Discovery
759 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★ - 894 ratingsExplorations in the world of science.
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Plant based promises and sustainability
August 01, 2022 19:32 - 28 minutes - 12.9 MBIn Plant Based Promises, Giles Yeo a foodie and academic at Cambridge University, asks how sustainable are commercial plant based products? This is a fast growing sector with a potential value of $162 billion by 2030. Giles travels to the Netherlands Food Valley to look at companies developing plant based alternatives and to find out what role they have to play in changing diets. And Giles designs his own plant based Yeo Deli range online but discovers that new markets are already causing sh...
Plant based promises, rise of the plant based burger
July 25, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBIn Plant Based Promises, foodie, researcher and broadcaster Giles Yeo looks at the science behind plant based diets and the increasing number of plant based products appearing in supermarkets and restaurants. The market for plant based products could be worth $162 billion in the next ten years and Giles asks how sustainable and healthy the products are and the role they play in decreasing the world's carbon footprint. Globally food production accounts for about 30% of greenhouse gases. In t...
The mysterious particles of physics, part 3
July 18, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBThe smaller the thing you look at, the bigger the microscope you need to use. That’s why the circular Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they discovered the Higgs boson is 27 kilometres long, and its detectors tens of metres across. But to dig deeper still into the secrets of the Universe, they’re already talking about another machine 4 times bigger, to be built by the middle of the century. Roland Pease asks if it’s worth it. Image: CMS Beampipe removal LS2 2019 (Credit: Maximilien Brice...
The mysterious particles of physics, part 2
July 11, 2022 19:32 - 33 minutes - 15.3 MBEpisode 2: Lost in the Dark Physics is getting a good understanding of atoms, but embarrassingly they’re only a minor part of the Universe. Far more of it is made of something heavy and dark, so-called dark matter. The scientists who discovered the Higgs boson ten years ago thought they’d also create dark matter in the underground atom smasher at CERN. But they haven’t seen it yet. Roland Pease joins them as they redouble their efforts at the upgraded Large Hadron Collider, and travels to B...
The mysterious particles of physics, part 1
July 04, 2022 19:32 - 30 minutes - 13.8 MBThe machine that discovered the Higgs Boson 10 years ago is about to restart after a massive upgrade, to dig deeper into the heart of matter and the nature of the Universe. Roland Pease returns to CERN’s 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) dug deeper under the Swiss-French border to meet the scientists wondering why the Universe is the way it is. He hears why the Nobel-prize winning discovery of the “Higgs Particle” remains a cornerstone of the current understanding of the nature of ma...
The Life Scientific: Adam Hart
June 27, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBAnt-loving professor, Adam Hart, shares his passion for leaf cutting ants with Jim Al Khalili. Why do they put leaves in piles for other ants to pick up? Talking at the Hay Festival, Adam describes the experiments he designed to test the intelligence of the hive mind. When does a waggle dance become a tremble dance? And how do the honey bees know when this moment should be? We like the phrase ‘as busy as a bee’. In fact, bees spend a lot of time doing nothing at all, a sensible strategy fr...
The Life Scientific: Jacinta Tan
June 20, 2022 20:00 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBWhen a person with severe anorexia nervosa refuses food, the very treatment they need to survive, is that refusal carefully considered and rational, as it can appear to those around them? Or is it really the illness that’s causing them to say ‘no’? This is one of the thorny ethical dilemmas that Jacinta Tan has wrestled with over the course of her career. She is deeply curious about the mind, and has spent hundreds of hours sitting with people with anorexia nervosa, not persuading them to e...
The Life Scientific: Pete Smith
June 13, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBPete Smith is very down to earth. Not least because he’s interested in soil and the vital role it plays in helping us to feed the world, mitigate climate change and maintain a rich diversity of species on planet earth. He was born in a pub and failed the 11+ exam (designed to identify bright children just like him) but he became a distinguished professor nonetheless. Tackling climate change in isolation is a mistake, he says. We need to consider all the challenges facing humanity and identif...
