Dinosaur extinction, Neanderthals in Gibraltar, Music appreciation, A year of New Horizons
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The dinosaurs met their end with a massive bang when, 66 million years ago, a 6 mile-wide rock crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. This was bad news for the dinosaurs, and consequently good news for the mammals left behind. Thomas Halliday is a palaeontologist, who specialises on the rise of the mammals, and his new work unpicks what happened to survivors after 75% of the species on earth died.
The Neanderthals were found in Gibraltar back in 1848. Ever since then, teams have been exploring the caves systems on that rocky outcrop of Europe. It's known as Neanderthal City and researchers think it was home to the very last of these people, some 30,000 years ago. BBC science reporter Melissa Hogenboom has just returned from Gibraltar and talks to Adam about the recent findings of abstract art, which suggest that Neanderthals are much more like us than previously thought.
We generally find the combination of notes in a consonant chord more pleasant to our ears than a dissonant one. The question is whether that reaction is learnt or simply part of our biology. It's a tricky thing to test because music is culturally ubiquitous. Neuroscientist Josh McDermott has found a way around this, by playing those tunes to members of a very remote Bolivian tribe - the Tsimane - and gauging their reactions.
One year on since the New Horizons probe zoomed past Pluto, Kathy Olkin, one of the chief scientists behind the mission talks to Adam about how the team have dealt with the new data. Noah Hammond from Brown University explains how he has used photographic data from New Horizons to examine the cracks in the surface of Pluto, and has suggested how they came to be.
Presenter: Adam Rutherford
Producer: Adrian Washbourne.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you I'm Adam Rutherford and this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first |
| 0:04.8 | broadcast on the 14th of July 2016. |
| 0:08.7 | More information can be found at BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:11.6 | UK slash Radio 4. You know it's part of my job on this program. BBC. |
| 0:13.4 | You know, it's part of my job on this program to make science really exciting. |
| 0:18.0 | I think it's always exciting, but I understand that not everyone shares my shameless |
| 0:22.3 | enthusiasm. |
| 0:23.0 | Though some weeks though I really don't have to try at all. |
| 0:27.0 | Today we have the last Neanderthals, the final resting place of our ancestors and the arts that they left there. We've got tribes from the Amazon |
| 0:35.2 | and how they appreciate music. And we've got more from that Pluto, the living dwarf planet that |
| 0:40.4 | just relentlessly surprises us with its wonders. |
| 0:44.0 | And to start, dinosaurs, they met their end, not with a whimper, but with a massive bang. |
| 0:50.0 | The third biggest bang ever witnessed on earth occurred 66 million years ago |
| 0:54.7 | when a six mile wide rock crashed into what we now call the Gulf of Mexico. |
| 0:59.5 | Everyone knows that this was bad news for the dinosaurs and good news for the mammals, but we don't |
| 1:04.8 | know exactly what actually happened. |
| 1:07.6 | We know that there would have been a colossal impact, a 110 mile wide crater, an unimaginable tsunami shock waves triggering |
| 1:16.4 | volcanoes and earthquakes and dust and ash blushing out the sky for millennia. |
| 1:21.4 | There's a new paper out this week from a Japanese team who |
| 1:24.4 | were proposing that it was the ejection of sooty oil that darkened the skies. |
| 1:28.2 | Links as ever on the BBC Inside Science website. Thomas Halliday is a |
| 1:32.2 | paleontologist who specializes on the rise of mammals and he's got a new paper out this week. We'll come to that in just a minute. |
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