Childhood cancers - Ghana telescope - Nano-listening device for cells - Ancient whales
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Adam Rutherford goes the pathology archive of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to hear how tumour samples from child patients about one hundred years ago may improve the diagnosis and treatment of very rare cancers in children today. He meets cancer geneticist Sam Behjati of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Great Ormond Street pathologist Neil Sebire in the hospital's basement archive.
Africa now has its first radio telescope outside South Africa. It is located in Ghana near the capital Accra. The telescope is in fact a defunct telecoms satellite dish which was spotted on Google Earth images and then re-purposed for cutting edge astrophysics. It is hoped the dish will be the founding instrument of a pan African network of radio telescopes scrutinising exotic celestial objects in the skies above the continent. South African science journalist Sarah Wilds tells the story of how the Ghanaian dish was found and converted.
Nano-engineers in California have created a device 100 times thinner than a human hair which they have used to measure the turbulence created by swimming microbes and record the sounds of heart cells contracting. Don Sirbuly is the professor of nano-engineering at the University of California San Diego who led the team.
A spectacular new whale fossil unearthed Peru is the oldest known member of the evolutionary branch which gave rise to the giant filter-feeding baleen whales of today. The 36 million year old fossil provides evidence for how ancestral whales transitioned from capturing prey with their teeth to filter-feeding with baleen fibres. They may gone through a period of sucking prey from the sea bed.
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 you, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4, first broadcast on the 18th of May 2017. I'm Adam Rutherford. Recycling, it's jolly important these days, but |
| 0:46.6 | not just for paper and bottles. African astrophysicists are recycling old mobile phone |
| 0:52.2 | communication satellite dishes and re-uping them to look at the stars. |
| 0:57.0 | And we have a new chapter in the story of how the whale became. |
| 1:00.0 | More specifically, we're filling a gap between the whales that have teeth and those who do not. |
| 1:05.0 | And a new device so sensitive it can record the force created in the wake of a passing bacterium as it swims by, or the whispers of heart cells twitching. |
| 1:17.0 | That's all coming up in just a minute, but first, Great Orman Street Hospital will be known to many of you. It's one of the oldest children's hospitals in the world. |
| 1:25.2 | And as with many specialist centres, they frequently deal with mercifully rare and unusual diseases. |
| 1:31.0 | Occasionally, doctors meet children who have cancers so rare that there is simply |
| 1:34.9 | no precedent for treating them. Drug regimes and clinical trials can't be done when you've |
| 1:39.6 | only got a handful of children with that particular genetic mutation or tumor. |
| 1:44.3 | Well, cancer geneticists Sam Bahati had a very clever idea and he approached pathologist |
| 1:48.8 | Neil Sabir at Great Orman Street. The idea was to raid the tissue archives to look for records of patients |
| 1:55.5 | with similar disorders since the founding of the hospital. Nowadays they keep only the last |
| 2:00.4 | ten years worth of patients records in the hospital itself and that includes biopsies |
... |
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