20/08/2015

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2015

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why the expansion of the paleolithic brain was powered by cooked carbohydrates. Gareth Mitchell talks to Professor of Evolutionary Genetics, Mark Thomas, about the difficulties of establishing what our ancestors ate. More than half the world's corals grow in deep, cold waters, many around the shores of the British Isles. But a new study shows they are under severe threat from ocean acidification caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide. Gareth talks to Professor of Marine Biology, Murray Roberts, from Heriot Watt University about why these corals could all be gone by the end of the 21st century. This week's short-listed Royal Society Winton Prize book is Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code. Marnie Chesterton talks to the author Matthew Cobb. BBC Science and environment reporter, Jonathan Webb, joins Gareth from the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston to talk about why the grime on buildings could be a new source of air pollution and why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be used to make carbon fibres.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello it's Gareth Mitchell here. This is the Inside Science Podcast and I am the man
0:05.2	described just last week by the amazing Adam Rutherford as inestimable.
0:09.8	What a thing to be described as but Adam I'll take the I'll take the compliment I should say by the way Adam is away for a few weeks yes even science presenters need a few weeks off
0:18.4	When I'm not here I tend to be on click which is the technology podcast and radio program from the BBC World Service,
0:26.0	if you ever fancy checking that out. But let's get down to business. This is what inside science sounded like today,
0:32.0	the 20th of August 2015 when at some point
0:35.2	on Radio 4 an announcer said something like and now on Radio 4 it's time for
0:40.0	Inside Science with Gareth Mitchell.
0:43.2	Hello everyone and today doubts over the paleo diet.
0:47.7	And also new grime statistics.
0:50.0	The calculations say that the grubby stuff on our inner city windowsills is part of a
0:54.5	pollution recycling process and not in a good way.
0:58.7	And there's nothing good either about how the seas form a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide, especially not if you're a deep sea coral.
1:06.5	And also we're discussing life's greater secret and one understated sentence that went on to change the world.
1:13.0	Well I know this might be a little hard to swallow,
1:16.0	but if you are on the paleo diet, eating more lean meat and veg,
1:20.0	and cutting out the carbs,
1:21.0	then your menu has just become rather less scientifically based.
1:25.2	Subscribers to the diet have assumed that paleolithic people survived on a low-carb diet,
1:31.0	but that ain't necessarily so, according to a paper in the latest edition of the
1:35.2	quarterly review of biology. The researchers were interested in how our
1:39.6	ancestors brains increased so rapidly in size around 800,000 years ago.
	...

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