BBC Inside Science Folgen

Every twenty years there's a detailed survey of the birds of the UK and Ireland and today, the 2007-2011 Bird Atlas is published. Adam Rutherford hears from Dawn Balmer from the British Trust for Ornithology about the citizen scientists, the forty thousand volunteers who collected data on a staggering 19 million birds - 502 different species - and meets their record breaking volunteer, Chris Reynolds. A 73 year old retired maths teacher, Chris took part in the previous three atlases and walked thousands of miles in all seasons across his patch in the Outer Hebrides. Dawn describes the avifaunal picture revealed in this latest Atlas.In 2009, Williams developed a flywheel - which temporarily stores energy - for their formula 1 car. After the Research and Development was done, the F1 governing body changed the rules, and there was no longer space for a flywheel on their car. No matter, these things have other uses. Mark Smout from Smout Allen has proposed a design for the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, which uses banks of these flywheels to regulate the energy from the nearby wind farm. It also uses spare electricity to grow a sea defence for the island. Marnie Chesterton reports on this flywheel technology and Tim Fox, energy expert at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers describes to Adam other potential solutions for storing energy on the National Grid.Professor Bill Sutherland from the University of Cambridge is a co-author on a new "cheat sheet", published in this week's Nature, to help politicians and policy makers sort the good scientific research from the bad. He talks to Adam about why it's more important and faster, to teach a scientific approach than simply to teach facts.Producer: Fiona Hill.

Global experts in DNA identification are flying to the Philippines to assess whether they can help families to determine, beyond doubt, which of the hundreds of victims of Typhoon Haiyan are their relatives. The International Commission on Missing Persons in Sarajevo used DNA matching to identify the thousands killed in the former Yugoslavia and has since helped in conflict zones around the world. Now, working with Interpol, scientists from the ICMP are called on to assist in victim identification after natural disasters as well, and head of forensic services, Dr Thomas Parsons, tells Adam Rutherford that a team will be sent to the Philippines on Monday.The enormous ash cloud following the 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokell, grounded aircraft across Europe for more than a week and caused unprecedented disruption. Dr Fred Prata has invented a weather radar for ash, and off the Bay of Biscay, his AVOID infra red camera system, the Airborne Volcanic Object Imaging Detector, has just been tested after a ton of Icelandic volcanic ash was dropped by aeroplane into the sky. From France, Dr Prata describes the experiment and Dr Sue Loughlin, Head of Volcanology at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, tells Adam how Iceland has become the scientific "supersite" for seismic research.Show Us Your Instrument: Dr Glenn Gibson at the University of Reading with his Robo gut, a full-working model of the human large intestine.Liverpool University's Dr Julian Chantrey, and his PhD student have spent the past 4 years monitoring red squirrels in the Sefton area. Out of the 93 they trapped and blood tested, 5 had antibodies for the normally-deadly squirrel pox, suggesting they had contracted the pox and survived. It's early days but this could mean that reds are developing a level of resistance to the squirrel pox, like rabbits have to myxomatosis. We could be seeing evolution by natural selection in action.Producer: Fiona Hill.

A hundred thousand Britons are being asked to donate their sequenced DNA, their personal genome, to a vast database on the internet, so scientists can use the information for medical and genetic research. The Personal Genome Project-UK was launched today and participants are being warned, as part of the screening process, that their anonymity won't be guaranteed. Stephan Beck, Professor of Medical Genomics at University College London's Cancer Institute and the Director of PGP-UK, tells Dr Lucie Green that anonymised genetic databases aren't impregnable, and that it is already possible for an individual's identity to be established using jigsaw identification. This new "open access" approach, he says, will rely on altruistic early-adopters who are comfortable with having their genetic data, their medical history and their personal details freely available as a tool for research. Jane Kaye, Director of the Centre for Law, Health and Emerging Technologies at the University of Oxford, describes the rigorous selection procedure for would-be volunteers.Scientists at Queen Mary University London and Imperial have created Good Vibrations by playing pop songs to solar panels. Exposing zinc oxide PV cells to noise alongside light generated up to 50% more current than just light alone. Pop and rock music had the most effect, while classical was the least effective genre.Thanks to the Russians' enthusiasm for dash-cams in their cars, the twenty metre asteroid that came crashing into the atmosphere above the town of Chelyabinsk, East of the Urals in February this year, was the most filmed and photographed event of its kind. Mobile phones and cameras captured the meteor, moving at 19 kilometres a second (that's 60 times the speed of sound) and the enormous damage caused by the airblast. The plethora of footage allowed researchers to shed light on our understanding of asteroid impacts and in a new study, published in Nature, Professor Peter Brown from the University of Western Ontario in Canada questions whether using nuclear explosions is an appropriate way to model these airbursts and whether telescopes could underestimate the frequency of these events.Seventh November this year is the hundredth anniversary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace. As the Natural History Museum in London unveils the first statue of him, we ask why, as co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Wallace doesn't share Charles Darwin's spotlight. Dr George Beccaloni, from the NHM, explains to Lucie why Wallace deserves both glory and commemoration.Producer: Fiona Hill.