Should we be worried about the plague?

This week, Claudia is joined in the studio by Clare Wilson, Science writer at The i Paper.

After a 28-young woman who was studying infectious diseases in a lab in Siberia has died from pneumonia, Health Check takes an in-depth look at the plague, examines what we know about what has happened and asks how worried we should be about this news.

A new series of papers from the journal, The Lancet, argue that the scale of young people’s digital media use and emerging evidence of harm justify preventative action now. Claudia Hammond speaks to Amy Orben, Research Professor at the University of Cambridge to discuss why it is difficult to gather evidence of harm, whether there is sufficient evidence of harm to encourage intervention and what these potential interventions could be to keep social media usage safe and moderate.

Researchers have developed a ‘speech clock’ which can analyse a person’s voice and estimate their biological age from hundreds of acoustic and linguistic characteristics of their speech. Using machine learning, they recorded the voices of nearly 3000 participants from Latin America and analysed hundreds of features capturing how people speak and what they say. Machine learning models then generated an individual speech age gap - the difference between a person’s speech-predicted age and their actual age - which is associated with multiple independent markers of biological aging, brain health, cognition, social adversity and dementia. The results have just been published in the journal Science Advances. Claudia looks at the potential implications of this ‘speech clock’ and asks how useful it is to measure biological aging.

And does sleeping with your dog disrupt your sleep? We tend to think that dogs disturb the sleep of humans, but not much research been done and previously results have been conflicting. A new study conducted in Ontario and published in PLOS One examines this very question, which Claudia discusses with studio guest Clare.

Presenter: Claudia Hammond

Producers: Jonathan Blackwell and Helena Selby