Discovery
Episodes
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...
Who To Believe?
08 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For many years the Chinese sourced organs for transplant from executed prisoners. Around a decade ago the authorities acknowledged that this practice ...
The Long Hot Summer - Part Two
01 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This summer the Northern Hemisphere has been sweltering in unusually high temperatures. It has been hot from the Arctic to Africa. This has led to inc...
The Long Hot Summer
24 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This summer the Northern Hemisphere has been sweltering in unusually high temperatures. It’s been hot from the Arctic to Africa. This has led to inc...
Sodium
17 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sophie Scott on why sodium powers everything we do, and why it might be the key to a new generation of pain killers.Putting sodium into water is one o...
Iron
10 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Beyond war and peace, Dr Andrew Pontzen explores how iron has shaped human biology and culture.From weapons to ploughshares, iron holds a key place as...
Fluorine
03 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Chemist Andrea Sella tells the story of how the feared element ended up giving us better teeth, mood and health.Many chemists have lost their lives tr...
Hypatia: The Murdered Mathematician
20 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Naomi Alderman's tale is a murder mystery, the story of Hypatia, the mathematician murdered by a mob in the learned city of Alexandria, around the yea...
Descartes' "Daughter"
13 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There's a story told about French philosopher René Descartes and his daughter. He boards a ship for a voyage over the North Sea with a large wooden b...
Making Natural Products in the Lab
06 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Ball tells the science story of German chemist Friedrich Wöhler’s creation of urea, an organic substance previously thought only to be produ...
The Real Cyrano de Bergerac
30 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Ball reveals the real Cyrano de Bergerac - forget the big nosed fictional character - and his links to 17th Century space flight. Cyrano was a ...
The Nun’s Salamander
23 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A convent of Mexican nuns is helping to save the one of the world's most endangered and most remarkable amphibians: the axolotl, a truly bizarre creat...
The Aztec Salamander
16 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Victoria Gill tells the extraordinary story of the Mexican axolotl: an amphibian that is both a cultural icon and a biomedical marvel. In its domest...
Gateway to the Mind
09 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The microbiome is the strange invisible world of our non human selves. On and in all of us are hoards of microbes. Their impact on our physical health...
Dirt and Development
02 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
BBC Health and Science correspondent James Gallagher explores the latest research into how our second genome, the vast and diverse array of microbes t...
Manipulating Our Hidden Half
25 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Are we on the cusp of a new approach to healthy living and treating disease? BBC Health and Science correspondent James Gallagher explores the latest ...
Do Insects Feel Pain?
18 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Insects such as fruit flies provide important insights into human biology and medicine. But should we worry whether insects experience pain and suffe...
Killing Insects for Conservation
11 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Prof Adam Hart stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy by asking the public to kill wasps for science. He explores why scientists kill insects to sav...
What’s the Tiniest Dinosaur?
04 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Two small creatures are at the heart of today’s questions, sent in to [email protected] Tiniest Dinosaur "What is the tiniest dinosaur?" as...
Can Anything Travel Faster Than Light?
28 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Two astronomical questions today sent in to [email protected] for Drs Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford to answer.The Cosmic Speed Limit "We often r...
Why Do We Dream?
21 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Adventures in Dreamland "Why do we dream and why do we repeat dreams?" asks Mila O'Dea, aged 9, from Panama.Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford delve into ...
Can We Use Chemistry to Bake the Perfect Cake?
14 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Domestic science is on the agenda today, with two culinary questions sent in by listeners to [email protected] Curious Cake-Off Can chemistry ...
Why Do Some Songs Get Stuck in Your Head?
07 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Two very annoying cases today sent in by listeners to [email protected] to our scientific sleuths, mathematician Dr Hannah Fry and geneticist Dr ...
Behaving Better Online
30 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Humans have become the most successful species on earth because of our ability to cooperate. Often we help strangers when there is no obvious benefit ...
The Cooperative Species
23 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
People are incredibly rude to each other on social media. Much ruder than they would ever be face to face. The great potential of the internet to brin...
Bringing Schrodinger's Cat to Life
16 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Schrodinger's cat is the one that's famously alive and dead. At the same time. Impossible! Roland Pease meets the quantum scientists hoping to bring o...
Barbara McLintock
09 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Barbara McClintock’s work on the genetics of corn won her a Nobel prize in 1983. Her research on jumping genes challenged the over-simplified pictur...
D'Arcy Thompson
02 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One hundred years ago D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form, a book with a mission to put maths into biology. He showed how the shape...
The Far Future
26 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How do we prepare for the distant future? Helen Keen meets the people who try to.If our tech society continues then we can leave data for future gener...
