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Leading Edge brings you the latest news from the world of science. Geoff Watts celebrates discoveries as soon as they're being talked about - on the internet, in coffee rooms and bars; often before they're published in journals. And he gets to grips with not just the science, but with the controversies and conversation that surround it.
radioscience@bbc.co.uk |
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LISTEN AGAIN 30 min |
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"If what interests you are new and exciting ideas, it's science you should be turning to. And whether it's the Human Genome Project or the origins of the Universe, Leading Edge is the place to hear about them."
Geoff Watts |
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The Neuro-anatomy of the Moral Mind
In this week's Leading EdgeGeoff Watts talks to moral philospher-turned-neuropsychologist Joshua Greene at Princeton University about his research using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to watch the brain activity of people making different kinds of moral judgements. In one experiment, Greene and his team gave a series of moral dilemmas for subjects placed in the MRI scanner to ponder. There were two categories of moral problem that they were particularly interested in comparing which the team have labelled impersonal and personal respectively.
The first impersonal type is based on the so-called the 'Trolley' scenario: A runaway railway trolley is heading towards a group of 5 people on the tracks. They'll be killed unless you switch the points and divert the trolley onto a side track, where - unfortunately - 1 person is standing. So, do you throw the switch and kill 1 person but save the other 5?
The second personal type is based on the 'Footbridge' scenario A runaway railway trolley is heading towards a group of 5 people on the tracks. You're standing on a footbridge, between the speeding trolley and the apparently doomed party. But there's a very large man standing next to you and you realise you can save the people below by pushing the big man off the bridge onto the tracks. His body will stop the trolley. You're not large enough yourself to halt it. So, do you kill 1 person to save the other 5?
For the majority of people, the 'personal'-style of dilemma is a greater challenge and they tend to take much longer to make a decision. In the MRI scans, the impersonal tends to result in an increased activity in abstract reasoning parts of the brain whereas the second 'personal' dilemma results in a more complicated pattern. In people who ponder this for sometime before making a decision, brain areas linked to social and emotional behaviour increase in activity as well as the abstract reasoning areas, together with an area (the anterior singulate cortex) which is active when different urges are in conflict.
Joshua Greene interprets the observations in terms of two mental domains of different evolutionary age in conflict - the ancestral primate social-emotional mind (which he says recoils from pushing the man off the bridge) and the more recently evolved abstract-reasoning capacity which is doing the Utilitarian numbers game. He believes an understanding of how our brains deal with moral judgements may help to us to make 'better' moral decisions.
Iceland's Hydrogen Economy
Andrew Luck-Baker reports on Iceland 's plans to become a hydrogen-based energy economy. Making increased use of its geothermal and hydroelectric potential, the country plans to use electricity to generate hydrogen gas from water, which is then put to use in fuel cells powering all of its road transport and its large fishing fleet and ferries. Iceland hopes to have banished carbon fossil fuels from the island by 2050 and act as a test-bed for the rest of the world's conversion to climate-friendly energy technologies.
Glowing Molecular Sensors
Geoff talks to Professor A P de Silva, an organic chemist at Queens University , Belfast about the latest developments in fluorescent molecular sensors. These are designer molecules consisting of two parts - a receptor that seeks out a specific target chemical, and another part that emits light when its molecular partner encounters the target. Professor de Silva created the first such sensor molecule (“a minor classic” as he describes it) and he talks about the research by chemists in Florida who have modified his prototype to fashion a sensor that gives off light when it encounters a potentially fatal toxin produced by 'Red Tide' algal blooms in the sea.
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