to do it. And this is valuable information along that path. It’s valuable information in that it shuts some doors. … So keep trying other doors, keep experimenting.”
The CrowdScience team like a challenge. And listeners Jenny and Kai in the UK have come to us with a big one. They want to know how many flies have ever existed.
Flies first appeared around 270 million years ago, so presenter Caroline Steel prepares herself to calculate a very, very large number indeed. She enlists the help of Dr Erica McAlister, Curator of Flies at the Natural History Museum in London. As Erica introduces her to specimens from the Museum’s collection of over 30 million insects, they start with the basics. Like... how do you define a fly in the first place?
Caroline also explores the incredible diversity of flies… from fast-moving predators like robber flies which catch other insects on the wing to midges which are a vital part of chocolate-production; and from blood-sucking mosquitoes which transmit fatal diseases to the housefly buzzing lazily around a room.
And that leads to another fly-related question. Listener Brendan in Colombia wonders why they always fly in circles around a particular area of his apartment. For an explanation we turn to Prof. Jochen Zeil from the Australian National University who reveals that this apparently aimless behaviour is, in fact, a battle for sex.
And Collin in Barbados has e-mailed to ask how flies and mosquitoes benefit us. He’s had first-hand experience of their negative effects through contracting the disease chikungunya from a mosquito bite so he’s wondering if these insects are anything other than a nuisance. However, passionate fly advocate Erica McAlister is ready with plenty of reasons that we should be extremely grateful for them!
Contributors: Dr Erica McAlister, Natural History Museum, London Dr David Yeates, Director, Australian National Insect Collection Prof. Jochen Zeil, Australian National University Prof. Jo Lines, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Presenter: Caroline Steel Producer: Jeremy Grange Editor: Cathy Edwards Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano Studio Manager: Sarah Hockley
(Image: Close-up of insect on leaf, Kageshwori Manohara, Bagmati Province, Nepal. Credit: Aashish Shrestha via Getty Images)
A nationwide power outage in Ecuador left 18 million people in the dark, shutting down traffic lights and the capital’s subway system.
But Ecuador isn’t the only place dealing with blackouts. In Nunavut, Canada, where panelist Meral Jamal lives, power outages happen frequently, including as she was preparing for this programme. How do you deal with a power outage in a remote place? And how did the Inuit manage the cold winter months without electricity at all?
What is the darkest colour in the world? You may think it is black, but, in fact, there is something even darker – ultra-black. Deep-sea fish, butterflies, and, surprisingly, even humans have used ultra-black for a variety of purposes, like being sneaky, fashion statements, and contemporary art.
But what about nature’s blackouts? Ocean scientists Allie Clement tells us about long sunless winters in Antarctica, merry midwinter celebrations, and how ecosystems in Antarctica responds to months of darkness.
Also, the singular origin of a new apex predator hybrid, why alligators have such disgusting table manners, and the maths of scamming which adds up to some astonishingly big bucks.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton with Meral Jamal and Phillys Mwatee Producer: Florian Bohr with Julia Ravey, Noa Dowling and Katie Tomsett Sound engineer: Tim Heffer
An injectable antiviral "PrEP" therapy that gives 100% protection against HIV infection. Trials among young women in South Africa and Uganda proved so effective, they were wound up early to accelerate its use. Linda-Gail Bekker of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation shares her excitement.
A new kind of gene therapy that uses the cell's own “epigenetic” mechanisms to silence troublesome portions of our DNA, tested against the prion protein responsible for some brain diseases. Jonathan Weissman led the research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts.
Accelerated evolution is being tested in Matthew Nitschke’s labs in the Australian Institute for Marine Science to see if it can help protect natural corals against future global warming.
The amazing 4.200 km transatlantic flight of some Painted Lady butterflies – and the extraordinary detective work ecologist Gerard Talavera and team needed to prove it.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: HIV Vaccine Efficacy Trial Conducted In Uganda. Credit: Luke Dray / Stringer via Getty Images.)