Discovery

Covid-19: Recovery

11 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Claudia Hammond and a panel of international experts look at the latest research into Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus which is swe...

Toilet

06 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You may call it the toilet, the loo, the privy, the potty, the can or even the bathroom, but whatever you call it, this everyday object has its roots ...

Wine glass

29 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Have you got one of those wine glasses that can hold an entire bottle of wine? Katy Brand does and she’s even used it for wine - albeit because of a...

The Evidence: Covid 19: vaccines and after lockdown

27 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Claudia Hammond and a panel of international experts look at the latest research into Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus which is swe...

Fork

22 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The fork is essential. Even camping without one is a false economy, in Katy’s experience. Even a spork - with a spoon at one end and a fork at the o...

High heel

15 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Katy Brand loves a high heel. Once known by friends and family for her ‘shoe fetish’, her dad even gave her a ceramic heel that could hold a wine ...

The Evidence: Covid 19: Transmission and South America

13 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Claudia Hammond and a panel of international experts look at the latest research into Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus which is swe...

Toothbrush

08 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

What is the most personal item you own - one you don’t want anyone else using?For Katy Brand it’s her toothbrush. So how did the toothbrush become...

Helium

01 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, celebrates the art and science of the chemical elements. Today he looks a...

The Evidence: Covid 19: Sub-Saharan Africa and Testing

30 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Claudia Hammond and a panel of international experts look at the latest research into Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus which is swe...

Aluminium and strontium

25 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, celebrates the art and science of the chemical elements. Today he looks a...

Gold and silver

18 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, celebrates the art and science of chemical elements. In this episode he l...

The Evidence: Covid 19: ending lockdowns

16 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Claudia Hammond and her panel of scientists and doctors analyse the latest science on the coronavirus and answer the audience’s questions on the imp...

Science of Dad

13 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Whilst most men become fathers, and men make up roughly half the parental population, the vast majority of scientific research has focused on the moth...

Ignaz Semmelweiss: The hand washer

04 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Lindsey Fitzharris tells the story of Ignaz Semmelweiss, the hand washer. In a world that had no understanding of germs, he tried to apply science to ...

The Evidence: Mental health and Covid 19

02 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Now that more than half the population of the world has been living for a time in lockdown, Claudia Hammond and her panel of psychologists and psychia...

Desert locust swarms

27 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The pictures coming in from East Africa are apocalyptic. Billions of locusts hatching out of the wet ground, marching destructively through crops, and...

Anne Magurran

20 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Anne Magurran started her career as an ecologist counting moths in an ancient woodland in northern Ireland in the 1970s, when the study of biological ...

The Evidence: Young people, lifting lockdowns, USA and Kenya updates

18 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Claudia Hammond and a panel of international experts look at the latest research into Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus which is swe...

Richard Wiseman

13 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

How do you tell if someone is lying? When Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, con...

Professor Saiful Islam

06 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Not so long ago, all batteries were single use. And solar power was an emerging and expensive technology. Now, thanks to rechargeable batteries, we h...

The Evidence: Taiwan, Vaccines, Africa Preparedness

04 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

International experts discuss the latest research into Covid-19

Elizabeth Fisher: Chromosomes in mice and men

30 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Elizabeth Fisher, Professor of Neurogenetics at University College London, spent 13 years getting her idea – finding a new way of studying genetic d...

Adrian Owen

24 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Neuroscientist Adrian Owen has spent much of his career exploring what he calls ‘the grey zone’, a realm of consciousness inhabited by people with...

The Evidence: Coronavirus Special

21 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

A panel of international experts take a global look at the science of Covid-19. We hear about vaccines, treatments, strategies to contain the virus an...

Professor Martha Clokie

16 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Martha Clokie tells Jim Al-Khalili how she found viruses that destroy antibiotic-resistant bugs by looking in stool samples, her son's nappi...

Demis Hassabis

10 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Jim Al-Khalili finds out why Demis Hassabis wants to create artificial intelligence and use it to help humanity.Thinking about how to win at chess whe...

