Well look they have called a press conference for I am well the discuss what action they're taking if the game is canceled than the Scots will be eliminated all my swales final pull the game against Euro go on because of a head injury suffered in the 2917 win over Fiji Aaron Ramsey will Miss Wales Euro qualifier in Slovakia tonight Leventis midfielder hasn't trouble with the squad because of fitness concerns he's expected to be available for Sunday's match against Croatia in Cardiff Max Whitlock fell in the pummel horse in the men's team final as Great Britain finished 5th of the world gymnastics championships in Stuttgart Russia took gold had of China and Japan and the former Chelsea also goalkeeper Pats a check has grass for ice by signing for the National Ice Hockey League team Guilford Phoenix is a goaltender He's currently the technical and performance director at Stamford Bridge but will be the 3rd choice keeper for the Phoenix and will train when his Chelsea schedule Alas this is b.b.c. Radio 5 Live on digital b.b.c. Sound small speaker. The weather forecasts are mainly dry and night overnight for many that showers will consider in western areas in turn have a in northern Scotland the Day head will stall sunny in the aist about Clyde and rain will spread in from the west as the day goes on highs a 12 in Glasgow and 16 in Cambridge police schools believe Radio porridge day it is indeed. Ok it's a little bit of a gimmick but it's been launched by a charity called Mary's Meals and every year they feed about one half a 1000000 children nice nutritious meal of maize porridge a school dinner which keeps them going all day I certainly find this I wouldn't say up all night sadly runs on porridge but it's a vital part of its nutrition. The 1st minister Nicholas starts and is going to having a mug of porridge in the morning that's my only issue with this but I understand why it must be a mug the dollar was a wooden bowl in the Horn school account of everything. We're going to spend our next hour in a different place than we usually do because usually we're in Sydney in the studios of the a.b.c. With Dr Karl but I must say that Dr Karl is absent he's an absolute friend this week because he's coming to London and he's got a big weekend in London and when I can find the relevant email which I will very soon I'm going to tell you all about it but in the meantime let us welcome to answer all our questions Bianca Grady Hello Bianca. A well awfully nice to have you with us I must say and I'm I'm sure the nutritional value of porridge is a kind of. A closely held secret among those who who know and love porridge isn't it once when she kind of get into porridge it's hard to give it up you never get out should I have it I I love parts I must mate it's and my hates. Because I always make it in a pot and then the pot bust be left to soak which can last for several days which is my way of avoiding having to wash the pot but it funny you talk about this this notion of the dinner the the miracle mystical magical nature of Part I remember having a nutritionist and when she was asked you know what is the one food if you could say to people the one thing you could add to your diet that would improve your life and she said oats whole whole grain Horridge really was the as far as we can imagine the best single thing if you're going to pick a meal and especially if you have it drizzled with lots of golden syrup it's my preference. Where there we might differ you know being. Scottish and salty and all but anyway yes I was of course I want to go on I would go out I've seen porridge treated in many cruel ways but there we all are let's start. I don't know if this a happy topic or not but Swiss scientists are coming up with a way to talk about earthquakes that might give people a clue as to what's going to happen next. Yes And this is important to some degree we're very lucky in Australia and similarly in the u.k. That generally we don't experience earthquakes at all and when we do have them they have pretty small and usually subject of much help on social media but as we know in other parts of the world they can be devastating and one of the the big issues with earthquakes is that often then not an isolated incident so you have your main quake and then there might be foreshocks And then there might be aftershocks and some of the off the shelves can actually be as devastating Raven more devastating than the main event and it's actually thought that these bigger aftershocks happen about 5 to 10 percent of the time and that's particularly dangerous because people you know obviously they evacuate their lave when the main quake happens and then as a period you know maybe a grace period and then as people go back and sometimes that price period can be quite long they can be a matter of weeks they go back home and then the aftershocks strike and you know you've got weakened infrastructure weakened buildings and the aftershock can often cause significant amount of damage but the challenge is we haven't really known worked out how to predict whether that main quake event is actually the main event or whether it's just a hobby or all of come. And so a couple of scientists were trying to work out whether it's possible to for Custis and so they looked at 2 major earthquake events that happened in 2016 so there was the I'm a tree so I'm a tree. Quake in Italy which was $6.00 on the Richter scale which killed nearly $300.00 people so really devastating and then this same year in Japan there was the Komodo earthquake which also killed 50 people so terrible terrible events but the distinguishing feature with both of these quakes was that they were both followed by even bigger aftershocks so people who you know people thought that the worst was over but it was yet to come and that was part you know one of the contributors to their being so much devastation so what these researchers did was they looked. That the average size of the disk distribution of aftershocks in both what we labeled as off shocks the both of these quakes and I did notice something interesting so normally when you have a bigger quake you kind of get these sort of run of small aftershocks and they're always there's more small aftershocks than bigger aftershocks. And so that tells you that the whole thing is kind of winding down it's had its big dummy spit and now things are kind of calming calming down but when they looked at these 2 earthquakes they saw the opposite so they were actually more bigger aftershocks than small aftershocks which suggests that things were still building up to that that these subsequent