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Podcast TranscriptThe Naked Scientists: Science Radio & Science Podcasts |
| 18th Nov 2001 | < Previous Show | Next Show > | ||||||||||
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A New Male Contraceptive Pill Target
Researchers from Harvard Medical school announced last week that they may have stumbled upon a way to produce a new kind of contraceptive pill. Scientists David Clapham and Dejian Ren have discovered a tiny channel on the tails of sperms that lets calcium, into the sperm. To swim along, sperms need small amounts of calcium to make their tails move, without calcium the sperms cannot swim and so shouldn't be able to fertilise eggs. To test this theory the researchers genetically altered mice so that they were unable to make this calcium channel in their sperm. These mice were perfectly healthy, and made sperm normally in their testes, but were unable to impregnate females. When sperm from these mice were physically injected into eggs, however, the eggs were fertilised, showing that the sperm were otherwise normal. So how can this discovery help mankind ? Well, the researchers suggest that if a drug can be designed to block the calcium channel, which is only found in sperms, a man's sperm would be immobilised and so not be able to swim to the egg and fertilise it. Better still, this pill could be taken by a man or a woman. Very unisex !
18th Nov 2001
Booze Cruise...in Space
If you're fond of wandering round in an alcoholic haze then outer space is a good place to be, according to BBC science online last week. There are billions of tonnes of alcohol floating around in a giant cloud near the centre of the galaxy. Astronomers have known for some time that this cloud contained ethanol - which is what goes into alcoholic drinks - and methanol - which methylated spirits are made from. But now they have evidence for a third type of alcohol called vinyl-ethanol, which has never been discovered in outer space before. Vinyl-ethanol is non-inebriating - in other words, it won't get you drunk. But it is a key player in many chemical reactions that are crucial to life on earth. So this discovery could shed light on how life might evolve in outer space. But if you fancy a drink you're probably better off going down to your local pub - the alcohol cloud is 26000 light years away from Earth - that's 100,000 million million miles!
18th Nov 2001
A Little Light Relief From Water-bourne Illnesses
For most of us, turning on the tap and drinking a glass of clean water is something that we take for granted, but the WHO estimates that 3 and a half million people, mostly childen in the third world, die each year from diseases caught from contaminated water. Most of these people cannot afford water sterilisation equipment, but a simple answer to this problem may be at hand. Scientists from Newcastle and India have come up with the bright idea (!) of using nothing more than fresh air and sunlight to purify water. They have found that briefly shaking up water in a bottle oxygenates the water. If this oxygenated water is then left in the sun for a few hours the ultraviolet rays in the light break up the oxygen to form 'free-radicals' which kill any microbes in the water that can cause food-poisoning. The researchers are now trying to work out exactly how much sun is needed to clean up water, and whether the same trick will work when the weather is bad, such as during monsoon times, when diseases spread by water are most common.
18th Nov 2001
Indians Make the Connection...
90% of India's population live in remote villages and don't even have access to telephones, let alone to the internet. But now researchers in Madras have worked out a cheap way of connecting rural communities to the web. They've designed an internet kiosk which doesn't need cables and costs the same amount to install as a single telephone line - that's about 40 000 rupees (a few hundred pounds). Internet access will transform the lives of millions of Indian villagers. N-logue, the company that have designed the new kiosk, equip all their PC's with Indian language software to make them accessible to everyone. The new kiosks will also provide employment in rural areas - young entrepreneurs without much capital will be able to afford to set them up. These local businessmen could earn over 4000 rupees a month - that's just over £50. It doesn't sound like much but it's enough to make them rich men in their villages.
18th Nov 2001
Clever Parrot
A Derbyshire pparrot, sick of being terrorised by cats, has developed a cunning plan to get his revenge - by learning to imitate a dog's bark, which usually scares the cats off sharpish!
18th Nov 2001
Test for Downs
Researchers have discovered a new aid to diagnosing Down's syndrome, a genetic condition caused by a developing baby having an extra copy of chromosome number 21. The condition can only be diagnosed with certainty by taking a sample of the fluid surrounding the baby inside the mother, but this is a risky business and can harm the baby. The researchers have found that part of the bone in the nose develops at a diferent time in most babies with Down's compared with normal babies. When this additional test is added to existing non-invasive tests for Downs syndrome, such as ultrasound scans and tests on the mothers blood, doctors can find 85% of down's babies - without having to resort to the risky kinds of test mentioned above.
Hong Kong scientists find Down Syndrome cells in mother's blood.
18th Nov 2001
Comet Sense (2)
A new comet is coming to the skies of Cambridge for Christmas. It's called 2000WH1, an is set to appear soon, but it won't be back for a while. Scientists are predicting that it will not apear again for at least another 100,000 years. The comet measures 2 miles across, is travelling along at 125,000 miles per hour an will pass within 30 million miles of the Earth in early december. Scientists are predicting that it should be quite bright and easy to see, but don't get your hopes up too much - they say 'it will be little more than a fuzzy patch in the sky"!
NASA Stardust probe collects world's first samples of comet dust from Wild 2.
18th Nov 2001
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