Naked Scientists Podcast

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The Science of Flight
25 Mar 2007
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10th Sep 2006

Hot Nectar, Warming Weather and Birds Missing the Spring


Helen Scales

Chris Smith

In the hot seat this week is Dr Beverley Glover from Cambridge University, who will describe how flowers warm their nectar to entice passing pollinators, real life weatherman John Law from Weatherquest discusses weather predictions and how to calculate the temperature days in advance, and Professor Marcel Visser from the Netherland Institute of Ecology explains how warming weather and earlier springs spells disaster for migrating birds. Also on the show, we will hear from Katey Walter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks about a new source of atmospheric methane, and in Kitchen Science Derek and Dave get their hands wet in the name of discovering how the human judges temperature.

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News

 

Rich Pickings For Dinosaur Diggers

Good news this week for any of our listeners who are budding palaeontologists - there are still plenty of dinosaurs out there to discover. That's according to a new study by Steve Wang, a statistician at Swathmore College, Pennsylvania and Peter Dodson, a palaeontolog...

 

Fish Populations Out of Their Depth

Nearly half of the fish that we eat today haven't been caught from seas, rivers or lakes of the world but began life in a farm just like the beef, pork and chicken that we eat. That's according to the latest report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the FA...



Kitchen Science

 

Strange Temperatures

Here is a way to entirely fool your senses using only three bowls of water. Have a go if you dare.


Questions

 

When we're out in the bars and people want to be funny (or annoying) people use the bottom of their beer bottle to tap the top of someone else's bottle. This makes the victim's beer fuzz up and overflow. Can you tell me the science behind this please?


 

Can you tell me how carbon dating works?


 

Why you get brain freeze or "ice cream headache" when you drink an icy or cold drink.


 

I have some frogs in my garden and they come up to me and let me tickle them. Why is this?


 

Why are most plants green? Sure, it's because chlorophyll rejects green light, but why does it? The green part of the spectrum is the most intense and it seems like a waste to reject it.


 

Are there any advanced and complex multicellular animals that have chloroplasts inside their bodies or under their skin?


 

Can you please explain why some pinot grapes turn into great wines and some don't. Is it down to soil chemistry for example?


 

I've been hearing a lot about when you get frost on your car first thing in the morning and people saying that it's the dawn dip. Before it gets light there's no frost and after the sun comes up there's frost on the windscreen. What exactly do they mean by the dawn dip?


 

If clouds are made up of water, why do they differ in colour, from fluffy white to dark and black?


 

Given that as altitude increases, temperature decreases, does this means that when precipitation falls from clouds it usually falls as snow or sleet or hail at altitude and then melts and warms as it gets nearer the Earth?


 

Do fish fart, and if so, where do they come from because you don't see any bubbles?


 

Why do French beans squeak when you eat them but runner beans don't?


 

My friend and I went to give blood the other day and were curious about how the body knows that it's a pint short so it can make more blood cells.


 

As light from other galaxies takes so long to reach us, can we be sure that any of them are still there?


 

My wife was out on Friday evening and noticed that the Moon was much larger than normal. Is there a reason for this?





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