The colour conundrum
June 06, 2022 20:00 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBThe world is full of colour! But, listener Maya Crocombe wonders ‘how do we see colour and why are some people colour blind?’ Dr Rutherford and professor Fry set out to understand how special light-sensitive cells in our eyes start the process of colour perception, why people sometimes have very different experiences of colour and whether, in the end, colour is really just ‘in our heads’. Dr Gabriele Jordan from Newcastle University explains why lots of men struggle to discriminate between...
The Turn of the Tide
May 30, 2022 20:00 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBMathematician Hannah Fry and geneticist Adam Rutherford investigate your everyday science queries. Today, they get stuck into two questions about tides. Lynn Godson wants to know why isn’t high tide at the same time at all points around the coast? Whilst Tim Mosedale asks, could we ever harness tidal power commercially? Did you think tides are caused by the pull of the Moon? And that they come in and out twice a day? Well, yes, that’s true but it turns out there’s so much more to it than tha...
The Evidence: The nature of mental health
May 28, 2022 19:06 - 50 minutes - 22.9 MBToday The Evidence goes green as Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts discuss plant power, how nature and the natural environment affect our mental health. Produced in collaboration with Wellcome Collection and recorded in front of a live audience in the Reading Room at Wellcome Collection in London, the programme addresses that widely-held view, even intuition, that plants and nature directly impact on our emotional wellbeing. As always, Claudia and her panel of experts are intereste...
The Shocking White Hair
May 23, 2022 20:00 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBWhy does human hair go grey and is it ever possible for it to go white overnight from shock? Hannah and Adam explore why hair goes grey, how much stressful life events and a lack of sleep can speed up the process. They hear from the pilot whose hair turned white after a flight where all 4 of his engines failed after flying through a volcanic ash cloud - was the shock responsible? They also uncover new research which has shown it's possible for greying hair to return to its natural colour and...
Surprising Symmetries
May 16, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBTwo eyes, two arms, two legs - we’re roughly symmetrical on the outside, but inside we’re all over the place! We just have one heart, which is usually on the left, one liver on the right, one spleen and one appendix….‘Why is that?’ wonders listener Joanne. Our science sleuths discover that being symmetrical down the middle - at least on the outside - is by far the most common body plan across the animal kingdom. Professor Sebastian Shimeld from the University of Oxford takes us on a journey ...
Surprising symmetries
May 16, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBTwo eyes, two arms, two legs - we are roughly symmetrical on the outside, but inside we are all over the place! We just have one heart, which is usually on the left, one liver on the right, one spleen and one appendix. "Why is that?" wonders listener Joanne. Our science sleuths discover that being symmetrical down the middle - at least on the outside - is by far the most common body plan across the animal kingdom. Professor Sebastian Shimeld from the University of Oxford takes us on a journ...
The Weird Waves of Wi-Fi
May 09, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBWe use Wi-Fi every day, but do you know how it works? “Is it waves and science or just some mystical magical force?” wonders listener Abby. Well, our science sleuths are on the case. To help them navigate the strange realm of electromagnetic waves they are joined by Andrew Nix, Professor of Wireless Communication Systems from the University of Bristol. He explains why your wi-fi router won’t heat up your baked beans, but your microwave will. Andrea Goldsmith, Professor of Electrical and Com...
The weird waves of wi-fi
May 09, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBWe use wi-fi every day, but do you know how it works? “Is it waves and science or just some mystical magical force?” wonders listener Abby. Well, our science sleuths are on the case. To help them navigate the strange realm of electromagnetic waves they are joined by Andrew Nix, Professor of Wireless Communication Systems from the University of Bristol. He explains why your wi-fi router won’t heat up your baked beans, but your microwave will. Andrea Goldsmith, Professor of Electrical and Co...
