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by **Pavy Crevis** on Sat Jan 14, 2006 12:00 pm

by **Pavy Crevis** on Sat Jan 14, 2006 12:00 pm

BBC Horizon - Space Tourists
Thursday 12th January 2006

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... pace.shtml The full write up from this link is below.

Information

Over 40 years ago man first went into space. Ever since ordinary people have dreamt of getting there themselves. But after several false starts, a group of space obsessed entrepreneurs believe the first commercial flights into the final frontier are only a few years away.

The concept of space tourism is not new. Following the enormous achievements made by the Americans and Russians during the 1960s many of us assumed that it was only a matter of time before it was the turn of tourists. These dreams were fuelled even further when the era's new celebrities – the astronauts – returned with tales of life-changing experiences. Space fever was so intense that by 1969 Pan-Am, one of the world's most respected airlines, opened a waiting list for a moon shuttle. It was only a concept on a drawing board but almost 100,000 people signed up.

The problem was that going to space was incredibly expensive. The vehicles being sent into space were only used once so every time a rocket lifted off millions of dollars effectively went up in flames. In order for space tourism to become a reality, that needed to change.

Budding space tourists were certain that the space shuttle was the answer to their dreams. It was reusable and capable of making several trips a year. Even the commercial world was inspired by the shuttle and in 1985 a California company started offering trips to space on a craft that would be ready for lift off in 1992.

In 1986 a civilian finally made it onto the launch pad when NASA put school teacher Christa McAuliffe on board the shuttle Challenger. But just over a minute into the mission Challenger exploded and the entire crew was killed. The accident had an immediate impact. Commercial ventures were cancelled.

It wasn't until ten years later that the dream of space tourism was revived by space entrepreneur Peter Diamandis. Convinced that it was the job of the commercial world to open the space frontier for the masses, Diamandis established the X Prize. The prize would eventually offer $10 million for the first craft to make it to sub orbital space – 62 miles above the earth – twice in 14 days.

The race attracted over 20 competitors. The first person to join up was Burt Rutan, one of the world's most prolific aircraft designers.

There was also Chuck Lauer, a former property developer who had co-founded Rocketplane Ltd. Rocketplane's approach was to build a spaceship by modifying a Lear Jet.

John Carmack, a 34 year-old computer games millionaire, signed up with his company Armadillo Aerospace. Carmack and his crew of volunteers only worked part-time but were attempting to build a vertical take-off and landing vehicle from scratch.

Most of the entrants had big ideas, but little money or concrete plans.

Burt Rutan decided to spend the first few years working in secret on his project. He eventually came up with a design he was certain could do the job, especially as it addressed two of the most dangerous aspects of space flight, lift-off and re-entry.

To avoid the dangers of a ground launch, which uses tons of highly explosive fuel, Rutan designed a carrier aeroplane that would carry his craft, SpaceShipOne, to 47,000 feet to be launched. To handle the dangerous g-force and heat encountered on re-entry, Rutan came up with the idea of using twin tails that would fold at a 90° angle. This would create incredible drag to slow the ship down. In effect the ship would go up like a bullet and come down like a shuttlecock.

With the backing of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, Rutan built his ship and in June 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first commercial manned craft in space. Three months later it completed the task again, twice in two weeks, and claimed the $10million X Prize.

Now Rutan and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson have formed a partnership to build the next generation of craft capable of taking several passengers. Branson's new company, Virgin Galactic, is already selling return tickets to space for $200,000. And even though the new craft that will take the first space tourists hasn't yet been built, the company has taken $10million in deposits.

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by **Claud1o** on Wed Jan 18, 2006 6:51 pm

Cheers Pavy!

by **Pavy Crevis** on Wed Jan 18, 2006 11:08 pm

No problem matey

No Natural World yet, and by the end of tonight there will have been three episodes this year. I'll grab what I can, but I was hoping for a 52 episode thread! By sheer coincidence, you have made 52 posts to date!

by **Pavy Crevis** on Sun Jan 22, 2006 10:53 am

BBC Horizon - Waiting for a Heartbeat
Thursday 19th January 2006

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... beat.shtml The full write up from this link is below.

Information

Rachel is just 25, but already she has suffered six miscarriages. She represents the 1% of women who struggle to give birth to a live baby. She is a patient at St Mary's Hospital in London where, in Europe's largest recurrent miscarriage clinic, a team of dedicated scientists offer women like Rachel the hope of a precious new life.