Isaac Newton and the story of the apple

02 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The story of how Newton came up with his gravitational theory is one of the most familiar in the history of science. He was sitting in the orchard at ...

Science Stories - Sophia Jex-Blake

24 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Naomi Alderman tells the science story of Sophia Jex-Blake, who led a group known as the Edinburgh Seven in their bid to become the first women to gra...

Science Stories - Mary Somerville, pioneer of popular science writing

17 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Mary Somerville was a self-taught genius who wrote best-selling books translating, explaining and drawing together different scientific fields and who...

Stem cells: Hope and hype

10 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Lesley Curwen reports on the magical aura that has been drawing so many people around the world to pay for “regenerative” therapies which harness ...

Stem cell hard sell

03 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Stem cells are cells with superpowers. They can become many different types of cells in our bodies, from muscle cells to brain cells, and some can eve...

The road to Glasgow

27 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Climate change is upon us. In 2018 the IPCC published a report with the most significant warning about the impact of climate change in 20 years. Unle...

Ecological grief

20 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

As the Earth experiences more extreme weather, and wildlife is dying, from corals, to insects, to tropical forests, more people are experiencing ecolo...

The misinformation virus

13 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In this online age, the internet is a global megaphone, billions of messages amplified and shared, even when they're false. Fake science spreads faste...

The silence of the genes

06 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In summer of 2019 NICE approved the use of a completely new class of drugs: the gene silencers. These compounds are transforming the lives of families...

Alexis Carrel and the immortal chicken heart

30 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Philip Ball tells the story of Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon who worked to preserve life outside the body and create an immortal chicken heart in ...

Ramon Llull: Medieval prophet of computer science

23 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Philip Ball tells the story of Ramon Llull, the medieval prophet of computer science. During the time of the Crusades Llull argued that truth could be...

Ignaz Semmelweiss: The hand washer

16 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Lindsey Fitzharris tells the story of Ignaz Semmelweiss, the hand washer. In a world that had no understanding of germs, he tried to apply science to ...

Madame Lavoisier's Translation of Oxygen

09 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Philip Ball tells the story of Madame Lavoisier; translator of oxygen. At a time when science was almost a closed book to women, Madame Marie Anne Lav...

Galileo's lost letter

02 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Galileo famously insisted in the early 17th Century that the Earth goes round the Sun and not vice versa – an idea that got him into deep trouble wi...

Robin Dunbar

25 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Maintaining friendships is one of the most cognitively demanding things we do, according to Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar. So why ...

Katherine Joy

18 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Katherine Joy studies moon rock. She has studied lunar samples that were brought to earth by the Apollo missions (382kg in total) and hunted for lunar...

Sir Gregory Winter

11 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In an astonishing story of a scientific discovery, Greg Winter tells Jim Al-Khalili how decades of curiosity-driven research led to a revolution in me...

Turi King: Solving the mystery of Richard III through DNA

04 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When a skeleton was unearthed in 2012 from under the tarmac of a car park in Leicester in the English East Midlands, Turi King needed to gather irrefu...

Plastic pollution with Richard Thompson

28 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

A Professor of Marine Biology who was not particularly academic at school, Richard Thompson went to university after running his own business selling ...

Protecting heads in sports

21 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The death last week of boxer Patrick Day, four days after he was stretchered out of the ring in a coma, is the latest reminder of how vulnerable sport...

Early diagnosis and research

14 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

James Parkinson described a condition known as the “shaking palsy” over 200 years ago. Today there are many things that scientists still don’t u...

Exercise

07 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Can exercise help people living with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative condition, with symptoms such as loss of balance, difficulty walking and stiff...

Living with Parkinson's

30 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

BBC newsreader Jane Hill knows all about Parkinson’s. Her father was diagnosed in t1980s and lived with the condition for ten years — her uncle ha...

Preventing pesticide poisoning

23 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Thanks to a ban on several hazardous pesticides Sri Lanka has seen a massive reduction in deaths from pesticide poisoning, and the World Health Organi...

