Crowdscience

Carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere today are higher than at any point in human existence. But going back further into Earth’s history, when do we find concentrations as high as they are now - and what was the planet like back then?CrowdScience sets out to answer our listener Thomas’s question, travelling back through time with the help of Antarctic ice cores, ancient plant fossils, and microscopic popcorn-shaped organisms called foraminifera, all of which hold clues to past climates.Enlisting the help of chemists, botanists and palaeontologists, we find out about the huge swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide from prehistoric times to the present day, and ask the all-important question: can this help us understand what's happening to our climate now?Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Cathy Edwards(Image: Polar bear on an ice floe. Credit: Getty Images)

Human Organs are in short supply. But what if you could grow new ones in the lab? And if you donate your body parts to help others, where might they end up? That's what Sarah Gray wanted to know after making the difficult decision to donate the body of her son, Thomas, to medical science after he died from an incurable disease shortly after being born. Sarah then contacted the scientists whose research has been made possible by Thomas’ donation and discovered just how he is contributing to research which, may one day mean that organ donation is no longer necessary. Presenter Bobbie Lakhera talks to Sarah about her decision and meets some of the scientists working to create biological artificial lab-grown organs, tissues and even bones. Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Bobbie Lakhera Producer: Louisa Field(Image: A doctor taking or delivering a bag containing a human organ for transplant. Credit: Getty Images)

Is it fair to kill invasive species which humans have introduced? When people move around the world, many of their favourite – and not so favourite - animals tag along for the ride. From cane toads through to rats, cats and crayfish, so-called ‘invasive species’ can destroy ecosystems and kill off native wildlife. CrowdScience listener Jude Kirkham wants to know if eradicating these invaders is justified.One country determined to do something about invasive species is New Zealand, where rats, stoats and possums are causing irreparable damage to the country’s unique bird life. If nothing is done, the iconic Kiwi could be extinct within 50 years. The government and volunteer groups across the country have responded with a plan to eradicate predatory mammals from New Zealand by 2050. But is all the time, energy and money needed to do this really justified? And is it morally right to kill off an animal species that humans introduced in the first place?Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us

Just one per cent of vehicles are powered by electricity, but CrowdScience listener Randall from Lac du Bonnet in Canada wants to know how quickly that might change, and whether one day all cars could be electric. Marnie Chesterton begins her journey in an electric car, stuck in traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. It was in California where the modern electric car revival began in the late 1990s with the EV1 – popular with Hollywood celebrities like Mel Gibson and Danny DeVito. More than two decades on, several countries have pledged to go all-electric in future. The latest is China, who currently lead the world in the number of electric vehicles on the road. But is the planet’s power infrastructure even capable of supporting this global electric dream? Marnie talks to experts about the practicalities of power supply and charging, takes a ride in an electric prototype with enough acceleration to impress even the most cynical petrol head and discovers an extraordinary vision for the future of personalised urban

Nuclear weapons and mega asteroids: what would the aftermath look like? CrowdScience explores past extinction events and future dystopias. In a past episode, CrowdScience headed to Denmark to find out whether humans could go the way of the dinosaurs – mass extinction triggered by a large asteroid impact 66 million years ago. Although no killer rocks are on route to Earth any time soon, we do not have to look far for other dystopias. “Do we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world?”, listener Ronald from Uganda asks CrowdScience. It turns out there is a web app which can help answer this question. Together with its maker nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, presenter Anand Jagatia tests hypothetical nuclear disaster scenarios and uncovers the nature of nuclear destruction in interviewees with climate scientist Alan Robock.Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Louisa Field(Image: Explosion of a nuclear bomb Credit: Getty

CrowdScience is uncovering the super-powers of spiders, flies and the most irritating mosquitos. Anand Jagatia meets spider specialist Jamie Mitchells at London Zoo to find out how spiders create such vast webs and speaks to researchers in Sweden about how they are trying and succeeding in recreating spider’s silk. Rory Galloway heads to Cambridge University’s Fly Lab to find out how their tiny brains process the world up to four times faster than humans. And Bobbie Lakhera is at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to find out how attractive she is to mosquitos and how they use their super-senses to home-in on our blood. Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Laura Hyde(Image: Close-up of a Jumping Spider. Credit: Getty Images

CrowdScience dives back into a debate about trees and their ability to tackle air pollution. Growing trees take in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, but their leaves also attract tiny particles, which can get into our lungs and brains. So how good are they at cleaning our clogged up skies? Following on from our original programme, CrowdScience was contacted by a team of researchers in the UK who claim tress may be as much as 50 times better than previously thought at mopping up particles, and learn that hedges may help us stay healthy on roads. Also in the programme, we discover what pollutants are doing to our brains and reveal research which shows that keeping house plants can significantly reduce pollution inside the home.Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Marijke Peters

