Knowledge is to take an inspiration from feathers for a new kind of color so these look for a shiny fantastic green color so this one's going and I think blue Yes this is beautiful color and we play some simple card games that will improve our children's mathematical skills these are preschoolers right there 4 and 5 it may not be time yet to sort of sit them down put them in front of a bunch of school like material and really kind of cram it into their heads but let's 1st joint click presenter Gareth Mitchell on the streets of Jakarta. Ages I tend to just think of them if I go somewhere with that amazing sound so I think that the rush hour traffic here in Jakarta the capital city of Indonesia Well it qualifies for pretty amazing sounds. Good a world of clock cities because it is nonetheless legendary When Gareth recorded that Audioboo in 2015 the government had been running restrictions for 20 years that had banned cos with fewer than 3 occupants from to keep the roads their version of carpooling meant to keep traffic flow a bit freer but the measure was unpopular and last year at short notice it was abandoned that gave mit economist Ben how can a chance to see the before and after effects of the policy which he told me created an enterprising class of freelance passengers an unusual phenomenon that happened in Jakarta that probably doesn't happen in a lot of places where they have packed with t.v. Of course directions was the emergence of professional passengers they were known as jockeys and these are people who stand outside the entrance of the 3 in One areas and you could hire them for about $15000.00 or Piotr a little more than one u.s. Dollar they would get in your car and be for extra passenger you needed to make it into the 3 in one area I mean it sounds like fantastically entrepreneurial spirit there's a lot of entrepreneurial. Today in Asia this was the kind of madness that drives the Jakarta government to cancel this high occupancy threshold for some rides but that's given you a chance and actually to see what the effect on traffic is exactly we said well gee this is going to be a major change to traffic patterns in Jakarta and it's going to allow us to study what was the impact of these high occupancy vehicle restrictions you know not just on the roads where they were in place but kind of throughout the city and those kinds of major traffic realignments are pretty rare to be able to study those and because we had a week's warning right they announced in March that they were going to do this but it was going to take effect one week after the announcement date that one week give us enough time to set up a study of this in the great thing if you didn't actually have to sit there with another click home and several something to count because through no we didn't we used Google Maps in the same way that when you're driving somewhere you can open up Google maps and say well how long will it take me to get from point a to point b. Right now and Google will tell you the answer based on anonymous data it's collecting from other users of Google Maps it'll say Well right now we know where the speeds are on all these different roads in all take you 12 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever so what we did is we set up our computers to query Google maps every 10 minutes for a bunch of different routes in the city and so we could say Well right now how long it would take to go from you know point a to point b. And we had this for a number of different points and then our computers kept doing that every 10 minutes both before the policy change and after the policy change and that allows us to get a really nice picture of how traffic speeds were during the didn't as usual period before they limited the bin to vehicle restriction policy and then every day thereafter throughout the day so there are a couple of roads in particular that you were looking at. How long were these roads so the policy focused on 2 major roads in Jakarta they were about maybe 5 to 8 kilometers long each and they form kind of a cross shape in the center of the city and these roads are really the heart of the central business district they feature tons of high rises shopping malls the stock exchange of government ministries they really are the heart of the city in a lot of ways so if I were to drive down these roads in the middle of the night 3 o'clock and I guess traffic fairly free moving Alfonse would I be going how long would it take me to get down those rides you'd be going about 32 kilometers an hour and that means it would take you about 1.87 minutes to move each kilometer and then how bad can it get now after they've taken these restrictions off under the current system how long does it do that the worst parts of the rush hour after they lifted the restrictions in the worst part of rush hour it takes 5.3 minutes to move one kilometer which is you know only slightly faster than walking in the critical question then is is that worse than it was when they did have they restrictions in it substantially worse so before the restrictions it took about 2.8 minutes to move one kilometer and after their stations were taken away it took 5.3 minutes to move one kilometer that's like 85 percent worse I mean that's a substantially worse was it just the area that these restrictions apply to that were affected I mean what was traffic being freed up on the other roads around that we're now coming down these limited roads no so that's actually I think the really surprising part of our study the thing you would normally expect is well gee if now kind of we make these mean roads open to everyone traffic that would have been on these other roads will substitute back to the main roads and then you'd expect the traffic on the other roads to become lighter and we find the opposite we actually find that traffic gets worse all over the city. Is there any chance that your findings will persuade them to revert to the old high occupancy rules you know I can't speak to the internal policy making decisions of a current government we've certainly share our findings with them my job in the Congress is to make sure people understand kind of what the data is what the tradeoffs are and the politicians make the political decisions Well I hope that listening to you worldwide because that serendipitous experiment was certainly in lightning they'll find details have been all can study if they like in Science magazine this week links on our Web page at b.b.c. World Service dot com decisions like that require some basic numerical skills and ability to appreciate and to use the numbers that went