Earth's Earliest Life, The Benefits of Pollution, Sexuality and Science and New ideas on Evolution
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2017
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The World's oldest sedimentary rocks reveal traces of our earliest ancestors. New analysis shows life forms existed more than 3.7 billion years ago which were very similar to those found in our deepest oceans today, microbial life around hydro thermal vents.
Some pollution might be good for the world oceans. New finding from China show how iron oxide pollution from power generation and industry has been turned into a source of nutrients for phytoplankton - by interacting with other chemical pollutants. The researchers say this is increasing the ability of the ocean to lock up atmospheric carbon dioxide and so reduce the impact of man made greenhouse gasses. They query whether reducing this kind of pollution could have a negative impact.
This week The Royal Society celebrated LGBT history month and 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales Rory Galloway meets Sir Dermot Turing, the nephew of renowned computer scientist Alan Turing, to discuss Alan’s Legacy for LGBT scientists today, and we look at the continued impacted of homophobia in science.
And we hear about a new test for ideas in Evolution. This involves recreating the ancestors of fruit flies. The findings have overturned an established theory on genetic inheritance in these alcohol tolerant flies.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4, first broadcast on the 2nd of March 2017. I'm Adam Rutherford. Listen out for the |
| 0:46.5 | rise of the robots which should have winged its way into this podcast feed and |
| 0:50.5 | next week a super mega mash-up that we do a couple of times a year with the film program. |
| 0:56.0 | Recorded live at the Science Museum, Francine Stock and I will be heading for Mars to talk |
| 1:00.4 | astrobiology and aliens in science and on the silver screen. |
| 1:05.0 | After all, the universe is a big place and if it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space. |
| 1:11.0 | Today, the strange tale of pollution which might be good for the ecosystem by ceding oceans with iron. |
| 1:17.0 | We change our minds about evolution. No, you can relax creationists, just a key piece of textbook evolutionary theory that turned |
| 1:25.2 | out to be wrong. |
| 1:26.8 | And during LGBT week we look at the legacy of the great Alan Turing. |
| 1:31.4 | I've always thought of Alan Turing as being somebody who is actually |
| 1:34.8 | quite proud of being a geek. I think if your question was saying is his genius a |
| 1:39.6 | reflection of being repressed I would say no it's probably the opposite. I think it's at the point |
| 1:44.0 | where it's actually allowed to, you know, where he's allowed to be himself that actually it starts to flourish. |
| 1:50.0 | But first we do like to tackle big subjects on inside science and there are a few bigger than the beginning of life on earth. |
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