This is a b.b.c. . B.b.c. News on 5 Live I'm. The deputy chair of the government's review of h s 2 says he hasn't been given a say on the conclusions little tiny Barclay he's a Labor pair has been critical of the plan to build a high speed rail way between northern and southern England our reporter is Greg McKenzie in recent weeks sources involved or close to the review have told the b.b.c. That Lord Barclay ball's in private very unhappy about the way the process was being handled now he's gone public on Twitter opponents of the scheme say the review which probably now won't be published until after the election will be a whitewash the Department for Transport says it's been clear no member of the panel would have a veto and that it would be inappropriate to preempt the report's recommendations the government says working age benefits such as universal credits and job seekers allowance will rise by the rate of inflation from next April they've been frozen since 2016 Labor has described it as a cynically timed announcement ahead of next month's general election Meanwhile Labor says it would cut carbon emissions in the u.k. By 10 percent if it comes to power the policy is promising the largest home improvement program for decades the plans include $60000000000.00 pounds of energy saving upgrades to low income households the conservatives say it would wreck the economy Abbie Mbaye says it will ban parties at the properties it helps rent out itself from a shooting at a high in California which was reserved through the company for a Halloween party 5 people were killed our correspondent Chris Butler brunch s.k. Who's a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Abyan Bay has set out a number of things that they are going to do he says they're going to create a dedicated party house rapid response. Steyn and they're going to screen high risk reservations among other things he's pretty blunt in these posts on Twitter he says we must do better and we will Iraq it is taking an oven on ingredients for chocolate chip cookies to the international space station astronauts will investigate what effect the white lessness has on the shape and consistency of the biscuits spores and Wellington New Zealand beat England by 21 runs in the 2nd t 20 months levelling the series with the rest of the sport has Shabnam Yunus to Manchester City is still 6 points behind Premier League leaders Liverpool after both sides have to come from behind to win their matches city be thousandths into one at home while Liverpool got a 21 win to Aston Villa a good win for Chelsea too who are just 2 points behind City in 3rd after be he wants the 21 Celtic beachheads a 52 to reach the final of the Scottish League Cup for the 4th year running in boxing island's Katie Taylor is beaten great Christina Elena Datu to win the women's w b o light welterweight title and become an undisputed 2 way world champion while Anthony crawler has finished his lightweight career with a win over Frank Keegan a Mercedes Valtteri Bottas will start in pole position at the Us Graeme Prix with teammate Lewis Hamilton in 5th as he tries to seal his 6th Well title this is b.b.c. Radio 5 Live on digital b.b.c. Sound small speak up. Low pressure of the u.k. Will bring showers all spells of rain for much of the country try and sunny spells at times 2 lighter winds highs of 12 in Belfast and 13 in London. The t.t.c. Sounds fine place football to eat whole county state some point you've got to give a young player a chance to just get completely lost for words he was barely able to string a sentence together nifty contest or Cup captain past ridiculous it's taken we had round as the season progresses we've got the latest news and analysis and some big name guests we are talking throughout the morning is this pain national coach finally I will say listen now I'm feeling. Sunday breakfast is coming up with Sarah Brett and Chris will present but 1st it's 5 Live Science This is a pretty recorded program so please don't text or call us. Hello welcome to 5 Live Science from the Naked Scientist team I'm out of Murphy and in this hour we are talking the science questions that you have been sending in over the past few weeks including is Ai a threat to humanity What's a panic attack and why does being scared make your legs wobble make it scientists for 5. So 1st up let's meet our panel to start with we've got University of Cambridge Ai specialist Beth Singler So Beth do you have anything about Ai that you want to get off your chest any bones to pick Yeah so I find it really fascinating that people quite regularly use those captured devices through Internet security where you tick the boxes say I'm not a robot you know these get out yeah and that's completely automated public sharing tast so obviously from Alan Turing he set up this idea of how we choose to see whether something's a on our But what a lot of people don't know is that when you're filling in some of these forms or selecting on an image what is and isn't a crossing on the road you're actually educating algorithms better in the machine vision system so you're actually the humans of performing a service for the ai in doing these capture tests so all these things have come around on pick the road signs were in the cars learn yeah the funniest one I think is when you have to pick out all the ones where it's Sarah Connor from the Terminator series or not are actually helping the I identify Sarah Connor and find I mean it's preparing for the future. Brilliant And we also have a fellow Naked Scientist and host of naked genetics will find some Hey fellas what are you brought in you've got something on the desk there for a year I've got some show and tell I'm going to do some quick Foley work but this is about. Coriander And the reason I'm pretty thin is because I don't know if you guys are aware but for different people supposedly coriander tastes and smells very different I've just got I've got Beth and I've got. Next to me I'm just going to give you guys a sniff at the thought. What do you think I don't like ariana smell particularly nice. Spells great to me makes me think of a delicious curry I want death doesn't smell like so you know it's not like it that's interesting because some people say so some people say dirt some people say delicious curry Yeah I'm fairly much on the counter to taste like washing up liquid yet but me too I hate the stuff getting operated thank you but the reason I want to talk about it is because that there was a study that took place in 2012 where they analyzed around 15000 people's whole genomes and in this set of people they'd had