Adapting California
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2020
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Roland Pease is joined by California based science Journalist Molly Bentley as we examine the impact of earthquakes and fires. California has experienced both in the last year - What’s it like to live with a constant threat from these extreme events? We also take a look at NASA’s plans for a new mission to Mars – to look for signs on life.
What is empathy? This week’s question comes from Maria in Amsterdam who has noticed that when one of her friends is in pain, she feels their pain too, literally. Maria wants to know - is she experiencing a type of ‘super’ empathy?
To help find the answer, Marnie Chesterton visits the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and gets into an MRI scanner to discover what is happening in her brain when she empathises.
She talks with a pro-social psychopath to find out how psychopaths experience empathy differently and how they navigate social situations.
And Marnie meets with a mediator specialising in The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, to learn the value of empathy when the stakes are at their highest.
Picture: Roland Pease with science journalist Molly Bentley, Credit: BBC
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 2019, we began investigating the disappearance of Dr. Ruzha Ignatva. |
| 0:08.0 | I believe we are a very special network. |
| 0:10.0 | A scammer who stole billions from investors around the world. |
| 0:15.0 | She's on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. |
| 0:18.0 | And now, we have some unmissable updates. She has money and when you have |
| 0:23.0 | money you have power. Join me, Jamie Bartlett, as the hunt for the missing crypto queen continues. |
| 0:29.5 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. Welcome to Science and Action from the BBC World Service, the first edition in the year 2020, and I'm Ronan Peace. |
| 0:42.3 | We're going to look forward to a fantastic NASA mission to Mars that's launching later in this year, |
| 0:47.8 | but we're also going to be looking back at lessons from some of the disasters, actually, in 2019. |
| 0:56.2 | There's some interesting stuff. This week, |
| 1:01.8 | I'm joined by my guest, Molly Bentley. Molly. Hello, Roland, and a happy new year. |
| 1:08.2 | Thank you. And you are? I am the executive producer of a radio show that is here in the United States called Big Picture Science. It's produced at the SETI Institute. |
| 1:11.8 | We are on stations all over the country and the occasion that is bringing us together. |
| 1:15.7 | I'm so pleased that we're looking at each other. We are at the American Geophysical Union meeting |
| 1:20.3 | here in San Francisco, California. I'll be very interested in your comments on this first interview, |
| 1:26.1 | which is with two of the scientists, an engineer and a researcher on the Mars 2020 mission, which will be launching later this year in June. |
| 1:34.5 | I'm Katie Stack Morgan. I'm the Deputy Project Scientist for Mars 2020 and a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. |
| 1:41.1 | And I'm Jim Bell. I'm a professor at Arizona State University and the principal |
| 1:44.8 | investigator of the Mass Camzi cameras on the Mars 2020 rover. So Mars 2020, his job is to cash and |
| 1:52.2 | collect samples and leave them on the surface for a potential mission to bring back to Earth with the |
| 1:56.4 | hope that we will have Martian samples on Earth to analyze and to help us understand more about the planet Mars |
| 2:01.6 | and role of life in the solar system. |
... |
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