The power of peace

16 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

“Nature red in tooth and claw”. “Dog eat dog”. “Fighting for survival". You may well think that the natural world is one dangerous, violent,...

The power of petite

09 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Bigger is better, right? An ancient lore in biology, Cope's rule, states that animals have a tendency to get bigger as they evolve. Evolution has cran...

The power of deceit

02 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Lucy Cooke sets out to discover why honesty is almost certainly not the best policy, be you chicken, chimp or human being. It turns out that underhand...

Patient Undone

26 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Deborah Bowman reveals how a diagnosis of cancer has transformed her view of medical ethics and what it means to be a patient.As Professor o...

The Great Science Publishing Scandal

19 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Matthew Cobb, Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester, explores the hidden world of prestige, profits and piracy that lurks behind scient...

Erica McAlister

12 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Dr Erica McAlister, of London's Natural History Museum, talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the beautiful world of flies and the 2.5 million specimens for w...

Richard Peto

05 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When Sir Richard Peto began work with the late Richard Doll fifty years ago, the UK had the worst death rates from smoking in the world. Smoking was t...

Lovelock at 100: Gaia on Gaia

29 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

James Lovelock is one of the most influential thinkers on the environment of the last half century. His grand theory of planet earth, Gaia, the idea t...

What next for the Moon?

22 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The Moon rush is back on. And this time it’s a global race. The USA has promised boots on the lunar surface by 2024. But China already has a rover e...

Irene Tracey on pain in the brain

15 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Pain, as we know, is highly personal. Some can cope with huge amounts, while others reel in agony over a seemingly minor injury. Though you might feel...

Paul Davies on the origin of life and the evolution of cancer

08 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Physicist Paul Davies talks to Jim al-Khalili about the origin of life, the search for aliens and the evolution of cancer. Paul Davies is interested...

Can psychology boost vaccination rates?

01 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1950s a batch of polio vaccine in the US was made badly, resulting in 10 deaths and the permanent paralysis of 164 people. Paul Offit, a paedia...

Global attitudes towards vaccines

24 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Global attitudes towards vaccinations are revealed in the Wellcome Trust’s Global Monitor survey. Our guide through the new data is Heidi Larson, Pr...

Why do birds sing?

17 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

"What happens to the human voice as we age? If I hear a voice on the radio, I can guess roughly how old they are. But singer's voices seem to stay rel...

Does infinity exist?

10 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

“Is anything in the Universe truly infinite, or is infinity something that only exists in mathematics?” This question came from father and son duo...

Why do we get déjà vu?

03 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

4/6 Part 1: Déjà vu"Do we know what causes déjà vu?" asks Floyd Kitchen from Queenstown in New Zealand.Drs Rutherford and Fry investigate this fam...

Will we ever find alien life?

27 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

3/6 In this instalment of The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, Hannah and Adam boldly go in search of scientists who are hunting for ET, spurred...

Why people have different pain thresholds

20 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

2/6 "How fast can a human run and would we be faster as quadrapeds?" This question flew in via Twitter from Greg Jenner.Is there a limit to human spri...

How do instruments make music?

13 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

1/6 "We play many musical instruments in our family. Lots of them produce the same pitch of notes, but the instruments all sound different. Why is thi...

A sense of time

06 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Our senses create the world we experience. But do animals have a ‘sense’ of time, and does that differ between species, or between us and other an...

Cat Hobaiter on communication in apes

29 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Dr Catherine Hobaiter studies how apes communicate with each other. Although she is based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, she spends a lo...

Carlo Rovelli on rethinking the nature of time

22 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who became a household name when his book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics became an unexpected international b...

Corinne Le Quéré on carbon and climate

15 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Corinne Le Quéré of University of East Anglia talks to Jim Al-Khalili about tracing global carbon. Throughout the history of planet Earth...

Ken Gabriel on why your smartphone is smart

08 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Ken Gabriel, the engineer responsible for popularising many of the micro devices found in smartphones and computers. Ken expla...

Donna Strickland and extremely powerful lasers

01 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Donna Strickland tells Jim Al-Khalili why she wanted to work with lasers and what it feels like to be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics...

