Northern white rhino preservation, Deep sea earthquake detection, Twitter's rare Heuchera discovery, Human roars
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The northern white rhinoceros is the world's most endangered mammal. The death earlier this year of the last male of this rhino subspecies leaves just two females as its only living members. New research out this week has adopted new techniques in reproductive medicine as a last ditch attempt to preserve these animals. Thomas Hildebrandt from Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and Terri Roth, Director of Conservation Research at Cincinnati Zoo, discuss the ambition, and how realistic this approach is in future animal conservation.
Earthquakes are scientifically measured with seismometers, but few are present on the sea floor, where earthquakes that can cause tsunamis originate. But could communication cables traversing the oceans fill in the gaps? Giuseppi Marra from the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, discusses his accidental discovery that fibre-optic cables might be registering the earth's vibrations.
For the first time in the annals of science, a tweet was the key reference in a paper reporting on a discovery that a rare wild variety of the gardener's favourite - Heuchera, thought to be limited to a few rocky outcrops in Virginia - is actually abundantly present 100km away. It's all come about because of a picture shared on Twitter. Reporter Roland Pease retraces the tale of the tweets with the key players.
Can the size of a roar be used to accurately determine physical strength?' Or can a roar deceive, and make you sound tougher than you actually are? That's what Jordan Raine from the University of Sussex decided to find out, not with lions or tigers or bears but in us.
Producer Adrian Washbourne.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
| 0:15.0 | It's in the hands of the creator. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing. |
| 0:26.0 | Julie, at your service. |
| 0:28.0 | Listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. |
| 0:31.0 | Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4, first broadcast on the 5th of July 2018. |
| 0:37.0 | I'm Adam Rutherford. It's LGBT STEM day today, so a big shout out to all of you in the lesbian gay by and trans science communities |
| 0:44.8 | diverse science is better science. Now sometimes you might feel that there's a lot of |
| 0:49.6 | gloom in the predictions that science makes especially about the changing climate and its consequences. |
| 0:54.4 | Today we've got some positive stories. Physicists luck out on a new way to monitor earthquakes |
| 0:59.1 | with cables that are already installed all over the planet. We've got the identification of an extremely rare plant |
| 1:05.0 | on Twitter of all places. |
| 1:07.0 | And with a lot of us spontaneously bellowing at the World Cup in the last few days |
| 1:11.0 | we're finding out if your raw can predict if you're tougher than the rest. |
| 1:15.6 | But first, the northern white rhinoceros is the world's most endangered mammal. |
| 1:20.2 | The death earlier this year of the last male of this rhino subspecies leaves just two females as its only living members. |
| 1:27.0 | This is a black mark on humankind's ledger. |
| 1:30.0 | We have hunted these beautiful beasts to the very last step before extinction. |
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