Gravity wave breakthrough, The antibiotic pipeline, Microbial waste recycling, Fausto - an AI opera
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
The gravitational waves produced by two massive black holes colliding have for the first time been detected by three gravitational wave detectors. Professor Sheila Rowan of the University of Glasgow explains the importance of this new three way observation.
The World Health organisation reports that there are too few new candidate antibiotics in the development pipelines to replace those becoming obsolete through the rapid spread of antibiotic resistance. Professor Willem van Shaik of the University of Birmingham and pharma-biotech analyst Dr Jack Scannell discuss where the problems and solutions might lie.
Could bacteria recycle all of our waste? Waste disposal is a growing concern as nations run out of space and ecosystems are increasingly polluted. Microorganisms may hold the key for turning household waste into biodegradable plastic and perhaps one day even into food and basic chemical feedstocks. Hans Vesterhoff, Professor of Systems Biology at Amsterdam University is developing microbial networks with the aim of converting all carbon-based waste into useful or edible stuff.
AI and Opera: Prof Luc Steels, an AI and language researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Catalonia is also a composer. He has just had his new opera premiered. With a libretto written by a neuropsychiatrist colleague, the opera 'Fausto' is a re-telling of the Faust story. It explores the dangers and flawed thinking of silicon-based transhumanism. In the opera, the Faust character is a social media-obsessed hipster and Mephistopheles is a malevolent AI in the cloud. In a twist on the original, Fausto trades his body rather than his soul so that he can be uploaded and reunited with his lover in the cloud.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings and would you believe it Adam is Galaventing again so I get to hang out with you once more to geek out with some science. |
| 0:07.0 | Yes, hello again I'm Gareth Mitchell and we're all inside the Inside Science podcast, |
| 0:12.0 | originally a radio program on BBC Radio 4 |
| 0:15.1 | on Thursday the 28th of September 2017. |
| 0:19.8 | And on the program, two black holes collided, and two billion years later caused quite a ripple here on earth. |
| 0:28.0 | But time isn't on our side in the battle to develop new antibiotics. |
| 0:32.0 | Just how badly is it going? Well |
| 0:34.8 | spoiler alert things could definitely be a lot better. On the upside bacteria |
| 0:40.5 | might be coming to the rescue in the recycling center solving our waste problem and that would be nice |
| 0:46.5 | Unless we make a pact with the devil first yes the story of Faust selling his soul sees a 21st century cyber opera as our hero uploads his mind to the |
| 0:56.9 | cloud. Well first it was one of the biggest ever scientific breakthroughs when the news broke and then they did it again and now a fourth time. Yes we've just confirmed yet |
| 1:15.5 | another burst of gravitational waves. So it all sounds pretty routine. Well actually |
| 1:20.6 | it's anything but in fact a massive achievement especially when |
| 1:24.3 | Einstein himself who predicted gravitational waves in his theory of general |
| 1:28.9 | relativity said we'd never be able to detect gravitational waves in the first place. |
| 1:34.4 | Yet, fleetingly, the whole earth stretched and then contracted only by less than the width of an atom |
| 1:41.2 | and some gigantic and highly sensitive instruments detected it. |
| 1:45.8 | The ripple actually set out two billion years ago when two massive black holes collided. |
| 1:51.9 | This latest discovery is newsworthy, especially because it was the first to be picked |
| 1:55.8 | up by a new detector in Europe, as well as by the existing two in the United States. |
| 2:00.3 | Well let's hear more about it all now from Sheila Rowan, she's with the University of Glasgow and |
| 2:04.8 | she then first of all tell us about your involvement in this whole quest to observe and |
... |
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