Science And Technology Videos

Emeritus Professor of Ethology at the University of Queensland, Glen McBride, gives us a different view of natural selection as we celebrate the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species.

Adelaide Institute develops new optical fibres The institute has developed new kinds of optical fibres with nanoscale holes. These holes can suck up fluid and opens a new field of sensing. An application is in assessing the quality of aircraft fuel which is susceptible to degradation. Another is measuring wine quality in barrels. And there are applications in medicine. The amazing behavior of octopuses and dolphins Mark Norman has found an octopus in Indonesia which uses coconut shells as a designer shield. If threatened, it assembles the shells and hides inside. This fits the definition of tool use! So does the octopus learn? Or is the memory retained in some other way. And dolphins have been observed preparing cuttlefish for dinner. They remove the ink sack, and later strip the skin and allow the bone to be removed. Tanya Ha - Germ phobia Tanya Ha looks at our approach to the bacteria commonly known as germs. You´d think we were at war with these organisms, but many are essential to our bodies and our health. Recalcitrant ants forced back to work Jürgen Liebig has ants from India, Florida, Arizona and Brunei. He studies their life cycles and uses their behavior for insights into the evolution of cooperative behavior in animals. In most species, worker ants don´t mate, but they do produce offspring by parthenogenesis, a pathway not involving sex. But if a worker ant competes with the queen, they can be detected, through a chemical marker, and will be dragged around by the workers, damaging their reproductive potential, forcing the recalcitrant ant back to work. New phase of stems cells for regenerative medicine Embryonic stem cells saw the birth or regenerative medicine. The stem cells create the environment in which healing can occur. Now in the US, patients with spinal cord injury are being treated with stem cells in clinical trials. Some trials have seen tumors develop. This is because stem cells are very similar to cancer cells. Paul Fairchild is looking at preventing the rejection of cells and tissues derived from embryonic stem cells. This is seen as one of the major barriers to regenerative medicine. The most important recent development in regenerative medicine is in the field of induced pluripotency. It allows a patient´s cells to be reprogrammed into embryonic stem cells. From here, potentially any bodypart can be made. This gets around the problem of rejected.

Evolution, mutation and transformation -- what do these themes evoke for you? Genes mutate, but so do bodies, brains and cultures. Celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and dive into the Gene Pool. We invited you to upload sounds, stories, and images to Radio National's social media site, Pool (http://pool.org.au), and to mutate and remix those of others. Catch All in the Mind's remix of your remixes!

Truly great oratory can move audience emotions and inspire nations. That's what Malcolm Tunbull was trying hard to do last night in his press conference on the need to fight climate change. Of course there are the famous speeches of history like Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Winston Churchill's 'fight them on the beaches', Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream', Nelson Mandela's speech from the dock and, more locally, Robert Menzies' 'forgotten Australians'. Now researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that our minds and spirits are being moved not only by well-delivered words, but also by the breath behind the words.

If you've got friends overseas you're sure to be using the internet telephone service Skype. It's gone from strength to strength: the attraction of free international video phone calls have attracted half a billion users. Three hundred thousand people join up every day, with Skype hosting up to 20 million simultaneous internet phone calls. But despite of those remarkable statistics, Skype's owner Ebay has just sold it back to the original owners.

On the eve of next month's Copenhagen climate conference, a new global synthesis of the last three years of climate science has been released internationally overnight. The Copenhagen Diagnosis finds that all the indicators for temperature, sea ice and ice-sheet loss and sea level rise are accelerating. Perhaps most disturbingly, the report says that the world is already locked into a minimum rise in sea levels of half a metre by the end of this century because of warming and melt already underway.

Painting a grim picture of the Neanderthal Modern science has long painted Neanderthals as our placid cousins. But a new book claims that the Neanderthal was actually a brutal carnivore who hunted and raped humans and then ate them. William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms William Boyd's new novel is Ordinary Thunderstorms. It's about Adam Kindred, who comes back to London from America where he has been working for a few years as a climatologist.

