Ancient Britons' DNA, Concorde's 40th Anniversary, Giant dinosaur, New planet?

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Our ability to extract DNA from old bones is improving, giving us a much clearer picture of who our ancestors were, and what they did. Two new papers out this week in Nature Communications are filling in some gaps in our knowledge of the history of Britain. One of the pieces of research - led by Professor Dan Bradley from Trinity College Dublin - examines DNA from individuals who died in northeast England at the beginning of the first millennium of the current era. The other paper analyses the genomes of East Anglian people who lived at a similar and slightly later time, and the lead author is Dr Stephan Schiffels. He worked at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge at the time of this research, and is now based at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Professor Mark Thomas from University College London is a co-author on Dan Bradley's paper and joins Adam Rutherford to discuss this research in the context of its rapidly changing field.

Concorde flew its first commercial flight on the 21st January 1976. To mark its 40th birthday, Concorde engineer Christopher Mitchell and Concorde pilot David Rowland talk about the extraordinary aeroplane's scientific and engineering legacy.

What looked like an innocent rocky outcrop in the Argentinian desert turned out to be something completely different: An eight foot long femur, belonging to the world's largest dinosaur. Ben Garrod is one of the team who has put together this as yet unnamed behemoth. He talks us through the extraordinary discovery and journey to investigate a new species - and it's only just beginning. The work has been documented as part of the TV programme 'Attenborough & the Giant Dinosaur', due to air at 6.30pm this Sunday 24th Jan on BBC One.

Finally, today's headlines indicate that we might have been missing something fairly substantial in our very own solar system: A new ninth planet. However, as BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos tells us, this isn't yet confirmed. With Dr Ellen Stofan, NASA Chief Scientist.

Producer: Jen Whyntie.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 21st of January 2016
0:07.0	There's tons more science at BBC.co.uk.
0:11.0	slash radio 4 but also for fans of our semi-regular science question time
0:15.2	on inside science we want your enduring conundrums for a new series on
0:19.5	BBC Radio 4 presented by your humble servants of science, Dr. Hanna-Fry and me.
0:24.8	The curious cases of Rutherford and Fry will be taking on miniature investigations into everyday
0:29.6	things and curios that puzzle, baffle or annoy or a sort of agony science aunts.
0:36.2	We take our examinations very seriously though, so send us your own suggestions, curious
0:40.3	cases at BBC.co.uk. Now on with the show.
0:46.4	Hello, everything is really old on this week's program.
0:49.8	Concord went supersonic 40 years ago this week and we're reminiscing on that beautiful
0:54.5	bird and looking at the future of faster than sounds travel.
0:58.1	A bit further back in time we have literally the biggest flipping dinosaur in history, a 70 ton mega behemoth.
1:06.0	And older than even that, we may have found the ninth planet of the solar system, but nobody
1:11.2	has actually seen it, so is it really there? But first, more and more these
1:16.1	days we're reconstructing the past using not the standard tools of history or archaeology,
1:21.7	but of biology, our ability to extract DNA from old bones is getting better and better
1:27.2	and fundamentally changing the picture of who our ancestors were and what they were doing.
1:33.0	Two new papers out this week in Nature Communications are filling in some of the gaps in our
1:36.4	knowledge of the history of Britain.
1:38.5	And Professor Mark Thomas from University College London is with me in the studio.
1:41.6	He's one of the authors on one of the papers and he's going to help us get to grips with the
	...

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