Signs of life on planets, Royal Society Book Prize, Queen Bee control, Galactic Prom 29
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What should we be looking for when searching for life on other planets beyond our solar system? Scientists urgently need to come to a consensus on this as a new suite of telescopes soon begins detecting. The space agency NASA has put together a virtual institute called The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, and they've just met to work out how we should be looking for bio signatures - on the burgeoning catalogue of worlds beyond the Solar System. Adam Rutherford hears from Sarah Rugheimer, an astrobiologist from the University of St Andrews, on why the world's astrobiologists have decided to lay down the law.
The Royal Society Insight Investment Book Prize celebrates some of the best science published each year. Today the judges announced their shortlist: The Cure by Jo Marchant; The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee; The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson; The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf; The Most Perfect Thing by Tim Birkhead; The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton. We're talking to all the authors over the next 6 weeks before the winner is announced on the 19th of September. The first is Oliver Morton's The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World.
Bee hives have evolved to have a complex, fascinating social hierarchy, and although we know about Royal Jelly and pheromones, how exactly does the queen bee control the fertility of the rest of the hive? A team of New Zealand geneticists, Peter Dearden and Elizabeth Duncan, has finally worked it out.
This Saturday's evening BBC Prom is set in space. The National Youth Orchestra performs The Planets by Holst, and Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. But the concert begins with a piece inspired by this year's detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Gravitational Waves composer Iris Ter Schiphorst discusses how she went galactic.
Producer: Adrian Washbourne.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 |
| 0:04.0 | first broadcast on the 4th of August 2016 |
| 0:07.2 | I'm Adam Rutherford and there's more information at BBC.co. |
| 0:10.3 | UK slash radio 4. |
| 0:12.0 | If you're looking for some brain food on your summer holidays, |
| 0:15.0 | we're previewing the Royal Society Book Prize |
| 0:18.0 | shortlist, six books filled with some world-changing ideas, |
| 0:21.0 | and a lot of wonder. We've got bees as well today, how the Queen stays the |
| 0:26.1 | Queen when there are so many other females buzzing around, and the proms goes into space with a new |
| 0:31.5 | piece incorporating the cosmic discovery of gravitational waves earlier this year. But first the eternal question, are we alone? You see space is really big. Even so we've been |
| 0:56.5 | discovering other planets outside of the solar system for a few years now and as of the |
| 1:00.9 | 1st of August 3,487 planets in 2,611 planetary systems have been catalogued. |
| 1:09.0 | Estimates vary, but now serious scientists think there might be 40 billion planets in our galaxy alone. |
| 1:16.0 | So the prospect of one of them, just one of them harbouring life is becoming more and more plausible. |
| 1:22.0 | After all, if it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space. |
| 1:26.0 | The James Webb Space Telescope becomes operational in 2018 |
| 1:30.0 | and the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile in 2020, both of them will be looking at planets and looking for signs of life. |
| 1:37.4 | So as we continue to look to the stars and to more and more planets we have to ask a more purposeful question which is what are we |
| 1:45.6 | actually looking for in 2015 NASA put together a virtual institute called |
| 1:50.6 | the Nexus for exoplanet system Science or Nexus, and they met last week to work |
| 1:55.6 | out how we should be looking for signs of life, biosignatures, on the burgeoning catalogue of exoplanets, |
| 2:01.8 | that is worlds beyond the solar system. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

