Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: Sounds of the stars

Episode Date: March 9, 2024

This week, how Nasa is harnessing the power of sound to help people visualise the universe. Also: we meet the man making bees whoop. And the woman making history in college basketball.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. I'm Sophia Smith-Gaylor. And I'm Sachi Cole. And we're on a quest to find out where in the world women are living their best lives.

We're here to shine a light on some surprising and inspiring places and what we can learn from them. Where to be a woman from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This week, NASA harnesses the power of sound to help people visualise our universe. When you're listening to something over time, your ear is really sensitive to be able to pick up more data. It's another way to be able to find a needle in a haystack.

It's like having another tool in your tool belt, if you will. This is The Happy Pod. I'm Harry Bly. Bees. Once a minute or so, we heard this whoop, whoop. Meet the man making them whoop and finding a way to check the health of bee colonies during winter without disturbing them. Hello, my name is Dr Martin Bencik. I've been studying honeybees, beehives, listening out for whooping signals. And you're listening to the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. A basketball record in the United States.

Caitlin Clarke making history, netting 35 points in a single game. Also in this podcast, we're looking at rare and endangered languages. We ask you, our listeners, to get in touch. Take a listen to this. And try and guess where it's from. This is the sound from space. NASA has released these extraordinary compositions which are created by translating data into noise. They're called sonifications and were originally designed to help blind people imagine space.

But for astronomers too, they're a useful tool to help better understand the universe. Here's Dr. Kimberly Arkand. She's a data visualizer at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. So we've just released three new data sonifications from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. And what that means is we're listening to the translation of information from a visual into sound. Well, we're going to hear one of those sounds now. It's essentially the leftover debris field from a star that exploded. And we're listening to the different kinds of light.

So we're listening to X-ray light from the ICSPE spacecraft as well as the Chandra spacecraft. And what happens is we mathematically map the information into sound. And we're scanning the data from the bottom to the top. So the brightness that we're hearing, for example, in the Chandra data, that's being converted into like these string light sounds. And the blast wave is being represented by sort of like a fireworks type of noise. So what is it that these sonifications can tell us that we might not notice when we're observing in a visual way? Well, sonifications are great when you have very dense and rich data sets, because your eye is getting all the information at once. But when you're listening to something over time, your ear is really sensitive to be able to pick up more data. So it's another way to be able to find a needle in a haystack. It's like having another

tool in your tool belt, if you will. And am I right in thinking that the project is primarily designed to help blind people, visually impaired people? Yes, though sonification is a totally valid research tool that astronomers use. This project was created to be able to connect with our community members who are blind or low vision. What kind of reaction have you had from those communities? This has been helpful to them to feel like they are part of that scientific enterprise and also give back something to it. Because we work with people who are blind or low vision to actually help create these sonifications as well.

It really is a moment to be able to work with another community and learn from each other. Dr. Kimberly Arkan speaking to Martha Carney, and that rather ominous sounding sonification is the interpretation of the jellyfish nebula IC443. All of these sounds are featured in a new short documentary, Listen to the Universe, which you can watch on the nasa.gov website. Now, we promise we are not making this up. Scientists have found that bees whoop, and they make the distinctive sound when they bump into each other by mistake. The discovery could allow beekeepers to check on their colonies during winter months without exposing them to the elements.

Instead, a gentle tapping on the hive encourages the bees to respond in unison. The scientist behind this discovery is Professor Martin Benchik from Nottingham Trent University in Britain. He says this kind of technology could be relatively easy to set up for professional and hobbyist beekeepers for around $25 if manufactured on a large scale. He told us how this all came about. We noticed simply by listening to the continuous vibrations that we were monitoring inside the colony, once a minute or so we heard this whoop, whoop signal. By gently tapping on the

hive, we could have many bees that go whoop together. So you could have hundreds of bees going whoop together. And that drew our attention. And we put all our attention, all our efforts to try and explore this exciting signal. And so we suggested that this signal was originating from a surprised bee. Perhaps the honeybee colony is made of individuals that are crammed together in a small space. And perhaps they collide into each other accidentally due to this small space that they've got. And in colliding into each other accidentally, perhaps they go whoop like this spontaneously. And so we tried and demonstrate this and we did. We did actually have a video of bees accidentally colliding into each other.

