Ancient farmers' genomes, Alice at Cern, Astrophysics questions

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2015

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Ancient farmers' genomes New research looking at the DNA of people who lived in Europe as early as 8500 years ago shows signs of evolution, of natural selection, and of how farming has changed Europe in the last few millennia. The huge sample of 230 ancient individuals includes 26 Neolithic people from Anatolia thought to be the very first farmers.

Cern's ALICE Experiment Adam visits CERN in Geneva, to see ALICE (A Large Ion Collision Experiment). ALICE is designed to investigate one of the four fundamental forces in the Universe. The strong nuclear force is the most powerful, but only over a very short distance. It is what holds quarks together, and quarks stuck together in the right conformation make neutrons and protons. Protons and neutrons stuck together plus electrons make up atoms, which is what everything is made of.

Listeners Questions on Astrophysics Space physicists, Dr. Carole Haswell from the Open University and Dr Andrew Pontzen from UCL answer your questions about the force of gravity, the size of stars, the volume of matter and more.

Producer: Fiona Roberts.

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 26th of November 2015.
0:07.5	I'm Adam Rutherford and this week just for the pod version we've got an extended session on the big universe and subatomic physics questions
0:14.3	and answers that we had to cut to squeeze into the 28 minutes that we get on air.
0:18.8	Podcasts for the win. More information at BBC.co.
0:22.5	UK slash Radio 4.
0:24.5	Life, the universe and everything this week.
0:26.8	Actually that's what we do most weeks on inside science,
0:29.0	but this time I visit Cern to meet Alice and my she is beautiful.
0:33.9	Alice is the less well known experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, but is up and running this
0:38.6	week and I went to see what atoms she is smashing.
0:42.4	And because you lot gets so excited about fundamental physics and also big
0:46.6	interstellar space, we've picked out a clutch of your questions from the hundreds sent in
0:51.5	to answer some of your big cosmological and subatomic
0:54.5	ponderings. But before we get to all that physics indulge me some of the most
0:58.6	exciting genetics that is being dug out of the ground. The study of the DNA of people long dead
1:05.0	has been accelerating at a breathtaking pace this year.
1:08.0	We've had a few of these stories on inside science
1:10.0	of how they are changing our understanding of our own history.
1:13.7	A new one was published in Nature this week and it's too good to miss.
1:17.6	Ian Matheson is part of a big team at Harvard Medical School who have been digging around
1:21.8	in the genes of our ancient ancestors.
1:24.1	And in this latest study they've dipped into the DNA of people ranging from
	...

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