really big big aftershocks that caused so much damage so it's it points to in both of those quakes it pointed to the fact that these 1st quakes were actually foreshocks they were the main event so using that information and there was obviously a lot of mathematical calculations that went on the behind all of this they proposed this formula that could generate a kind of a warning system for the likelihood of things getting bigger rather than small and they could do this in real time so what they would be doing would be monitoring these aftershocks and you know as an event happens monitoring and measuring the size of those aftershocks and from that working out whether these aftershocks look like they were getting bigger or smaller and they tested this because they they got records for historical records from $58.00 earthquakes that were all greater than 6 in magnitude and they found that using this method they were able to predict whether a specific event was an aftershock or the main quake with an accuracy of 95 percent which is really really important because if they could say to people actually not don't go back to has dug about 2 buildings go to safety and stay there because this is going to go to get worse they must but there would be so many lives that could be saved from having that knowledge so it's really really useful information and I guess and you know the. So much that we don't understand about these things but if we could if we could save lives by by just having an understanding of which direction the severity is going in that would be modeless be tremendous. You know this is this quite fun because it kind of holds up the value of paddling pools and you know if you're a highest mom or a dad you know about paddling pools in hot weather they are they are the best thing but there's science behind just putting your toe in the water. Yes And this is obviously how to keep cool in summer is going to be increasingly important we're just coming into we're in mid spring here and actually quite cold today but yes coming into some of is always that Ok How are we going to get through those mid afternoon where it's just sweltering and you desperately trying to cool down but you know we used to this idea of will turn on a fan or we'll turn on the air conditioning and I think we've talked before about using fans and how fans can can work in hot weather if you combine them with you know which in your skin to help help with evaporation but what happens if the power is out and this is obviously a very timely because at the moment there's huge areas of San Francisco that going into blackout because they've got really high fire danger weather and the power company is really afraid of power lines sparking wildfires and so that actually opted to shut down the grid in these vast areas of this kind of bush exposed areas of I think San Francisco might be kind of callous as well as northern California it's all the area right in San Francisco Yes yes which is I mean it makes sense I mean in Australia we've got a number of bushfires that get sparked by a by Palin's trees falling on power lines every year so it's certainly I mean it points to this being an increasingly common scenario where there is no power you can't turn the fan on so what do you do well one solution is to dip your feet in cold water. Which is a lovely idea and it's funny it makes me it makes me tingle that notion of putting my feet in cold water like it makes my toes cold but that's because I think it's cold and so really it's not an appealing scenario at the moment but a group of research is naturally from from Australia. Trying to work at it like I had 3 scenarios of ways to keep cool in a hate wave that don't rely electricity on electricity so they had 90 volunteers bless. Them and they were exposed to 2 hours of these simulated hate wave conditions and importantly they were looking at hate waves that were hot and dry and hate waves that were hot and humid because the body behaves very differently under those scenarios so whenever you're looking at how to keep cool you've really got to look at it in both of those kind of settings and so the volunteers had 3 kind of though testing 3 approaches so one was drinking water which obviously we do a lot of wouldn't when it's hot in which great day hydrated The 2nd was actually using a sponge to kind of douse yourself to really cover your arms and legs and chest and back and everything bits that you can reach just with the water and then the 3rd option was putting your feet into water above the ankles now obviously in this case I found that dousing yourself with a wet sponge is actually the best option. Because what you're doing is you're helping evaporation from your skin cooling yourself down and it actually decreases how much she's sweat which means that you're also conserving more of your own your own liquid so you're less likely to get dehydrated and this always reminded me because it's a it's a time honored childhood classic of running through the sprinkler I are presume it's probably similar in the u.k. You know you put the sprinkler on in the garden hose on a godly kids run through it and everyone has a great time and I think you will this says adults should be doing that as well but if you don't have that space if you don't have a gun to put a sprinter on and you don't want to spend yourself down just putting your fate into a bucket of cold water really really helps and and this isn't just about this so they're looking at a number of things they're looking at your core temperature you know your body temperature but importantly they're looking at cardiovascular strain so how hard your heart is working because in hate waves when you're trying to cool down you cut it puts a lot of strain on your heart you hot strong to circulate the blood trying to dump hate and it can't and so it that's really what kills off and what kills people and hate waves is just extremely hot stress. So. Yes So the message is if it's very hot and you don't want to put a fan or an a conditioner on which you know if you're if you're not using green energy probably shouldn't be putting those on the kind of contributing to the problem then really just get a sponge dust yourself with water or if you don't want to do that oh you can't do that or in addition to that sit down put your feet in a bucket of cold water pick up a book and chill. Yeah it's it's exactly like the damp towel solution I mean why here we are talking about staying cool you're you've got more reason to think about staying cool and we right now we're trying to get. But if you put a damp toe on your