Lab-grown leather; Goal line technology; Bacteria outrage; Marine buoy

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Science

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2013

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cultured meat was on the menu earlier this week, but Mark Post's public tasting of his lab-grown burger marks the culmination of decades of research on producing artificial meat. Adam Rutherford talks to one of the other major players in the world of manmade animal products, Gabor Forgacs. However, his company, Modern Meadow, is concentrating on launching a different product first - cultured leather.

The football season is about to start, and for the first time electronic Goal Line Technology will be introduced. This year will see the Hawk-Eye system deployed at all Premier League grounds in an attempt to help referees make more informed decisions. But how will it work, and how accurate can it be? Inside Science speaks with the inventor, Paul Hawkins, and the engineers who are testing it to international standards.

A bacteria or a bacterium? We sparked a controversy on last week's programme by using bacteria to describe a singular microbe. Adam talks to evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel about how words evolve and whether scientists can halt their adaptation.

This week on 'Show Us Your Instrument', oceanographer Helen Czerski introduces her giant marine buoy. She'll be sailing into the eye of a storm just off the south coast of Greenland later this year, where the buoy will measure bubbles to help refine climate models.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:29.2	Hello there, England retained the ashes this week.
0:32.6	Good Lord how I enjoy saying that.
0:34.4	Andy Murray is Wimbledon Champion,
0:36.2	and the Premiership kicks off next Saturday.
0:38.3	Yes, this is the Inside Science Podcast
0:40.6	for which the terms and conditions can be found at BBC.co.
0:43.2	UK slash Radio 4. We'll be taking a look at Hawkeye and its inventor Paul Hawkins.
0:48.3	Yes, that is where the name comes from and finding out how science has transformed these three sports this year.
0:54.8	And you say bacterium, I say bacteria, listeners fly into uncontrollable furies, with this single
1:01.5	datum being a criterion for talking about science and language evolution.
1:06.0	But first, some words of wisdom from Winston Churchill.
1:10.0	We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing
1:15.0	by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.
1:18.8	Churchill said that in 1936, but you probably heard about the synthetic hamburger revealed to the world and cooked on Monday.
	...

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