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BBC Inside Science: Dinosaur extinction, Neanderthals in Gibraltar, Music appreciation, A year of New Horizons

14/07/2016

Dinosaur extinction, Neanderthals in Gibraltar, Music appreciation, A year of New Horizons

BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science, Dinosaur extinction, Neanderthals in Gibraltar, Music appreciation, A year of New Horizons

Dinosaur extinction, Neanderthals in Gibraltar, music appreciation; a year of New Horizons

An asteroid impact 66 million years ago caused a mass extinction, but allowed rampant evolution for the survivors. Adam Rutherford examines new insights into the events.

The dinosaurs met their end with a massive bang when, 66 million years ago, a 6 mile-wide rock crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. This was bad news for the dinosaurs, and consequently good news for the mammals left behind. Thomas Halliday is a palaeontologist, who specialises on the rise of the mammals, and his new work unpicks what happened to survivors after 75% of the species on earth died. 

The Neanderthals were found in Gibraltar back in 1848. Ever since then, teams have been exploring the caves systems on that rocky outcrop of Europe. It's known as Neanderthal City and researchers think it was home to the very last of these people, some 30,000 years ago. BBC science reporter Melissa Hogenboom has just returned from Gibraltar and talks to Adam about the recent findings of abstract art, which suggest that Neanderthals are much more like us than previously thought.

We generally find the combination of notes in a consonant chord more pleasant to our ears than a dissonant one. The question is whether that reaction is learnt or simply part of our biology. It's a tricky thing to test because music is culturally ubiquitous. Neuroscientist Josh McDermott has found a way around this, by playing those tunes to members of a very remote Bolivian tribe - the Tsimane - and gauging their reactions.

One year on since the New Horizons probe zoomed past Pluto, Kathy Olkin, one of the chief scientists behind the mission talks to Adam about how the team have dealt with the new data. Noah Hammond from Brown University explains how he has used photographic data from New Horizons to examine the cracks in the surface of Pluto, and has suggested how they came to be.

Presenter: Adam Rutherford

Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

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