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.
New CFC emissions, Cannabis and the Environment, The Noisy Cocktail Party, Automated Face Recognition
Hubble Not-So Constant, Synthetic E. Coli, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt
Forensic science provision, optimal garden watering strategy, and a mystery knee bone
Sex, gender and sport - the Caster Semenya case and the latest Denisovan discovery
Thought-to-speech machine, City Nature Challenge, Science of Storytelling
Notre-Dame fire, Reviving pig brains, ExoMars, Evolution of faces
Visualising a black hole, Homo luzonensis, Two ways to overcome antimicrobial resistance
Cretaceous catastrophe fossilised, LIGO and Virgo, Corals, Forensic shoeprint database
UK pollinating insect numbers, Tracking whales using barnacles, Sleep signals
Where next World Wide Web? Space rocks and worms
Rules and ethics of genome editing, Gender, sex and sport, Hog roasts at Stonehenge
A cure for HIV? Sleepy flies, Secrets of the Fukushima disaster, Science fact checking
Falling carbon and rising methane; Unsung heroes at the Crick
Mars - rovers v humans? Forests and carbon, Ethiopian bush crow
Insect decline, Gut microbiome, Geomagnetic switching
Sea Level Rise, Equine Flu, Generator Bricks, Iberian Genes
Sprinting Neanderthals, Geodynamo, Spreading Sneezes and Dying Hares
Ultima Thule, Dry January, Periodic Table
Gene-edited twins, Placenta organoids in a dish, When the last leaves drop
Mars InSight mission, Detecting dark matter, Redefining the kilogram, Bovine TB
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