Miscarriage is surprisingly common, with as many as half of all fertilised eggs failing to develop into a foetus that survives to birth. But recurrent miscarriage, when a woman's body hits the self-destruct button time and again, is a reproductive phenomenon that medical science is battling to understand.

A woman who miscarries once may be told by her doctors that her loss was a random event, probably the result of a one-off chromosome abnormality in her foetus – unlikely be repeated – and that she and her partner should try again for a child. But the women who come to Professor Lesley Regan's Clinic at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington will usually have tried, and failed, to produce a live baby at least three times.

The challenge for Professor Regan's team is to determine which of these women have simply been unlucky several times in a row, and which are carrying an underlying medical condition that could explain their losses and may, more importantly, be treatable.

Over the course of a year, the Recurrent Miscarriage Clinic sees up to 1,000 new patients – patients like Joanne and Naomi. Both in their 30s, they have lost eight pregnancies between them. In the laboratories at St Mary's, their blood is put through a barrage of tests, hunting for the tell-tale signs of abnormality and any clues to explain their losses.

The scientists are on the trail of genetic defects which, when passed from parent to embryo, can disrupt the blueprint of life from the very start. They look for imbalances in the hormones that drive pregnancy from conception to delivery. Blood-clotting disorders have been identified that can restrict the vital flow of oxygen and nutrients between mother and baby.

And there may even be elements in a women's immune system that can attack the cells of her embryo and placenta as they develop. But the painstaking research into so many failed pregnancies, while thorough, is destined to reveal an underlying condition in fewer than 50% of cases.

For Joanne the news of her test results is disappointing. Her blood has revealed nothing unusual to account for her losses. But while she feels deflated, Professor Regan is at pains to point out that being told nothing appears to be wrong should be good news. Statistically, it has been shown that patients are more likely to be successful in the future if their test results come back negative. However for Joanne and husband Dave, the prospect of embarking on another pregnancy, with no problem diagnosed, remains daunting.

When Naomi and her husband Paul return to St Mary's for their blood results, they are surprised to learn that Naomi does in fact carry an antibody disorder which could explain their three losses. When lupus anticoagulant is present in a woman's blood it has a doubly negative effect in pregnancy. In the very early stages, it can attack the cells at the interface between embryo and uterus and cause the process of implantation – when the tiny embryo embeds itself into the lining of the womb – to fail, resulting in miscarriage.

These antibodies also cause the woman's blood to be thicker than normal. In later pregnancy (after eight to nine weeks) this can cause blood clots to form in the tiny vessels of the placenta, restricting the flow of vital nutrients and oxygen between mother and baby.

In Naomi's next pregnancy she will be given aspirin to thin the blood and daily injections of heparin, another blood-thinning drug which will also prevent the lupus anticoagulant antibodies attacking the cells of her developing pregnancy and improve the blood flow through the placenta. With treatment, Naomi and Paul's chances of having a successful pregnancy will rise from 10% to around 70%.

Rachel has had six miscarriages. Three years after being referred to the clinic, she still doesn't know why. When she falls pregnant for the seventh time, she returns to St Mary's to see what her consultant, Raj Rai, can do to prevent yet another miscarriage. Although Rachel's test results have failed to identify a specific cause for her losses, Raj Rai believes that something is preventing Rachel's embryos implanting properly.

In Rachel's previous two pregnancies, Raj Rai prescribed drugs to promote better implantation, but as those pregnancies also failed, this time he decides to add another drug, a steroid, to her treatment. He believes that steroids, given in the first trimester of pregnancy, will suppress the negative effects of certain chemical messengers within the lining of Rachel's womb. But the use of steroids in treating miscarriage is controversial. Their effectiveness has yet to be proven in a clinical trial and there are known side-effects.

Rachel's previous pregnancies have all ended by the 11th week. As her seventh pregnancy progresses towards and past that danger zone, the realisation slowly dawns that, this time, she and her husband Gary may finally have the baby they've waited seven years for.

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by **Pavy Crevis** on Sat Jan 28, 2006 10:58 am

BBC Horizon - The War on Science
Thursday 26th January 2006

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... /war.shtml The full write up from this link is below.

