Sanchi oil tanker, Gut gas-monitoring pill and Chimpanzee portraits
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the Sanchi oil tanker collided with another ship it discharged its cargo of 1 million barrels of condensate oil. This could cause one of the biggest oil disasters in 25 years. What is condensate, can it be cleaned up and how toxic to marine life is it if large amounts of it leak or the tanker sinks? Adam talks to Simon Boxall from Southampton Oceanography Centre.
A long-held belief that babies look more like their fathers is being put to the test by scientists at St Andrews University. They are launching an on-line citizen science experiment asking members of the public to see if they can tell from a group of chimps which are the close relations. Geoff Marsh takes the test and talks to researcher Cat Hobaiter about why it might be advantageous for a baby primate to look like its father more than its mother and what they hope to learn from humans' ability to recognise chimp family trees.
A new swallow-able, electronic pill that sniffs out the gas produced in your gut could be the answer to accurately diagnosing and distinguishing between ailments of the gut. The gastrointestinal tract is hard to access so when something goes wrong, conditions like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, lactose intolerance and over production of bacteria. can be hard to distinguish from one another and so accurately diagnosed. Professor Kourosh Kalantar Zadeh from RMIT in Melbourne explains why his device, which senses gases in the gut and transmits its findings back to a smartphone in real time,, is more accurate and less invasive than current breath tests or endoscopies and colonoscopies.
And Janet Kelso answers listener questions on human evolution and why modern Europeans still carry Neanderthal DNA.
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. |
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| 0:26.4 | Julie, at your service. |
| 0:27.4 | Listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. |
| 0:31.4 | Hello this week, the latest gadget that has been designed to help diagnose diseases of |
| 0:36.3 | the gastrointestinal tract but it's a pill that you swallow and it smells the |
| 0:40.5 | various gases being produced in your gut. |
| 0:43.6 | We answer some of your urgent questions about having sex with Neanderthals, I'm just going to leave |
| 0:47.4 | that there, and the popular idea that newborn babies always look like their fathers. |
| 0:51.6 | Well, is it true true a new online project is |
| 0:53.8 | setting out to test this idea and you can get involved. Heaven forbid you were to |
| 0:58.1 | have a child. Oh yeah. And it came out looking you know like a chimpanzee or eerily like, you know, your wife's fitness instructor |
| 1:09.0 | You'd be terrible. You'd give it all your paternal love. Well maybe that's for the best. |
| 1:14.1 | That's all coming up later. But first on Saturday night local time the oil tanker Sanchi |
| 1:19.0 | collided with a freighter, the CF crystal off the coast of China. |
| 1:22.1 | The Sanchi was carrying around a million barrels of oil from Iran to South Korea, |
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