Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/drkarl drkarl_20131104-0330a.mp3
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Time once again to catch up with the week's science news with Dr. Chris Smith / hi / why windfarms / turns out / laid out all wrong / proved / we've all been missing / our obsession with ornate regular grids of turbines could be robbing us of up to 30% of the potential output. We'll find out why, and how we should / windfarms
first though / this week / headlines / together earlier today to talk about weighing planet / star systems, the genetics of cancer, and super computer of tomorrow / before those __ has got / waggy dog story to kick off with.
It certainly is / are you a dog person, Chis? / succession / dogs / about dogs / cause / scientists have discovered that the direction / wag its tail tells other dogs what it's thinking. And that's according to / published in the journal Current Biology / now / animal behavior researchers / tail-wagging isn't just / back and forth / biased / right or the left. But a closer look / right / may reveal / actually thinking ... I mean / I love you", "Feed me", / "take me for a walk" / anyway, dogs are watching / approach of their owners / they tend to wag / more rightwards / that are cautious / threatened by a larger dog / they tend to wag more to the left. But until now, it wasn't really clear whether the dogs themselves / sensitive / wagging signals of other dogs / might be convenient for humans / no evidence / or interpret what / maybe / doesn't mean anything. Now / Italian scientists led by / M__ / studied 43 domestic dogs / range of breeds, and he showed them videos of unfamiliar dogs of with either left wag or / right wags / team monitored / dogs' behaviors / heart rates / these movies / how stressed they became, and, when they / wagging to the left, they / became significantly more stressed. Their heart rates went up / about two hundred beats a minute / pictures non-wagging dogs / smaller increase / a minute / and rightward-wagging dogs / much less, about 140. Now the team also did the experiment / dog-shaped silhouettes 'cause they wanted to know / and they got the same results. Now the researchers think that this shows that domestic dogs can actually read communication cues from the tale wags / dogs. And, they think / because the left half of the brain / right side of the body / they think / somehow specialized for friendly behavior, while the right side of the brain, which controls the left side of the body / might control / region that, sort of, recognizes / retreat behivior or something like that / maybe / something to do with / social behivior / evolution of / left / right / if you want to know / Fido loves you / check out its tail / I wonder, then, if other social spieces, including dogs' relatives, wolves, will behave the same way / this is interesting because / into the shoes, or paws, perhaps, of other dogs, doesn't it? It means / slightly sceptical about / animals are concerned / in front of a video, uh, be my guest. / Thank you very much / story / which is completely out of this world
Scientists are / discovered / describe as the smallest exo-planet, in other words, planet which is in another system other than around our sun, which is yet to be discovered / in other words they have been able to measure and weigh a planet which is not much bigger than the Earth, orbiting a distant star. / two papers in the journal Nature this week / one from / Francisco P__ from / University / Geneva / independently, both described this planet orbiting the star / called / Kepler / produced this mass measurement for it / extraordinary piece of research / which is about the same size as the Earth. It's only / 1.2 times / slightly bigger but almost the same, and it weighs about 1.86 times as much as the Earth does. And, that means they can tell you that / composition of roughly 20% iron, 80% rock, and the density, 5.5 grams per centimeter cube / which is almost the same as the Earth. / we / around another star, which is almost analogus to the Earth. But the difference / sort of, stop there / 3000 degree C. And the reason for that is, it orbits its star about a hundred times closer in than the Earth does / this means the surface is / blistering 3,000 degrees C. But what it does show is that the techniques / got to detect ex__ solar planets / can be pushed right down to very tiny worlds / power of the Earth / and start looking for Earth-like planets / the right distance from their star, in order to try to find places that are almost home from home for us / researchers do this? Well, they were looking at the light coming from / Kepler 78 / distant star / which is only / young star, really / more Justine B___ than Tina Turner of the star world / what they find / because / even / small / round / so close to the star, as it goes round, its gravity stretches the surface of the star a little bit / water / towards it and gives us tides / the planet goes around the star, pulls the surface of the star / towards it very slightly, and this has the effect of stretching the light which / out a little bit when / back, and then squeezing it when / in front of the star relative to us. And this alters the color / coming towards us very subtly, but it does it every / because this planet goes whizzing round 'cause it's so close in / once every / year is / half-hour's long / to work out basically what this planet's made of and what it weighs, because / Isn't that extraordinary? / incredible / so far away / work that one out? / given that I'm / UK's biggest / cancer / this week / I noticed a really / news, and it's about / cancer chromosomes. Now / has revealed a new understanding / published the result in the journal Cell. Now, the story actually starts a hundred years ago. When / cancer / they noticed / chromosomes / long string of DNA / cancer cells which / unusual / wrong numbers / stuck together. Now, healthy / 23 pairs of chromosomes / cancer cells often miss / phenomenon known as / extra chromosomes in / pairs / there might be / smaller / big chunks / copied or missing / moved around the place / but it's not clear / other things __ gone wrong / whether / key driver for the desease. Now, until now / most / researchers have just been focusing on / called mutations, rather than really big changes like this. But / evidence that maybe / pattern to the chromosome changes / cancer cells / could be the key to developing more effective strategy to treating it. / bunch actually done? / Well, rather than / on cancer cells in the lab the __ team / and / mathematical analysis to look at chromosome changes / DNA taken from more than 8,000 cancer samples / stored / genes / often / supresses these / breaks / often / missing / you might expect in cancer cells. And / many many t___ s___ / more likely to be missing. And / packed with anchor genes / more likely to be copied / containing particularly potent anch_r / more likely / copied or missing, respectively / this suggests / could be a / key driver / rather than / question / cancer research / which says you need to have faults in / two copies of the cancer gene / cell / team / big changes of a number of different genes / one chromosome / or copying several anchor genes, could actually have a big effect. / And, so, what does this mean / practical terms, you know / next / kind of thing / for patients today / at the moment / still a theoretical idea. So, / researchers / experiments with cancer cells in the lab / to prove / correct / so, for example / add or remove / big chunks of chromosomes and see if / still drives / not clear how this mechanism / fits in / already know / driving cancer / individual genes / or changes in the activity levels about the genes / other genes / certainly / new / explored
thank / been discussing had enormous relevance to super-computing and big powerful computers, and, if we are to keep pace / we need to see in the computer world, then / have / step change here, because, we / can achieve with silicon chips in their present architecture, which is why IBM have announced recently their vision / pack a super computer into a sugar-cube-sized volume. And, the way / they want to do it is to solve / major issue / chip / heat / and, their solution is electronic blood. Now, that sounds / pefect / recently had. But / genious / what they suggest is that if you have layers of chips / spread out / radiate all of the heat off of it / loads / into a sugar cube lump-type architecture, but you have tiny holes going through them. And you / pump in / fluid / cools down the chip. Now / you / say / already use water-cooling / some computing applications / what's new about this? Ah ha. / because they are not just using / this is really clever / to / also doing what the brain ... the human brain does / blood / correct operating environment for the nerve cells / blood also brings / into / in the form of sugar. This computer blood / charged irons / they are playing around / charged / what we call / a certain oxidation state. And then, as they go through the processor / they / discharge / onto the parts of the computer chips, giving them energy, and / pump the __ back out / taking away the heat / waste / back in again / And, this / pack far more processing / into your chip space and / super power, which is currently / half a football field into potentially / desktop computer by 2060. So, / certainly promising
I wonder / still / running Windows on it / this week's / transcripts / references, all of them / online at naked / news /
Windfarms now / driving through the countryside, you often see huge grids of windturbines dotted across the fields / But does it actually matter how we lay them out? / is from University of Delaware, where she / wind actually flows through windfarms in order to answer this question. / some staggering results, actually / can make this joke. You can actually improve the performance of the windfarm / by 13 to 33% if you placed your turbines in a staggered arrangement. And, what I mean by that is, it's easier to describe / if you think about / movie theatre, and / have / good vision of of the screen, and, of course, you don't want to have a person / sitting right in front of you. And, so, the way / often / seats in a theatre / very / which is not very smart because if you want look at the screen, you will like / person in front of you but slightly staggered / just / in / slightly staggered / chose to put them in the theater arrangement / when / kind of order / Maybe it is. If you have any / in your yard / wedding or something, You will see / natural instinct / make things lined up. If / you know / it's very understandable. / the numbers you are suggesting, of between / in the productivity of a windfarm / enormous number. So, how did you do this? And, why did you begin looking at this? / First of all, the ultimate goal is to try to reduce the cost of wind energy / relatively cheap compared to all the other renewable energy sources, possibly the cheapest, but the designs of turbines are already very good / the blades are optimized / even beautiful at this point. So, there's really not much you can do / to make them even more productive / pretty much / So, if you want to reduce the cost / wind energy / you have to act on something / interested in is, can we place them in such a way that / turbines generate, and you can / think / wake of turbulant / the next turbine, obviously it impacts its productivity. So, you don't want these wakes to interfere too much with the turbines / downstream. / So, you are saying / view of the cinema / person in front / dirty air / full / hitting the turbine behind / minimize that effect / So, how did you actually do that? How did you / how best to place them / I use / very sophisticated simulator. This is a computer code that tries to resolve the equasions of motion of the atmosphere / very fancy /say / basically predict / wind will be / millions of them in a windfarm / imagine / a cube that include the entire / I'm trying to predict / temperature / pressure will be at all these million points, and / to include obviously the presence / in this volume / fact that they rotate / the fact / turbulance / can impact / you must / powerful computer to do that. / Yes, absolutely. Actually / even more powerful system / I would like / more / listeners / more / please let me know. Right now, I'm using / hi / over / parallel processors / it's still gonna take me about / take me about two months / per simulation / before we finish, could you just tell us, how / do we know that this isn't just the product of some computer time / really applies to the real world / Yes. We have data from existing windfarms, so, I can definitely access those and / in my list of things to do. The tools / I'm using / more useful when / planning / because it's a prediction. And, so, I'm trying to tune / very well / to simulate conditions in other locations for future times, and so on. / Christina Archer from the University of Delaware / recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters
finally / in search of / super-foods can stave off cancer. / This week we digest some data and get to the bottom of a question / providing / a few listeners, including Karen and Kate got in touch with this: / How much / is there / cancer / what / cheers." / So, we often / headlines that / might decrease your likelyhood of cancer. Dr. Emma Smith at Cancer Research UK has this to say / awful lot / about these so-called super-foods / aledgedly cure cancer. And / solid evidence / trials. There isn't any single food or type of food / protect you from cancer ultimately / research / perhaps just / certain foods like b___ or cabbage / kill cancer cells / chemical / cancer cells / grain / dish / laboratory. / OK. But surely this __ dada somehow translates / how / reacts / particular foods / problem is / don't necessarily / or perhaps / adding to the cancer cells. And when you look at the evidence / any proof that these foods help to / cancer / And, what about red wine? I'm sure I've heard that that / a good cancer-beater. Or is / just me / red / is interesting one / we are actually running / clinical in red wine / chemical in red wine called / also, perhaps you've heard / termeric, which / those chemicals could protect us from cancer / clinical trials / look at / the case or not / studing the chemicals / controlled doses / getting people to drink / in fact the evidence / outweighs any benefit / possibly / So we definitely are not condoning red wine to protect you against cancer / published / international journal of cancer. / And / used clever chemical analysis / that 111 glasses of red wine need to be consumed each day in order to get the correct dose of cancer-beating / to balance out / which is a bit excessive / intake, even for me / with cancer can do / undergoing treatment / can they help by changing their diet? / first of all / undergoing / it's important to / make sure / calorie intake is high enough so you can cope with treatment. And, if you / lose a bit of weight / just eat healthier / it really is important / major changes. / Thanks / including Karen and Kate / who got in touch / and also, to / Dr. Emma Smith /
Closing, we / to get an answer to this: / Hello / I am calling from Madrid. I came back to Madrid to take care of my niece, Adriana / year old. Since then, I have spoken to her solely in English. So, my question is, is it OK if I speak to her in English, or I am delaying her learning? / bilingual babies - helping or hindering brain development? / have an insight into that one, for Hanna / Chris / nakidscientist.com, or can tweet / our forum / nakedscientist.com/forum
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