BBC Inside Science Folgen

Food crime is now big business that criss crosses national boundaries, according to today's report into the safety and authenticity of our food. Public Analyst, Dr Duncan Campbell tells Dr Adam Rutherford that he and his colleagues are hampered by lack of funding and the lack of a national plan for a sustainable laboratory infrastructure. While report author, Professor Chris Elliott, the director of the Global Institute for Food Security at Queen's University, Belfast describes how he wants the UK's scientific infrastructure to be strengthened to avoid yet another serious food scandal.Show Us Your Instrument: Cosmic Scientist Dr Natalie Starkey from the School of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University reveals the NanoSims instrument.Thousands of miles apart the same species of microbes seem to crop up deep beneath the earth's surface in cracks of hard rock. Yet nobody seems to quite know how they spread so widely. Scientists now believe they may have survived completely isolated from the surface for what could be billions of years. Dr Matt Shrenk from Michigan State University explains that the biosphere as we know it is far more extensive than we previously thought.Crystallography... as it sounds is the study of crystals, but it's not quite as simple as that. It underpins many scientific fields and yet it remains a relatively unknown subject area. Scores of Nobel prizes have been won, the first almost 100 years ago and we wouldn't understand the structure of DNA without it. The United Nations has declared 2014 as the International Year of Crystallography and emeritus Professor Mike Glazer from Oxford University says he hopes it will help bring the subject out of the shadows.Producer: Fiona Hill.

Badger culls in England have ended and Professor Roland Kao from the University of Glasgow discusses with Dr Adam Rutherford the scientific options remaining to tackle the spread of bovine tuberculosis. Field trials of the TB cattle vaccine are due to start next year and Professor Kao hopes that their success in sequencing the genome of Mycobactrium bovis will also provide a greater understanding about how this devastating disease spreads. The name of Douglas Mawson isn't discussed along with the famous triumvirate, Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton, but one hundred years ago, he led the first science-only Australasian Antarctic Expedition. A century later, Professor Chris Turney is co-leading a repeat expedition, where scientists will repeat many of the measurements of the Mawson trip.Rising inflexion at the end of your sentences is known as "uptalk" or "valleygirl speak" and it's usually associated with young Californian females. But now a new study shows that uptalk is expanding to men. Professor Amalia Arvaniti explains that uptalk has negative connotations which makes men less likely to admit to using it, but it was clear was that this pattern of speech is like totally spreading.Waste plastic makes its way into many areas of the environment which can threaten wildlife. Small particles of plastic can also be ingested by organisms and as they act almost like sponges the plastics attract other chemicals onto their surface. Despite this their hazard ranking is the same as scraps of food or grass clippings. Dr Mark Browne from the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, USA, describes his new research in the journal, Current Biology, which shows that these microplastics have toxic concentrations of pollutants in which can harm biodiversity. He also explains how these microplastics transfer toxic pollutants and chemicals into the guts of lugworms. These worms have been nicknamed "eco-engineers" because they eat organic matter from the sediment and prevent the build-up of silt.Producer: Fiona Hill.

Therapeutic hypothermia is standard treatment for cardiac arrest patients to protect against the damaging or deadly repercussions of a beatless heart. But this global practice has been called into question after research in the New England Journal of Medicine reported no difference in survival rates between patients chilled to 33 degrees and those cooled to just below normal body temperature to 36 degrees. Dr Jerry Nolan, vice chair of the European Resuscitation Council tells Dr Adam Rutherford how doctors worldwide are reacting to this new study and Dr Kevin Fong, author of "Extremes, Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body" describes how medicine has historically harnessed hypothermic states to heal.Show Us Your Instrument: The European Space Agency's GAIA mission is due to launch just before Christmas. It will spend the next 5 years recording space, using a billion pixel camera. This camera is made up of charge-couple devices, similar to the ones you'd find in your smart phone. These are damaged by space radiation. Dr Ross Burgon damages them in his lab first, to tell whether the images coming back from space are real stars or planets, or the digital equivalent of a smudge on the lens.Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide because it's 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping the sun's rays. And it doesn't hang around as long either, ten years as opposed to a 100. So tackling methane is seen by many countries as a useful way of reducing greenhouse gases, quickly. But that depends on knowing how much there is. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that United States could be underestimating its methane emissions by as much as fifty per cent. Dr Vincent Gauci Head of Ecosystems and Biodiversity at the Open University explains how the Americans got their sums so wrong, and considers whether the British calculations are similarly suspect.The fuzzy concept of "terroir" for wine fans has always been difficult to pin down. Climate, soil, geology and individual wine-making practice don't make it easy to identify what makes particular wines unique. But Dr David Mills, Professor in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at University of California, Davis, has used DNA sequencing to study the microbial ecology of individual grapes. And he concludes bacteria and fungi could explain "microbial terroir".Producer: Fiona Hill.