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In the dead of night at his home in Machinjiri, Malawi, CrowdScience listener John can hear a small, but persistent, hum. Whenever it’s quiet enough, the hum is there – but what’s causing it? And is John the only one who can hear it?
Reports of consistent, low-pitched noise have been popping up around the world for decades. No one knows this better than Dr Glen MacPherson, who runs the World Hum Map. He tells presenter Caroline Steel his theory for what’s behind these hums.
And Caroline does some investigating of her own. We visit the Isle of Lewis off the coast of Scotland, where residents are reporting a hum. We hear about the impact that persistent noise has on people’s lives, and find out… can Caroline hear the hum too?
We also ask why some people can hear a hum but others can’t. We head to an anechoic chamber – one of the quietest places in the world – to speak to Professor Jordan Cheer, who puts Caroline’s low-frequency hearing to the test.
From industrial activity to internally generated sounds, we sift through the noise to try and find out what could be causing listener John’s hum.
Presenter: Caroline Steel Producer: Sophie Ormiston Series Producer: Ben Motley
This week, get ready for a whole loot box of gaming-related stories!
First up, we find out about a video game that could give people the power to battle misinformation.
We also hear how scientists are putting harbour seals in front of a computer monitor to decipher how they navigate under the water.
And Dr Brett Kagan from Cortical Labs joins us down the line to tell us why he taught a clump of brain cells to play the 1970s arcade game Pong.
Along the way, we discover what happens when artificial intelligence tries to explain idioms, we learn about a tiny frog named after Bilbo Baggins and try to establish whether or not video games benefit your brain.
All that, plus many more Unexpected Elements. Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Kai Kupferschmidt and Leonie Joubert Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, with Margaret Sessa Hawkins, Imaan Moin and Minnie Harrop
What is Fusarium graminearum and why were scientists allegedly smuggling it into the US? Also, Alpine Glacier collapse and an HIV capitulation.
The FBI has accused two Chinese scientists of trying to smuggle a dangerous crop fungus into the US, calling it a potential agro-terrorist threat. But the fungus has long been widespread across US farms, and elsewhere, and is treatable. So what’s going on? Frédéric Suffert, Senior researcher in plant disease epidemiology at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, gives us some insight.
Last week, a glacier above the swiss village of Blatten collapsed and up to 12 million tonnes of ice and rock buried the idyllic, yet thankfully all-but evacuated, hamlet below. Daniel Farinotti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology explains how it was monitored more than any such event before, and maybe, despite the tragedy, could help inform the science of such events in a warming world.
Amongst the latest cuts to scientific funding by the US government, two consortia working at advanced stages of a potential HIV vaccine have been told their funding will not continue. Dennis Burton of Scripps Research describes finding out.
The recipient of the Royal Society Faraday Prize 2024 gave his prize lecture last week. Titled Science Under Threat: The Politics of Institutionalised Disinformation, Salim Abdul Karim’s lecture is available on YouTube. Afterwards, he was kindly able to have a chat with Science in Action about his theme.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George
(Photo: A hand holding an ear of wheat. Credit: Heather Schlitz/Reuters)
When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examines two momentous changes to global economics and how they play out for individuals. He explains to interviewer David Edmonds how the rise of China’s manufacturing dominance and the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence likely are and will affect individual people accustomed to do specific tasks for pay.
What he finds is not as straightforward as the headlines alluded to above. Take China and its remarkable ascent and how that impacted the United States.
“[The rise] benefited a lot of people. It lowered prices. It allowed American companies to kind of produce a lot of products more cheaply. You know, it's hard to imagine Apple's growth without China, for example, to do all that assembly, which would have been extremely expensive to do in the United States. At the same time, it displaced a lot of people, more than a million, and in a very geographically and temporarily concentrated way, extremely scarring the labor market. Now those people also got lower prices, but that's not even remote compensation for what they lost. And now there are new jobs -- even in those places where those trade shock occurs -- but it's not really the same people doing them. It's not the people who lost manufacturing work.”
Concerns about these shocks have been widespread in the 2020s, but the tough if erratic talk about tariffs coming from the U.S. president centers on the idea of restoring something (while ignoring question of that thing ever existed or if it makes sense to go back). Autor argues that the administration actually is asking the right question – but they are arriving at the wrong answers, He notes that the U.S. currently has a half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs open already, a sizeable figure relative to the nation’s 13 million manufacturing workers. But that number itself is roughly a tenth of China’s 120 million.
“We cannot compete with them across every front. .. What we should be very deeply worried about is losing the frontier sectors that we currently maintain. Those are threatened. So aircraft, telecommunications, robotics, power generation, fusion, quantum computing, batteries and storage, electric vehicles, shipping. These are sectors that we still have (except for shipping, actually) but China is making incredibly fast progress, and instead of trying to get commodity furniture back, we need to think about the current war we're in, not the last war.”
At MIT, Autor is co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, while off campus he is a research associate and co-director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.