US shutdown; Nobels; New climate science; Airport heart attack headlines
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The US has shut down government science with potentially devastating results for American and international science projects. Many individual scientists are banned from talking but Matt Hourihan from the American Association for the Advancement of Science tells Dr Adam Rutherford about the serious consequences of the political squabble.
Roland Pease gives the low down on this week's Nobel Prizes including the much anticipated Physics gong for Peter Higgs' for his eponymous boson.
Marnie Chesterton reports on the new iCollections at the Natural History Museum where butterflies collected 150 years ago are shedding new light on the changing British climate.
And after studies this week linked cardiovascular disease to aircraft noise, Kevin McConway, Professor of Applied Statistics at the Open University quantifies the risks of complex science being distorted by simple headlines.
Producer: Fiona Hill.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello you, this is the Inside Science Podcast and I'm Adam Rutherford. |
| 0:39.7 | Terms and conditions and the location of the Jade Monkey are available at BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:45.0 | One of those things is not true. |
| 0:48.0 | Hello, early morning phone calls from Sweden were quite the thing this week for scientists at least. |
| 0:54.0 | Yes it's been the annual Nobel Prize jamboree. |
| 0:56.8 | The three gongs went to eight researchers but the big one was genuinely massive and yet... |
| 1:02.3 | This year's prize is about something very small that makes all the difference. |
| 1:07.0 | Yes, Francois-Anglaire and of course Peter Higgs got the call, the medal and a big pile of Swedish Krona for his eponymous |
| 1:14.4 | boson. We'll have the full Nobel lowdown. We'll also be discovering how John Humphreys can help |
| 1:20.0 | you work out if you're more or less likely to have health problems if you live in a busy flight path. |
| 1:25.0 | And we'll be taking you back to spring 1876 and how a flutter of butterflies is helping us track the changing climate. |
| 1:34.0 | But first, while our scientists are bevering away as usual, changing the world, inventing the future, |
| 1:39.4 | many of our US colleagues are having an enforced enforced vacation or holiday in proper English. |
| 1:45.0 | In the U.S. Congress on the 1st of October, a cabal in the Republican Party protested against |
| 1:50.0 | President Obama's policies by hurling all their toys out of the pram and shutting down all federally funded |
| 1:56.4 | projects. Millions are directly affected, including thousands of working scientists. |
... |
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