The Mystery of the Teenage Brain
May 02, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MB‘Why are teens prone to risky behaviour?’ asks Dr Mark Gallaway, ‘especially when with their friends?’ 13 year old Emma wonders why she’s chatty at school but antisocial when she gets home. And exasperated mum Michelle wants to know why her teens struggle to get out of bed in the morning. Swirling hormones and growing bodies have a lot to answer for but, as Professor of Psychology from the University of Cambridge Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains, there’s also a profound transformation going o...
Wild Inside: The Ocean Sunfish
April 25, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBBen Garrod and Jess French get under the skin of Mola mola the world's largest bony fish to unravel this bizarrely shaped predator's ability to swim to a huge range of depths. Producer Adrian Washbourne
Wild Inside: The Burmese Python
April 18, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBBen Garrod and Jess French delve deep inside the predatory Burmese Python to examine its extraordinary body plan that enables it to catch, constrict and consume huge prey whole. Producer Adrian Washbourne
Wild Inside: Jungle royalty - the Jaguar
April 11, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBWild Inside embarks on something we hardly ever witness – a look inside some of nature’s most wondrous animals. Its a rare chance to delve deep into some enigmatic and very different wild animals – from a reptile, to a mammal to a fish – unravelling the intricate internal complexity inside three of the most amazing animals ever to evolve. What makes the ultimate predator? What are the keys to successful survival in an ever-changing environment? Whilst we’ve gained a lot by observing their be...
The Evidence: War trauma and mental health
April 02, 2022 18:06 - 50 minutes - 23.3 MBWar and conflict turns lives upside down and millions of adults and children witness atrocities, lose loved ones and often lose their homes and even their countries. The psychological and emotional suffering can continue long after the immediate threat to their life has gone. One in every five people touched by war – that’s 20% - will have a mental health problem that needs help and one in twenty or 5% will be severely affected. As the humanitarian crisis deepens in the Ukraine with millio...
The Life Scientific: Steve Brusatte on the fall of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals
March 28, 2022 19:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBSteve Brusatte analyses the pace of evolutionary change and tries to answer big questions. Why did the dinosaurs die out and the mammals survive? How did dinosaurs evolve into birds? If you met a Velociraptor today you’d probably mistake it for a large flightless bird, says Steve. His intense interest in T. rex, Triceratops and all the other dinosaur species developed when he was a teenager and continues to this day. More recently, however, he’s focussed on the long history of mammals. For ...
The Life Scientific: Shankar Balasubramanian on decoding DNA
March 21, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.7 MBSir Shankar Balasubramanian is responsible for a revolution in medicine. The method he invented for reading, at speed, the unique genetic code that makes each one of us who we are, is ten million times faster than the technology that was used in the human genome project at the turn of the century. What’s more, it can be done much more cheaply than before and on a desktop machine. And it’s transforming healthcare, by helping us to understand the genetic basis of many diseases (particularly c...
Tooth and Claw: Wolves
March 14, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBWe look at wolves and the programme is a little different, because the predator we’re talking about is very much a predator of our imaginations. Wolves are the spirit of the wilderness, but they also symbolize the darker side of human nature, and many myths and legends surround the wolf from all around the world. Our fear of the wolf may be primeval, but it is still very much alive and well. The idea that wolves could be reintroduced in Scotland led to headlines about the British Queen's ...
Tooth and Claw: Army ant
March 08, 2022 04:32 - 27 minutes - 12.4 MBThe army ant might be small enough to squash under foot but, make no mistake, it’s a formidable predator. When they club together in their thousands they are a force to be reckoned with. Picture a tiger, comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny ant-sized units, prowling through the forest and you start to get the idea. They’ll take down anything in their path, from spiders and scorpions to chickens that can’t escape them. There are even grisly stories of African army ants attacking people...