Information

When Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution nearly 150 years ago, he shattered the dominant belief of his day – that humans were the product of divine creation. Through his observations of nature, Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection. This caused uproar. After all, if the story of creation could be doubted, so too could the existence of the creator. Ever since its proposal, this cornerstone of biology has sustained wave after wave of attack. Now some scientists fear it is facing the most formidable challenge yet: a controversial new theory called intelligent design.

In the late 1980s Phillip Johnson, a renowned lawyer and born-again Christian, began to develop a strategy to challenge Darwin. To Johnson, the evidence for natural selection was poor. He also believed that by explaining the world only through material processes was inherently atheistic. If there was a god, science would never be able to discover it.

Johnson recruited other Darwin doubters, including biochemist Professor Michael Behe, mathematician Dr William Dembski, and philosopher of science Dr Stephen Meyer. These scientists developed the theory of intelligent design (ID) which claims that certain features of the natural world are best explained as the result of an intelligent being. To him, the presence of miniature machines and digital information found in living cells are evidence of a supernatural creator. Throughout the 90s, the ID movement took to disseminating articles, books and DVDs and organising conferences all over the world.

To its supporters, intelligent design heralds a revolution in science and the movement is fast gaining political clout. Not only does it have the support of the President of the United States, it is on the verge of being introduced to science classes across the nation. However, its many critics, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, fear that it cloaks a religious motive – to replace science with god.

Throughout the 20th century Christian groups resisted the theory of evolution. Many US states did not teach it until 1968 when the Supreme Court ruled that banning the teaching of evolution contravened the first amendment of the constitution of America, the separation of church and state. It was however still legal to teach religion as part of science class until the Edwards vs. Aguillard case in 1987, where mentioning a theory called 'creation science' in biology lessons was also deemed unconstitutional. This left evolution as the only theory of biological origin that science teachers were allowed to teach.

In 2005, the school board of Dover, a small farming community in western Pennsylvania, became the first in America to adopt the theory of intelligent design. The move divided the community and the small town became the centre of national attention. The school board voted to teach the ninth grade biology class that there are gaps and problems with the theory of evolution and to present intelligent design as an alternative.
Dover science teacher Bryan Rehm and his wife Christy believed that this new policy was not only anti-science, but religious and therefore unconstitutional. By promoting religion it was a violation of the law passed in 1987. The Rehms and nine other parents and teachers filed a law suit against the school board. Neighbour was pitted against neighbour in the first legal challenge to intelligent design.

After 40 days of trial, Judge John E Jones III ruled against the school board, stating: "We have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

Evolution supporters heralded this victory as the damning blow to the intelligent design movement. However, as history shows, law suits have little effect on the support for creationism in a country where over 50% of citizens believe that God created humans in their present form, the way the bible describes it.*

*Gallup national poll September 2005
Further reading:

Anti intelligent design:

Eugenie Scott - Evolution Vs. Creationism Kenneth Miller - Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution
Pro intelligent design:

Michael Behe - Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution Phillip Johnson - Darwin on Trial

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by **Claud1o** on Sat Jan 28, 2006 11:33 am

Click

by **Pavy Crevis** on Wed Feb 08, 2006 8:06 am

BBC Horizon - Lost City of New Orleans
Thursday 2nd February 2006

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... eans.shtml The full write up from this link is below.

Information

Modern day New Orleans was a city that defied the odds. Built on a mosquito-infested swamp surrounded by water, it sits in a bowl 2.5m below sea-level. Its very existence seemed proof of the triumph of engineering over nature.

The storm hits
But on the 29 August 2005 the city took a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina and overnight turned into a Venice from hell. In the chaos that followed the worst natural disaster in American history, a forensic investigation has begun to find out what went wrong and why. Scientists are now confronting the real possibility that New Orleans may be the first of many cities to face extinction.

The forensic analysis
Professor Ivor Van Heerden of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Centre used computer modelling to simulate hurricane paths across New Orleans. He had been appointed by the state to discover why New Orleans flooded so catastrophically and had his own unique methods of gathering data. By collecting eye-witness testimonies from residents and the stopped clocks from their flooded homes, Van Heerden pieced together a timeline of the levee breaches. He also took samples from the breach sites for analysis.

His results were shocking. He believed they showed that there was a design fault in the levees. "The old system that led to the design and the building of them, the funding, the decision making process, didn't work. We've got to change that and part of that is going to be for the federal government and the engineers corps to step up to the plate and say we screwed up."

