A distant planet’s atmosphere
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2022
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A distant planet's atmosphere - NASA's JWST space telescope has unpicked the chemical contents and state of the atmosphere of planet WASP-39b 700 light years away. Astronomer Hannah Wakeford explains.
Earth's atmospheric haze and global warming - meteorologist Laura Wilcox warns that atmospheric haze over China and South Asia is masking some of the effects of global warming.
Pregnancy brain fog explained - loss of memory and other mental changes during pregnancy have been traced to structural changes in the brain, possibly due to hormone effects, neuroscientist Elseline Hoekszema speculates.
Improving lab coats - every scientist has a lab coat, but how many have one actually fits? Founder of Genius Lab Gear Derek Miller explains the problem and how he's trying to fix it.
As someone who dislikes crowds, listener Graham is curious about them. Crowds gather in all sorts of places, from train stations and football matches, to religious events and protest marches. Many of these events are celebratory, but occasionally – such as in Seoul this year – they can become horrific. Is there a science behind how crowds form, move and behave?
To find out, CrowdScience presenter Anand Jagatia speaks to some actual crowd scientists. He learns about the psychology of social identity, which influences everything from how close we stand to others to how we react in emergencies. He hears about the algorithm behind the biggest marathons in the world, and how they ensure 50,000 runners move smoothly through a city on race day. And he explores how research into the spread of rioting can help to stop crowds from becoming a mob or a crush, helping us to navigate crowded spaces as safely as possible.
Image credit: Melissa Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might |
| 0:04.7 | like our podcast too. You might. You might. It is called Sightracked with me, Nick Grimshaw. |
| 0:09.2 | And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. All the news, all the cultural |
| 0:14.0 | happenings in the UK and beyond. And great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can |
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| 0:34.3 | Thank you for downloading the Science Hour from the BBC World Service with me, |
| 0:38.5 | Roland P's, where in half an hour, Anne-Hacketeer will be answering one of your questions |
| 0:43.0 | about what makes the world tick. People gather in all kinds of places, from sports stadiums to |
| 0:49.6 | train stations, but how do crowds behave and why? We'll be looking at the psychology of identity, |
| 0:56.5 | algorithms for marathon planning and why some peaceful protests erupt into violence. |
| 1:01.8 | That's crowd science on crowd science. We'll sit the other way around. Anyway, it's with |
| 1:07.1 | Ann Ann Jacketeer later in the podcast. Before that, science and action where you can hear how |
| 1:12.9 | getting rid of atmospheric pollutants will add to global warming. We dip into the myth, or is it, |
| 1:19.8 | that pregnancy affects women's brains? If you talk about memory, we do see steep declines in the volume |
| 1:25.9 | of the hippocampus, which is a structure |
| 1:27.9 | that's very involved in memory. And of course, this could be related to memory problems |
| 1:32.1 | women are experiencing. And we have a plea for an improvement to the most common and humble |
| 1:37.5 | piece of scientific kit, the lab coat. That is it. People left comments. The comments are so |
| 1:43.5 | rich, just free-form rants about |
| 1:46.1 | what they hate about their lab codes. And we have engine start? Decolage lift off from a tropical |
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