Prehistoric Strong Women, Semi-synthetic Life, Listener Feedback, Artificial Superintelligence
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2017
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than 5,000 years of heavy agricultural labour by women can be read from the bones found in ancient cemeteries from the Neolithic to Iron Age times. Cambridge University anthropologist Alison Macintosh compared the arm bone dimensions and strength of women from these times with those of modern female athletes such as runners to rowers. Her conclusion is that average upper body strength of women through the Neolithic to the Iron age times exceeded that of today's semi-elite female rowers.
A laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute have created a semi-synthetic bacterium with two new man-made genetic letters in its DNA, in addition to the natural four A, G, T and C. What's more, the engineered microbe can use its enhanced genetic alphabet to build synthetic amino acids into the proteins it makes. Chemist Floyd Romesberg talks to Adam Rutherford about what we can learn from his team's extraordinary feat of synthetic biotechnology, what we might gain from it and why, in his opinion, we've no need to be worried.
Adam deals with some of your correspondence on axolotls by talking to laboratory salamander breeder Randal Voss at the University of Kentucky. He also notes listeners' comparisons of the recent visit by interstellar asteroid Oumuamua with the alien vessel in Arthur C Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama'.
Cosmologist and AI researcher Max Tegmark visits BBC Inside Science to discuss the possibility of artificial intelligence machines with super-intelligence and how humanity should be preparing for their advent.
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 30th of November |
| 0:06.1 | 2017 I'm Adam Rutherford and today we've got the potential new life emerging from artificial |
| 0:12.1 | intelligence is it hype or should we really new life |
| 0:13.6 | emerging from artificial intelligence is it hype or should we really be concerned |
| 0:16.0 | we've got a new life form with an unnatural genetic code not alien but bacteria |
| 0:21.0 | being built in labs today and a bit of feedback from |
| 0:24.3 | listeners on alien invaders and axolotals. We're nothing if we're not weirdly diverse. |
| 0:30.8 | But first trying to piece together the lives of people in the past is kind of like a detective |
| 0:36.6 | story. |
| 0:37.6 | There are lots of threads of evidence coming from archaeology and history and nowadays genetics too, but there are plenty of secrets still to be found in good old bones. |
| 0:47.0 | A new study out this week is uncovering the lives of women from the past by assessing their physical strength and it shows |
| 0:54.3 | that they were very strong. Biological anthropologist Allison McIntosh |
| 0:58.3 | compared the bones of women from more than 7,000 years ago through the Bronze and Iron Ages into the medieval and the present |
| 1:05.8 | and compared them to today's female rowers, footballers and runners. |
| 1:10.3 | She found that the ancient women typically had more powerful arms than today's elite rowers. |
| 1:16.0 | When you combine this with archaeology, we can build a picture of the working lives of women in history and prehistory, |
| 1:22.0 | and this is an area that is currently |
| 1:23.8 | underrepresented. I asked Allison how you can work out the strength via |
| 1:28.7 | ancient bones. What we know about how bones respond to how they're strained in life from living people lets us kind of look at relationships between the structure of that bone, so how much bone there is and where it's distributed. We can kind of see patterns |
| 1:46.0 | in particular sports that load the limbs a certain way. Then when we see those patterns in the bones |
| 1:51.6 | of prehistoric people, we can start to infer that they might have been loading that bone in the same way or |
| 1:57.8 | similar intensity. |
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