Flu, Coffee yeasts, Wave machine, Cochlear implants
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The flu season is running later this year. And it has been unusually virulent. Professor Wendy Barclay, virologist at Imperial College London, tells Tracey Logan about the constant race to keep up with flu mutations in order to build an effective vaccine.
Wine has a microbial terroir which is thought to affect its taste. A new paper suggests coffee and chocolate might do too. Aimee Dudley from the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute in Seattle has studied global populations of yeast found on cacao and coffee beans. She explains that these yeast varieties are genetically diverse. Tracey Logan travels to coffee supplier Union, to meet scientist-turned-coffee-buyer, Steve Macatonia, and unpick the flavours of coffee.
In Delft, the world's biggest artificial waves are pitted against a new kind of super-strong sea wall. The Delta Flume team, led by Mark Klein Breteler, has created a giant concrete channel with a wave generator. Reporter Roland Pease turns up in time to see the team testing their artificial waves against a 10 metre dyke.
People with cochlear implants hear a degraded version of speech. Using subtitles helps train the brain to understand it faster. Matt Davis and Ed Sohoglu from the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Science Unit in Cambridge suggest that this feeds into a model of how the brain learns called Perception Learning.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is the podcast of BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 24th of March 2016. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm not sounding too good today, can you still understand me? Sounds heard through cochlear implants and the science that could make them clearer. |
| 0:24.0 | Wine, coffee and chocolate, do they all have a microbial terra-hour that affects their taste, |
| 0:30.0 | as well as plant variety, soil and climate. |
| 0:33.0 | A new study says yes, just in time for us to test it here on inside science. |
| 0:37.0 | And our reporter watches the world's biggest artificial waves try to destroy an entirely new kind of super strong sea wall. |
| 0:45.9 | Let's say a hundred tons of water is moving now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| 0:50.8 | So this is a big one. Oh, oh, indeed. But we're starting with flu. Have you just got over it? I know I have along with the soprano section in my choir. We've been decimated for weeks. |
| 1:05.0 | That's no surprise as public health experts now agree that the flu season is running late this year. |
| 1:11.0 | It usually peaks in the coldest winter months when we all huddle, cough and sneeze together, |
| 1:16.7 | but this winter 2015 to 2016, confirmed cases of influenza requiring intensive care admission have already |
| 1:23.9 | exceeded the last year's entire flu season by more than 30% and there's still |
| 1:28.8 | another couple of months of it to run. Why? I asked Wendy Barclay, a professor of virology and flu expert from Imperial |
| 1:36.9 | College in London. She told me when the flu season's peak months normally are. |
| 1:41.9 | It normally would peak late December into January. So we get |
| 1:46.6 | seasonal flu every year and there are four different types of flu circulating in humans at the |
| 1:51.8 | moment and any one of those in any year could cause |
| 1:54.8 | your influenza illness. There are two types of A we call H1 and H3 and there are two types |
| 2:01.0 | of B as well. Has this year followed the same seasonal pattern as previous years? |
| 2:06.8 | This year is quite an unusual year because although we had some flu early in the season, |
| 2:12.0 | we've seen the numbers rise and rise and it really does seem like through |
| 2:16.2 | February and March there's been an unusually high level of laboratory confirmed |
... |
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