CrowdScience listener Ali wants to know why we experience vertigo.
Anand Jagatia finds out that it’s not just the giddy sensation we feel when we’re at the top of a mountain. Vertigo is also a physical illness that can be triggered by a range of disorders.
He talks to leading experts on balance to learn what causes the condition, discovers how virtual reality can help people with a phobia of being in high places and volunteers to be turned upside down to experience what it feels like to be treated for vertigo.
Contributors:
Peter Rea, consultant ENT surgeon, University Hospitals of Leicester, Honorary Professor of Balance Medicine, De Montfort University, Honorary Professor in Life Sciences, University of Leicester, UK
Tammy Barker, clinical scientist, Balance Centre, Leicester Royal Infirmary, UK
Rupal Rajani, broadcast journalist and member of Life on the Level
Tara Donker, clinical psychologist, Freiburg University, Germany
Andrew Hugill, composer, musicologist and deputy director, Institute for Digital Culture, University of Leicester, UK
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Jo Glanville
Editor: Richard Collings
Production co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris
Sound design: Julian Wharton
Studio manager: Bob Nettles
With thanks to Andrew Hugill for permission to include his composition Verdigrade, commissioned by The Space as part of ‘Culture in Quarantine’, BBC.
Image: CrowdScience presenter Anand Jagatia tries out a machine for diagnosing and treating vertigo at Leicester Royal Infirmary
Credit: Peter Rea
20 years ago, the cult classic movie 'The Core' was released in theaters. From the start, it's clear that science is more a plot device than anything — but some scientists love it anyway. Today, Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber has a friendly laugh with geologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach about the creative liberties writers took to make the movie's plot work.
P.S. We're biased here, but we don't think you need to have seen the movie to enjoy this episode.
This edition of our periodic 'movie club' series, where we separate fact from fiction, was highly requested by you, our audience. If you want us to do the same for another movie you love, write us! We're at shortwave@npr.org.
Record-breaking global temperatures are accelerating Greenland ice melt at an alarming rate. Professor of glaciology Alun Hubbard has witnessed the melt first hand. He tells us how the ice sheet is being destabilised and what this could mean on a human level.
Also, how safe are Japanese plans to dispose of nuclear waste from the Fukushima accident? We get reassurance from molecular pathology expert, Professor Gerry Thomas.
And last week was a big one for cosmology news. We catch up on science behind the gravitational hum that permeates the Universe with astrophysicist with Dr Chiara Mingarelli. And we hear about the traces of ghostly neutrinos within our Galaxy from the principal investigator of the world’s largest neutrino detector, Professor Francis Halzen.
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Ella Hubber
(Photo: Meltwater forming on top of the Russell Glacier, Greenland)
This week time is up for the UN to come up with rules about how to mine the ocean bed. We hear about the mysterious potato shaped objects on the sea floor that contain lots of valuable minerals that are essential for electronics like mobile phones.
Our team on three different continents compare how recycling of precious metals is going in their parts of world, and we hear why early Lithium batteries kept catching fire.
We also speak to an expert on hydroelectric power who tells us how small scale hydro is a massively untapped resource, possibly even in your own back garden.
This week’s Under the Radar story is a personal tale of floods and landslides in the Himalayas, and what science tells us about the huge cloudburst that caused them.
Our search to discover The Coolest Science in the World continues with a fascinating look at sonification with a researcher who straddles science and music, and we dive into the fact that human use of underground water has redistributed the weight of the planet.
All that plus your emails and WhatsApps, the answer to a question about heavy metal and the wonderful laugh of a Nobel laureate.
Presented by Marnie Chesterton
Produced by Alex Mansfield, with Ben Motley and Sophie Ormiston
“We have been evolving into a species that is super-cooperative: we work together with strangers, we can empathize with people, we are really an empathic flock,” begins Carsten de Dreu, a professor at Leiden University. “And at the same time, there is increasing evidence from archaeological excavations all around the world that already 10, 20 and 30 thousand years ago, people were actually violently killing each other.”
Trained as a social psychologist, de Dreu uses behavioral science, history, economics, archaeology, primatology and biology, among other disciplines to study the basis of conflict and cooperation among humans. In this Social Science Bites podcast, he discusses how conflict and violence – which he takes pains to note are not the same – mark our shared humanity and offers some suggestions on how our species might tamp down the violence.
