Horsemeat; NanoSims; Early bacteria; Crystallography

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2013

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Food crime is now big business that criss crosses national boundaries, according to today's report into the safety and authenticity of our food. Public Analyst, Dr Duncan Campbell tells Dr Adam Rutherford that he and his colleagues are hampered by lack of funding and the lack of a national plan for a sustainable laboratory infrastructure. While report author, Professor Chris Elliott, the director of the Global Institute for Food Security at Queen's University, Belfast describes how he wants the UK's scientific infrastructure to be strengthened to avoid yet another serious food scandal.

Show Us Your Instrument: Cosmic Scientist Dr Natalie Starkey from the School of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University reveals the NanoSims instrument.

Thousands of miles apart the same species of microbes seem to crop up deep beneath the earth's surface in cracks of hard rock. Yet nobody seems to quite know how they spread so widely. Scientists now believe they may have survived completely isolated from the surface for what could be billions of years. Dr Matt Shrenk from Michigan State University explains that the biosphere as we know it is far more extensive than we previously thought.

Crystallography... as it sounds is the study of crystals, but it's not quite as simple as that. It underpins many scientific fields and yet it remains a relatively unknown subject area. Scores of Nobel prizes have been won, the first almost 100 years ago and we wouldn't understand the structure of DNA without it. The United Nations has declared 2014 as the International Year of Crystallography and emeritus Professor Mike Glazer from Oxford University says he hopes it will help bring the subject out of the shadows.

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, I'm Adam Rutherford and this is the BBC Inside Science Podcast.
0:40.0	BBC.co. UK.uk.
0:41.6	slash Radio 4 is the web page that you can look at with lots of... BBC. freezing fog. This week primordial soup is off the menu. We take a look at the
0:54.9	rocky origin of life deep underground. Another scientist will be showing us her
0:59.5	instrument, a giant tool for looking at very small things. You were all like totally enraged by our
1:04.9	valley girl intonation last week so today up talk backchat and we reposition one of the great work
1:10.8	horses of science a whole field that has generated some 50
1:14.4	Nobel Prizes, but that no one has heard of.
1:17.0	It's very much a subject in its own right. It has its own jargon, it has its own way of
1:21.1	doing things, and although other subjects do you make use of what we do
1:26.3	It's true to say that many of my fellow scientists find crystallography a bit of a mystery
1:32.4	But first earlier this year we discovered that the ingredients in your lasagna
1:36.7	should have included a nay and a whinny rather than a simple moo.
1:40.0	Horse meat found in burgers sold in British and Irish supermarkets.
1:44.0	Tesco, Iceland and several others are taking the products off the shell.
1:48.0	This is the French-owned factory where the ready meal was made.
	...

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