Episodes

December 22, 2022

The UK has the opportunity to access European science funding. However disagreements over the Northern Ireland protocol are preventing the UK from joining the multi billion pound Horizon Europe project which funds scientific partnerships between European institutions. BBC Science correspondent Palla...

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December 15, 2022

Climate science and politics

As the COP27 environment summit draws to a close we look at some of the issues still to be resolved. BBC Environment correspondents Victoria Gill and Georgina Rannard join us from the meeting. And we head to the houses of parliament in the company of a group of teenagers who are putting their conc...

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December 8, 2022

COP27

One key issue on the agenda at the COP27 environment summit in Egypt is how to fund damage from the effects of man made climate change. Often the effects of climate change are felt the strongest in countries least responsible for creating the emissions. This year we’ve seen a range of extreme wea...

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December 1, 2022

Monkeypox

A new study published in the British Medical Journal suggests monkey pox might be passed from person to person before symptoms show. Esther Freeman, Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School and Director of Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been foll...

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November 24, 2022

Turtle Voices, a Pandemic Retrospective and a Nose-Picking Primate

New recordings featuring the voices of 53 species of turtle, caecilian and tuatara previously thought to be silent have illuminated the evolutionary origins of vocal communication. Gabriel Jorgevich-Cohen a PhD student at the University of Zurich has travelled the world collecting recordings and sum...

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November 17, 2022

The BBC at 100

Recorded in front of an audience at Bradford’s National Museum of Science and Media, we’re delving into the next 100 years of broadcasting, examining the science and technology behind what we’ll watch and listen to. And what the seismic technological shifts mean for all of us. Victoria Gill is j...

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November 10, 2022

Avian flu

Avian or bird flu is normally seasonal, disappearing as migratory birds leave for winter. However a new strain which seems to spread more easily between wild birds and into poultry has led to the deaths of far more birds than usual. David Steel, Nature Reserve Manager on the Isle of May relates hi...

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November 3, 2022

Coronavirus - new variants

The virus which causes Covid 19 is continuing to evolve, but into several different closely related strains rather than more new variants such as Delta and Omicron. Ravi Gupta, Professor of Clinical Microbiology at Cambridge university gives us his assessment of the current picture, and Jeremy Farra...

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October 27, 2022

Fracking Science

The government has lifted a moratorium on fracking imposed in 2019 following a series of small earthquakes caused by exploratory drilling. The British Geological Survey was asked to investigate, we speak to two of the authors of their new report into fracking and earthquakes, seismologist Brian Bap...

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October 20, 2022

Science collaborations – with Russia

The sub Arctic boreal forests stretch across the northern hemisphere. They represent a huge carbon sink , but are also vulnerable to climate change. Most of the forest is in Russia and most of what we know about its current state comes from long running international field studies. The Scott Pola...

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October 13, 2022

Is the James Webb Space Telescope too good?

The James Webb Space Telescope continues to beam exciting data back to earth from exoplanet systems, galaxies and stars further away than we’ve ever seen before. But what happens to that data when it reaches us? We spoke to Julien De Wit from MIT about how exactly we process the vast amounts of info...

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October 6, 2022

Ancient Amputation

The discovery of a body missing a foot in a thirty one thousand year old grave suggests our ancient ancestors may have been capable of performing complex surgery. The foot seems to have been cleanly amputated, and the patient survived for several years afterwards. Dr Tim Maloney from Australia’s Gri...

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September 29, 2022

Dealing with drought

As parts of England enter drought conditions we ask what are the drivers for drought and what can we do about it? With Dr Jess Neumann, Hydrologist at Reading University, Aidan McGivern meteorologist at the Met Office and Professor Richard Betts, Chair in Climate Impacts at University of Exeter. W...

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September 22, 2022

Return of the ozone hole

Research on recent extreme fire events shows they have a direct effect on the size of the seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica. Climate scientist Jim Haywood is concerned more frequent and extreme fires predicted by climate models could negate all the work done to reduce the ozone depleting chemical...