Why We Cut Men
19 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Male circumcision is one of the oldest and most common surgical procedures in human history. Around the world, 1 in 3 men are cut. It’s performed as...
Iodine
12 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The phrase 'essential 'element' is often incorrectly used to describe the nutrients we need, but can aptly be applied to iodine - without it we would ...
Phosphorus
05 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What links trade unions with urine, Syria with semiconductors, and bones and bombs? The answer is phosphorus, UCL Inorganic Chemistry Professor Andrea...
Lead
26 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
From the plumbing of ancient Rome, to lead acid batteries, paint, petrol and a dangerous legacy, the metal lead has seen a myriad of uses and abuses o...
The Power of Sloth
19 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Zoologist and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society, Lucy Cooke, unleashes her inner sloth to discover why being lazy could actually be the ultima...
Pain of Torture
12 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Does knowing that someone is inflicting pain on you deliberately make the pain worse? Professor Irene Tracey meets survivors of torture and examines ...
Controlling Pain
05 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What if your brain could naturally control pain? Professor Irene Tracey and her colleagues are trying to unlock the natural mechanisms in the brain th...
Knowing Pain
29 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists reveal why we feel pain and the consequences of life without pain. One way to understand the experience of pain is to look at unusual situa...
Seeing Pain
22 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Mystery still surrounds the experience of pain. It is highly subjective but why do some people feel more pain than others and why does the brain appea...
Humphry Davy
15 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Bristol in 1799, a young man started to experiment with newly discovered gases, looking for a cure for tuberculosis. Humphry Davy, aged 20, nearly ...
Lise Meitner
09 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Ball reveals the dramatic tale of Lise Meitner, the humanitarian physicist of Jewish descent, who unlocked the science of the atom bomb after a...
The Day the Earth Moved
01 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Roland Pease tells the story of how fifty years ago geologists finally became convinced that the earth’s crust is made up of shifting plates. The id...
Maria Merian
25 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Maria Merian was born in 1647. At the time of her birth, Shakespeare had been dead for 30 years; Galileo had only just stood trial for arguing that th...
Alcuin of York
18 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Dark Ages are often painted as an era of scholarly decline. The Western Roman Empire was on its way out, books were few and far between, and, if y...
Cheating the Atmosphere
11 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
All countries are supposed to measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions but BBC environment correspondent, Matt McGrath, reveals there are gap...
Better Brains
04 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Every three seconds someone is diagnosed with dementia, and two thirds of the cases are Alzheimer’s Disease. As the global population ages, this is ...
What would happen if you fell into a black hole?
21 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Two deadly cases today sent in by listeners to [email protected] Dark Star "What's inside a black hole and could we fly a spaceship inside?" a...
What will happen when the Earth’s poles swap?
20 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Polar Opposite No one knows why the Earth's magnetic North and South poles swap. But polar reversals have happened hundreds of times over the hist...
Why can’t we remember being a baby?
13 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Astronomical Balloon "How far up can a helium balloon go? Could it go out to space?" asks Juliet Gok, aged 9. This calls for an experiment! Dr Ker...
Why can’t we remember being a baby?
13 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Astronomical Balloon "How far up can a helium balloon go? Could it go out to space?" asks Juliet Gok, aged 9. This calls for an experiment! Dr Ker...
How do cats find their way home?
06 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“How on earth do cats find their way back to their previous home when they move house?" asks Vicky Cole from Nairobi in Kenya. Our enduring love for...
How much of my body is bacteria?
30 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Science sleuths Drs Rutherford & Fry take on everyday mysteries and solve them with the power of science. Two cases in this episode concerning the...
Sydney Brenner: A Revolutionary Biologist
23 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Sydney Brenner was one of the 20th Century’s greatest biologists. Born 90 years ago in South Africa to impoverished immigrant parents, Dr Brenner b...
SOS Snail
16 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
This is a big story about a little snail. Biologist Helen Scales relates an epic tale that spans the globe and involves calamity, tragedy, extinction ...
Indian Science – The Colonial Legacy
09 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For more than 200 years Britain ruled India, bringing many aspects of British culture to India - including European science developed during the enlig...
India's Ancient Science
02 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
We go behind the scenes of a new exhibition on India at London’s Science Museum. What can historical objects tell us about India’s rich, and often...
Africa’s Great Green Wall
25 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Can Africa’s Great Green Wall beat back the Sahara desert and reverse the degrading landscape? The ambitious 9 miles wide and 5000 miles long line o...
Internet of Things
18 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Can we Control the Dark Side of the Internet?The Internet is the world's most widely used communications tool. It’s a fast and efficient way of deli...