Tooth and Claw: Venomous snakes
February 28, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.4 MBAdam Hart discovers why rattlesnakes make good mothers and how deadly their venom is. There are over 600 different species of venomous snakes around the world with fearsome fangs delivering deadly venoms. Up to a third of the world’s population lives in fear of snakes, but are these reptiles misunderstood? And while Adam living in the UK where there are very few snakes, finds them fascinating, we shouldn’t forget that an estimated 7,400 people every day are bitten by snakes, and somewhere ...
The Evidence: Drug-resistant superbugs
February 26, 2022 19:06 - 49 minutes - 22.9 MBToday, Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts focus on what’s been called “the silent pandemic”, the threat to modern medicine of anti-microbial resistance or AMR. Infections are increasingly resistant to live-saving drugs like antibiotics and many believe the very future of modern medicine is hanging in the balance. In a series produced in collaboration with Wellcome Collection, this edition of The Evidence is recorded in front of a live audience in the Reading Room at Wellcome in Londo...
Tooth and claw: Spotted hyena
February 21, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBCursed as a worthless scavenger and cast as villainous cowardly sidekicks in Disney’s The Lion King, the spotted hyena is one of the world’s most misunderstood of all predators. It may scavenge at night on a giant rubbish tip on the outskirts of Mekelle in Ethiopia, but it earns it’s top predator status when it takes down its prey in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. Adam Hart and guests polish up the spotted hyena’s tarnished reputation. Professor Kay Holekamp, a behavioural ecologist ...
Deep sea exploration
February 14, 2022 20:32 - 37 minutes - 17.1 MBUCL oceanographer Helen Czerski explores life in the ocean depths with a panel of deep sea biologists. They take us to deep ocean coral gardens on sea mounts, to extraordinary hydrothermal vent ecosystems teeming with weird lifeforms fed by chemosynthetic microbes, to the remarkable biodiversity in the muds of the vast abyssal plains. Helen's guests are Adrian Glover of the Natural History Museum in London, Kerry Howell of Plymouth University and Alex Rogers, scientific director of REV Ocea...
A new space age?
February 07, 2022 20:32 - 42 minutes - 19.3 MBIn 2021, Captain James Kirk, aka William Shatner, popped into space for real for a couple of minutes, transported by space company Blue Origin's tourist rocket New Shepard. Elon Musk's Space X ferried more astronauts and supplies between Earth and the International Space Station, using its revolutionary reusable launchers and Dragon spacecraft. On Mars, the latest Nasa robot rover landed and released an autonomous helicopter - the first aircraft to fly on another planet. This year promises ...
African science, African future
January 31, 2022 21:00 - 27 minutes - 12.4 MBProfessor Tom Kariuki has spent his career battling for science in Africa, both as a leading immunologist and as the former director of the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa. Now, as the world comes to grips with the coronavirus pandemic and a global movement for social justice, could this prove an opportunity for the transformation of African science? Tom talks to leading scientists in Africa about the successes they have achieved as well as the profound challenges...
The Evidence: Africa, the pandemic and healthcare independence
January 29, 2022 19:06 - 50 minutes - 23 MBIn a special edition of The Evidence, Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts focus on Africa, on how the more than fifty countries on the continent, home to 1.3 billion people and the most youthful population in the world, have fared, two years into the pandemic. African scientists have been key players in the global response, sequencing variants of the virus and sharing this vital information with the world. But there’s been huge frustration and anger on the continent about the way Afri...
The venomous vendetta
January 24, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBWhilst watching a documentary about some poisonous frogs, Curio Janni in Amsterdam, started to wonder what would happen if a frog licked itself or another frog of the same species. She asks Dr Adam Rutherford and Professor Hannah Fry to investigate whether an animal would react badly to a toxin it itself produces? In essence 'can a venomous snake kill itself by biting itself?' Of course the answer is complicated, but the sleuths know exactly who to ask. Steve Backshall, award-winning wildl...
