Pluto images, Space elevator, Insect migration, Imagination app

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This summer, the spaceship New Horizons sped past Pluto at 30,000mph, snapping photographs as it went. The pictures sent back this week have transformed our view of this former planet. It isn't a dead rock; it is geologically active, with ice volcanoes and plenty of terrestrial movement. Dr Cathy Olkin from the mission explains what has got her team so excited.

The space elevator, first dreamt up in the 19th century, is a tower tall enough to reach space. The sci-fi concept took a step towards reality recently, when the Canadian engineering company Thoth were granted a patent for an inflatable tower 20 kilometres high. Adam speaks to Thoth's Chief Engineer Ben Quine about the viability and possibilities of this project.

It's the season when 30 million European songbirds fly south for the winter. Lower profile and harder to study are the billions of insects that take a similar journey. Dr Jason Chapman from Rothamsted Research tells Adam how to study animals that are too small to tag

Can you measure imagination? A team from the Hungry Mind Lab at Goldsmiths University in London thinks you can. The goal of their two year project is to produce an app that can improve imagination by training it. To improve it, first they need to reliably measure it. Adam tries out their new test.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello you I'm back. Did you miss me? This is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4.
0:05.1	First broadcast on the 178th of September, it says according to this script.
0:10.0	I'm going to go with a 17th. Thanks to Gareth Mitchell and Tracy Logan,
0:14.2	who's science the hell out of Radio 4
0:16.1	when I'm off gadding around.
0:17.8	More information available on the website, BBC.co.
0:20.4	UK slash Radio 4. Autumn is here and you're all back from your holes. Code.
0:22.6	Autumn is here and you're all back from your holes, but for some birds, bats and insects, their
0:27.6	travel plans are just beginning. We're looking at how and why they head off in
0:31.8	search of a better life for the winter. And is it the end of
0:35.4	rocket launches? One engineer thinks so, not because interplanatory exploration is over, but because
0:40.4	he's planning to build a space elevator with a launch pad that will render those iconic
0:45.2	countdowns a thing of the past.
0:47.1	Our belief is that as soon as one of these platforms to 20 kilometers is constructed, this will be the only
0:52.4	method that humanity access is space. is the very fertile imagination so we're going to try and assess what imagination is how we can measure it
1:06.4	and if we can improve it mine gets put to the test later on in the program but first we
1:11.8	return to the far reaches of the solar system to the story that
1:14.4	caught our imagination earlier in the summer. On July the 14th, the spaceship New Horizons
1:19.6	sped past Pluto at 30,000 miles per hour at a distance of some 7,800 miles.
1:27.0	Now that's slow enough and close enough for it to take and send back some pictures that utterly
1:32.1	and completely transformed our view of this
1:34.8	former planet. It isn't a dead rock, it is as far as we can ascertain,
	...

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