Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 5d ago

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · Is male testosterone in freefall? · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

The sound design was by Joel Cox and the executive producer was Ellie Burey. matched

We'll be back on Tuesday. matched

See you then. matched

This is The Guardian. matched

This is The Guardian.

So this is a team from the University of Minnesota led by Kate Ademala, and she is a geneticist there.

And what they've been doing over the years is working towards, can you build life from scratch?

So just from chemicals that you know and understand, what they've come up with is what they're calling a synthetic cell.

It can grow, it can divide, and it can sort of replicate its own genome.

And when I spoke to Kate, I asked her what these synthetic cells look like.

Wonderfully, they call it spud cell.

And that name is intended to evoke Sputnik as the dawn of the space age, the beginning of a new era.

But Kate is from Poland and she says, well, look, another reason is that I'm mostly made from potatoes.

So spud cell seemed like a pretty fitting name.

Spud cell is essentially a small ball of like a fatty-like substance and inside it's liquid.

So you can think of it as a small sort of water-filled sphere.

They're very tiny.

They're like a few microns across, a few thousandths of a millimeter.

And inside that little sphere, they put a very small genome.

And so that genome can do basic functions.

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