The slippery situation
January 17, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MB'What is the slipperiest thing in the world?' asks 8 year old Evelyn? 'Why do my feet slip on a wet floor but when my feet are even slightly moist it's nearly impossible to put on a pair of socks without falling over and cursing the universe. What is going on here?' asks Evelyn's Dad, Sam. Hannah and Adam investigate the science of friction and lubrication - so called 'tribology' with the help of tribologists and mechanical engineers Professor Ashlie Martini from California University Merced...
The painless heart
January 10, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBDr Mitch Lomax is a sports scientist at the University of Portsmouth. She helps actual Olympic swimmers get faster. She explains how most of the muscles attached to our skeletons work: Tiny fibres use small-scale cellular energy, which, when all these fibres work in concert, turns into visible muscular movement. Mitch also explains how the dreaded Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, or DOMS, can hit, taking a stair-wincing 48-72 hours to peak after exercise. But skeletal muscles turn out to be q...
The weirdness of water, Part 2 of 2
January 03, 2022 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MB“I don’t really understand why water has so many properties on different scales ranging from very large and cosmic to very small quantum and quarky - Could you help by zooming in and out on water to explain what is known about it? Asks Neil Morton in Stirling. “Why does boiling water sound different to cold water?’ asks Barbara Dyson in Brittany in France Ollie Gordon, in Christchurch in New Zealand, wants to know ‘why water is essential for all life as we know it?’ And many more question...
The weirdness of water, Part 1 of 2
December 27, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MB“I don’t really understand why water has so many properties on different scales ranging from very large and cosmic to very small quantum and quarky - Could you help by zooming in and out on water to explain what is known about it? Asks Neil Morton in Stirling. Rutherford and Fry learn about the special hydrogen bonds that makes water such an unusual liquid. Quantum physicist Professor Patricia Hunt, at the Victoria University in Wellington in New Zealand explains to Hannah the quantum prope...
The Evidence: When will the pandemic end?
December 25, 2021 19:06 - 50 minutes - 23 MBEverybody hopes that the new super-charged Omicron variant of coronavirus will be less severe, but even if it is, it’s spreading so fast and infecting so many people, health services around the world could still buckle under the strain. Two years into the pandemic, Claudia Hammond is joined by two world-leading scientists to discuss the impact of Omicron and to review what the world has got right in its response to coronavirus, and what it has got very, very wrong. As many countries roll o...
The guiding hound
December 20, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBDogs and humans have gone paw in hand for thousands of years. Historic and genetic evidence shows we’ve shaped each other's existence over millennia. But dogs were only first trained as guides for blind people in the UK 90 years ago. What’s the biology behind this extraordinary partnership? Hannah heads to Guide Dogs UK’s training school in Royal Leamington Spa. She meets up with expert Graham Kensett to find out what it takes to make a guide dog from nose to tail, starting from before birth...
The James Webb Space Telescope
December 13, 2021 20:32 - 33 minutes - 15.5 MBThe launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is only days away. Scheduled for lift off on 22 December, the largest and most complex space observatory ever built will be sent to an orbit beyond the moon. James Webb is so huge that it has had to be folded up to fit in the rocket. There will be a tense two weeks over Christmas and the New Year as the space giant unfurls and unfolds. Its design and construction has taken about 30 years under the leadership of NASA’s Goddard Space Fligh...
Genetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares
December 06, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBCRISPR is the latest and most powerful technique for changing the genetic code of living things. This method of gene editing is already showing great promise in treating people with gene-based diseases, from sickle cell disease to cancer. However, in 2018 the use of CRISPR to edit the genes of two human embryos, which were subsequently born as two girls in China, caused outrage. The experiment was done in secrecy and created unintended changes to the children's genomes - changes that could b...
