Intrusive memories, Silent aircraft, Nuclear fusion, Pluto

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adam Rutherford talks to Emily Holmes from the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, about two new studies on preventing intrusive memories. She discusses why stopping someone from sleeping after seeing a lab based film of traumatic events like a news reel or car crash may actually stop people from forming intrusive memories about those films. This offers an intriguing insight in to the role that sleep has in consolidating intrusive and possibly traumatic memories. She also explains how if memories of a traumatic event are laid down, why playing a computer game like Tetris could disrupt that memory and stop it from becoming intrusive.

Silent Aircraft: The Davies report recently recommended a new, third runway should be built at Heathrow airport but as flight numbers increase how quiet can planes of the future become? Adam talks to Jeremy Astley from Southampton University and Michael Carley from Bath University about where the noise in jet engines comes from, how engineering can make them quieter and will the silent aircraft initiative ever make a truly silent aircraft.

Nuclear Fusion. For decades scientists have tried to harness the power of the Sun to smash atomic nuclei together to create a clean, limitless energy source from nuclear fusion. Marnie Chesterton talks to scientists from Tokomak energy about their new design for a Tokomak machine that has already exceeded previous records. Could it be a vital step forward in the quest for nuclear fusion on Earth?

New Horizons: On 14th July 2015 the spaceship, New Horizons will complete its 10 year mission to flyby Pluto. BBC Science correspondent Jonathan Amos gives Adam a preview and tells him why he's so excited about the mission and what they hope to discover about the darker regions of our Solar System.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from the BBC first broadcast on the 9th of July 2015
0:06.8	I'm Adam Rutherford more information about this and other radio for science programs such as the
0:11.6	infinite monkey cage all in the mind and the life scientific
0:14.7	can be found at BBC.co. UK slash Radio 4.
0:19.3	The government moved forward this week on the extremely controversial edition of another runway at Heathrow,
0:24.3	dividing many people and raising arguments about serious noise pollution.
0:28.5	We take a look at the technology that is driving down the noise that jets emit, which may yet end in commercial flights almost
0:35.3	silent running. Nuclear fusion, the clean, green but unfortunately, currently fictional
0:40.6	commercial energy source, takes a baby step forward with a non-trivial record
0:45.0	breaker. And the countdown has begun to the big fly-by of the enigmatic X-planets that loiters at the
0:51.1	edge of the solar system.
0:52.5	Next week we're turning the whole program over to Pluto,
0:54.8	but the data is already coming in,
0:56.9	so we're taking a sneak peak.
0:59.1	But first, this week we commemorated the 10th anniversary
1:02.0	of the bombings of the 7th of July 2005
1:04.6	when 52 people were murdered in four separate attacks in London and over 700 were
1:09.8	injured. I was in Kings Cross when the bombs went off and when we were allowed went to the pub with my family as we all tried our best to refuse to be traumatised by these horrors.
1:19.0	Many survivors witnessed horrific scenes that day and a small percentage were at risk of
1:24.0	developing post-traumatic stress disorder where vivid visual and emotional
1:28.3	memories can become intrusive and persist for weeks, months or even years.
1:33.0	At the time a task force was set up to contact and offer treatment for people who are at risk.
	...

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