Boaty McBoatface in Antarctica, Aeroplane biofuels, Bakhshali manuscript, Goldilocks zones
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The submarine famously named Boaty McBoatface is deployed this week for its first mission to examine a narrow submarine gap in the South Atlantic. Mike Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey tells Adam Rutherford how this research into the behaviour of deep water at this crucial point in the oceans will help us answer key questions about global ocean temperature flows.
Some close-quarter flying in the wake of a jet has provided new insights on reducing aircraft pollution. Richard Moore at NASA Langley in Virginia describes how he's taken to the skies to measure gasses emitted by new biofuels to assess their impact in reducing carbon soot particles, aircraft contrails and climate-changing cloud formations across the sky
Angela Saini visits the Bodleian Library in Oxford where the Bakhshali manuscript which contains possibly the very first graphical representation of the number zero is finally being carbon dated so we can better understand its scientific importance
And the habitable zones around stars in our the universe just got a whole lot bigger. Lisa Kaltenegger of the Carl Sagan Institute reveals how the presence of volcanoes pumping out hydrogen has a significant warming effect on planets, and increases the range of the so called Goldilocks Zone
Producer: Adrian Washbourne.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
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| 0:29.0 | Hello You this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the |
| 0:35.3 | 16th of March 2017. I'm Adam Rutherford. Don't forget that Series 5 of the |
| 0:41.9 | curious cases of Rutherford and Fry is now online |
| 0:44.8 | lots of extra super fun times with me and Maths mastermind Hannah Fry in the |
| 0:49.8 | podcast all on the radio for website, here's this week's offering of jet-fueled science. |
| 0:57.0 | Dare-Devil science this week. |
| 0:59.0 | NASA Climate Scientists go all top gun measuring atmospheric pollution by flying small jet planes |
| 1:04.5 | extremely close to large jet planes and then we're out of the danger zone and |
| 1:09.4 | the Goldilock zone you know when something is not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life on a planet. |
| 1:16.4 | Well, for the 3,000 unexplored planets we know of so far, that zone just got a whole lot bigger and it's all thanks to volcanoes. |
| 1:24.0 | If you have a lot of volcanoes you would also have a lot of this hydrogen |
| 1:28.0 | and that would actually warm you further out |
| 1:31.0 | and so this old limit of the habitable zone, where it just gets too cold and |
| 1:36.0 | everything becomes an icy wasteland, is now pushed out by about 50%. There are more and |
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