Futureproof With Jonathan Mccrea

As well as trying to sell you products you’ve just been talking about but don’t want, and beating humans at chess or Go or Mario cart, AI can actually do some real good in the world. One field in which AI could really have a profound effect is medical diagnostics for instance. Dr. Nikolas Pontikos is the Principal Investigator and Group Leader of the Pontikos Lab at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital - he joins Jonathan to discuss.

Physics, while absolutely fascinating, can be impenetrable. And it isn't just cutting-edge ideas that can melt our brains, often we accept basic principles and ideas without really knowing how they work or even what they are. This week, Jonathan is joined by Sean Carroll, physicist, and author of 'The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion', to explain some of the fundamental aspects of science we thought we knew.

Pain is a deeply subjective thing. When it’s with us it’s all we can think about. So, what is life like then for someone for whom pain never leaves? Haider Warraich, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of 'The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain' joins Jonathan to discuss.

It can be easy to think poorly of humans. When we're not destroying the planet or starting wars, we're likely off somewhere making fools of ourselves on social media. We're not all bad though, as some people dedicate their spare time, and even their lives, to helping others. But can we say the same about other animals? (We're looking at you, cats.) Bob Pitman is a Marine Ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. He joins Jonathan to discuss.

Yiddish author and playwright Sholem Aleichem; the man whose stories formed the basis for 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof once proposed that “life is a dream for the wise but a game for the fool”. So, is modern technology and more specifically “Gamification” making fools of all of us? Adrian Hon - CEO of Six to Start and author of You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All joined Jonathan on the show to discuss.

We have covered the lives and behaviors of bees a few times here on the programme. So much so we thought we’ve seen and heard it all. Well, we may have been wrong about that…in particular, with something to do with the dance they perform in the hive and how it relates to their ability to communicate and navigate. Prof. Jürgen Tautz is a bee expert, animal behaviorist and Emeritus Professor at the Biozentrum, University of Würzburg and author of ‘Communication Between Honeybees: More Than Just a Dance in the Dark’ and he joined Jonathan on the show.

Average adults' heart beats 72 times a minute. In a lifetime it creates enough energy to drive the truck to the moon and back and generates astonishingly 2,5 gigajoules of energy. Yet, cardiac arrests and heart diseases are major causes of death worldwide, despite decades of research. How much further we'll have to go before we solve this problem? To discuss Jonathan was joined by Sian Harding, Emeritus Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, and author of The Exquisite Machine. The New Science of the Heart.

Drug development is notoriously slow and expensive to bring a new compound from the lab bench to market. A major cause of this inefficiency is the traditional reliance on testing drugs in animals before they are tested in humans. Animal models often do not accurately reflect human physiology, meaning that drugs that appear to be safe and effective in animals frequently turn out to be harmful or ineffective in humans. The solution could come from computer microchip manufacturing methods to create “Organs-on-Chips", microfluidic culture devices that recapitulate the complex structures and functions of living human organs. Dane Gobel, the Co-Founder and Operations Director of Methuselah Foundation joins Jonathan to discuss.

If you have acute migraines, your doctor might refer you to a neurologist. If your Asthma is really bad, maybe you’ll be sent to a respiratory specialist. They will then use their expertise to alleviate your symptoms but crucially they won’t be able to tell you what is causing your illness because frankly, they don’t know. So, what if the ultimate cause of these ailments isn’t happening in the brains or the lungs but elsewhere? Doesn’t that present a problem for how our medical system operates? The resounding answer is yes according to Professor Harald Schmidt who is Chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Personalized Medicine at the University of Maastricht and author of 'The End of Medicine as We Know It and Why Your Health Has a Future'. He joins Jonathan to discuss.

Recently, the Chinese government has been testing a thorium nuclear reactor that uses molten salt as a coolant. Although this radioactive element has been trialed in reactors before, experts say that China is the first to have a shot at commercializing the technology. The Wuwei reactor is designed to produce just 2 megawatts of thermal energy, which is only enough to power up to 1,000 homes. But if the experiments are a success, China hopes to build a reactor that could power hundreds of thousands of homes by 2030. So could Thorium Nuclear Reactors be the answer to all of our current climate woes? Simon Middleburgh, Professor of Materials at the Nuclear Futures Institute in Bangor University joins Jonathan to discuss.

