The Life Scientific

Jehane Ragai on the science of authenticating artworks

27 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Ever heard of the unsuccessful Dutch painter who decided to humiliate his critics by forging Vermeers, which the artworld subsequently dubbed 'masterp...

Tony Juniper on parrots, princes and environmental protection

20 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Tony Juniper is an environmentalist who has worn many hats, over the course of his career.After developing a passion for birds in childhood, his first...

Pierre Friedlingstein on carbon’s pivotal role in climate change

09 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The COP30 climate summit is taking place in the Brazilian city of Belém, a gateway to the Amazon rainforest, which continues to face widespread defor...

Julia Simner on tasty words and hearing colours

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine if you were listening to an opera or a Taylor Swift concert, and as the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the music was accompanied by a rainb...

Caroline Smith on meteorites and potential ancient life on Mars

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Caroline Smith is passionate about space rocks, whether they’re samples collected from the surface of asteroids and the Moon and hopefully Mars one ...

AP De Silva on building molecular fluorescence sensors for healthcare

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From humble beginnings in his native Sri Lanka, to a more than 40 year academic career at Queen’s University Belfast, Prof. AP (Amilra Prasanna) De ...

Peter Knight on quantum technologies

11 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There are problems and tasks so hard and complicated that it would take today’s most powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack them. But i...

Eleanor Schofield on conserving Tudor warship the Mary Rose

04 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In July 1545, King Henry VIII watched from Southsea Castle on England's south coast as his fleet sailed out to face the French - only to witness his p...

George Church on reimagining woolly mammoths and virus-proofing humans

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

"My ideas are often labelled as impossible, or useless, or both. Usually when people say that I'm on the right track."George Church is a geneticist, m...

Gareth Collett on a career in bomb disposal

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Movies might have us believe that bomb disposal comes down to cutting the right wire. In fact, explosive devices are complex and varied - and learning...

Sonia Gandhi on building model brains to tackle Parkinson’s disease

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Many people will be familiar with Parkinson’s disease: the progressive brain disorder that causes symptoms including tremors and slower movement, le...

Mark O'Shea on close encounters with venomous snakes

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do you feel about snakes? What about highly venomous ones?For Mark O’Shea, close encounters with the world’s most rare and deadly snakes are n...

Kevin Fong on medical planning for Mars and Earth-based emergencies

15 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There can't be many people in the world who've saved lives in hospital emergency rooms and also helped care for the wellbeing of astronauts in space –...

Dame Pratibha Gai on training atoms to do what we want

08 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Chemical reactions are the backbone of modern society: the energy we use, the medicines we take, our housing materials, even the foods we eat, are cre...

Catherine Heymans on the lighter side of the dark universe

01 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever considered the lighter side of dark matter? Comedy has proved an unexpectedly succesful way to engage people with science - as today's g...

Tim Coulson on how predators shape ecosystems and evolution

24 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As a young man, traveling in Africa, Tim Coulson - now Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford - became seriously ill with malaria and was to...

Claudia de Rham on playing with gravity

17 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Claudia de Rham has rather an unusual relationship with gravity. While she has spent her career exploring its fundamental nature, much of her free ti...

Neil Lawrence on taking down the 'digital oligarchy' and why we shouldn't fear AI

10 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When you think of Artificial Intelligence, does it inspire confidence, or concern?Although it's now generally accepted that this technology will play ...

Liz Morris on Antarctic adventures and the melting polar ice sheets

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A frozen, white world at the far-reaches of the globe, where you're surrounded by snow and silence, might sound rather appealing. Factor in temperatu...

Anthony Fauci on a medical career navigating pandemics and presidents

27 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to a world where medicine meets politics: a space that brings together scientific research, government wrangling, public push-back and healthc...

Brian Schmidt on Nobel Prize-winning supernovae and the joys of making wine

22 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever pondered the fact that the universe is expanding? And not only that, it's expanding at an increasing speed - meaning everything around ...

Jacqueline McKinley on unearthing bones and stories at Britain's ancient burial sites

15 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How much information can you extract from a burnt fragment of human bone? Quite a lot, it turns out - not only about the individual, but also their br...

Jonathan Shepherd on a career as a crime-fighting surgeon

08 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Surgeons often have to deal with the consequences of violent attacks - becoming all too familiar with patterns of public violence, and peaks around we...

Doyne Farmer on making sense of chaos for a better world

01 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Doyne Farmer is something of a rebel. Back in the seventies, when he was a student, he walked into a casino in Las Vegas, sat down at a roulette table...

