Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea

Dr. Zheng-Yi Chen, Associate Scientist in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at Mass Eye and Ear Hospital in Boston, speaks with Futureproof host Jonathan McCrea about his efforts to cure hearing loss.

On this episode of Futureproof: Dr Ruth Freeman, Science Foundation Ireland & Eoin Murphy, biochemist and science communicator, join Jonathan McCrea for Newsround. And Dr. Anne Moore, Senior Lecturer and Principal Investigator in Vaccines at University College Cork, explains her work in developing vaccine patches.

Surrogacy can be a complicated enough process but if you bring in the potential of AI into it, how would it look? To discuss this and the future of surrogacy in general, Jonathan is joined by Dr. David Walsh, 'First IVF' chairman.

Over time, our memory begins to fade but new research suggests human memory can go wrong just three seconds after an event takes place. The author of a new study on short-term memory illusion, Dr. Marte Otten, a Cognitive Psychologist from the University of Amsterdam joins Jonathan to discuss.

Professor Caitriona Jackman is an Irish space scientist and head of the planetary magnetospheres group at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and was among those at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, for the launch of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, or “JUICE”. She joins Jonathan to discuss the mission and what she and her colleagues hope to learn.

Implanting an electrode into your fragile brain to control abnormal activity can cause extensive damage. But researchers in Sweden have developed a type of gel that they hope will ease the process of neural implantation for humans and perhaps ultimately help the treatment of diseases like Parkinson’s. Joining Jonathan to discuss is Hanne Biesmans, Ph.D. student at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, at Linköping University in Sweden.

What would a message from ET sound like? Researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Post-Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have their eyes and ears peeled to interpret alien language. Among them is Dr John Elliott, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science and the Coordinator for the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and Chair of UK SETI Research Network.

Joining Jonathan on this episode of Futureproof is Dr Aashish Manglik, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California who is examining how odour activates our human receptors. Also featuring Dr Lara Dungan and Dr Oran Kennedy in Newsround.

Diamond formation occurs when carbon deposits deep within the earth are subject to high temperatures and pressure. But what are the specific environmental conditions needed to make this actually happen? You’d think that by now we would have a pretty good grasp of how they form considering the value we place on them, but that’s not the case. Until now that is. Dr. Emma Tomlinson is an Associate Professor of Geology at Trinity College Dublin and part of a team from TCD and Queensland University of Technology who have been looking into this. She joins Jonathan to discuss.

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking is famous the world over, but one of his closest collaborators for twenty years was working alongside him developing a new theory of the cosmos. Thomas Hertog, a cosmologist from KU Leuven University in Belgium, explores this in his newly published book, ‘On The Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory’. He joins Jonathan to discuss.