Depending on your social media proclivities you may or may not have noticed that your feed is awash with images from the JWST. Certainly science Twitter is very excited about it. And so they should be, it’s amazing to see what we can observe of the very big and very far away thanks to the increased resolution of our newest space telescope. In a similar vein the third run of the Large Hadron Collider is allowing us to peer ever further into the world of the very small. So what might we find? Amanda Donohue is a UCD Doctoral Student at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN Jon Butterworth is Professor of Physics at University College London (UCL) working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

How do you eat an elephant? One spoon at a time, right? Well It's the same with living forever. No one is going to find a magic potion that will make you 20 again but over the years we are slowly, consistently and incrementally improving patient health and preventing diseases associated with ageing. We've nearly doubled life expectancy in just over a century. Doubled! Jonathan caught up with Author and Biomedical Gerontologist Aubrey De Grey at the Inaugural Longevity Summit in Dublin to hear why he thinks the first person to live to 150 has already been born.

A recent Newstalk survey on commuting has found that people are spending longer on their journeys to work since the pandemic. And so all week we’ve been speaking to transport experts, policymakers as well as commuters themselves to hear about the issues being faced on a daily basis as we look to get from A to B. But what does the future hold for commuting and for transport in general? Are the likes of Hyper Loop, Air Taxis, and automated pods a thing of science fiction? Professor Marcus Enoch, a professor of transport strategy at Loughborough University in the UK joins Jonathan to discuss.

You’ve probably seen the likes of '2012' or more recently 'Don’t Look Up' - disaster movies where there’s a race against time to save humanity. Those films also have a common thread: you have a superset of super-rich people looking to buy their way to salvation. Pretty silly stuff, right? But what if we told you those preparations are happening right now, and that there really is no room at the inn for the like of you and me? Douglas Rushkoff is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at the City University of New York, and is the author of over 20 books, the latest of which is called ‘Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires' - he joins Jonathan to discuss.

Sometimes in science, a question can be so hotly debated that attempting to answer it can become a lifetime project. And more often than not these questions are ones that we didn’t even realise were up for debate. In plant biology, the topic getting researchers all hot under the collar at the moment is the question of whether plants can be intelligent or not and this week's guest is just one of the many voices in the debate. Paco Calvo is Principal Investigator in the MINT (Minimal Intelligence) lab at the University of Murcia and co-author of 'Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence'. He joins Jonathan to discuss.

Steven N. Austad is the Chair and a Distinguished Professor within the UAB Department of Biology and the author of 'Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives'. He joins Jonathan to discuss what we know about longevity in animals, and what they might be able to teach us humans about extending our own lifespans.

When Leo Szilard conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933 he immediately tried to suppress his own discovery culminating in 1945 with the Szilard petition which advocated a demonstration of the atomic bomb rather than its use in warfare. Szilard knew only too well the awesome destructive power of what he had discovered and knowing what we do about what happened next, what then should we make of the field of genetic engineering, a field of research that has instigated a self-imposed moratorium on four separate occasions in the last 50 years? Professor Matthew Cobb from the University of Manchester is author of 'The Genetic Age: Our Perilous Quest To Edit Life' - he joins Jonathan to discuss.

Prof. Lee Cronin, Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow joins Jonathan to discuss working on taking the guesswork out of creating the pharmaceuticals that we depend on through the use and development of 'Chemputers', a new method that is capable of reliably synthesising organic chemicals.

Language is fundamental to who we are and what has makes us so successful as a species, and while all species have their own means of communicating, we are the only ones that seem to have mastered it. But where did this ability to share complex ideas using sound come from? And what effect has it had on our development? In this Futureproof special, Jonathan looks to unravel questions about the evolution of language, the impact it has on our brain, and how we might communicate with extraterrestrials if we were to encounter them. - Mark Pagel, Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading - Lera Boroditsky, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD and author of '7,000 Universes: How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think' - Daniel Oberhaus, writer with 'Wired' and author of 'Extraterrestrial Languages'

Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is a genetic disorder that occurs in approximately one out of every 15,000 births. It affects males and females with equal frequency and affects all races and ethnicities and is recognized as one of the most common genetic causes of life-threatening childhood obesity. To discuss this disorder and what can be done to help people living with it, Jonathan is joined now by Dr. Tony Holland, Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, UK & President of the International Prader-Willi Syndrome Organisation.