Tori Herridge on ancient dwarf elephants and frozen mammoths

25 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Elephants are the largest living land mammal and today our planet is home to three species: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, an...

Sir Magdi Yacoub on pioneering heart transplant surgery

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does it take to earn the nickname, ‘The Leonardo da Vinci of heart surgery’?That's the moniker given to today's guest - a man who pioneered h...

Tim Peake on his journey to becoming an astronaut and science in space

31 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What's it like living underwater for two weeks? What's the trickiest part of training to be an astronaut? What are the most memorable sights you see f...

Anna Korre on capturing carbon dioxide and defying expectations

24 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the famous frog once said, it's not easy being green. And when it comes to decarbonising industry, indeed, reducing emissions of all sorts, the tas...

Rosalie David on the science of Egyptian mummies

17 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Rosalie David is a pioneer in the study of ancient Egypt. In the early 1970s, she launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using t...

Peter Stott on climate change deniers and Italian inspiration

10 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the summer of 2003, Europe experienced its most intense heatwave on record - one that saw more than 70,000 people lose their lives. Experiencing t...

Ijeoma Uchegbu on using nanoparticles to transform medicines

03 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine a nanoparticle, less that a thousandth of the width of a human hair, that is so precise that it can carry a medicine to just where it’s need...

Darren Croft on killer whale matriarchs and the menopause

27 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Darren Croft studies one of the ocean’s most charismatic and spectacular animals – the killer whale. Orca are probably best known for their pred...

Bill Gates on vaccines, conspiracy theories and the pleasures of pickleball

20 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Bill Gates is one of the world's best-known billionaires - but after years at the corporate coalface building a software empire and a vast fortune, hi...

Kip Thorne on black holes, Nobel Prizes and taking physics to Hollywood

06 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The final episode in this series of The Life Scientific is a journey through space and time, via black holes and wormholes, taking in Nobel-prize-winn...

Vicky Tolfrey on parasport research and childhood dreams of the Olympics

30 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It's summer - no really - and although the weather might have been mixed, the sporting line-up has been undeniably scorching - from the back-and-forth...

Dawn Bonfield on inclusive engineering, sustainable solutions and why she once tried to leave the sector for good

23 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The engineering industry, like many other STEM sectors, has a problem with diversity: one that Dawn Bonfield believes we can and must fix, if we're to...

Raymond Schinazi on revolutionising treatments for killer viruses

16 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In recent decades, we've taken huge steps forward in treating formerly fatal viruses: with pharmacological breakthroughs revolutionising treatment for...

Janet Treasure on eating disorders and the quest for answers

09 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From anorexia nervosa to binge-eating, eating disorders are potentially fatal conditions that are traditionally very difficult to diagnose and treat -...

Anne Child on Marfan syndrome and love at first sight

02 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Marfan syndrome is a genetic disorder that makes renders the body’s connective tissues incredibly fragile; this can weaken the heart, leading to pot...

Conny Aerts on star vibrations and following your dreams

25 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Many of us have heard of seismology, the study of earthquakes; but what about asteroseismology, focusing on vibrations in stars?Conny Aerts is a Profe...

Mike Edmunds on decoding galaxies and ancient astronomical artefacts

23 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is the universe made of? Where does space dust come from? And how exactly might one go about putting on a one-man-show about Sir Isaac Newton? T...

Hannah Critchlow on the connected brain

16 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

With 86 billion nerve cells joined together in a network of 100 trillion connections, the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe...

Fiona Rayment on the applications of nuclear for net zero and beyond

09 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The reputation of the nuclear industry has had highs and lows during the career of Dr Fiona Rayment, the President of the Nuclear Institute. But nowad...

Nick Longrich on discovering new dinosaurs from overlooked bones

02 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We are fascinated by dinosaurs. From blockbuster hits to bestselling video games, skeleton exhibitions to cuddly plushies, the creatures that once roa...

Sheila Willis on using science to help solve crime

27 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dr Sheila Willis is a forensic scientist who was Director General of Forensic Science Ireland for many years. She has spent her life using science to ...

Sir Charles Godfray on parasitic wasps and the race to feed nine billion people

19 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Charles Godfray, Director of the the Oxford Martin School tells Jim Al-Kahlili about the intricate world of population dynamics, and how a h...

Jonathan Van-Tam on Covid communication and the power of football analogies

12 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, or ‘JVT’ as he's arguably better known, first came to widespread public attention in his role as Deputy Chief Medical Office...

Michael Wooldridge on AI and sentient robots

19 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Humans have a long-held fascination with the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a dystopian threat: from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through to ...

