Tabby's Star, Space 2018, Mosquito sounds, C diff and food additive link

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Science

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2018

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Adam Rutherford talks to astronomer Tabetha Boyajian at Louisiana State University about the wierd star that's perplexed astronomers since its discovery two years ago. KIC 8462852 has the unique habit of intermittently and sometimes dramatically dimming and then brightening. Some scientists even suggested vast alien megastructures around the star might be the explanation. After twenty months of almost continuous observation, Professor Boyajian has much more information about what the star is doing. But the big mystery hasn't gone away.

BBC News science correspondent Jonathan Amos joins Adam to share some highlights in space exploration for the coming 12 months.

Zoologists and engineers at the University of Oxford are developing an app that identifies one species of mosquito from another by analysing the sounds their rapid wing beats make. Graihagh Jackson visits Marianne Sinka at the Zoology Department to listen to her collection of mosquito songs.

Did the widespread introduction of the food additive trehalose fuel the emergence of epidemics of virulent Clostridium difficile in hospitals from the early 2000s? Microbiologist Robert Britton tells Adam about the evidence his team has gathered and published this week in the journal 'Nature'.

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.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service.
0:28.0	Listen to all episodes on BBC Sales.
0:31.3	Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 4th of January 2018
0:38.2	I'm Adam Rutherford happy perihelian everyone the earth was closest to the Sun at 0534 Universal Time last Wednesday
0:46.2	morning. Can you feel the heat of being just 147,97,233 kilometers away.
0:53.7	Mm, toastie.
0:55.7	Thanks to Darren Baskill for those perahillion numbers.
0:58.4	And a special hello you to Superfant Trudeau fish from Twitter
1:02.4	who is at sea for a month and takes BBC
1:04.4	podcast with her. Now on with the show we've got more bright stars and space
1:08.7	exploration coming up in just a minute. Also this week we have the food additive that fueled an epidemic of
1:14.9	lethal bacteria and the sound of the mosquito. So this is
1:19.8	Aedes alpipictus and she is the vector of dengue.
1:27.0	How listening to mosquitoes is helping us to distinguish the disease carriers from the just
1:32.2	playing annoying species.
	...

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