The Large Hadron Collider Upgrade, Voltaglue, Cambridge Zoology Museum, Francis Willughby
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
It's been 8 years since the Large Hadron Collider went online and started smashing protons together at just below the speed of light. CERN announced this week that they're ready for a massive upgrade, and on Friday last week, there was a ceremony to break ground on what is being called the High luminosity LHC. Particle physicist Jon Butterworth from UCL discusses the next generation of particle accelerators that are undergoing early trials and what the newly announced upgrade means for particle physics.
Medical surgeons routinely stitch or pin organs and blood vessels with needle and thread and secure medical devices like pacemakers with hooks. But what if you could just use glue? Material scientist Terry Steele from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has devised Voltaglue, a flexible adhesive that works in wet environments by putting an electric current across an inert substance. He explains how this new kind of chemistry could revolutionise many medical procedures.
This weekend Sir David Attenborough will reopen The Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University. It's undergone a five-year redevelopment, showcasing thousands of incredible specimens from across the animal kingdom, and exploring stories of conservation, extinction, survival, evolution and discovery. Adam Rutherford visits the new displays under the watchful eye of conservator Natalie Jones and zoologist and museum manager Jack Ashby.
And Professor Tim Birkhead of the University of Sheffield discusses The Wonderful Mr Willughby - his fascinating new account of 17th century ornithologist Francis Willughby who together with the celebrated naturalist John Ray pioneered the way we think about birds in science.
Producer Adrian Washbourne.
Transcript
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| 0:31.4 | Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 21st of June 2018 I'm Adam Rutherford |
| 0:39.5 | in the menagerie today we have the first birder, 17th century Polymer, Francis Willoughby, and how he gave us the scientific |
| 0:46.6 | discipline of ornithology. |
| 0:48.8 | I'm off to Cambridge to see some great Irish elk, a giant wombat, a mower, and some of the best specimens of animals alive |
| 0:55.2 | and dead that I've ever met. |
| 0:57.4 | And we've got a new type of glue that can stick wet things together using electricity, and that |
| 1:02.0 | could include body parts for surgery that is not |
| 1:04.9 | for Frankenstein but first surely the grandest scientific experiment of all |
| 1:09.6 | Cern is going from strength to strength it's been been eight years since the Large Hadron Collider went online and started |
| 1:16.0 | smashing protons together at just below the speed of light. An insane amount of physics has emerged from these ongoing experiments and nothing bigger than the discovery of course of the Higgs boson in 2012 |
| 1:27.6 | Thus fulfilling Peter Higgs's prediction of the standard model which is the description of the fundamental forces and particles that make up matter in the universe. |
| 1:36.3 | But that doesn't mean that physics is finished. Oh no sir, last month I popped over to CERN which straddles the Swiss French border, to have a sniff around |
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