Coping with Covid

Unexpected Elements

BBC

Science

4.4 • 568 Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This has been an incredible year for scientific advance and collaboration, epitomised by the roll out of vaccines that didn’t exist a year ago, against a virus that no one had ever heard of .

And yet at the same time its been a year of incredible frustration. We are stil largely using the same methods to counter the virus that were used in past pandemics, going back a hundred years. Here we look back at key the findings on who is most susceptible and why, and ask how to improve the strategies for reducing transmission.

As regular listeners may recall, CrowdScience has delved into the strange world of fungi before, as we dug down into the forest floor to reveal how plants and trees are connected to the vast mycelial network known as the “wood wide web”. But what makes this network possible and how might it have evolved? Fungi are incredible clever, or at least , it appears that they’re capable of displaying complex behaviour that gives them the appearance of intelligence. In this episode, we speak to fungal ecologist and author of a new book, Merlin Sheldrake, about fungal “brains”, the evolution of magic mushrooms and zombie insects – the astonishing way certain fungi can take over the bodies of ants and wasps in order to sow their spores above ground.

(Image: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might
0:04.7	like our podcast too. You might. You might. It is called Sightracked with me, Nick Grimshaw.
0:09.2	And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. All the news, all the cultural
0:14.0	happenings in the UK and beyond. And great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can
0:19.7	also enjoy lots of playlists, music mixes and
0:22.6	live radio. Everything from my six music breakfast show to Radio 3 Unwind. But obviously start with
0:29.3	our podcast, sidetrack. Obviously. Obviously. So if you like music, listen on BBC Sounds.
0:34.0	Thank you for downloading the Sardt S hour from the BBC World Service with me,
0:38.1	Roland Pease. And in half an hour, it is, I'm afraid, a thoroughly rotten edition of crowd
0:43.4	science, because they're looking for fungi. If you look here on this fallen branch, can you see
0:49.7	this brown colour all over the surface there? It looks a bit like mud. Hmm, perhaps.
0:54.9	To the untrained eye.
0:56.3	Yes.
0:57.3	Well, that actually is the fruit body of a fungus.
1:00.9	This is Science in Action for the BBC World Service,
1:03.6	a program which 11 months ago,
1:06.1	mid-January, had to abandon all its plans for the week
1:09.4	because of this announcement on China TV.
1:14.7	We considered risks of this before, but now evidence has confirmed that it is contagious
1:19.4	among humans. There is such evidence collected from Wuhan. Meanwhile, there are two patients
1:24.0	in Guangdong who have not been to Wuhan but caught the novel coronavirus
1:27.5	after their family members came back from Wuhan. The two patients are from two separate households,
	...

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