Speechification

The whole set of Am I Normal? programmes is well worth a listen. There’s one on Social Phobia, another on Dyslexia,  a third on Maths and another on Sleep. That’s the one that I thought would resonate most with our listeners (though Social Phobia is a contender too) so that’s the one I’ve stuck on the podcast by linking  to an MP3 here.  All the shows are there to be listened to though, and there’s a nice bunch of links too.  Excellent work. And you’ve got to listen  right to the end of this show, to hear a sports reporter fall asleep live on air, while reading out some football scores. Brilliant.

I think The Material World is my favourite radio science show. It’s to do with presenter Quentin Cooper (it’s not as good when someone’s filling in for him), to do with the real live scientists interviewed every week and to do with the very broad range of subject matter: all the sciences, all in one place, which is great for your pop science dilettante. This one’s about polythene and sound perception and a new supercomputer for British scientists. MP3 and podcast.

Radio 4 has a set of prejudices left over from the Reith days. Not bad prejudices, admirable actually, but not mainstream. A set of priorities that gives Radio 4 its character. Sport’s not that important, books and religion are, and Christianity is still part of the fabric of weekly life. Personally I find some of the religious stuff a bit irritating, the sappiness of Thought For The Day is always the final straw that gets Today turned off in my bathroom. But, anyway, anyway, what I’m building up to saying is that this week’s Analysis represents the best of these prejudices. It’s thoughtful, intelligent radio that examines religion as a human, social, cultural phenomenon, not just to be accepted but to be thought about. It looks at religion through the lens of science, not to determine its ‘truth’ or otherwise, but to see how what we can learn about it, to think about why we’re drawn to it. Radio 4 has a bias towards examination. I like that. Thanks to Matt. MP3 here.

Presented by Natasha Mitchell, All In The Mind is ABC Radio National’s weekly psychology programme (or, “the mind, brain and behaviour”), and is always worth a listen. This particular episode featured an interview with Jonah Lehrer, who wrote last year’s popular science bestseller Proust was a Neuroscientist. The book essentially argues that certain artists and writers anticipated some of the great discoveries about the mind and brain that took place in the early 20th century. Lehrer - something of an over-achiever himself, and editor-at-large for SEED magazine - looks at the work of Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Auguste Escoffier, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cezanne, and what, with a bit of imagination, they might have foretold about perception, representation, memory and the nature of the psyche. It’s a fascinating discussion.

(And though Proust was in no way a neuroscientist, of course, his implicit understanding of the power of smell and taste recalls the 2007 Boyer Lectures we blogged about here, featuring Prof. Graeme Clark’s work on contemporary understanding of the senses. Oh, and All In The Mind also has its own blog, where Mitchell wrote about this episode.)

All In The Mind: Proust was a Neuroscientist (mp3)

Look, I tried really hard not to post this. We can’t just post every episode of Archive Hour every week. It’s not Archivication. But there are people out there waiting to get on trains or walk dogs. And they can’t do it until their MP3 players are full of high-quality speech radio content. And that’s what this is; Kathy Sykes looking back at the BBC’s history of science programming; explaining science to the nation. We hear from the tweedy gents of old, the eccentrics of the 60s and 70s, the occasional attempts at youthiness and the splendidly doomed live experiments of Tomorrow’s World. And, there’s a bit of The Great Egg Race. Dear BBC, Bring Back The Great Egg Race! MP3 here.

An absolutely fascinating piece, this. Scary, but fascinating. And leaves you wondering quite why it feels scary (I think I know).

Professor Julian Savulescu, an eminent ethicist at Oxford University, on why it might benefit society as a whole to allow genetic modification and enhancement of humans. Simplifying, his arguments are relatively straightforward: ignoring the fact that we already enhance - via ritalin, say, or even coffee and alcohol - if we could genuinely and safely improve IQ, behaviour, even morality through tweaking genetics and pharmacology, shouldn’t we do that? The impact on everything, from architecture to sport to law to relationships, is barely capable of being comprehended - at least, without the sharpener of modafanil and Ritalin that US airforce pilots use when flying over Iraq.

The image I’m left with, however, is that of a rabbit that had a fluorescent gene from a jellyfish transferred into it. Perfectly safely, apparently. Thus, a fluorescent rabbit, and Savulescu points out that there’s no reason we couldn’t make a fluorescent human right now, the same way. At least they’d have each other.

Background Briefing: Stronger, smarter, nicer humans (mp3)

Britain (long before it was called Britain, obviously. I think it was called ‘Ugghh’) used to be joined to continental Europe (’Hagghh’). The land between the two long ago sank below the waves but down there, on the bottom of the ocean, is a pristine archaeological site. Not a narrow ’causeway’ as people used to think but thousands of square kilometres of settlements, paths, riverbeds and burial grounds. From speechification’s collection of ’scientists who can’t contain their excitement’ here’s a 2005 show about the exploration of this mysterious and inaccessible domain, only recently uncovered with the help of oil industry seismic data. Fascinating (MP3).

Forgive me as I stray a little northwards from my Antipodean lair to bring you this quite wonderful edition of Studio 360, presented as usual by Kurt Anderson. It’s devoted to amateur inventors and ‘mad scientists’, with Nikola Tesla as the super-dense object bending the show’s waves around him. The programme lovingly and carefully explores Tesla’s pioneering work in radar, radio, alternating current and just about everything else in the modern world - which was all to little acclaim at the time.

Mike Daisey relates the life of Tesla in a hilarious and bewitching set of excerpts from his one-man show. With a delivery like Emo Phillips with the fast forward button held down, be sure to stay for the story of Tesla’s death ray. Just after the story of Tesla x-raying Mark Twain’s head.

The WYNC Director of Engineering takes Anderson to the top of the Empire State Building, to see the big machines that carries the sound WYNC upwards into the sky - and then gets him to put his hand in them. Then there’s a gentle section on garage inventors from Kansas. Samantha Hunt, writer of a new (fictional, but barely) book on the extraordinary life of Tesla. Plus some notes on the popular perception of the mad scientist, from a mildly disgruntled, real (not mad) scientist. Beautifully produced of course, this is just great, great radio. There’s lots more info at the S360 site.

Studio 360: Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius (mp3)

This is just proper, informative radio. Nothing flashy. No comedians. Just the complicated science and engineering of a nuclear reactor being decommissioned; being explained well. Both episodes are still up on the Radio 4 site but aren’t listed on Listen Again, which is odd given how topical this stuff is. The first episode is here, the second is here.

I’ve always found the sense of disgust to be one of the most bizarre and intriguing human emotions. After all, we’re the only species to develop an instinct for the revolting, and it has become a crucial part of the way we develop socially.

Luckily, Radio 4 science strand Frontiers had a piece on a couple of weeks ago tracking different pieces of research into disgust (here’s the MP3). Things got really interesting when the show started to go beyond measuring disgust and explored how our morals 0- and perhaps even political tendencies - are defined by it.