The coast is disappearing into the sea
Over the years the levees and dams stopped annual floods from the Mississippi River. As a result sediments that were brought down by the river to replenish the land were prevented from reaching their natural destination. Gradually Louisiana started to lose its coast. Today it has the highest rate of coastal land loss in North America. Every 20 minutes an area the size of Wembley stadium is swallowed up by the sea.

Shea Penland, a coastal geologist at the University of New Orleans, knows every inlet, every cove and every stretch of marsh that surrounds the city. He also knows that Louisiana's wetlands, thought of as wasteland for years, are in fact critical to the survival of the city. Providing protection against storm surges, these wetlands are a natural defence against the onslaught of hurricanes. As he says: "The first line of defence isn't the levee in your backyard, the first line of defence is that marsh in your back yard and we're learning what that means."

After the disaster, he chartered a seaplane to investigate the overnight loss to Louisiana's precious wetlands. What he discovered sounded like the death knoll for the city. In just one night, Louisiana had lost three-quarters of the wetland that it usually loses in one year. Without this protection, New Orleans is a sitting duck against future storms.

And the problems don't just stop there. The city itself is sinking. Since 1878 it has dropped by 4.5m, one of the highest rates of subsidence in the entire United States. Once again it's mainly human intervention that is to blame. According to Professor Harry Roberts, a geologist at the Louisiana State University: "It's been accelerated by man's efforts to keep the water out of the city. When you pump the water out of those kinds of soils they start to collapse and even more importantly the organic material oxidises and goes away so you've taken out one component of the soil, and all that adds up to subsidence."

The future
The city will have to change to survive. There will have to be a paradigm shift in the thinking about the environment surrounding the city. What was once ignored as wasteland, will now have to be protected.

Radical plans are also underway for the city itself. Local urban planner Professor Bruce Sharky believes that the survival of the city is dependent on preserving its lowest lying areas, its devastated residential areas, as parkland. Areas like the Lower 9th Ward, built 2.5m below sea-level and where hundreds of people died, will exist no more. They will be turned into green spaces, serving both as buffers against future flood waters and as a reminder that sometimes nature should be left alone.

The residents of New Orleans who lived in the Lower 9th are fighting this idea but ultimately the survival of the city for future generations may depend on it.

The future for New Orleans is today uncertain. The city is sinking city, sea levels are rising, and there is an increased intensity of hurricanes. The challenges ahead are enormous, but in some form New Orleans will be rebuilt. However, one lesson will reverberate around the world – humankind cannot take on mother nature and think it can win every time.

"For man as a species we have to respect mother nature," says Dr Penland. "We have to realise that there are boundaries that have been given to us that we have to respect and our technology cannot be 100% successful all of the time."

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by **Pavy Crevis** on Tue Feb 21, 2006 9:55 am

BBC Horizon - Most of our Universe is Missing
Thursday 9th February 2006

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... sing.shtml The full write up from this link is below.

Information

There was a time, not so long ago, when science seemed to understand how the universe worked. Everything – us, the Earth, the stars and even exotic-sounding supernovae – was made of atoms which were all created at time-zero: the Big Bang. In between the atoms was nothing, a void: quite literally, 'space'.

But recently things have started to unravel. There is, it seems, a lot more to the universe than meets the eye. According to the best estimates, we only really know what about 4% of it is made of. But if only 4% is made of atoms, what about the rest? The rest is made of mysterious entities about which very little is understood, with equally mysterious names: dark matter and dark energy.

The accidental discovery
In 1974 the astronomer Vera Rubin, was working on a project investigating stars at the outer edges of galaxies. What she discovered was quite a surprise.

Shortly after the apple fell on his head, Newton famously declared that gravity was 'universal'. An apple falling on Earth obeys the same mathematical rules as an apple falling on the other side of the Universe. In the same way that the Sun controls the orbiting planets by exerting gravity on them, a spiral galaxy must be controlled by the gravity-giving black hole at its centre.

It has long been known that Pluto, at the edge of our solar system, travels much slower than Mercury, close to the Sun. In fact observations like these allowed Newton to pin down his laws in the 17th century. When Vera Rubin did her work on galaxies she expected to find that as you reach the edge of a galaxy the stars would be moving much slower than those close to the centre. But it didn't work out like that at all.