Mercedes Maroto-Valer on making carbon dioxide useful

12 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How do you solve a problem like CO2? As the curtain closes on the world’s most important climate summit, we talk to a scientist who was at COP 28 an...

Sir Harry Bhadeshia on the choreography of metals

05 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Life Scientific zooms in to explore the intricate atomic make-up of metal alloys, with complex crystalline arrangements that can literally make or...

Cathie Sudlow on data in healthcare

28 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

“Big data” and “data science” are terms we hear more and more these days. The idea that we can use these vast amounts of information to unders...

Sir Michael Berry on phenomena in physics' borderlands

21 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Jim Al-Khalili meets one of Britain's greatest physicists, Sir Michael Berry. His work uncovers 'the arcane in the mundane', revealing the s...

Professor Sarah Harper on how population change is remodelling societies.

14 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

People around the world are living longer and, on the whole, having fewer children. What does this mean for future populations? Sarah Harper CBE, Prof...

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on human evolution and parenthood

07 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Our primate cousins fascinate us, with their uncanny similarities to us. And studying other apes and monkeys also helps us figure out the evolutionary...

Edward Witten on 'the theory of everything'

31 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Life Scientific returns with a special episode from the USA; Princeton, New Jersey, to be precise.Here, the Institute for Advanced Study has hoste...

Alex Antonelli on learning from nature's biodiversity to adapt to climate change

19 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

With the world's biodiversity being lost at an alarming rate, Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has made it ...

Paul Murdin on the first ever identification of a black hole

12 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Astronomer Paul Murdin believes a good imagination is vital for scientists, since they're so often dealing with subjects outside the visible realm.Ind...

Bahija Jallal on the biotech revolution in cancer therapies

05 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Some of the most complex medicines available today are made from living cells or organisms - these treatments are called biopharmaceuticals and in thi...

Sir Colin Humphreys on electron microscopes, and the thinnest material in the world

29 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How much more of our world could we understand, if we could take stock of it, one atom at a time? If we could see the structure of individual molecule...

Chris Barratt on head-banging sperm and a future male contraceptive pill

22 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Reproductive science has come a long way in recent years, but there's still plenty we don't understand - particularly around male fertility. The relia...

Gideon Henderson on climate ‘clocks’ and dating ice ages

15 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We’re used to hearing the stories of scientists who study the world as it is now but what about the study of the past - what can this tell us about ...

Deborah Greaves on wave power and offshore renewable energy

08 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

If you’ve ever seen the ocean during a storm, you’ll understand the extraordinary power contained in waves. On an island nation like Britain, that...

Harald Haas on making waves in light communication

27 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine a world in which your laptop or mobile device accesses the internet, not via radio waves – or WiFi – as it does today but by using light i...

Anne Ferguson-Smith on unravelling epigenetics

20 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Our genes can tell us so much about us, from why we look the way we look, think the way we think, even what kind of diseases we might be likely to suf...

Anne-Marie Imafidon on fighting for diversity and equality in science

13 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Anne-Marie Imafidon passed her computing A-Level at the age of 11 and by 16, was accepted to the University of Oxford to study Maths and Computer Scie...

Bruce Malamud on modelling risk for natural hazards

06 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From landslides and wildfires to floods and tornadoes, Bruce Malamud has spent his career travelling the world and studying natural hazards. Today, he...

Gillian Reid on making chemistry count

30 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How often do you think about chemistry?The chances are, not often - but it is vital to every part of our lives, from the air we breathe, to the proces...

Andre Geim on levitating frogs, graphene and 2D materials

23 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The world around us is three-dimensional. Yet, there are materials that can be regarded as two-dimensional. They are only one layer of atoms thick and...

Julie Williams on Alzheimer’s disease

28 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

There are almost a million people in the UK living with dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common form. But the disease actually starts long befo...

James Jackson on understanding earthquakes and building resilience

21 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Since 1900, our best estimates suggest that earthquakes have caused around 2.3 million deaths worldwide; we saw the devastating effects of one just re...

Marie Johnston on health psychology and the power of behavioural shifts

14 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Marie Johnston is a pioneer in the field of health psychology: the discipline that seeks to understand how psychological, behavioural and cultural fac...

Julia King on manipulating metals and decarbonising transport

07 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Dame Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, is an engineer whose fascination with metals, and skill for handling both research projects an...

Danny Altmann on how T cells fight disease

28 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Jim Al-Khalili talks T cells, our immune response and Long Covid with Prof Danny Altmann. Danny Altmann joined ‘team T cells’ in his twenties and ...

Haley Gomez on cosmic dust

21 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Jim Al-Khalili talks to astrophysicist Haley Gomez about defying expectations and becoming a world expert on cosmic dust.For centuries, cosmic dust wa...

