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BBC Inside Science: Climate change belief; Anthropocene era; Eyes on the sea; Origins of multicellular life

29/01/2015

Climate change belief; Anthropocene era; Eyes on the sea; Origins of multicellular life

BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science, Climate change belief; Anthropocene era; Eyes on the sea; Origins of multicellular life

Perceptions of climate change, the Anthropocene era and a new theory of cell evolution.

Adam Rutherford examines a report on our changing attitudes to climate change in the wake of the winter floods of 2013/14 and a new theory on the evolution of complex cells.

We all remember the floods across much of central and southern England this time last year, and the devastating effect they had on people's lives and livelihoods. Today, a group of researchers at Cardiff University published a report on how people's perception of climate change has evolved in the wake of the floods. To what extent has our belief in man-made climate change altered? Do we now regard last year's events as a sign of things to come? Adam Rutherford talks to Nick Pidgeon from Cardiff University's School of Psychology who led this UK wide study

Earlier this week an international group of climate scientists, geographers and ecologists met at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden to wrangle how we can practically make the best of the Anthropocene - the new geological epoch that many consider that we now find ourselves in. Gaia Vince author of Adventures in the Anthropocene, reports from the Stockholm meeting


At the UK's Satellite Application Catapult in Harwell, a project has been unveiled that seeks to offer real time data on the world's fishing fleet to help governments police illegal fishing.
Pulling together data from shipping registers, satellite images, radar and ships' own transponders, Eyes on the Sea automatically scans for suspicious activity and can alert human users and allow them to see what ships are up to. The Pew Charitable Trusts hope that vessels carrying illegal cargoes can then be tracked across the ocean, and any port receiving them would know where they had been and what they had been up to.

How complex cells evolved is a mystery. Current theories on the evolutionary jump, between 1 and 2 billion years ago, from life forms based on a simple prokaryote cell to the complex multiple eukaryote cells with a cell nucleus and a host of complex internal machinery, fails to explain much of what we see within animal, plant and fungi cells today. Adam talks to Buzz Baum a cell biologist at University College London who has devised a new testable model which appears to explain one of biology's most basic questions.


Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

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