BBC Inside Science Folgen

We face many global problems, such as drought, flooding and climate change. All of these issues are rooted in science. It'll take politics and people and business to fix them, or for us to manage them, but none of that can happen without a solid scientific base.In front of an audience at the Hay Festival, Adam Rutherford is joined by Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London, Marcus du Sautoy, the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, and science journalist, Gaia Vince, to discuss what the future holds for humanity and the planet, what we can know, what we can predict, and what is to come.Adam Rutherford talks to Gaia Vince about the new age of man, the Anthropocene, and the impact it is having on peoples' lives, to Marcus du Sautoy about chaotic systems and when maths can and cannot predict the future, and to Steve Jones about forecasting human population growth and how we are still evolving.

The topic of GM plants raises strong opinions and many questions. This week, the Royal Society published answers to some of those questions. Adam speaks to Professor Ottoline Leyser, plant science expert and Head of the Sainsbury Lab in Cambridge. She was involved in writing the responses and Adam quizzes her on the possible issues with GM crops.Institutes from around the world made deposits to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week. More than 8,000 varieties of crops from Germany, Thailand, New Zealand, and the World Vegetable Center arrived at the Vault, located on a remote Norwegian archipelago, to be stored deep within the permafrost. Reporter Marnie Chesterton was there to see it happen, and take a tour of this normally inaccessible place. The Vault is located within the Arctic Circle, and helps to protect the biodiversity of some of the world’s most important crops against climate change, war and natural disaster. This week Professor Frances Arnold was awarded the Millennium Technology Prize; the Finnish version of the Nobel Prize. Her work is a process called Directed Evolution, and involves creating batches of mutant proteins to see if the mutations make them better at certain functions. Dolphins use ultrasound to echolocate. Until recently, scientists did not quite know how. Making ultrasonic noises normally requires some hard surfaces such as metal, and dolphins don’t have metal in their blowholes. Acoustic scientists Aaron Thode at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego thinks he’s solved this conundrum, and it involves snot. Producer: Jen Whyntie

Today we're asking how anyone can make sense of the deluge of climate change data that is almost continually published. By the end of last month, nearly 200 countries had signed up to the Paris climate change agreement, and in doing so they were nominally committing to keep global temperatures "well below" 2C. So now comes the tricky bit: How best to do that - and what is the scientific evidence for policymakers to decide? Climate change expert Dr Tamsin Edwards of the Open University joins Adam Rutherford to help us unpick the research. Last week a major new report on the State of the World's Plants was unveiled at Kew Gardens in London. There are some 391,000 vascular plants known to science - that's ones with vessels, xylem and phloem - and over 2000 were discovered last year alone. But just over a fifth of all plants are estimated to be threatened with extinction - and global climate change forms part of this threat. Our reporter Cathy Edwards met Professor Kathy Willis, Director of Science at Kew, to find out how plants are responding to the changing climate, and also spoke to Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Oxford University, and Kay Havens, Chicago Botanic Garden.The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, headed by economist Jim O'Neill, was published today. Molecular microbiologist Professor Matt Hutchings from the University of East Anglia, gave us a brief summary.A new paper out this week looks into exactly what the act of making a phone call can reveal. The study, which was led by Patrick Mutchler and Jonathan Mayer at Stanford University in the States, is the culmination of work looking into what metadata really can show - you may have seen reports of some of their findings, as they've been revealing them in the public interest since 2013. They collected metadata volunteered by 823 participants, in total, more than 250,000 calls, and 1 million text messages. Steven Murdoch from the Information Security Research Group at University College London joined us to put this into context. As part of the BBC's Do Something Great season celebrating volunteers, Adam joined Professor Kate Jones from University College London on a Hampstead Heath bat watch, part of the citizen science project Bat Detective. Producers: Marnie Chesterton & Jen Whyntie.