Dark Side of the World Wide Web
11 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
With the coming of the World Wide Web in the 1990s internet access opened up to everybody, it was no longer the preserve of academics and computer hob...
The Origin of the Internet
04 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Just how did the Internet become the most powerful communications medium on the planet, and why does it seem to be an uncontrollable medium for good a...
Silicon - The World's Building Block
28 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Silicon is literally everywhere in both the natural and built environment, from the dominance of silicate rocks in the earth crust, to ubiquitous sand...
The Day the Sun Went Dark
21 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For the first time in almost 100 years the USA is experiencing a full solar eclipse from coast to coast on August 21st 2017.Main image: Totality duri...
Carbon - the backbone of life
14 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Carbon is widely considered to be the key element in forming life. It's at the centre of DNA, and the molecules upon which all living things rely.Moni...
And then there was Li
07 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
From the origins of the universe, though batteries, glass and grease to influencing the working of our brains, neuroscientist Sophie Scott tracks the ...
Oxygen: The breath of Life
01 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Oxygen appeared on Earth over two billion years ago and life took off. Now it makes up just over a fifth of the air. Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic...
Mercury - Chemistry's Jekyll and Hyde
24 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The most beautiful and shimmering of the elements, the weirdest, and yet the most reviled.Chemist Andrea Sella tell the story of Mercury, explaining t...
Eating Well in Lyon: Healthy Diets to prevent Bowel Cancer
17 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Anu Anand is in Lyon, looking at what we eat and drink and the risk of bowel cancer
Catching Prostate Cancer Early in Trinidad
10 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Anu Anand on detecting and treating prostate cancer in Trinidad and Tobago.
The USA’s Deadly Racial Divide: Black Women & Breast Cancer
03 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Anu Anand explores why more black women are more likely to die of breast cancer in the US
Screening and Treating Cervical Cancer in Tanzania
26 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Anu Anand on how vinegar and a head torch are used to tackle cervical cancer in Tanzania
Taking On Tobacco - Lung Cancer in Uruguay
21 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For more than 65 years we have known that smoking kills. So how can it be that a Mexican wave of tobacco use, disease and death is heading at breaknec...
Dying in Comfort in Mongolia
16 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Mongolian matriarch who is helping people with terminal liver cancer die in comfort
Can Robots be Truly Intelligent?
05 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
From Skynet and the Terminator franchise, through Wargames and Ava in Ex Machina, artificial intelligences pervade our cinematic experiences. But AIs ...
Robots - More Human than Human?
29 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Robots are becoming present in our lives, as companions, carers and as workers. Adam Rutherford explores our relationship with these machines. Have we...
History of the Rise of the Robots
22 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of robots goes back to the Ancient Greeks. In myths Hephaestus, the god of fire, created robots to assist in his workshop. In the medieval pe...
Quantum Supremacy
15 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
IBM is giving users worldwide the chance to use a quantum computer; Google is promising "quantum supremacy" by the end of the year; Microsoft's Statio...
Re-engineering Life
08 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Synthetic biology, coming to a street near you. Engineers and biologists who hack the information circuits of living cells are already getting product...
Hunting for Life on Mars
01 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
As a small rocky planet, Mars is similar in many respects to the Earth and for that reason, many have thought it may harbour some kind of life. A hund...
Lifechangers: Charles Bolden
24 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Lifechangers, Kevin Fong talks to people about their lives in science.Major General Charles Bolden – a former NASA administrator – talks to Kev...
Lifechangers: Neil deGrasse Tyson
17 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Lifechangers, Kevin Fong talks to people about their lives in science.Astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, Neil ...
Lifechangers: George Takei
10 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the start of a new series of Lifechangers, Kevin Fong talks to three people about their lives in science.His first conversation is with a man bette...
The Bee All and End All
06 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Bees pollinate and can detect bombs and compose music. What would we do without them? The world owes a debt of gratitude to this hard working but unde...
Extending Embryo Research
27 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Since the birth of Louise Brown - the world’s first IVF baby - in England in 1978, many children have been born through in vitro fertilisation. IVF ...
The Split Second Decision
20 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
As the pace of technology moves at ever greater speeds, how vulnerable are we when making split second decisions? Kevin Fong flies with the Helicopter...
Human Hibernation
13 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wished you could miss an entire cold dark winter like bears or dormice? Kevin Fong explores the possibilities than humans could hibernate. This a...
Delivering Clean Air
03 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Internet shopping continues to rise worldwide. That means a lot more delivery vans on the streets of our towns and cities. Those vans and trucks, ofte...
Make Me a Cyborg
27 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Swain can hear Wi-Fi.Diagnosed with early deafness aged 25, Frank decided to turn his misfortune to his advantage by modifying his hearing aids ...