And indeed, this results in one of the two bees going whoop. Why bees? What is it that makes bees your area of interest? In life, we make three types of acquaintances. You meet people who they drag you down because of their behaviour. And we meet people who are our equal. They inspire us and they make us do the same things that we would do every day. And then the third category of people we meet, they inspire us and they pull us upwards. We feel they're inspiring us because they do better than we can. And to me, the honeybee is the third category of things I've encountered in my life. It's an animal that's so inspiring.

It challenges me and it makes me research and do things that I wouldn't do otherwise because I find it such an inspiring animal. Martin Bencik, Professor of Physics, specialising in bees. Next on The Happy Pod, a couple of weeks ago, we found out more about the language of Scottish Gaelic, a language spoken by an estimated 60,000 or so people. And this sparked an idea. Here's Jackie. It did make us wonder about other languages that listeners speak

that might be rare but are still worth preserving, celebrating and indeed speaking. Do let us know. The usual address, globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. And as if by magic, Amy Tauma K that this is her talking about why she loves the happy pod in her native language of Maltese. I'm just going to have to trust her on that. She went on to tell us more about the language and the island of Malta. So Malta is really a small island. It is

27 kilometres long by 14.5 kilometres wide. But it's in a really strategic place in the Mediterranean. And so throughout history, we've been conquered by lots and lots of different forces. So that's where we get the differences in our language. So Maltese is a whole mixture of Arabic, and then it also has elements of Italian. So if we ever go to somewhere Arabic, we can understand roughly what they're saying. But then you also go to Italy, and you can also understand the words that they're saying. And then we also have elements of English. There's lots of English words, but they're spelt in Maltese. So Maltese is spelt like, it doesn't look like Arabic,

but it sounds a lot like Arabic. So we have, it's a bit more complicated. So over to you. Tell us about your native language or perhaps one you've been learning. The email address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. To the USA next, where a new champion goal scorer is being celebrated in the world of college basketball. 22-year-old Caitlin Clarke is now the all-time champion goal scorer in both the women's and men's college basketball. Hawkeyes player netted 35 points against rival Ohio State, bringing her career total to 3,685 points, beating the previous record holder Pete Maravich. She spoke to Good Morning America

about scoring that historical point. When I first went out there and looked at it, I'm like, this has to be in the wrong spot. Like, it seems way further back from where I actually shot it from. How will she go for history? There it is! This is what I dreamed of. Like, I dreamed of playing in front of these types of crowds and these type of environments during every national anthem

or every pregame. Like, I just try to take a deep breath and look around and, you know, soak in the environment because it seriously never gets old. Our sports reporter, Sam Harris, gave us his take on her record-breaking achievement.

Oh, it's huge. This is massive. We're talking college basketball, and for listeners who don't know basketball, college basketball is massive in the US. It is huge, especially the NCAA. The cities come together over this, and there are millions that turn out and want to watch their home city team play. Caitlin's achievement is massive.

You can tell that by it hadn't been broken since 1970. This is no small feat whatsoever. And a huge amount of praise from athletes and politicians alike. Tell us more about the reaction. Oh, the reaction was great who wouldn't want to be congratulated by arguably the greatest basketball athlete of this generation lebron james he himself had just passed a record of 40 40 000 points in the nba that's that's something special and we might never see again. So to have praise from someone like him is second to none. And well, second to none to the president, Joe Biden.

That's also not bad, is it? It's extraordinary. And for college basketball, which, of course, like you say, in the US, big deal, perhaps here in the UK, not so much. She's only 22 years old as well. So a long career ahead. What can we expect from Caitlin Clarke in the future? It's all up to Caitlin, really, and the choices she makes now going forward. And hopefully we get to see the star rise of Caitlin,

because she's already a star now. And having phrases coined about how big you'll grow in the women's game, like the Caitlin effect, that's pretty good going straight out of the blocks. Sam Harris. Coming up in this podcast, remember this from a few weeks ago. We need help to find this monkey. Woo! Woo! If you've heard him, please give us a call.

Well, we have an update. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts

or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. BBC World Service, full of thoughtful letters of advice, personal stories and life lessons for daughters everywhere. And it's back for a new series with more of your letters and more fantastic guests. Search for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Dear Daughter. Now to a story that proves the saying, if at first you don't succeed. This song, Witches, by a UK girl band called Zanana, failed to chart when it was released nearly 40 years ago, and now it's come back to life after a young DJ found a copy in a second-hand shop. The song gained a club following and now Zanana have landed a deal with a Dutch record label.