CrowdScience heads to the Sydney Science Festival in Australia where, from a special event at The Powerhouse Museum, we reveal answers to questions listeners have been sending in such as: What living thing has the most toxic venom? What is déjà vu? And why do our fingers wrinkle in the bath? To tackle our listeners’ questions about life, Earth and the universe, presenter Marnie Chesterton is joined by four special guests who will bring the good, weird and bemusing from the world of science to the stage.Prof Shari Forbes, Professor in Forensic Science at the University of Technology Sydney,aims to help police and forensic teams establish a more precise time of death in missing person and homicide cases.Dr Katie Mack is an astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on finding new ways to learn about the early universe and fundamental physics using astronomical observations.Dr Jonathan Webb runs the science unit at ABC RN. He is also a former neuroscientist and a former science reporter for

Is it possible to get power from lightning? This was the first CrowdScience question posed by listener John Emochu in Kampala, Uganda, in November 2016. We revisit John’s story as presenter Marnie Chesterton goes hunting for answers at a lightning lab in Cardiff, Wales, where she discovers just what lightning lab is, and how to make a tiny – but very loud – lightning bolt. And we tackle the best of the many questions that came into our inbox about thunderstorms after the original broadcast – from how many types of lightning exist to whether antennae in the clouds could gather electricity. Finally, we head to Kampala to meet listener John to hear just what he thought of the programme and what life is really like in one of the lightning capitals of the world. Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Jen Whyntie(Image: Artist impression of lightning inside a conical flask. Credit: Getty Images)

** Contains some upsetting scenes **As a species, we humans can be uniquely horrible to our own kind. But are we the only animal to commit murder? Listener Michelle’s question sends CrowdScience trekking – and getting lost - in the Budongo rainforest in Uganda in search of one of Man’s closest relatives, the chimpanzee. We hear from the scientists, who only days before the team’s arrival at the camp, witnessed a gang of chimps brutally killing another adult. But does chimpanzee lethal aggression pass muster as murder? We head to the capital Kampala for some legal advice and take a look at the grim history of putting animals on trial.Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Geoff Marsh Producer: Louisa Field(Image: Closeup of angry chimpanzee Credit: Getty Images)

How do we end up speaking the way we do? What's happening in our brains and mouths to make us sound so different from each other - even when we’re speaking the same language? This week on CrowdScience we return to our listener Amanda’s question of why there are so many accents, and discover more about what our accents say about us.We visit Glasgow in Scotland, home to one of the most distinctive dialects of English, to see how social status and age affect the way we speak; and investigate another of our listeners’ questions: is there really such a thing as a ‘political accent’?But how do babies pick up accents in the first place – and is it impossible to learn new sounds later in life? Presenter Nastaran Tavakoli-Far discovers something unexpected about her own accent, visits a voice coach to try and sound Texan, and uses ultrasound to try and get her tongue round new sounds.And you can find out how much of an accent expert you are, by taking part in our online quiz.Do you have a question we can turn into a p

People said they’d never catch on. Mobile phones, the internet and even robot assembly lines all once seemed like niche technologies. But today they are at the heart of the modern world.But just how far can technology go? Could machines start to compete with humans in making complex and life-changing decisions, like those made by lawyers and judges? That’s what CrowdScience listener Zackery Snaidman from Orlando in the US wants to know and presenter Marnie Chesterton has set out to find answers. She starts at a hackathon in London, where she witnesses the birth and design of the UK’s new online court. And in Uganda, she hears how technology and social media is filling a crucial gap left by a shortage of human lawyers. Marnie is also surprised to discover a simple algorithm that regularly out-performs human judges in making bail decisions. But could technology bring as many problems as it solves? Could seemingly ‘unbiased’ computers hide the prejudices of their makers? And more fundamentally: With our future l

A billion people across the world smoke cigarettes, and many would agree it’s the hardest habit to quit. One such smoker, listener Sharif, emailed CrowdScience from Uzbekistan to ask if we could find out why giving up is so difficult. Marnie Chesterton travels to San Francisco to meet addiction experts and discovers how nicotine tricks smokers into thinking tobacco’s good for them. And we meet ex-smokers at a weekly therapy session aimed at retraining the brain.Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Marijke Peters(Image: Lit cigarette. Credit: Getty Images)