She found that almost all of the stars in spiral galaxies are racing around the centre at approximately the same speed. This was very strange. Could it be that Newton's laws weren't really universal and didn't apply in galaxies?

Questioning Newton seemed unthinkable, so the majority of scientists went down a different route altogether. Rather than variable gravity, they argued, there had to be something else in galaxies, something that was providing extra gravity. With extra gravity, the stars would be pulled harder, and would travel faster – as Rubin's observations suggested. And the name they gave to this extra stuff? Dark matter.

But what is dark matter?
Two men at Princeton University – Professors Peebles and Ostriker – looked further into dark matter. They even suggested that there was at least 10 times more of it than there was ordinary matter. But despite its growing acceptance, dark matter's real identity remained completely unknown. Nothing that particle physics came up with appeared to fit the bill. Even the newly-discovered neutrino had the wrong characteristics.

What was needed was something with mass but also something which does not interact with ordinary matter. Professor Tim Sumner from the Imperial College London believed he had the answer – a new, hypothetical particle called the neutralino. It is thought to have the right mass and exist in suitably vast quantities – but has never been detected.

If dark matter is everywhere in our galaxy, then it must be present here on Earth. In fact thousands of tonnes of the stuff must be passing through the Earth every day. It doesn't interact with ordinary matter, so it can pass straight through it, whatever 'it' is: us, the Earth, everything we're familiar with.

The bottom of a mine, away from the cosmic rays and atmospheric particles on the surface, is the perfect place to try to detect a signal. So that's exactly what Professor Sumner tried to do, with a detector located at the bottom of Europe's deepest mine on the coast in Cleveland, northern England.

If his team detected a neutralino, then a Nobel Prize would surely follow. But the search has so far proved fruitless.

Doubting Newton
Not everyone was so keen though. In 1974, while most scientists decided to pursue dark matter, Israeli astrophysicist Professor Milgrom tried something even more audacious – he tried to rewrite Newton's laws of gravity. Knowing this wouldn't exactly be welcomed by the rest of the community, he worked at his theory in private until he was ready to unleash it on the world in 1981.

He called it Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and used it to showed how gravity could be a little stronger than previously thought, across the huge distances that galaxies cover.

But surely Newton couldn't have been wrong? Milgrom continued to work on the theory and has since begun to attract admirers and recruit like-minded people. The longer the identity of dark matter remains a mystery, the more credence will be given to his ideas.

A deeper mystery
In 1997 Professor Saul Perlmutter opened another can of worms. While looking at the expansion of the universe, he accidentally discovered that not only were all stars and galaxies moving away from each other, they were doing so at greater and greater speeds.

This meant that our future selves might one day look up to a sky without stars (they'd all be too far away). It also meant that 'something' was pushing the stars apart. This anti-gravity force was completely new to science, but again what it actually was remained a mystery. It did however have a name: dark energy.

It turned out that the universe is 4% ordinary matter, 21% dark matter and 75% dark energy. That's a lot of stuff that no one really understands. Inevitably then, this Standard Model has its sceptics – not everyone believes that such a huge and important set of theories can be based on so little physical evidence.

Professor Mike Disney from Cardiff University even went as far as to suggest that this wasn't "physics at all – just fairies at the bottom of the garden".

In response the dark matter believers, led by Professor Carlos Frenk at Durham University, have produced impressive computer simulations of the Universe. These apparently show that dark matter and dark energy have been vital to the development of the Universe. Without their influence the galaxies, stars and planets, and indeed life itself, would never have come to be.

The results of the WMAP satellite survey appear to confirm the quantity of each of the 'dark' components. So despite the growing popularity of Milgrom's MOND idea in some quarters, dark matter still has the backing of the vast majority of scientists.

The standard model, with its officially approved mix of atoms, dark matter and dark energy, is the latest in a long line of brilliant ideas. Every civilisation since the year dot has had its own cosmological model. Every few decades or centuries, it has been replaced by something better.

Whether we are the privileged generation living in the time of the right idea remains to be seen. Is dark matter here to stay?

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by **Adam Cook** on Sun Mar 19, 2006 12:09 pm

ed2k://|file|Horizon.2006.Winning_Gold_ ... 374D5B94|/

Winning Gold in 2012: A Horizon Special
How can science produce champions for the London Olympics?
Saturday, 9.15pm BBC Two

no details yet on the bbc page, will add when they do, and add shots etc too. just rlsing now.

