Making mozzies safe with a microbe, CO2 at 400 ppm, Chixculub crater rocks, Why Mars Lander failed
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2016
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Adam Rutherford meets the Australian scientist behind a radical new technique to prevent mosquitoes from spreading the zika and dengue fever viruses to people. The method involves infecting mosquitoes with a harmless bacterium. The microbe doesn't kill the mosquitoes but stops the viruses multiplying inside them and spreads rapidly through wild mosquito populations. After 15 years of research, the mosquito control method is about to be deployed in large scale trials in urban areas in South America.
Also in the programme, the world's atmosphere crosses an iconic threshold as measured by the concentration of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide: scientists get their hands on the rocks at the centre of the extinction of the dinosaurs: and details emerge of why the European Space Agency's recent Mars lander crashed onto the Red Planet.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 |
| 0:04.0 | first broadcast on the 27th of October 2016 and I am Adam Rutherford |
| 0:09.8 | BBC.co.uk.uk. |
| 0:11.6 | UK slash radio 4 is the website as if you couldn't find it for yourself. |
| 0:16.2 | There's been a lot of science in the news in the last seven days, so we're getting behind |
| 0:20.3 | the headlines for some proper analysis. |
| 0:22.7 | We've passed a major threshold in the world's changing climate, |
| 0:26.5 | and it's not good news. |
| 0:27.7 | 2016 will be the first year where CO2 levels were continuously above 400 parts per million. |
| 0:34.4 | What does it mean and will it start dropping again? |
| 0:37.6 | Some old new news, dinosaurs are still extinct, |
| 0:40.4 | but after 66 million years, |
| 0:42.3 | we've finally gone under the sea floor to the center of the crater for the meteorite that killed them. |
| 0:48.0 | And sticking with disastrous impacts last week we heard, well we heard nothing from the Martian Lander Crafts |
| 0:54.0 | sciaparelli. It hit the red planet rather harder than was intended and we're |
| 0:58.6 | having a look at the autopsy and what it means for future missions. |
| 1:02.0 | We know that the hard part we can do, |
| 1:05.0 | and we've actually done it twice now with Beagle, |
| 1:08.0 | done the extremely hard part with Scaparelli. |
| 1:10.0 | We just got to figure out this last bit of the so-called easy bit of getting onto the surface successfully. First though, Bill Gates was in London this week announcing an 18 million dollar pledge from his charity foundation from the Welcome Trust and from the US and UK governments |
| 1:26.0 | to fund the large-scale trials of a new biological approach to deal with the spread of |
| 1:31.7 | Zika and Dengue viruses in South America. |
... |
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