into Ben's calculations parentally complained that too many of us are innumerate and in many countries where children of the 1st generation to attend schools they won't benefit from the kind of parental support I had to get that 1st educational leg up simple counting games or card shake games all of which caught nurture our basic intuitive mathematical instincts in India the press and Educational Foundation has seen that many of the children struggle to access the math they encounter at primary school and they turn to have a developmental psychologist more Dylan to help devise a preschool program that would leave them better prepared the idea was to take these early emerging intuitive skills in number in geometry and foster them and encourage children to use them and exercise them with the hope that they might be able to more easily bridge those intuitions to their formal learning that they're required to do in primary school so you engage some kind of gaming was it with some of the children to try and develop in a subtle way the mathematical skills Yes So these are preschoolers right there 4 and 5 it may not be time yet to sort of sit them down put them in front of a bunch of school like material. And really kind of cram it into their heads so they were card games they were over physical materials for a couple of reasons one is that physical materials are cheap but also this idea of having these physical things over which children can play the games makes an inherently social element to the gameplay which again we think was important for kids of this age and because this was a psychological experiment you also had 2 of the groups of children one who were just given the standard preschool curriculum and others who were given another kind of critical innocent right that's right so in order to determine whether or not the content of our math games was effective in bolstering students' learning we had to compare their performance against 2 different groups so one crew who received the curriculum as usual we also had an active control condition they received games just like the ones we created with math content but the content was instead in the social domain so instead of engaging their intuitive numerical and geometric skills they were engaging their intuitive social skills for example their ability to follow the gaze direction of another individual or read that person's emotional expression and these skills are truthfully essential to success in early learning and so they were again truthfully presented to teachers and students as potentially helpful for their success early on in primary school and so is the critical question will you able to prove the mathematical abilities all of the children who got the mathematical games we had 2 different kinds of outcome measures that we were interested in with these children we were interested in whether their intuitive sense of number and geometry could be improved the kind of thing that we were training in the games and the kind of thing that we think is important to building a foundation of knowledge for school mathematics we tested those skills and then we also tested the symbolic skills that kids are asked to learn in school for example their recognition of Arabic numerals their operate. Simple arithmetic addition stuff like that their ability to identify shape properties and name shapes so what we found is that immediately after the intervention which is to say as 0 to 3 months after the intervention kids who had received the math game treatment were better on both of those types of skills so they were really a lot better in their intuitive skills showing us that you know these games were able to both exercise and improve what they were aimed to train we found no such advantage in the children who had received the social the active control the social games so 6 months after the intervention we saw a long lasting a sustained improvement in their intuitive skills these skills about estimating the number of dots in an array or identifying which shape doesn't belong with the rest based on some property those kinds of intuitive skills remained robustly improved in the math group and these improvements weren't present in the active control group but the advantage in the formal skills had disappeared by 6 months I mean it strikes me that there are 2 kills for this one is that you need to tweak the kinds of games that you're doing so they match the primary school curriculum better or the primary curriculum needs to pick up on the skills you've given them to develop them better you're absolutely right so those are 2 avenues that were investigating if we're able to incorporate in our training not only the intuitive skills but also the opportunity to map those gains onto the formal representations that kids will be exposed to in their 1st year of primary school then perhaps they'll be able to carry that along with them further it's also possible that the curricular around the world are not all sort of strictly formal like the curricula in India so for example we're testing whether or not training with these materials that build on intuitive skills might be more effective in contexts like in the us where. The curriculum itself has a little bit more of that intuition built into it is not strictly formal Dylan who's just started a new post New York University where she'll be continuing this intriguing line of research my children actually 1st learned about science through their love of dinosaurs and our understanding of the history of dinosaurs has been hugely improved by a series of spectacular discoveries from China fossil sites like northeast of Beijing particularly our understanding of how feathered dinosaurs became the forerunners of modern birds the University of Nottingham is hosting an exhibition with some of the best examples giving Rory Galloway a chance of a closer look at the ancestors of our feathered friends. Now when the dinosaurs more beautiful and the more color for they are covered by fathers they saw while they're still going on around us they change everything about dinosaurs that was Dr Wang Chih co-curator of the dinosaurs of China exhibition highlighting how bird like some dinosaurs would have appeared and giving insight into how birds are modern day dinosaurs paleontologist nothing in Natural History Museum Dr Adam Smith explains just how bird like some dinosaurs really were if you saw many of the dinosaurs in this exhibition walking down the street you would think look there's a chicken crossing the road this image of dinosaurs as massive chickens is incredibly recent in paleontology I want to