data which was like Do You Tube like coriander do not like coriander and what they found is that there's a certain single base change on a certain chromosome that was really really strongly linked with whether or not people like coriander and that little base change is in a gene that codes for a small receptor in your nose that detects a chemical called the heights and al the hides are part of what make coriander smell like coriander but they're also in loads of detergent products and washing out liquids and also insects hence dirt and cleaning products Now the caveat to this is that there's only a 10 percent of the variability is down to the genes but it is quite a cool thing to think that that can affect some things at such a big level and that's why for years I thought my wife was mad because she liked the taste of so. That that might be something else. But we've also got also from the University of Cambridge some virtue here with us and what do you want to bring to the table about physiology that you'd like to talk about so I'm going to actually to bunk myth and at least according to my local supermarket is Halloween tomorrow so I thought I would bring in a bit of a macabre myth which is about something that happens. After we die or more accurately something that doesn't happen so there's a long standing myth that your fingernails and hair continue to grow even after you've died this is just not true once you Dari your heart stops you stop pumping blood and the cells that make the proteins that make up our make our hair or make all fingernails are also old diet but this myth may have came about because another thing happens after we die which is we d. Hydrate So the fingernails on her look longer because the rest of us is smaller not because they're actually getting longer so it's prunes as opposed to zombies going up indeed brilliant and finally Olivia reams of her anxiety and mental health of the so you also have a myth that you'd like to bring the title Don't you I do I do so a lot of people think that you know when they're feeling very anxious and especially if they've had anxiety for a long time or if they're worrying a lot they think that it's just part of who they are it's their personality traits you know they're just born where we are just extremely shy but actually it's not part of who you are it's a diagnosable condition which can be treated and that's really important to know because anxiety is one of the most common mental health problems in the world one in 14 people are affected women are twice as likely to having Zajac as men and young adults are also most affected and the thing is a if you have it it can lead to suicide to depression to substance abuse but there is treatment and there are things that we can do to help ourselves to overcome it so serious people don't have to just say they're just a worrier there's there is help out there exactly exactly there you can you know put your worries out of your mind especially if you know if you worry a life if you have excessive uncontrollable worries which a lot of people with anxiety have thank you now before we dive into the questions for those of you home we've got to guess who quiz running all the way through the show are we giving you close throughout the eye. Hour so if you think you have an idea what it is to eat as a naked scientists with your guesses the 1st clue is who or what makes this sound. So that's one time normal speed slowed down so it is quite quick but if you think you know it it might be a good scientist and don't worry we're not going to leave you with that we've got a couple more clues coming up later on the show you know let's jump right into the questions and start with this one for you Beth Singh is here to talk artificial intelligence let's talk what is a I right it's quite a slippery term and some people use it when actually what they're talking about is not necessarily artificial intelligence and one of the ways to understand the term and where it comes from and what it means to think about the history and the term was 1st sort of Queens and used at a particular conference in 1956 in Dartmouth College about a very very intelligent people have been working computer sciences got together and decided there was this thing that they could create called artificial intelligence where they could create machines that could do all the things that humans could do basically could sort of perceive things understand things make decisions be broadly intelligent by their understanding of what intelligence could and should be and since then the term has really been applied wherever some machines seem to be doing something that smarts under the umbrella term you do get things like machine vision systems you expert systems robotics gets lumped under Ai as well and a lot of the time when people point to something and say that's artificial intelligence it might not actually be in the same category as those original thinkers was talking about it's become something that's a very pickle to lots of different places at the very simplest level it's the use of algorithmic systems to make deductions that then become part of the data set that then go back into the algorithmic systems of the car iterative process and it can do some very spectacular things so if you've been watching the news about Ai game systems like Alpha star and Alpha go from Google. The mind it can be very very super intelligent and very narrow field so playing computer games particularly well because it iteratively learned how to play computer games very well in this algorithmic process what it can't necessarily do is decide it's going to stop playing the computer game so it has that very narrow form of intelligence that isn't directly mappable on to human intelligence in the way that the original founders There's a gentleman 156 thoughts and by the way they thought they'd fix this whole problem of artificial intelligence in about 2 months over summer a 10 man team will just get it on to get it done so now ai is something that has been applied to lots of different things partly because of our conception of it from science fiction as well so it's sort of our ideas of what it is and could be a very much influenced by Saif I tails and you know a lot of companies now say that they're using artificial intelligence and they might not necessarily be using exactly the same thing they might be doing advanced a to sticks or as one chief technology officer said I'd just rather say we did math and over there but Ai has this kind of glamour around it so it's as I say it's a very slippery term it's hard to kind of pin