Earlier this year Crowdscience explored the question of time. Back then we were on a mission to uncover what the real time is and how we're able to measure time to ever greater degrees of accuracy. But as ever, the programme uncovered more questions than answers so presenter Anand Jagatia is back to try and find out where time comes from, why it runs forwards and not backwards, what happens to time in a black hole and does time even exist beyond our experience of it? We speak to Claudia Hammond, author of a book that reveals the mysteries of time perception and the man who defined time for the online Encyclopaedia Britannica, tells us if time really exists or not. Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Rami Tzabar(Image: Abstract clock image. Credit: Getty Images)

We're always up for a challenge on CrowdScience but this week’s question, which comes from an artist, tests our limits as we investigate the nature of thought itself – something that has puzzled scientists and philosophers since ancient times. Undeterred, presenter Nastaran Tavakoli-Far heads off to the Spanish island of Ibiza to visit listener Romanie in her painting studio and attempt to peer into the workings of her mind. As we explore the relationship between thought and language, why not join in with our experiments to discover if you’re thinking visually or verbally? We find out how language can affect thinking in surprising ways – why German speakers might see a bridge differently from Spanish speakers, how being bilingual can make you a better driver and even why some languages give their speakers a remarkable sense of direction.Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk Presenter: Nastaran Tavakoli-Far Producer: Cathy Edwards(Image: The Thinker a bro

David in Bogota might have raised a few eyebrows in the CrowdScience office with his questions – can plants talk? And can they hear us talking to them? But actually scientists now know that plants do have the ability to communicate with the world around them to a much greater extent than previously thought. Some scientists even talk about plants being able to “hear” a hungry caterpillar or the sound of running water, while others argue that we should not anthropomorphise plants. One underground communication network, affectionately dubbed the Wood Wide Web by scientists, is made of fungi that grow off the roots of plants. The network lets plants forge alliances, friendships and business partners. But as we learn nothing is free in nature. In return for their haulage services, the fungi which make up the network siphons off some of the sugar produced during photosynthesis by the plants. Presenter Anand Jagatia goes foraging for answers in the woods together with fungal ecologists. Do you have a question we c

Back when Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested something different - that the changes you are exposed to during your lifetime can be passed on to future generations. By this theory, giraffes have long necks because, over generations, they have stretched them, reaching for leaves. This theory became laughable when genes were discovered as the means of heredity. Lifestyle choices cannot be passed down in your DNA, or so we thought….But recently this idea has returned and a new field of biology has emerged called epigenetics – which looks at how the genes we inherit from our parents are controlled and modified by their life experience and the choices they made. Marnie Chesterton meets the survivors of the Dutch Famine of World War Two, whose grandchildren show health effects from that event despite being born three generations after the starvation of 1944. As the new field of epigenetics develops, does this mean Lamarck was right

Listener Ros Allen wondered why it always seems to rain on her village but not the one a mile away. It’s all down to microclimates. CrowdScience explores the impact of microclimates on our lives, discovers how more rain can help an English tea plantation and reveals the deadly effect of the urban heat island. Marnie Chesterton also talks to a local project in New York City, the Cool Roofs Program, that aims to reduce the urban heat effect, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change. But just how much of a difference can measures like this really make?Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Marijke Peters(Image: Women standing on the edge of a forest with an umbrella. Credit: Getty Images)

Trees transcend human generations – but are they the oldest living things on Earth? CrowdScience listener William from London, UK, got in touch to ask what the oldest tree or other organism on our planet is. Presenter Marnie Chesterton heads out to meet one of our older arboreal cousins to see how we can work out its age - without cutting it down to count the rings. But whilst certain individual trees can live for thousands of years, some that live in colonies can survive for much longer – perhaps up to 80,000 years old. Along the way, Marnie asks what other organisms contend for this title, what the word ‘oldest’ really means, and even ponders whether some creatures could actually be immortal. Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.ukPresenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Jen Whyntie(Image: Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Credit: Getty Images)

You don’t have to be a “super-recogniser” to know that human facial features are extremely varied. Just look around you. Yet look at a most other animals and you’d find it hard to tell individuals apart. So why are human faces so diverse?We’ll also be finding out why salt tastes salty (warning: lots of spitting and gargling ahead) and one listener wants to know what would happen if one of the key ocean current systems, the North Atlantic Conveyer, slowed down or stopped altogether. Presenter Marnie Chesterton heads to the beaches on the West Coast of Scotland in search of answer. Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk Presenters: Marnie Chesterton and Geoff Marsh Producers: Laura Hyde and Jennifer Whyntie