A recent study on how to get rid of microplastics in water sparked presenter Marnie Chesterton’s curiosity. When she turns on the tap in her kitchen each day, what comes out is drinkable, clean water. But where did it come from, and what’s in it? Dr Stewart Husband from Sheffield University answers this and more, including listener questions from around the UK. Is water sterile? Should I use a filter? And why does my water smell like chlorine?
Also, new research indicates that bumblebees can show each other how to solve puzzles too complex for them to learn on their own. Professor Lars Chittka put these clever insects to the test and found that they could learn through social interaction. How exactly did the experiment work, and what does this mean for our understanding of social insects? Reporter Hannah Fisher visits the bee lab at Queen Mary University in London.
And finally, more than 20 million years ago, our branch of the tree of life lost its tail. At that point in time, apes split from another animal group, monkeys. Now, geneticist Dr Bo Xia at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard thinks he may have found the specific mutation that took our tails. Marnie speaks with evolutionary biologist Dr Tom Stubbs from the Open University about why being tail-less could be beneficial. What would a hypothetical parallel universe look like where humans roam the earth, tails intact? And what would these tails look like?
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Louise Orchard, Florian Bohr, Jonathan Blackwell, Imaan Moin Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.
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26/11/2020
COVID Operation Moonshot; Big Compost Experiment; Gulf of Mexico meteorite and new life
mRNA vaccinations; bacterial space miners; Artemis accords
COVID in families; earthquake under Aegean Sea; Camilla Pang wins science book prize
A new saliva gland, Bill Bryson on the Human Body, and the return of the Dust Bowl
COVID reinfections, Susannah Cahalan questions psychiatry and sense of smell and COVID
Test and trace - how the UK compares to the rest of the world; Linda Scott's book The Double X Economy
08/10/2020
Brian May's Cosmic Clouds 3-D; How fish move between waterbodies and Jim Al-Khalili's take on physics
Royal Society Science Book Prize - Gaia Vince; Biodiversity loss and Science Museum mystery object
COVID-19 in Winter, Acoustics of Stonehenge and Dog years
Coronavirus: The types of vaccine; How the UK is scaling up vaccine production
Bird and dinosaur skull evolution; the wonders of yeast and Science Museum mystery object
What does the science say about the COVID risks of schools reopening? Dolphin ear autopsy
Smart bricks, The Royal Academy of Engineering awards for pandemic engineering solutions and detecting SARS-Cov-2 in sewage
Land use and zoonoses, California's earthquake risk and the Tuatara genome
How sperm swim, the theory of soil & the Big Compost Experiment update
Science Museum mystery objects; home security camera security and Rosalind Franklin at 100
Pre-prints over peer review during the COVID pandemic and roads and birds
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