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LEADING EDGE
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Leading Edge brings you the latest news from the world of science. Geoff Watts celebrates discoveries as soon as they're being talked about - on the internet, in coffee rooms and bars; often before they're published in journals. And he gets to grips with not just the science, but with the controversies and conversation that surround it.
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LISTEN AGAIN 听30 min |
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"If what interests you are new and exciting ideas, it's science you should be turning to. And whether it's the Human Genome Project or the origins of the Universe, Leading Edge is the place to hear about them."
Geoff Watts |
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The Beginnings of Bling
A search through the archaeological collections of London's Natural History Museum has yielded the earliest evidence for body ornaments in our Stone Age ancestors.
Pierced seashells from a cave in Israel were almost certainly beads on a necklace worn by someone about 100,000 years ago.
As the museum's head of human origins, Chris Stringer, explains the find pushes back evidence for symbolic behaviour in Homo sapiens by tens of thousands of years.
Doomsday Seed Vault in an Arctic Mountain
The Arctic island of Svalbard will be home a global seed bank of last resort - a collection of seeds from each of the world's three million varieties of agricultural crop, housed deep in a frozen mountain of permafrost and rock.
Should any crop face extinction from climate change, natural disaster or disease, the Doomsday seed bank will always be there with fresh seed to start again.
Geoff Watts talks to one of the project's scientific consultants, Geoff Hawtin.听
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The SKA - Square Kilometre Array Telescope
The giant steel dish of Jodrell Bank's Lovell Observatory is an icon of British astronomy.
As Jon Stewart reports, radio telescopes of this design will become a thing of the past as astronomers build multi-antennae radio telescopes instead.
The SKA will be the most ambitious of the new generation, consisting of hundreds of receivers across a landscape and working as one. It'll be much more sensitive than today's dishes, probing the radio universe in much greater detail and over much larger swathes of the heavens.
Jodrell astronomers Ian Morrison and Peter Wilkinson outline the vision.
The CLEVER Car
CLEVER stands for Compact Low Emissions Vehicle for Urban Transport.
As well as running greenly and cheaply on compressed natural gas, the three wheeled, two seat car is also very narrow. Because of its one metre width, engineers such as Ben Drew at the University of Bath have devised a special tilting mechanism to keep the skinny vehicle stable when it takes corners.
Could the Clever car be the answer to our cities' increasingly polluted and congested roads?
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