Goshawk, Cosmic Renaissance, Carl Djerassi and Charles Townes

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As Helen MacDonald's "H is for Hawk" secures 2014's Book of the Year at the Costa Awards, a paper appears describing the hunting tactics of the Northern Goshawk, quite literally, from a birds' eye view. Suzanne Amador Kane of Haverford College in the US describes her work analyzing footage from tiny cameras mounted on the head of the predatory raptor.

The Planck Consortium releases yet more findings from the very beginning of the universe. A new age for the very first stars confirms our best models of the universe. But analysis of the dust in our own galaxy edges out the possibility that last year's BICEP2 announcement did in fact represent evidence of inflation and the first observed primordial gravitational waves.

And in the last two weeks, two giants of the twentieth century passed away. Science writer Philip Ball shares his thoughts on the lives of Carl Djerassi, father (he preferred mother) of the contraceptive pill, and Charles Townes, known as father of the Laser.

Producer Alex Mansfield.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC 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.
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0:36.0	Hello You, this is the podcast or Podcat version as it says in this script of Inside Science from the BBC first broadcast on Thursday the 5th of
0:44.8	February 2015 I'm Adam Rutherford and there's a picture of me at BBC.co.
0:49.6	dot UK slash radio 4.
0:51.6	Birds of prey, lasers, sex and deep space.
0:55.0	Honestly, scientists pretend to be grown-ups, but it's the thinnest of facades.
1:00.0	In a minute we'll return to the saga of gravitational waves. They were there, now they're not, we take a
1:05.4	look at the grandstanding project that might just be a model of how scientific discoveries
1:10.3	are made. And as two titanic scientists shuffle off this mortal coil, we celebrate their wildly different
1:16.4	inventions, both of which profoundly changed the world, the laser and the pill. But first we take to the skies and ask what it is like to be that most
1:26.1	magnificent predator, the goshawk. These raptors have been popular hunting birds for centuries,
1:31.3	though they neared extinction in the UK when their status was
1:34.2	downgraded from hunter to vermin.
1:36.6	But Falcon has reintroduced them in the 20th century, and there are now more than 400 breeding
1:41.3	pairs, elusive, but definitely there, mated for life cohabiting in single nests.
1:47.0	These spectacular birds were thrust into the limelight last year as the subject of the memoir H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald, a gorgeously lyrical book that describes
1:56.3	her ascent into Goshawkkfolkenry following the death of her father.
	...

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