Australian scientists are behind a major breakthrough in detecting the mechanisms that make cancer cells proliferate. Cancer cells, unlike normal cells, have the ability to be 'immortal' so to speak, to continue reproducing and so to form tumours. They do this using two mechanisms. The first is telomerase, discovered by Elizabeth Blackburn in 1985, for which she was awarded the Nobel prize just a few weeks ago. The second, the use of something known as ALT or 'alternative lengthening of telomeres' which was discovered in 1995 by Professor Roger Reddel, the director of the Children's Medical Research Institute in Sydney. Now another doctor at that institute, Jeremy Henson, has devised a new blood test which greatly reduces the time it takes to detect how ALT works, enabling far better drug tresting as well as allowing doctors to give patients far better feedback. And it could result in an effective means of blocking cancer growth.

Charles Darwin´s publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago is not a barrier to belief but an invitation to see God as larger than previously imagined. So says Dr. Nancy Howell, Co-Chair of the Theology and Science Group of the American Academy of Religion. Science is hegemonic today, but it is not capable of measuring a God that is only known to us as analogy, says Dr. Martinez Hewlett, a theistic evolutionist and a cellular biologist at the University of Arizona. The idea of the Cosmic Christ, says Fr. Jacques Arnould who works for the French Space Agency, anticipates modern cosmology.

Last week Dr Jim Endersby, from the University of Sussex in the UK, told the tale of how Joseph Dalton Hooker met Tasmanian Ronald Gunn who, over the years, sent hundreds of carefully dried and preserved specimens of unknown flora to Kew, where Hooker named and classified his finds. Today Europe's museums and botanic gardens are full of dried plants, stuffed animals etc, as a result of the dedication of these men.

Spacesuits for Mars A possible future Mars habitat has been constructed in the desert in Utah. It contains rooms and workshops, as well as an airlock with simulation spacesuits. James Waldie designs spacesuits. Current suits are big body shaped balloons filled with gas from the Earth´s atmosphere. The new approach is to use a skinsuit. Pressurisation is attained by way of physical compression. It´s like thermal underwear. This kind of suit may be used on missions to Mars. But what happens if there´s a tear? And a bigger problem is bone loss in zero gravity in space. The skinsuit is being designed to simulate gravity and hopefully prevent or reduce bone loss. James Waldie explains. Tanya Ha - Gadgets garbage and gorillas Tanya Ha explains the link between our love affair with mobile phones and other electronic devices and the gorillas of the Congo. Brasenose College Oxford celebrates 500 years Brasenose College is 500 years old. The foundation stone was laid in 1509. Roger Cashmore describes the college´s history, including its curious name. Brasenose is famous for the study of law, as well as classics, philosophy, politics and economics. Notable students include author William Golding. Australians having studied at Brasenose include Prime Minister John Gorton and Malcolm Turnbull. Roger Cashmore is actually a physicist and once ran the CERN particle accelerator. He discusses prospects for the large hadron collider. Time, physics and science in the world of movies and TV Movies and TV programs contain increasingly more science. Sean Carroll describes the connection between scientists and movie makers and a new body, the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which links move makers with scientists. Sean Carroll researches time. He´s trying to understand what the early universe was like. He´s even considering what was going on before the Big Bang. The Diamond Synchrotron Naomi Fowler visits a new synchrotron just opened near Oxford in England. The apparatus can be used to study the microscopic detail of ancient artefacts such as those from the Mary Rose, the favourite ship of Henry VIII which sank 500 years ago. Galapagos Islands Arturo Izurieta was director of the Galapagos Park Authority when he was just 27 years old. He brought in a decentralised structure allowing local people to deal with environmental problems. He restricted the number of boats visiting islands. Neil Collier worked on the islands as a biologist and employed a model assisting local people to work with scientists in improving the environment and saving threatened species.

In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, top British climate scientist Mike Hulme wants to understand climate change as a psychological and cultural force. Anthropologist Jonathan Marshall has just edited a provocative collection of Jungian perspectives on climate change. They join Natasha Mitchell to discuss mythology, mental ecology and a changing climate.