Welcome to this very special edition of The Naked Scientists, which is coming to you live from

Chicago and the annual meeting of the world's largest scientific society the

Triple A S, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. My name's Chris Smith

otherwise known as the naked scientists.

And we're here at this conference with people from all over the world who are authorities

in their own rights and we've been hearing about lots of discoveries and challenges that are going on.

Revolutionary new steps were announced in the workings of the human body and modeling that inside a computer.

We heard about an e-liver, for example, and an e-brain, so in other words a computer that pretends to be a liver or a brain.

I know one mentioned whether either of those things are susceptible to alcohol poisoning,

unfortunately, so journalists and politicians are going to have to wait a bit longer

before we have a faithful way to predict how your body's work and respond to alcohol.

Most people watching the news will have also seen the images on television of the UK's

really important recent acquisition.

We have a new inland ocean.

It's called Somerset.

That's one of our counties.

Now meanwhile, for those of us who've been here in Chicago

you'll have noticed that it's brutally cold here in the city and this city has

been experiencing its worst winter for decades.

Hell which is 238 miles to the east of here, according to Google Maps, that

has quite literally frozen over in recent weeks, and the temperatures have been dipping

as low as minus 25 degrees. To put that into perspective,

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