understand how these fossils from China have been so instrumental in changing our understanding of how dinosaurs looked when Adam guided me through some of the fossils in the exhibition I was surprised that I could clearly see the feathers you can see it is very clear topped along the back here and along the tail of down the feather like material this is the fossil of a meeting theropod dinosaur signed up to Rick's lived in the quotations period in China and at that point it was the 1st feathered dinosaur that was ever known so no Saurabh tricks or literally translated. China dragon bird is a fair report it did have feathers but not for flight there are 2 key hypotheses about the origin of feathers The 1st is that maybe the dinosaur feathers evolved to keep the animal warm if it was in a cold environment and China at that time was relatively cold the other possibility is that you use these by those in the 1st instance for displaying and they were probably colorful and they might have been stripey and they might have used their colorful feathers to show off just like modern birds do as well and you can see all that in a fossil that's why these bottles are so incredibly important this is America sample of the limestone with very fine preservation that preserved soft tissues as well including the feathers and is particular to these deposits from like owning in China it's not the case of which came 1st the chicken or the egg rather which came 1st the feather or the bird it was the feather by the way but what was so special about leaning province fossils that allowed us to see these feathers when she is from this north eastern part of China especially in learning programs we have a very well preserved there as that's from the Cretaceous time we think that there will be a lot more candles in their areas and then when they have the rupture in this fire if one that what kind of ash is there just to cover everything this fine volcanic silt didn't just preserve dinosaur feathers but also clues to their behavior something nothing in the university's animal taxonomist Thom Hartmann gets very excited by he's able to pick some parenting behavior of dinosaurs that similar to that found in birds now they sat on their eggs where we're looking at over Raptor which name translates as eggs because the 1st specimens found with an egg and they sought to do uniquely strange blunt skull was a dead. Did for cracking open eggs and since this 1st fossil was found others have been found which are brooding its eggs in the same way as some birds do today so they were a good parent not an egg thief was originally thought the u.v. Raptor looks a lot like an ostrich with feathers over its body but instead of wings it had arms with claws and standing at one and a half meters tall It certainly wasn't getting off the floor the similarity between dinosaurs and birds was far more than superficial day eventually a branch of small theropod dinosaurs evolved into the birds that fly around today but curator Adam Smith says if we concentrate on flight alone it gets quite difficult to know exactly which branch of the dinosaurs became our birds light is really important and that's why evolves many times some of the earliest plying dinosaurs such as the micro up to actually had or when not to for when in fact the dinosaurs and even the strangest way that dinosaurs evolved flight some didn't even use feathers a tall This is a replica of a dinosaur called by the e.t. Has a different type of wing much more like a bats wing with a membrane and that membrane was supported by long fingers it also has bird like Posey feathers on its head and along its back and on its body now all birds use feathers to fly so each e is certainly not the direct ancestor of modern day birds but birds at the end of the Cretaceous had already started to evolve some of the features that distinguish them from the theropod dinosaurs so in the case of this bird here the competition is so on it it has a big. Brothers on its arms and on its tail but it also has huge hangs with 3 fingered hands and clones and these are obviously dinosaur like out of his dick We think that something like Archaeopteryx or Microraptor might have been the ancestor of birds but they were around the same time exactly the case about $120.00. 5000000 years ago they all share a common ancestor it is a very complicated story and that delineation between where the dinosaur ends and a bird begins is getting more and more blurred all the time so in the evolution of dinosaurs there's still more that we don't know that we didn't which is how I like my sites Adam Smith and in that report from bulletin hall in Nottingham links on our Web page the displayed colors of some feathers was one aspect that Rory dwells on there who hasn't been dazzled at some time by their fans hail a peacock with its shimmering blues turquoises and golds the feathers of another family of birds the South American kid singles are the inspiration for a new approach to colors I saw recently in Zurich like peacock tail feathers and butterfly wings the Katinka sparkling Blues have nothing to do with colored pigments and everything to do with their internal structure but unlike peacocks and butterflies which use ordered a raise of crystalline protein to reflect selected colors the could think as rely on random tangles of nano scopic barbs inside the feathery filaments the easier it researchers have captured this effect in nano sponge is made of metallic alloys intrigued to see the results and to understand the complex physics underlying it I dropped in on their labs I'm having landscape and working at the Laboratory for not a mythology at age 3 Rick. So. We have. Just give you an idea so this looks very shortly and then see this fantastic green move this is yet meeting green color Yes it went so this one's got an amazing blue Yes this is this beautiful color and they are how thin he lay on top is just 300 Nonna meters 300 nanometers so not even a micron not even Micron there's no 100th the width or something of a human hand and then the blue layer. And you actually see the blue color this is just 16 on a meters that's extraordinary I mean I think the colors remind me of the kinds of colors you see on a bus or flight wings or all beetle shells exactly showing colors so this colors really structural colors and so far no mention of surface plasma arms which I regard as a plus there the physics that underlies the power of this fantastically thin layer way less than a wavelength of light to impose its will on the spectrum the structures heading was showing me are effectively nano sponge is network