Pesticides in British Farming
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2018
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A few weeks ago, Inside Science featured an item on neonicotinoids and the negative impact these pesticides have on insects like honey bees. The discussion turned to alternatives, including organic farming. Many listeners wrote in about some issues that went unchallenged. So this week, Adam returns to the subject to get into the nuts and bolts of both organic and conventional farming.
Next week sees the launch of a NASA mission called TESS. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is surveying the brightest stars near Earth and looking for habitable planets. Roland Pease reports.
Traditionally, the move from Bronze Age to the Iron Age is estimated to be around 1200 BCE. But recent excavations of smelting sites in Uttar Pradesh in India suggest that this date might be a few centuries late and that it might even originate in Asia. Adam visits The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire to see how a particle accelerator is revealing the details of the Indian Iron Age.
Our ancestors bore a very prominent brow ridge, which scientists think was a symbol of dominance. Modern humans, however, have lost this ridge in favour of a flatter forehead. Why? Dr Penny Spikins and her colleagues think the answer lies in social interaction and in particular, the ability to raise your eyebrows.
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. |
| 0:31.5 | Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 12th of April 2018. I'm Adam Rutherford. This week the Clash of Old New and New new technology tracing the origin of the iron age using |
| 0:45.6 | particle accelerators and this puts the first iron smelting in India a good few centuries |
| 0:51.1 | earlier than previously thought. |
| 0:52.6 | We're planet spotting with Tess, that's a satellite, |
| 0:56.3 | about to launch that will be scanning the skies for thousands of strange new worlds. |
| 1:01.6 | And are you more Groucho Marx or Frida Carlo? A good set of eyebrows is a fine thing and |
| 1:07.6 | may well have been a significant development in the evolution of our faces and sociality, though we're not quite the only animal that benefits from an arch eyebrow. |
| 1:17.0 | Dogs in shelters that are able to raise one of their eyebrows or both of their eyebrows but raise the area above their eyes |
| 1:24.7 | get taken out of shelters more regularly they're more likely to be taken home and adopted. |
| 1:30.3 | That's all coming up later but first a few weeks ago we featured an item on the ongoing |
| 1:35.2 | saga of using the chemical family neonicotinoids and the negative impact these pesticides |
| 1:40.5 | have on insect life, notably honey bees. |
| 1:43.7 | We were talking about them in anticipation of an EU vote |
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