CO2 and rice, Underground farming, Ancient interstellar asteroid, Microplastics air pollution
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2018
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New research suggests that rice will be depleted in important B vitamins and minerals by rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Adam Rutherford to talks to Kristie Ebi of the University of Washington, one of the scientists behind the finding, and consults Marco Springmann of the Future of Food project at the University of Oxford.
Is the future of farming subterranean? Marnie Chesterton visits a farm called Growing Underground for some answers. Specialising in salad and herbs, it is located beneath Clapham Common in South London in an old Second World War air-raid shelter.
Has an interstellar asteroid been lurking in our solar system for more than four billions years? It's a possibility according to the astronomers who've watched and plotted its strange orbit. It travels around the Sun in the opposite direction to most of the planets, asteroids and comets. Asteroid specialist Alan Fitzsimmons of Queens University Belfast talks to Adam about this astronomical oddity and assesses the evidence for it being a traveller from the stars, captured by our solar system during its early childhood.
Stephanie Wright of Kings College London explains about what we do and don't know about the abundance and health risks of microplastic particles in the air we breathe.
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
| 0:15.0 | It's in the hands of the creator. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong |
| 0:25.4 | thing. |
| 0:26.4 | Julie, at your service. |
| 0:27.4 | Listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. |
| 0:31.4 | Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first |
| 0:35.4 | broadcast on the 24th of May 2018 I'm Adam Rutherford. |
| 0:40.0 | Underground farming this week a trip to a bomb shelter in London where herbs and vegetables are being grown, |
| 0:46.2 | and a visitor from the stars, we've spotted a weird celestial body that is probably not from our solar system but has been here for more than |
| 0:54.0 | four billion years and is going the wrong way around the sun. So where did this object |
| 0:59.2 | come from and how was it captured by a Jupiter or some other mechanism to form this orbit about the sun now, |
| 1:05.8 | where is it going in a retrograde motion? |
| 1:07.8 | But first, we often talk about the changing climate on Insight Science. |
| 1:11.7 | It is one of the defining scientific, economic and |
| 1:14.6 | social issues of our age. The increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere |
| 1:19.1 | are well established and is well understood to be the primary factor in the rise of global temperature. |
| 1:24.5 | We talk often about how sea levels will rise and how biodiversity is in decline. |
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