“Violence,” de Dreu explains to host David Edmonds, “is not the same as conflict – you can’t have violence without conflict, but you can have conflict without violence.” Conflict, he continues, is a situation, while violence is a behavior. Conflict, he says, likely always will be with us, but resorting to violence need not be.
The psychologist says behavior has a biological basis, and various hormones may ‘support’ violent actions. For example, greater concentrations of oxytocin – which helps maintain in-group bonds and has been dubbed “the love hormone” -- is found in primate poo after groups fights. But, he cautions, that is not to say we are innately violent.
But when we do get violent, it’s worse when we’re in groups. Then, the potential for violence, as he put it, “to get out of hand,” increases, escalating faster and well beyond the violence seen between individuals (even if that one-on-one violence sometimes can be horrific).
“In an interpersonal fight, the only trigger is the antagonist. In intergroup violence, what we see is that people are sometimes blinded to the enemy – they might not even recognize who they were because they were so concerned with each other.”
What drives this violence is both obvious and not, de Dreu suggests. “Even among my colleagues, there is sometimes fierce debate - conflicts sometimes about what are conflicts! But if you zoom out, there are two core things that groups fight about:” resources and ideas.
Fighting over resources is not unique to humans – groups of primates are known to battle over land or mates. But fighting over ideas is uniquely human. And unlike resource conflicts, which have the potential to be negotiated, “for these truth conflicts ... there is no middle ground, no trade-off.” Regardless, he argues, values have value.
Citing recent work with colleagues, de Dreu says he thinks “these values, these truths, these worldviews that we have, that we share within our groups and our communities, within our countries sometimes, they are the ‘oil’ of the system. To work together so that we all can survive and prosper, we need certain rules, a certain shared view of how the world operates, what is good and bad, what is right and wrong. These are very important shared values we need to have in order to function as a complex social system.”
But “when these values get questioned, or attacked, or debunked, that’s threatening.” Depending on how severe the threat is seen, violence is deployed. And sometimes, as even a casual observer may divine, it’s not the direct quest for resources or to protect values that sparks violence, but what de Dreu terms “collateral damage” from leaders cynically weaponizing these drivers – or even inventing threats to them -- while actually pursuing their own goals.
But de Dreu ends the podcast on a (mostly) upbeat note. He says we can break the cycles of violence, even if there’s no neat linear trajectory to do so, and concludes by offering some rays of hope.
We hope you had a restful holiday! Maybe even got outside for some relaxing fresh air. If so, you might've come across cute and not-so-cute critters like ticks. With ticks in mind, we're heading to Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas. Among the trees and trails, researchers like Adela Oliva Chavez search for blacklegged ticks that could carry Lyme disease. She's looking for answers as to why tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease are spreading in some parts of the country and not others. Today, what Adela's research tells us about ticks and the diseases they carry, and why she's dedicated her career to understanding what makes these little critters ... tick. (encore)
Chefs will tell you, cooking is not just an art — it's a science. And the spirit of summer barbecues, NPR science correspondent Sydney Lupkin brings us this piece about how understanding the chemistry of cooking meat can help you perfect your barbeque. It's all about low and slow cooking.
This story was originally reported for NPR by Gisele Grayson. Read her reporting.
Curious about other science powering the things you love? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
We all enjoy a deep-fried Mars bar with french fries from time to time, but why do we crave these unhealthy foods instead of healthy things like spinach or broccoli? And what is a food craving? The answers lie in a complex blend of our psychology, physiology, and even sociology.
BBC CrowdScience presenter Alex Lathbridge savours a mystery-meat crocket with the experts on a quest to discover the hidden sources and sauces of our food cravings.
Presenter: Alex Lathbridge
Producer: Richard Walker
Editor: Richard Collings
(Image: Stack of cheeseburgers and French fries. Credit: Dominic Lipinski/PA)
New gravitational waves, why orcas might be attacking boats and a new robot prototype inspired by animals: it's all in our latest roundup of science news, with All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro, Regina G. Barber and Geoff Brumfiel.
Have questions about science in the news? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
We have entered a “permacrisis”, an extended period of instability and insecurity, fuelled not only by natural disasters but pandemics, climate change and war.
This week, Science in Action is at the Royal Society as they host the All European Academies assembly on the importance of research in crises. Roland speaks to international experts on how research contributes to responding to and preparing for the multiple and entangled crises of our time.
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Ella Hubber
Editor: Richard Collings
Production co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris
(Photo: A man wearing a protective face mask walks past an illustration of a virus in Oldham, 3 August 2020 Credits: Phil Noble/Reuters)
