The Xaidreadian Notebook

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion - Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part

programme summary [52min]:

Beneath our feet is a world wide web that keeps us all alive. Estimated to be the origin of about 97% of the calories we eat, soil is fundamental to life. But it's a whole living world of its own. A biological engine, a carbon sink, and home to an abundance of bacteria, insects and worms. Tom Heap and Helen Czerski find out how soil is made, how it's faring in a world of intensive farming and how to get it back to full health. Joining Tom and Helen to dig into the hidden drama of soil are:

Jack Hannam, Professor of Sustainable Agriculture & Biodiversity at the University of Greenwich’s Natural Resources Institute

Duncan Farrington MBE, farmer and founder of Farrington Oils

Simon Jeffery, Professor of Soil Ecology at Harper Adams University

Dr Rachel Cassidy, lead scientist on Northern Ireland's Soil Nutrient Health Scheme.

programme summary [5 eps of 13min each]:

Award-winning writer Rebecca Stott likes to unearth the overlooked and forgotten.

While taking a long walk in Sussex to mark the first anniversary of her mother’s death, Rebecca’s focus shifts to the mud all around her. Noticing it for the first time in detail, she sets off on a journey to discover its hidden depths and meanings. She finds herself peeling back layers of literature, culture, science and geology; she discovers the rich literary history of marsh monsters, dips her toes into Darwin’s mud experiments, treads in the footsteps of soldiers in the trenches during World War One and finds out how mud cores extracted from the sea bed can shed light on the planet’s past and future.

Written and narrated by Rebecca Stott Producer, Lisa Lipman Editor, Kirsten Lass Sound engineer and mix, Jon Calver A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4

Episode summaries:

The walk: Rebecca asks if paying attention to mud might help her ‘take in’ her mother’s death.

Writing Mud: Rebecca examines how bogs and mudflats appear as places of mystery and sometimes horror in British literature from as early as Beowulf and later in stories by Susan Hill, Arthur Conan Doyle and J.R.R Tolkein. She discovers how the master poet of mud-writing, Seamus Heaney, found his inspiration in the bogs of Denmark.

The origins of mud: Rebecca delves into how mud came about 458 million years ago.

Mud and War: Rebecca traces her own tragic family history: two newly discovered letters reveal that two of her family members lost their lives on mud-drenched battlefields, one in Mesopotamia and the other in France.

programme summary [28min]:

Cultural entomologist Bridget Nicholls investigates an intriguing natural phenomenon.

An ant becomes infected by a fungus which takes over its nervous system, turning the ant into a vehicle for the fungus’s reproduction and killing the ant in the process. It sounds like science fiction, but it's happening in rainforests around the world.

It's a parasitic relationship that has inspired the TV series The Last of Us, but it also reveals a great deal about control, autonomy and the interconnectedness of the natural world.

With:

Merlin Sheldrake, mycologist and writer;

Philip Ball, science writer;

Mark Brown, director of the University Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University;

Nura Sidarus, Lecturer in Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London;

Lore Lixenberg, mezzo-soprano and sound artist;

Jason Singh, sound artist and composer. Jason's recordings and compositions feature throughout this documentary.

Zombie Ant Fungus: The chemistry of Control is a show created and produced by Bridget Nicholls, and written and directed by Wade McCollum who also performs in the show and composed its music. The original production premiered as a Pestival commission at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Presenter: Bridget Nicholls Producer: Eliane Glaser

"Varied forms of seaweed." Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia. 1924.

It's Moon Day, so let's look at a dinosaur from the moon!

…Well, not literally. But Eoraptor lunensis' name means "dawn thief from the moon", in reference to it being discovered in the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) of Ischigualasto Provincial Park, Argentina.

Living during the Late Triassic, around 231-229 million years ago, Eoraptor was one of the earliest known of all dinosaurs. Originally classified as an early theropod, it's now thought to actually be a very early offshoot of the sauropodomorph lineage, closely related to other South American forms like Buriolestes and Pampadromeus.

It measured around 1.2m long (~4'), with leg proportions that indicate it was a fast runner. Its jaws contained both leaf-shaped and serrated pointed teeth, suggesting it may have been an opportunistic omnivore, feeding mainly on plant matter but occasionally supplementing its diet with smaller prey.

Unlike later dinosaurs it also still had vestigial palatal teeth on the roof of its mouth.

Eoraptor would have lived in a warm humid climate alongside several other early dinosaur species such as Herrerasaurus and Eodromaeus — but this was at a time before the dinosaurs had become the dominant terrestrial vertebrates, so other animals like rhynchosaurs, aetosaurs, rauisuchians, cynodonts and dicynodonts were also very abundant in the Ischigualasto ecosystem.

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Anniversary of APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING

On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon. Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface. One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” –Neil Armstrong