4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
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A hundred thousand Britons are being asked to donate their sequenced DNA, their personal genome, to a vast database on the internet, so scientists can use the information for medical and genetic research. The Personal Genome Project-UK was launched today and participants are being warned, as part of the screening process, that their anonymity won't be guaranteed. Stephan Beck, Professor of Medical Genomics at University College London's Cancer Institute and the Director of PGP-UK, tells Dr Lucie Green that anonymised genetic databases aren't impregnable, and that it is already possible for an individual's identity to be established using jigsaw identification. This new "open access" approach, he says, will rely on altruistic early-adopters who are comfortable with having their genetic data, their medical history and their personal details freely available as a tool for research. Jane Kaye, Director of the Centre for Law, Health and Emerging Technologies at the University of Oxford, describes the rigorous selection procedure for would-be volunteers.
Scientists at Queen Mary University London and Imperial have created Good Vibrations by playing pop songs to solar panels. Exposing zinc oxide PV cells to noise alongside light generated up to 50% more current than just light alone. Pop and rock music had the most effect, while classical was the least effective genre.
Thanks to the Russians' enthusiasm for dash-cams in their cars, the twenty metre asteroid that came crashing into the atmosphere above the town of Chelyabinsk, East of the Urals in February this year, was the most filmed and photographed event of its kind. Mobile phones and cameras captured the meteor, moving at 19 kilometres a second (that's 60 times the speed of sound) and the enormous damage caused by the airblast. The plethora of footage allowed researchers to shed light on our understanding of asteroid impacts and in a new study, published in Nature, Professor Peter Brown from the University of Western Ontario in Canada questions whether using nuclear explosions is an appropriate way to model these airbursts and whether telescopes could underestimate the frequency of these events.
Seventh November this year is the hundredth anniversary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace. As the Natural History Museum in London unveils the first statue of him, we ask why, as co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Wallace doesn't share Charles Darwin's spotlight. Dr George Beccaloni, from the NHM, explains to Lucie why Wallace deserves both glory and commemoration.
Producer: Fiona Hill.
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0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
0:24.9 | searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds hello this is the |
0:31.0 | BBC Inside Science podcast and I'm Lucy Green. |
0:35.0 | Terms and Conditions at BBC.co. UK. |
0:38.0 | forward slash radio for. |
0:40.0 | Today it's everyone's favorite naturalist talking about the father of evolution and it's not Charles Darwin. |
0:48.0 | He wrote voluminously in support of the revolutionary theory about the way a species originated, which he was happy to call Darwinism. |
0:57.0 | For me, there is no more admirable character in the history of science. |
1:02.0 | The forgotten man of science remembered, Alfred Russell Wallace. |
1:06.0 | Also, what makes solar cells rock? |
1:10.0 | So it likes rock music. |
1:11.0 | So I think it was Adele, ACDC, |
1:14.6 | Foo fighters. |
1:16.0 | We found Led Zeppelin works very well as well. |
1:18.1 | Led Zeppelin. Doesn't like classical. |
1:21.4 | Beethoven didn't work very well. |
... |
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