down to some people what it actually is so your computer might be very good at doing video games but it's not going to be able to say diagnose patients with a heart condition exactly so there are there are Ai systems that can do diagnostics in that way look at images machine vision imagery they can check that so and make a diagnosis but no you can't you can't be doing a broad range of things at this stage although that is the ultimate goal artificial general intelligence for a lot of people if the criteria for an ai is that it can't stop playing a video game then a lot of people out there might be a way to me included true yes so that's one of the interesting things seeing the comparison between Ai systems playing computer games and humans playing computer games and some of the world's best games players are exactly those people who have played hours and hours of games against other players but what ai can do exponentially better is play against itself. Millions millions of times to improve so that yeah and again that's a very narrow usage of Ai Alpha star can play Starcraft 2 fantastically well but they discovered you know initially it was beating humans but that was when it was capable of seeing the whole map once they can see the map as a human sees a map you know bit by bit through the fog of war lost to human players the day you know the situations are also kind of set up for ai to to show off what they can do as well brilliant thank you very much and now we're moving over to you Phil we've gotten something in from the form from Paul and he wants to know if you can analyze your d.n.a. At home is not something you can do you see I've been having a think about this one and it's a tricky one obviously you can get all these you know direct to consumer I guess you call them d.n.a. Testing kits there's there's actually a whole suite of them at this point and you can send off a bit of blood or something and get back your results and that's that's sort of from home right that's about $100.00 I think they're there currently going for now $100.00 and you can get details of your heritage and also health screen and I think the key to answering this question actually is in the word analyze right analyzing d.n.a. Is very very tricky it's a whole field and when you get your results back from ancestry or 20 through me or whatever they've done quote unquote analysis for you and the results of that analysis need interpretation to actually make sense for example with the stuff like your heritage and might say your 7 percent Irish cool great what does that mean what it actually means is that you share 7 percent of that heritage in common with Irish people today it doesn't mean 7 percent of your ancestors were Irish if that makes sense so if they're comparing it to the current d.n.a. Profile across the world if someone says they're oh yeah I'm 7 percent Irish. Are you really. So I hope I'm a little more than some percent. I can tell. But when it comes to the analysis part there's so many cats when it comes to genetics and even this coriander thing I was just telling you about that one single base pair difference that was only responsible for 10 percent of the variance and if you don't have like that kind of analysis there in front of you then you haven't really treated the d.n.a. As it should be treated as just one piece of a huge puzzle the other part of the question is can you buy the huge genie d.n.a. Sequencing machines and yes and they cost about 20 grand so you just are going to make it until we find you just sell your car yeah. Well thanks very much the home technology d.n.a. Killer is only 20 ground away now moving on to you Olivia we've got this question in about anxiety from day one kind of anxieties are there so can you pick that one apart from us yes so there are different types of anxiety disorders but the most important thing that we need to distinguish is what is a normal day from what is an anxiety disorder because he hear this word so much you know people are talking about anxiety so much but there is a difference between normal and abnormal anxiety so normally he is just annoyed you know human emotion that we all have when we are in stressful situations it helps us to deal with challenges and to overcome obstacles so for example if you're out in the woods and you encounter a wild animal you're going to start feeling anxious and this rush going through you so that's normal anxiety or you know the deadlines that you have at work but if you take this normal anxiety to the extreme and especially when it arises in situations which don't pose a real threat then that's when you might have an anxiety disorder there are different types one of the most common anxiety disorder. Utters a generalized anxiety disorder and this one is marked by you know you have this excessive uncontrollable worry about anything that is going on in your life you can worry about very small things to major matters anything really that worries can keep you up at night you might feel restless irritable you might find it hard to concentrate and it can be very impairing and disabling for some people there are other anxiety disorders as well this is just one of them how do we distinguish between what is normal and what isn't because normal is a very baseline for different people Yeah exactly so you know for some people there are so anxious that they find it hard to leave their house they find that they need to quit their job because of all of this anxiety that they're feeling and they might not know why they're feeling like they're about to have a heart attack you know for no reason or they start sweating in social situations when they're talking to other people they feel like they can't hold it together when they feel this distress then you know some people go to the doctor for that and the doctor can diagnose you according to this manual the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and this manual has got all of the symptoms of each disorder there and the doctor uses that and other questionnaires to see if you meet criteria for one of these disorders and then you can get treatment for that thank you very much Olivia And speaking of being nervous we have this question from you on Twitter from b w 7 they have a 6 year old son and they were scared by some ambulances and they asked Why do your legs go wobbly when you're scared is not the worst possible time for that to be opening. So this is quite a nice question follow on from the want to live you just answered because what we're talking about here is the sensible physiological responses that we have to something that f