We've been hearing from the band, Penny Griffiths, Ruth Elder and Anita Gabrielle Tedder, who at the time were in their teens and twenties and are now in their fifties and sixties. Two years ago, a young DJ called Kiernan Abbott was in a second-hand shop in Cornwall. He found our record and he really, really loved it. He played it at gigs that he was doing. He played it to friends who were into synth-pop music in Los Angeles and Berlin, all over the world.

And quite by chance, we were at a party and for the first time in 37 years, was it, girls? Yeah. We actually put the track on, the old backing track on. All the moves were there, the voices were there, and the very next day, Kiernan, through Facebook, found his way to me, Anita. And here we are, through a DJ,

doing another remix through another DJ, getting this incredible deal. For our age, this is fantastic. That was what made us different back in the 80s, is that we were strong women writing our own music. So it still stands up on its own two feet today. All three of us have been through so much in our lives since the Zinana split up. I think it just makes you in life really know what really matters and what's really important. To be honest, I was a little bit dubious. I thought, oh, I don't know if we should be doing this at our age. But Ruthie and Penny said, oh, come on, you know, what can we lose?

And that's the thing. When you're younger, you worry about what people think. But these days, I think I'm going to be dead sometime soon. I might as well grab this. You know, you're never too old to do anything anymore. The newly successful girl band Zanana, with their original 1980s track Witches. A woman in Wales has gone viral on TikTok after CCTV footage showed her getting her coat caught on a shopfront shutter and being hoisted in the air. Anne Hughes, who's 72, is the talk of not only her village but of the world after the video got more

than two million views. Our reporter Andrew McNair has been telling me all about this rather uplifting story. First things first, she is okay and being hoisted nearly three metres in the air it could have been anything but. But Anne has been working as a cleaner at this local convenience store for years and sort of being from this small village called Tonteg in South Wales, she probably wasn't expecting overnight social media fame. But the footage posted online has given her exactly that. So here's what happened. She was leaning up against the shutters with her trolley when the owner, unbeknownst to her, starts to open the shop.

So he raises the shutters and she gets caught on one of the hooks on her coat. The next thing she knows, she's hoisted right up in the air and finds herself dangling upside down from the waist. Absolutely nothing she can do about it. And it was all captured on CCTV. Anne has been speaking to the BBC. When I made his owner in the shop, when he was inside bringing the shutters

up, my court had caught when I was going up and then I screamed his name and thank goodness he came out. My grandchildren have asked me why are you holding on to your trolley? I said, I don't know. Make no mistake, it's a very funny video. Big question, was Anne

ready for this level of online fame? Well, she must have been absolutely terrified, but her and her family have had a right laugh at this, as you might imagine. And as we've heard, the thing that's got many people talking is the fact that she was grabbing hold of her trolley and held on to it as she was dangling there. So her friends think that she looked ridiculous all round. Here's Wendy Barrett. It's hysterical. I've known Anne for years. She's a very good friend of mine. And just to see her, well, it made my day yesterday. And for the shop owner, Ahmed,

it's possibly the best marketing campaign that a local shop has ever had. So in the end, a happy news story because she made it out alive. Andrew McNair. Earlier in the Happy Pod, we were talking about rare and unusual languages. Australia used to be one of the most linguistically diverse places with over 200 languages. But today, many of them are considered highly endangered. Enter Gilad Zuckerman, a Hebrew-speaking linguistics professor

who's on a mission to help indigenous communities reclaim their mother tongues. Gilad has painstakingly pieced back together the dormant language of Bangla, which was spoken in South Australia before presenting his work to the indigenous community for approval, among them Shania Richards. So where did Gilad begin? I had a dictionary written in 1844 with up to 3,500 words, which is a lot. He reveled in the delights of this language. Gilad refers to Bangala as a sleeping beauty. So I asked five representatives of the Bangala tribe to come to my office and I told these five Bangla representatives, I have found enough material to reclaim your dreaming, sleeping beauty.

Are you interested? Their response changed my life because they told me, and I quote, we have been waiting for you for 50 years. changed my life because they told me, and I quote, we have been waiting for you for 50 years. The wait was over. Just a few months later, they planned the first language workshop with Gilad and members of the community. The entire night, I was working like a dog, preparing songs, including the head, shoulders, knees and toes in Bangla.

