Superpowers

BBC Earth Podcast

Jenkins Laura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel, Tv & Film

4.6 • 611 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2022

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rutendo and Sebastian get to indulge their passions for nature AND superheroes, as they look at real-life superpowers in nature.

Rutendo explores how these superpowers inspire fictional worlds and heroes with Mike McHargue, a science advisor/world builder for film and television. Mike helps writers and film-makers integrate accurate and consistent science into their stories, and together he and Rutendo invent a brand new superhero.

Rats seem unlikely superheroes but in Tanzania they’re being trained to save lives. Their acute sense of smell means they can detect landmines, and sniff out illegal wildlife being trafficked in shipping containers. We drop in on their training at non-profit organisation, APOPO.

Sebastian’s favourite superhero is Spiderman, whose spider-sense gives him advance warning of impending danger. This superpower is used every day by real spiders whose special leg hairs can sense vibrations. Web-building spiders use this superpower to build a mental map of the world around them by detecting and decoding the tiny vibrations created by anything that touches their web. Through a special program designed by experts at MIT, we hear a digital version of this experience, turning the web into a musical instrument with thousands of unique notes.

Credits:

The BBC Earth podcast is presented by Sebastian Echeverri and Rutendo Shackleton.

This episode was produced by Rachel Byrne and Geoff Marsh.

The researcher was Seb Masters.

The Production Manager was Catherine Stringer and the Production Co-ordinator was Gemma Wootton.

Podcast Theme Music was composed by Axel Kacoutié, with mixing and additional sound design by Peregrine Andrews.

The Associate Producer is Cristen Caine and the Executive Producer is Deborah Dudgeon.

Special thanks to:

Isabelle Szott, Lily Shallom & Said Mshana from APOPO and producer Charles Kombe for the recordings.

Science consultant Mike McHargue from Quantum Spin Studios.

Markus Buehler from MIT for providing the spider web soundscape.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	So my first encounter with superpowers was through a video game.
0:05.0	It was 1997, I was around 6 years old, and my family had just moved to Queens, New York.
0:15.0	As a Christmas present, I received a Game Boy, and my first video game to go with it,
0:21.6	Pokemon.
0:22.6	For the few of you who might not be familiar, the basic premise is this.
0:28.6	You are a kid in this new alternate universe.
0:33.6	Your aim is to go out and explore and find these creatures called
0:39.5	Pokemon, that each have their own superpowers. They'll travel with you, they become
0:44.9	stronger, and you fight bad guys together. Six-year-old Sebastian had never
0:50.5	experienced anything like this at all. And like most kids of my generation,
0:57.2	it basically took over my life.
1:00.4	My first ever Pokemon was Bulbosaur.
1:03.5	This little frog-like amphibian lizardy dude
1:07.4	with a giant plant growing out of his back,
1:10.6	and his superpower was that he could control
1:14.0	plants. He had these vines that he could whip around, he could shoot razor-sharp leaves,
1:19.6	and he even had these spores that could poison or paralyze or just put you to sleep.
1:27.8	And then there was Rai Chu,
1:29.7	who's the evolved form of Pokemon's main mask at Pikachu,
1:32.9	but in my mind, objectively better.
1:36.2	Its superpower was to shoot electricity.
1:40.5	And then there was Arcanine,
	...

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