Crash risk; Mary Rose bacteria; History of Science; Greenwich telescope
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
July has seen train crashes in Canada, Pakistan, France, Spain and Switzerland. Inside Science asks if this is a trend or just a coincidence. Professor David Spiegelhalter, an expert in the public perception of risk, explains whether there is such a thing as a 'crash season'.
Microbiologists working on the Mary Rose in Portsmouth have discovered a new type of metal-eating bacteria which is damaging the ship's wooden timbers. Reporter Gaia Vince goes behind the scenes at Portsmouth's Historic Dockyards to find out how conservation scientists have saved the ship.
Last week Manchester hosted the 2013 International Congress of History of Science Technology and Medicine, the biggest ever meeting of historians of science from around the world. The keynote speech was given by Prof Hasok Chang of the University of Cambridge, urging his colleagues to put "Science back in History of Science". Inside Science asked him if there should also be more history in the practice of science...
Finally, Dr Marek Kukula Public Astronomer at the Greenwich Observatory shows us his instrument - the 28inch refracting telescope which historians at the time likened to a Spanish onion, or the Taj Mahal.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:29.1 | Hello I'm Adam Rutherford here is your weekly dose of Inside Science to be applied externally only |
| 0:35.0 | terms and conditions at BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:39.2 | UK slash radio 4. Lots of excellent history on this week's podmax. |
| 0:42.1 | From the bottom of the sea to the heavens above, |
| 0:44.4 | we have a bacteria unique to the wreck of the Tudor battleship The Mary Rose, which is slowly eating the remains. |
| 0:50.6 | We have a magnificent Victorian telescope, and what the history of science can teach us about science and there's a poem about physics. |
| 0:59.0 | But first, July has been a bad month for accidents on the railways. |
| 1:04.0 | Police in Canada say three people have been killed after a runaway train carrying crude oil exploded in Quebec. |
| 1:12.0 | Dozens of people are still. will exploded in |
| 1:13.8 | at a local time here in Switzerland two trains collided at a station a very small |
| 1:17.4 | railway station called Grange-Parin. |
| 1:19.7 | 77 people are killed and 140 injured in Spain's worst train crash for decades. |
| 1:26.0 | An express derailed. |
| 1:27.0 | The French Rail Company, SNCF, says a technical fault on the truck caused yesterday's rail crush near Paris. |
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