Gilad's approach is for the community to be in charge of the revival of their language. I need to make it clear, the Aboriginal people are at the wheel. They're the ones who have to approve of any decision that I make. In fact, I don't make decisions, I make recommendations. I remember the first time I met Professor Gillard. He was the one that really helped us heaps with our language revival. When Shania was a teenager and struggling with her mental health, she went to a newly set up Bangla community centre. I was so spun out because it was like he was one of those heroes from the books that came around.

They were like, hey, you know you're allowed to be yourself. She went to a Bangla language workshop, learning songs in the language and reading books. It was like he understood and he saw how much we needed to find this so that we can find ourselves again, not only just as individuals, but as a collective and hopefully for the whole community. For Shania, there's no question about the impact it's had for her. Coming back to find my people again, my culture and my language, is literally like I found myself through language again because now I feel like I have a purpose,

even if it's as simple as being able to learn a new bungler word per day. Shania has come a really long way since she was a teenager and she's now an elected politician in the region. She's also writing a book of Bangla poems and wants to record an album of Bangla songs. But for Shania, the biggest difference is in how she sees herself. Oh my gosh, I never used to be able to look at myself in the mirror and now I look in the mirror and

now I actually like what I see. Like I see me smiling. I see my beautiful skin. I see my beautiful curly hair. And yeah, that has been a real transformation for me to now actually being the person I've always dreamed of becoming. Shania Richards ending that report by Josephine Catterley. For more on this and stories like it, search online for BBC World Service People Fixing the World or wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You may remember a few weeks ago we told you about the adventures of an escaped monkey in Scotland. Honshu, a Japanese snow monkey, escaped from a wildlife park in the Scottish Highlands and became the subject of a

major search operation involving drones and monkey-catching rangers. Honshu was safely found, but his story did not end there. With a recap and an important update, here's Callum Leslie. Hello. This is the story of the Scottish macaque. At the Highland Wildlife Park, up near Kincraig, an adventurous monkey had an exciting few days. His name was Honshu, a Japanese macaque, and this is the story of how he escaped and came back. Now, Japanese macaques sometimes like a scrap, which can leave knees bloody and make eyes black. But Honshu didn't really fit in. He was a sensitive soul. He preferred reading books or listening to music on his own. It all got too much when one fateful night, he got fed up of his troop after a really big fight.

So he hopped a fence and channeled William Wallace, yelling freedom as he ran off to the forest. His heart was racing, but he found he wasn't all that scared. He was curious and excited about the big world out there. The highlands were beautiful. The Cairngorms stopped him in his tracks. He decided right then that he wasn't Japanese anymore. Now he was a Scottish macaque. He wanted to see Ben Nevis and Loch Ness too.

He wanted to eat a tatty scone and drink iron brew. As he explored, his fame grew and grew. People loved the story of the Scottish monkey on the loose from the zoo. He popped up in gardens, in wee Scottish towns and was having a great time cutting around. But the people at the wildlife park wanted him to come home, as Scotland in February was too cold for him to be on his own. They were worried about Honshu and hoped he'd come back.

And a man named Ben searched with drones and made monkey maps. After five days, they found him in a garden eating Yorkshire puds. And the adventure was over, but not quite for good. He went back to the park, but things stayed the same. The other macaques didn't let him join in in their monkey games. So the people at the park, they came up with a plan to make him much more happy so he wouldn't want to run away again. They asked him if he'd like to go to Edinburgh Zoo.

He thought for a moment Edinburgh seemed far big and new. But then he remembered how he felt on that fateful night and how things that seem at first scary can still be alright. So he plucked up his courage and said he would go. He was excited about new places to see, new things to know. And as it turns out, everyone was excited to see him too. And people came from all around to visit him at the zoo. He hoped he could see more of Scotland one day,

go to Stirling Castle and the Spaghetti Hat to watch Livingston play, get a big bag of chips from Karen Fish Bar, play golf at St Andrews and try to break par. So this is a story for anyone who thinks they don't fit in. Maybe you're just waiting for your adventure to begin. There are people out there who will appreciate you for you, just like there were for the Scottish macaque, the famous Honshu. Head of monkey business and poet Callum Leslie. We love it when he hangs around with us. You've been listening to The Happy Pod from the BBC World Service.

It's been a joy to hear from our listener, Amy, in this episode. As always, you can send us an email with a message, a story, something that made you smile. Our address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Craig Kingham. The producer was Anna Murphy. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Harry Bly.

Until next time, goodbye. I'm going to go. global story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts.