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Science In Action: 27/03/2009

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27/03/2009

BBC World Service - Science In Action, 27/03/2009

Malaria map, Alfven solar waves, afterlife experiences and Light Controlling the Brain.

Global Malaria Map

You can now find out your risk of catching malaria wherever you are on the planet. The most detailed map ever created of malaria infection has just been published. It’s an international and on-going effort involving over 200 experts around the world. Malaria is carried by mosquitoes and kills a million people every year and the map should help target control methods more effectively. Dr Simon Hay has been co-ordinating the project in Kenya and is now based at the University of Oxford in England.


Alfven Solar Waves

We all know that the closer you get to a fire, the hotter it is – and since the sun is a huge ball of fire you would think the same applied. But it doesn’t. The hottest part of the sun’s heat is just outside the surface of the sun itself and scientists have been struggling to work out why for a long time. This week a paper in the journal Science seems to go quite a long way to solving the puzzle. We talk to one of the researcher’s:  Dr David Jess at Queen’s University Belfast.


Afterlife Experiences

Everyone wonders at some stage what it must feel like to die. Will you be frightened, brave, happy, at peace - or conscious of anything at all? It’s one of the great unknowns – except that a small but growing number of people do claim to know. They’re people who have all experienced serious injury or illness that has brought them close to death – but they’ve recovered. What’s so fascinating is that so many seem to have very similar experiences. 
A conference on the subject was held recently in Jamaica and Martin Redfern of the BBC Science Unit went to find out if science can help understand what is going on. 


Light Controlling the Brain

Understanding how the brain works and being able to treat it when it goes wrong occupies an army of brain scientists all over the world. Small steps in that direction are constantly being made but the complexity and subtlety of the human brain means the goal remains elusive. A new approach to seeing inside the working brain is described in the Journal Nature. Dr Karl Dieseroth and colleagues at Stanford University in the USA have developed a way of using light to track the function of the brain. He explained how they came up with the idea


Presenter: Sue Broom
Studio Guest: Roland Pease
Producer: Peter McHugh

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