Coronavirus questions; HMS Challenger and ocean acidification; Sean Carroll's quantum world

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adam Rutherford is joined by Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, Jonathan Ball, to help answer some of your questions on the latest coronavirus outbreak. Will it become endemic, and once infected and recovered how long are we resistant to the virus? And can face masks and alcohol hand gels help prevent infection? In the 1870's the scientific research ship, HMS Challenger, sailed all the world's oceans measuring sea temperatures, ocean depths and sampling the geology of the seabed. But it's the seawater samples, containing microscopic zooplankton, preserved for 130 years which intrigued climate scientist Dr. Lyndsey Fox. She has been measuring the thickness of the shells of Foraminifera - tiny single-celled organisms - as a way of measuring how much the ocean has acidified over time. The shells are made of calcium carbonate, that is much harder to accrete when the pH drops. Theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll is very good at explaining the unexplainable. He chats to Adam about his latest book - Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. Producer: Fiona Roberts

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.2	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know I also know that comedy is really
0:24.4	subjective and everyone has different tastes so we've got a huge range of comedy on offer
0:29.6	from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about. So if you
0:36.2	fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.3	Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 20th of February
0:47.0	20 20 do we say 2020 20 it's got a lot of 20s in it I'm Adam Rutherford and today we're diving deep into the ocean and into the past with the voyage of HMS Challenger, a scientific naval ship that's helping us to understand the changing climate today via plankton and we delve even deeper into the
1:06.1	quantum realm and take a peek at the future of physics with Sean Carroll all sorts of
1:10.3	tech is based on quantum mechanics but do we even understand how it works?
1:16.0	But first, COVID-19, the coronavirus epidemic is ongoing.
1:20.6	Last week we asked you the listeners for questions and you did not disappoint.
1:25.2	We've had hundreds so we're going to whip through as many as we can with our resident virologist
1:29.2	Jonathan Ball from Nottingham University.
1:31.0	He's going to answer them.
1:32.1	To kick off, Howard Davis emailed in and asked,
1:34.9	the virus is now called COVID-19,
1:37.3	could it become endemic,
1:39.0	could it dodge the bullet, as it were,
	...

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