Genetic dreams, genetic nightmares
November 29, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBProfessor Matthew Cobb looks at how genetic engineering became big business - from the first biotech company that produced human insulin in modified bacteria in the late 1970s to the companies like Monsanto which developed and then commercialised the first GM crops in the 1990s. Were the hopes and fears about these products of genetic engineering realised? Thanks to The State of Things from North Carolina Public Radio WUNC for the interview with Mary-Dell Chilton. (Picture: DNA molecule, C...
The Evidence: Healthcare pushed out by the pandemic
November 27, 2021 19:06 - 50 minutes - 23.1 MBAs all eyes have been on the virus, other serious killer diseases took a backseat. Resources and staff were diverted, lockdowns were common all over the world and a very real fear of Covid-19 kept people away from clinics and hospitals. Claudia Hammond and her expert panel from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America look at the devastating impact of the pandemic on illnesses other than Covid, on global killers like tuberculosis, polio, measles and HIV/Aids. And they hear that the worldwide...
Genetic Ddeams, genetic nightmares
November 22, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBBiologist Matthew Cobb presents the first episode in a series which looks at the 50-year history of genetic engineering, from the concerns around the first attempts at combining the DNA of one organism with the genes of another in 1971 to today’s gene editing technique known as CRISPR. The first experiments to combine the DNA of two different organisms began at Stanford University in California in 1971. The revolutionary technique of splicing genes from one lifeform into another promised to ...
Listening to coral reefs
November 15, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.4 MBCoral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, and also some of the noisiest. Up close, a healthy reef teems with trills, whoops, buzzes, hums and snaps made by the diverse lifeforms that inhabit it. But as many reefs are now degrading due to rising temperatures, their sound signatures are changing. Conservationist Rory Crawford meets marine scientists who believe these sounds could provide a new way of monitoring the health of coral reefs, and boosting their resilience....
Geoengineering The Planet
November 08, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.6 MBGeoengineering is already underway from Australia to the Arctic as scientists try to save places threatened by global heating. It’s time for a global conversation about how we research these powerful techniques, with agreements on how and where to deploy them. Global temperature today is 1.2°C hotter than preindustrial levels and it is causing climate change and sea level rise, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Coral reef ecosystems are headed for extinction with...
Geoengineering The Planet
November 01, 2021 20:32 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBEven with the best efforts, it will be decades before we see any change in global temperatures through our mitigation efforts. Given the pace of global heating and the time lag before our emissions reductions have any impact, scientists are exploring additional ways of reducing global temperature. Gaia Vince explores ways of actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. She discusses the idea of BECCS, biological energy with carbon capture storage, and DAC, direct air capture with Simon Evans...
The Evidence: When misinformation kills
October 30, 2021 18:06 - 50 minutes - 23.2 MBA maelstrom of misinformation and its sinister cousin, disinformation, have been swirling all around us about Covid-19. The rumours and conspiracy theories have raced around the globe as fast as the virus itself. Untruths, half-truths, misunderstandings and deliberate mischief-making aren’t new when it comes to health of course, but a global pandemic with a novel virus means that there is much uncertainty and a lack of definite facts. In that gap, falsehoods flourish and in our super-connec...
Chilean mummies
October 25, 2021 20:00 - 26 minutes - 12.1 MBThink of ancient mummies, and you might imagine Egyptian pharaohs in their highly decorated cases. But in actual fact, Chile has the oldest mummies in the world. Unesco recently addded the archaeological sites and the artificial mummification of the Chinchorro culture to its World Heritage List. Around 300 mummies have been excavated from three different sites in the north of the country, near the border with Peru. The nomination took decades of work, drawing on many years of different scien...
Earthshot 3 - The prize winners
October 18, 2021 20:00 - 27 minutes - 12.4 MBOver the last 2 weeks we have featured the 15 finalists in the Earthshot prize, an initiative to highlight and award projects designed to conserve and sustain natural environments, and improve our lives in ways that are sensitive to issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Here we discuss this year’s winning projects and what future investment could mean for them. There are five prize categories with a million pounds up for grabs in each. Protect and restore nature. Clean our ...