Mice & Men; Fuel from CO2; fRMI; Insect calls

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2014

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A recent paper demonstrated that mice show elevated stress levels in the presence of male hormones. What implications does this have for future mouse research? Adam Rutherford heads to University College London to speak to Dr Clare Stanford, who works with mice and men.

How do you get jet fuel from thin air? Just add water, carbon dioxide and a large amount of concentrated sunlight. A team from the European Solar Jet Project has, for the first time, proved that you can make 'green' or carbon neutral paraffin, the hydrocarbon used in jet fuel. It's feasible; the next step is to try and make this process commercially viable.

Neuroscience is a fast growing and popular field, so naturally there are an abundance of stories reported in the press often illustrated with a beautiful picture of the brain. But despite the advances, when an area of the brain 'lights up" it does not tell us as much as we'd like about the inner workings of the mind. Adam Rutherford speaks to neuroscientists to get to the bottom of what brain imaging can be useful for and when over-interpretation is an issue.

Our resident zoologist Dr Tim Cockerill recently found himself filming animals deep in the jungles of Borneo. Before he left, we gave him an audio recorder to see what he could discover about the animal communities there, just by listening to them. It seems you can set your watch by some of their calls.

Producer: Marnie Chesterton.

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.
0:29.1	Hello you this is the BBC and this is Inside Science and I'm Adam Rutherford and you voted
0:34.4	us Best New Radio Programme at the Voice of Listeners and Viewers Awards for Excellence in Broadcasting
0:39.6	today the 1st of May 2014. We're absolutely delighted by this so much so that this week I'm not
0:47.1	going to tell you whether terms and conditions can be found.
0:49.3	Seriously, thank you so much. Do not adjust your radios. It is still tuned. That was the noise of, well, you can find out later.
1:00.0	On the program today we'll be doing some mind reading how we image the working brain
1:03.7	what it tells us about patients in comas and how to tell when brain imaging claims
1:08.6	a little more than reading tea leaves and we take a look at the first steps towards extracting carbon dioxide
1:15.3	from the atmosphere in order to turn it back into oil.
1:28.2	Oh there's another one. Any ideas? Anyway, to start off, are you feeling stressed? Are you maybe surrounded by sweaty men? Poor you. Last week we defended the crummy y chromosome, but today I'm afraid it's us men
1:36.1	who are causing the stress. A study published in nature methods from McGill University in Canada
1:40.8	this week has shown that in the presence of a t-shirt worn overnight by a chap,
1:45.8	mice displayed a hike in stress levels, and it isn't seen when the t-shirt was worn by a woman.
1:52.2	With the increase in stress, you also see a rise in pain thresholds.
	...

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