Climate change questions, Animal computer interaction, Sounds and meaning across world's languages
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Climate change is in the news this week. The international Paris agreement to curb global temperature rise has just come into effect but President Elect Donald Trump has said he would take the United States out of the process. In BBC Inside Science, Adam Rutherford puts listener's questions and views about climate change to experts, such as the emissions reduction impact of becoming a vegan to a proposed technology to remove carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere. Myles Allen and Peter Scarborough of the University of Oxford, and Anna Harper of the University of Exeter are consulted.
The programme also visits a lab at the Open University which studies the way animals interact with computer technology. Research includes technology to enable dogs to phone the emergency services if humans get into trouble, and using dogs to detect cancer. Reporter Marnie Chesterton meets researcher Clara Mancini and dogs Ozzie and Tory.
Are there commonalities across the world's languages between the sounds in particular words and the meanings of those words? The traditional thinking in linguistics says no. But new research surveying the meaning and sounds of words across 6,000 languages from the Americas, Asia, Europe and Australasia finds otherwise. The 'r' sound is used in words for the colour 'red' all around the world at frequencies much higher than by chance. The case is the same for the words for 'nose' and other parts of the body. Morten Christiansen of Cornell University talks to Adam Rutherford about the research.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcasts on the 10th of November 2016. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Adam Rutherford. Don't forget we're doing our occasional Science Question Time special in December, the agenda set by you dear listening. occasional science at |
| 0:20.2 | science question time special in December, the agenda set by you dear listener and answered by some proper grown-up scientists. |
| 0:18.0 | So send them in BBC inside science at BBC.co. UK and now here are some very normal sounding words. |
| 0:25.0 | None of these words really mean anything do they and by that I mean linguistic |
| 0:30.1 | says that the sounds of words themselves carry no inherent relationship with their meaning. |
| 0:35.5 | Well, new research suggests that certain sounds, in certain words, are virtually universal, |
| 0:41.0 | regardless of which language they're in. We find out about red noses. |
| 0:45.1 | We're having a look at the curious world of animal computer interactions from dogs |
| 0:50.0 | detecting cancer to training them to phone emergency services when we're in trouble. |
| 0:55.0 | God has triggered alarm. |
| 0:57.0 | Good boy, well done Ozzy. |
| 0:59.0 | Good boy. |
| 1:00.0 | Sending emergency alarm calls and texts to contact least out. |
| 1:04.0 | But first, last Friday the Paris Agreement on Climate Change came into force. |
| 1:09.0 | 193 countries signed the treaty, 103 have ratified it, and governments are now bound to not let the |
| 1:15.7 | global temperature rise by more than 2 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels by 2,100. |
| 1:22.4 | In fact, their aim is to keep the increase to 1.5 degrees. |
| 1:26.3 | This week and next delegates from 200 countries are meeting in Morocco to work out just how that's |
| 1:31.5 | going to be achieved. |
| 1:33.0 | A couple of weeks ago, we reported on the news that 2016 will be the first year that carbon dioxide |
| 1:39.3 | in the atmosphere has climbed above the symbolic 400 parts per million threshold and will remain so for generations to come. |
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