Unbottling the past

25 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine finding a notebook containing the secret recipes of some of the world’s most iconic perfumes? Formulas normally kept under lock and key. T...

California burning

18 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When Paradise burned down last year, it made the Camp Fire the most destructive and deadly in Californian history. A few months earlier the nearby Ran...

ShakeAlertLA - California’s earthquake early warning system

11 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Los Angeles is a city of Angels, and of earthquakes. Deadly earthquakes in 1933, 1971 and 1994 have also made it a pioneer in earthquake protection –...

From the Cold War to the present day

04 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

For more than 100 years chemical weapons have terrorised, maimed and killed soldiers and civilians alike. As a chemist, the part his profession has pl...

From the Crimean War to the end of World War Two

25 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In the first of two programmes he looks back to the first attempts to ban the use of chemical weapons at the end of the 19th century. Heavily defeated...

Tracks across time

18 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In a dry creek bed in the middle of the Australian outback is a palaeontological prize like no other: 95-million-year-old footprints stamped in a sand...

Trouble in paradise

11 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The atoll of Tetiaro is a string of tiny islands in French Polynesia, about 60km away from Tahiti. The islands – known as ‘motus’ to local Polyn...

Back from the Dead

04 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The Night Parrot was supposed to be extinct and became a legend among birdwatchers in Australia: a fat, dumpy, green parrot that lived in the desert a...

Eye in the Sky

28 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this mission, SOFIA is setting out to study Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, by flying into the faint shadow that it casts as it blocks the light fr...

Kepler's Snowflake

14 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The Six Cornered Snowflake, a booklet written by Johannes Kepler as a New Year's gift, sought to explain the intricate and symmetrical shape of winter...

Lucretius, Sheep and Atoms

07 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

2000 years ago Lucretius composed a long poem that theorised about atoms and the natural world. Written in the first century BCE, during a chaotic and...

Eddington's eclipse and Einstein's celebrity

31 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Philip Ball's tale is of a solar eclipse 100 years ago observed by Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer who travelled to the remote island of Princi...

Earthrise

24 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On Christmas Eve in 1968 Bill Anders was in orbit around the moon in Apollo 8 when he took one of the most iconic photos of the last fifty years: Eart...

The Supercalculators

17 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Alex Bellos is brilliant at all things mathematical, but even he can't hold a candle to the amazing mathematical feats of the supercalculators. Alex h...

The China Syndrome

10 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Plastic waste and pollution have become a global problem but is there any sign of a global solution? And how did we allow this to happen in the first ...

How Much Plastic Can We Recycle?

03 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Plastics are fantastically versatile materials that have changed our lives. It is what we do with them, when we no longer want them, that has resulted...

Why We Fell In Love with Plastic

26 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Plastic waste and pollution have become a global problem but is there any sign of a global solution? And how did we allow this to happen in the first ...

Finding the Coelacanths

19 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The first Coelacanth was discovered by a woman in South Africa in 1938. The find, by the young museum curator, was the fish equivalent of discovering ...

The Big Bang and Jet Streams

12 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Evidence for the big bang was initially thought to be a mistake in the recording. Jet streams in the upper atmosphere were revealed by the dust emitte...

Viagra and CRISPR

05 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Viagra’s effects on men were first discovered as an unexpected side-effect during trials for a medication meant to help patients with a heart condit...

Tracking the First Animals on Earth

29 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

What were the earliest animals on Earth? The origin of the animal kingdom is one of the most mysterious chapters in the evolution of life on Earth. Ou...

Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting

29 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Mary Anning lived in Lyme Regis on what is now known as the Jurassic Coast in the first half of the 19th century. Knowing the shore from childhood and...

Cooling the City

22 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The summer of 2003 saw the largest number of deaths ever recorded in a UK heatwave - but by 2040 climate models predict the extreme summer temperature...

Tourism and Transparency

15 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In the second programme exploring the Chinese approach to organ transplantation, Matthew Hill looks at what is happening today. Where are the organs c...