head or on your neck specially on your neck it has a marvelous effect seems it seems to go far. Greater you know reaches far far more of the body than you would imagine. And it's such a delicious feeling when you're really hard she just that you know putting her lies again really we can only dream about it really hard to the last mean a few months and I'll be able to give you the reality that I think. For your tax a 5058 if you please or 59 or 96 night 3 for your phone calls and a poll might be b.c. Dot co dot u.k. If you are listening to the podcast so with no further ado we had a little discussion last week Dr Carl actually about geese fly information and we had a botanist saying you know it's not all just physics and so on but it just a little follow up on this from John in currency who says if you look at a wind tunnel video of a are coming off the top of an aircraft wing you'll see a vortex swirl. When geese flying a v. Taking the right wing of the lead goose from the rear as it flaps down the left wing of the goose next to it rises up using the vortex swirl to aid the wing upwards conversely on the upward flap of the lead goose the other goes flaps down as they all position themselves to take the upward part of the wing vortex thus saving energy the lead goose does most of the work but swaps a lead when tired that's a that's a fun thing to to think about and watch you know watch the geese where they're going overhead and see what you make of what John says from Guernsey What do you think of that what's phenomenal I mean a mount of coordination an awareness of what your you know your fellow bird is doing both in front of you and behind you I mean there's still so much awareness that goes into that it and also what I find fascinating watching birds fly information about equally when you get those big and I can't say the word probably but when you get those huge flocks of stylings that they kind of wheel and crash and dive around and they don't hit each other and I don't know how they move so fast and similarly with fish how do they coordinate so much that they all stayed just the right distance from each other and responded with such accuracy and such timing it's quite extraordinary if you tried to get a group of people to do that you'd have to rehearse for 6 months and even then they'd still be one Plunker who goes left instead of right that's right could I just say by the way in reference to maybe a couple of you have said or sorry didn't catch Bianca's name this is Bianca Grady who is a science journalist and who do you write for I mean you write for a few people don't you. I do I do well I write a lot for Nature magazine which is a science magazine. And I have write for The Guardian of The Australian branch of its rights for sometimes for the baby save for. A graphic written for mit Technology Review in the us a great environmental magazine called in Syria so I'm afraid Lance which is great because it means I get to write for lots and lots of different outlets and editors and audiences around the world which suits me very well as I like variety. Wonderful where you are again very welcome terribly pleased that you're here to take over from Dr Karl who is coming London words this point. He is going to be in London from Friday the 11th to the 16th of October that much I know I also noise at the Royal Institution on Friday night and I continue to look through my e-mails for any further information oh here we go I did just catch something in one of his emails he he writes quite long emails he says. I'll be doing shows a Royal Institution on Friday the 11th of Tobar and the New Scientist live on Saturday Saturday the 12 or so if you haven't got a ticket for the Royal Institution or indeed cannot get a ticket for the Royal Institution on your inner are on the London or coming to London you can also try New Scientist live I can tell you where that says it works quite often out towards Docklands way in one of the big centers out there so just basically Google it and you will find out Carla we hope people and we were small the best Anyway back to questions and this is a species of question that we get a lot and it's it's it's a pilot you know mankind's part in climate change and obviously we're all thinking about that right now oh and Helen in Newberry says you know do we have any idea what percentage of climate change is due to man's activities humankind's activity and what percentage is jus to Mother Nature which has obviously gently change the climate for these millions of years. Well it is a very difficult question to answer because it's necessarily attribute a certain degree like say that this much is response is is human induced climate warming but what we can point to is if you look at the kind of the historical climate record and yes there is variation along that record there's this ice age is there a much warmer periods for example when the for in the dinosaurs dominated there had been periods when much of the earth was covered with ice and so those variations have always been there but what is different now is the speed of change so what we're seeing now is rapid warming and it's warming far more rapidly than it has ever done in history and since you know the it's I guess and since things kind of settle down we got an atmosphere that remained fairly stable and you know if things started to to not be kind of volcanic and planet forming and so whilst we can say 80 percent is human and used 100 percent as human ages what we can say is that we have changing the climate of this planet faster than it has ever change before and the reason that we know that it's because there's no other variation natural variation you know people talk about sunspot activity all the talk about you know solar cycles and all of these other things none of those account for any significant proportion of the change that we are now saying that has taken place literally in the last 100 years which is barely I mean it's it's a micro micro amount of time on a planetary scale so you know I think what we can say with absolute certainty is that our human activity is changing the climate of this planet faster than it has ever changed in history and everything that we know about atmospheric science and climate tells us that that changes come about because of being crazy. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because we we know that these concentrations have been this high in past times but they were that high for a whole range of other reasons that were you know much much broader timescales much you know that the Earth was very very different and so when peo