Antarctica's volcanoes, science book prize nominee - Mark O'Connell, US solar eclipse and 40 years of NASA's Voyager mission
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 August 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Not so much hiding in plain sight, but tucked under the ice-sheet in Antarctica are 91 volcanoes. This adds to the 47 volcanoes already known on the continent. After a graduate student posed the question,"are there any volcanoes in Western Antarctica?", Dr Robert Bingham, and colleagues, at Edinburgh University, scoured the satellite and database records to find the volcanoes. This huge region is likely to dwarf that of East Africa's volcanic ridge, which is currently the most volcano-dense region on Earth.
Journalist Mark O'Connell is the second of our Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2017 nominees. His broad-minded, yet sceptical look at the world of 'transhumanism', "To be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death", questions how and why some of us are looking to use technology to fundamentally change the human condition.
On Monday 21st of August 2017, some of the United States will go dark. This is the first total solar eclipse, visible from coast to coast in the US for 99 years. Gareth gets excited with veteran eclipse watchers, David Baron and Jackie Beucher.
On the 20th of August 1977, NASA's probe Voyager 2 launched. This was quickly followed two weeks later by the launch of Voyager 1 (which was on a faster trajectory). Since then the two spacecraft have been exploring our Solar System, the Heliosphere and interstellar space. Surpassing all expectations, the probes have taught us so much about our planets, their moons and beyond. Gareth looks back at the highlights with the Voyager mission's chief scientist, Professor Ed Stone, in a celebration of the 40 year mission.
Produced by Fiona Roberts Presented by Gareth Mitchell.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello Podcast Downloader, this is BBC Inside Science as broadcast on Radio 4 on Thursday the 17th of August 2017. I'm Gareth Mitchell standing |
| 0:45.5 | in for Adam Rutherford for the whole of August. Lucky me. And in fact one of the best bits for me |
| 0:50.0 | is that we're working our way through the Royal Society Science Book Prize. |
| 0:53.7 | So I get to read a whole pile of science books and then I sound very clever in the pub. |
| 0:58.4 | On Twitter, computer science PhD student Sando Stuckey, who's at St Stuck in Theory he's enjoying it all as well |
| 1:05.0 | He's in fact tweeted a picture of his own pile of those six books and he says |
| 1:08.4 | My reading list for the rest of this summer. Thanks for the tip BBC Inside Science. Sanjo, it's all part of the service. |
| 1:15.0 | Let's get on with today's show though. Today a continent covered in ice, Antarctica. Under the Glassiers, |
| 1:22.0 | Surprises in store. store, volcanic ones. |
| 1:25.6 | And another continent covered from coast to coast by a fast moving shadow, at least a large |
| 1:31.6 | sway of that continent. The United States is bracing itself |
| 1:34.6 | for the first such total eclipse for nearly a century. |
| 1:38.8 | These are often once in a lifetime events. |
| 1:41.6 | Unless of course you could live for hundreds of years, |
| 1:44.0 | the transhumanists aim to achieve just that, so how do they propose to put death on hold? |
... |
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