Animal experiments, Bees and diesel, Sense Ocean, Readability of IPCC report

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Animal experiments Scientists are changing the way they measure animals used in research. The most recent Home Office report not only shows the numbers of animals used, it also grades how much each animal suffered. Dr Sara Wells from MRC talks to Adam about this new measure, and also the fact that the overall number of animals used in 2014 has declined for the first time in years.

Bees and diesel The polluting power of diesel has been getting a lot of press recently. Now, new research has shown that the volatile nitrogen oxides in diesel exhaust (NOx) are preventing bees from finding their food flowers. The diesel chemically alters some of the most common floral scent compounds, rendering them unrecognisable to bees and other insect pollinators. The effect adds to the suite of environmental factors impacting bee survival.

Sense Ocean Adam visits the National oceanography Centre in Southampton where they are working on Sense Ocean - A big Europe-wide project which is monitoring what is in the world's oceans. Professor Matt Mowlem, is Head of the Ocean Technology and engineering group, and he is in charge of making sensors, which measure the chemical and biological nature of sea water from small platforms and vehicles.

Readability of IPCC Report A paper in Nature Climate change last week scored the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers report, very low for 'readability', Adam discusses the trade-off between writing science that is right, and writing science that is understandable.

Producer: Fiona Roberts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello you this is the podcast version of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first
0:03.9	broadcast on the 22nd of October 2015 more things are at BBC.
0:09.1	co. UK slash radio 4.
0:11.6	Diesel emissions are back in the news, not VW's faked exhaust tests,
0:15.8	but because they're messing around with the ability of bees
0:18.9	to recognize nectar-rich flowers.
0:21.4	We're back in the deep with a new network of micro labs that can perform
0:25.2	highly detailed measurements of the fine tunings of the ocean floor. And our old favorite is back,
0:31.4	bafflement and obfuscation in the language of science.
0:35.4	This time it's the all-important reports of the International Panel on Climate Change that are
0:39.4	causing us to say, what?
0:42.2	But first, every year the Home Office releases its data on precisely how many animals
0:47.2	have been used in experiments in the previous year. Animal research is an essential part of many, if not most aspects of biomedical research,
0:54.3	and most scientists, myself included, agree that they are necessary to understand basic biology and the progress
1:00.8	and treatment of disease from cancer to diabetes and everything in between.
1:06.0	The regulations in the UK for performing animal experiments and science are the toughest in the world.
1:11.0	Cosmetic testing has been banned since 1998.
1:14.0	For many years, researchers have been encouraged to follow the principles of the three
1:18.8	rs, reduction of the number of animals used, refinement of the procedures to make them less severe,
1:25.6	and replacement to use alternatives where and when available, things like cells in test tubes.
1:31.0	The figures for 2014 were released this morning and for the first time in several years the total has gone down by 6% on 2013 4.12 million procedures down to 3.87 million. But before we pat ourselves on the back, the way
1:46.2	we count has changed following an EU directive. We'll come to that in just a minute.
	...

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