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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service, the show that answers your science questions. I'm Caroline Steele, and I'm standing in a barn in Switzerland, watching two scientists run up a rickety ladder to gather some very precious cargo. So we have the four juvenile owls now here in our clothes bags, and we will... Now start to measure them and take them.
Oh my gosh, so in that space of time, like a minute, you caught four owls. Baby owls. And you are carrying three dead rodents? Yeah, exactly. So that's their food reserve. So we will now determine the species, measure them, weight them, so we just have a rough idea of what they eat. We're here thanks to a question from one of you, which you're probably going to think has nothing to do with owls.
But stick with me, all will become clear later in the show. This week's listener happens to live quite close to home, so we jumped on a train to meet her in person. My name is Rachel. I live in Cambridge in the UK. My question for CrowdScience is how does Bluetooth work? Was there any particular moment where you thought of this question?
Yeah, so on my commute to work, I cycle through the fields in Cambridge and listen to a podcast or some music along my journey. And I was just wondering, how does my phone connect to a device like my headphones and transmit such a clear signal? We're often in a room with multiple people. They've connected to their headphones. And how do the devices not get their metaphorical wires crossed?
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Chapter 2: How does Bluetooth technology work for wireless headphones?
And then two years later, we went worldwide to launch the system. And then we didn't have a really commercial name. So Bluetooth was stuck and it was never changed anymore.
So it comes from a Danish king from thousands of years ago. Right, a Viking king.
And well, we made a little bit of a story around it because he spread out Christianity in the Scandinavian world, in Norway, Sweden, Denmark. And then we said, okay, instead of fighting each other, he made the people communicate with each other. And that's what Bluetooth does as well.
And what about the logo, which to me is sort of crisscrossing triangles, or to me it looks like a bow tie on its side.
Right. And the logo, yeah, it actually consists of two parts, and it comes from the rune alphabet. One part is really a bee, bee from Bluetooth, but actually his first name is Harald. And Harald in the rune alphabet is written as a pole with an X. So if you have a pole and an X and you merge that with the B, then you get the logo which you see today.
Who knew the Bluetooth logo is actually a hidden set of initials? It's made by combining two runes, letters from an ancient Scandinavian alphabet, an H, which is represented by a cross with a vertical line through the middle, and a triangular capital B laid on top. So back in the summer of 1994, did YARP expect Bluetooth to really take off?
No, no, no. I was a happy engineer just working with new scientific challenges. But then at a certain moment in 2006, I read an article and it said, okay, there are 1 billion Bluetooth devices shipped. And then I thought, oh, wait a minute, this is all very serious. This will not go away anymore. And I think there are like six or seven billion devices every year shipped now.
That's so many devices. Oh, my gosh.
But also, some years ago, I bought a sauna. And the sauna had Bluetooth inside, so I can listen to podcasts while in the sauna.
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