6.9

by **Claud1o** on Sun Mar 19, 2006 12:11 pm

Interesting! Thanks

by **Pavy Crevis** on Sun Mar 19, 2006 7:50 pm

Crikey, didn't even know it was on. Thanks.

by **jcesmi** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 7:44 pm

thx very much - great releases!

by **CapsNum** on Mon Mar 27, 2006 8:43 pm

This series and PLANET EARTH are phenomenal!
Thx for the releases folks! :smokin:

by **Pavy Crevis** on Wed Jun 14, 2006 1:34 pm

BBC Horizon - The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow
Thursday 08th June 2006

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... mple.shtml The full write up from this link is below.

Information

Dr Temple Grandin has a legendary ability to read the animal mind and understand animal behaviour when no one else can. But this is no feat of telepathy; her explanation is simple. She's convinced she experiences the world much as an animal does and that it's all down to her autistic brain.

Since the 1940s, when Temple was born, our understanding of autism has come a long way. For years during the fifties and sixties many psychologists and doctors believed that the condition was an emotional disorder, the product of a disturbed childhood.

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim became famous for his theory that children with autism exhibited the symptoms of the condition because their mothers had unconsciously rejected them as babies and young children. Children, he argued, could be cured with psychotherapy.

It wasn't until psychologists such as Bernard Rimland started to put forward evidence for a biological cause of autism that the old ideas lost their public appeal.

Today, neurologists like Professor Nancy Minshew are using brain scanning techniques to investigate the brains of people with autism. As yet it is impossible to diagnose autism based on a brain scan of an individual, but the results do indicate that the brain is different in someone with autism and that this is the real cause of the condition.

When Temple was a baby, research into autism was in its infancy and the doctors didn't even have a name for her condition. Many children like her spent their whole lives in an institution. Temple was lucky, but despite intensive tutoring and care it took her many years to learn basic skills. To this day, socialising continues to be a struggle for her.

For her and many others with autism the condition makes it very difficult to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. To Temple the world is an unpredictable and frightening place.

Temple believes she experiences life like a prey animal in the wild. Her emotions are much simpler than most people's and she feels constantly anxious – always alert and looking for danger. It's this struggle with overwhelming anxiety that led her to discover just how much she has in common with animals and, in particular, cows.

During a summer spent on her aunt's ranch, when she was 16, she began to notice that nervous cattle seemed to calm down when they entered a piece of equipment called a squeeze chute.

Designed to hold the cattle still, whilst they received veterinary treatment, the wooden contraption clamped the cows along either side of the body. As the sides squeezed their flanks, Temple noticed several of the cows become visibly relaxed and calm.

Eager to find a way to conquer her own anxiety she asked her aunt to operate the chute on her. The result was a revelation. Temple felt much calmer and the effect lasted for several hours afterwards.

Inspired by her experiences on the ranch, she built her own human squeeze machine at home. She still has one installed in her bedroom.

There is a scientific explanation for what seems like her quirky behaviour. Psychologists have discovered evidence to suggest that the effects of deep pressure on the body are very real and can be beneficial and calming for many people with autism.

Twenty years ago Temple did something no one with autism had ever done before. She wrote an autobiography. It was her account of what it was like to grow up with autism.

Since then she has written several other books. For parents and scientists working in the field of autism her words are a revelation, giving them an invaluable understanding and insight into the autistic mind.

For Temple, though, her greatest achievements are in the field of animal welfare.

The slaughterhouse seems an unlikely place to look for an animal lover like Temple but it's here that she has carved a unique career. Until Temple stormed on to the scene, in the 1970s, animal welfare was an unheard of phrase in the meat industry. The animals were destined for slaughter and no one cared what happened to them along the way.

But Temple has changed all that. Using her unique ability to observe the world through an animal's eye she has fundamentally redesigned the equipment and buildings where they are held and slaughtered. Today her advice is sought from around the world and half the cattle in the US go to their deaths in humane equipment designed by her.

Labelled 'retarded' at three years old, Temple didn't learn to speak until she was five. But at nearly 60 she's an associate professor of animal science, a best-selling author and the most famous autistic woman on the planet.

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Comments: The are a few glitches during the programme.

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BBC Horizon - 2006

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