Adrian Smith on the power of Bayesian statistics

07 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How a once-derided approach to statistics paved the way for AI. Jim Al-Khalili talks to pioneering mathematician, Professor Sir Adrian Smith.Accused ...

Clifford Johnson on making sense of black holes and movie plots

31 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Clifford Johnson's career to date has spanned some seemingly very different industries - from exploring quantum mechanics around string theory and bla...

Rebecca Kilner on beetle behaviours and evolution

24 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A fur-stripped mouse carcase might not sound like the cosiest of homes – but that’s where the burying beetle makes its nest; and where Rebecca Kil...

Pam Shaw on the research battle against motor neurone disease

17 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Motor Neuron Disease (MND) is a degenerative disease that relentlessly attacks the human nervous system, deteriorating muscle function to the point wh...

Chris Elliott on fighting food fraud

10 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Chris Elliott is something of a ‘food detective’. A Professor of Food Safety and Microbiology at Queen's University Belfast and a foundi...

A passion for fruit flies

18 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What use to science is a pesky organism that feeds on rotting fruit? Professor Bambos Kyriacou has spent fifty years observing the behaviour of fruit ...

Why study sewage?

11 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Leon Barron monitors pollution in our rivers, keeping tabs on chemicals that could be harmful to the environment and to our health. He’s also gather...

The sounds of coral reefs

04 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Tim Lamont is a young scientist making waves. Arriving on the Great Barrier Reef after a mass bleaching event, Tim saw his research plans disappear an...

Can computers discover new medicines?

27 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Daphne Koller was a precociously clever child. She completed her first degree – a double major in mathematics and computer science – when she was ...

Emily Holmes on how to treat trauma

20 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Emily Holmes is a distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology at Uppsala University and a neuroscientist who struggled to learn to read and write ...

Judith Bunbury on the shifting River Nile in the time of the Pharaohs

14 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Think Sahara Desert, think intense heat and drought. We see the Sahara as an unrelenting, frazzling, white place. But geo-archaeologist Dr Judith Bunb...

Frances Arnold: From taxi driver to Nobel Prize

06 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Frances Arnold left home at 15 and went to school ‘only when she felt like it’. She disagreed with her parents about t...

Sir Martin Landray on saving over a million lives

28 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Who could forget the beginning of 2020, when a ‘mysterious viral pneumonia’ emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Soon, other countries were affec...

Vlatko Vedral on the universe as quantum information

21 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Vlatko Vedral describes himself as a quantum information practitioner, who believes that our universe is made up of quantum bits of information. It i...

Adam Hart on ants, bees and insect burgers

14 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ant-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 ...

Jacinta Tan on anorexia nervosa and the mind

07 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When a person with severe anorexia nervosa refuses food, the very treatment they need to survive, is that refusal carefully considered and rational, a...

Pete Smith on why soil matters

31 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Pete 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 cl...

Chi Onwurah on why engineering is a caring profession.

24 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Chi Onwurah tells Jim Al-Khalili why she wanted to become a telecoms engineer and why engineering is a caring profession. As a black, working class wo...

Ailie MacAdam on the biggest construction project in Europe

29 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ailie's first engineering challenge was working out how to get the solids to settle in a mixture of raw sewage at a treatment plant in Stuttgart. Year...

Ben Garrod on conservation and extinction

22 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ben Garrod is an obsessive bone collector and wild animal behaviourist. He was destined for a career in medicine but a chance encounter with primatolo...

Steve Brusatte on the fall of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals

15 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Steve Brusatte analyses the pace of evolutionary change and tries to answer big questions. Why did the dinosaurs die out and the mammals survive? How ...

Shankar Balasubramanian on decoding DNA

08 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is responsible for a revolution in medicine. The method he invented for reading, at speed, the unique genetic code that ma...

Julia Shaw on memories that aren't true

22 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Early in her career, Julia wanted to know if it was possible to get someone to believe they committed a crime (when they hadn’t)? In a bold experim...

Sharon Peacock on hunting pandemic variants of concern

02 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Microbiologist Sharon Peacock has led one of the genuine science success stories of the pandemic. Professor Peacock is the founding director of COG-UK...

Tim Clutton-Brock on meerkats, red deer and evolution

26 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The huge popularity of meerkats is in no small part down to Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, zoologist and evolutionary biologist of the University of Cam...

Tim Spector and personalised diets for long term health

19 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Many of us take dietary rules for granted such as eating little and often, not skipping meals and keeping a check on our calorie intake. But genetic e...