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September 15, 2022

A Possible Sequel to the Dinosaur Armageddon

Did the Chicxulub meteor that did for the dinosaurs have a smaller companion? Dr Uisdean Nicholson and Professor Sean Gulick talk to Vic Gill about the newly discovered Nadir Crater. Located on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s raising questions about whether Earth was bombarded with not one, but...

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September 8, 2022

Amplified Arctic Amplification and Microclot Clues to Post-Viral Disease

Professor Anna Hogg joins us on today’s programme for some polar explorations, we speak to one team recalculating arctic warming estimates and another who are storm chasing in Svalbard. Antii Lipponen from the Finnish Meterological Institute talks us through how quickly the arctic is really warming ...

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September 1, 2022

Shaun The Sheep Jumps Over The Moon, Bronze Age Kissing and PPE Rubbish

ESA announce that Shaun The Sheep will fly around the moon this month aboard Artemis-1 mission. Philippe Deloo tells Gaia Vince what's in store for the woolly astronaut this month. Philippe is the team lead on the European Service Module, the part of NASA's Orion spacecraft which will be the workhor...

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August 25, 2022

Heatwave: the consequences

The severity of last week's heatwave is changing the narrative. Gaia Vince talks to Simon Evans, deputy editor of the climate publication Carbon Brief, who has been following the media coverage of this heatwave, and Lorraine Whitmarsh, professor of environmental psychology at the university of Bath....

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August 18, 2022

Multiverses, melting glaciers and what you can tell from the noise of someone peeing

The Multiverse Laura Mersini-Houghton is an internationally renowned cosmologist and theoretical physicist and one of the world's leading experts on the multiverse and the origins of the universe. She talks to Gaia Vince about finding evidence that supports her multiverse theory as more than just a ...

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August 11, 2022

Deep Space and the Deep Sea - 40 years of the International Whaling Moratorium.

The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in business - what further treasures will it find? Also, the origins of the International Moratorium on Whaling, 40 years old this month. This week NASA invited President Joe Biden to help them publish the first of five images of full scientific value from ...

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August 4, 2022

Robotic Thumbs, Mending Bones with Magnets, and the State of Science this Summer

Gaia Vince takes you for a mosey around his year's Summer Science Exhibition, held by London's Royal Society. Along the way, PRS Sir Adrian Smith talks of reforming A-Levels and a sorry international science collaboration situation as many european research grants are terminated amidst a Brexit with...

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July 28, 2022

10 Years of the Higgs Boson

In 1964 a theoretical physicist called Peter Higgs suggested a mechanism via which elementary particles of a new theoretical scheme could obtain mass. It had been a thorny mathematical stinker in the framework that today we now call the standard model of particle physics. Ten years ago this July, th...

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July 21, 2022

Engineering Around Mercury, Science Festivals, and The Rise of The Mammals

How hard is it to get to Mercury and why are we going? Also, do science festivals work? And why did mammals survive when dinosaurs died? Marnie Chesterton and guests dissect. As this programme went out, scientists and engineers eagerly wait for new images of the planet Mercury to arrive, snapped fr...

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July 14, 2022

Inside Sentience

Marnie Chesterton and guests mull over the saga of an AI engineer who believes his chatbot is sentient. Also, climate scientists propose a major leap in earth system modelling, that might cost £250m a year but would bring our predictive power from 100 km to 1km. And the story of a Malaysian Breadfru...

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July 7, 2022

Miscounting Carbon, EU Funding Stalemate, and How to Make a Royal Hologram

This week on inside science Marnie Chesterton is looking at how companies measure and account for their use of renewable energy, how politics is impacting science funding in the UK and the technology behind the Queen’s holographic stand in at jubilee celebrations. Dr Anders Bjorn from Concordia u...

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June 30, 2022

A Reign of Science

Society itself and the ways we live have been transformed in 70 years of science. Marnie Chesterton, Andrea Sella, and Gemma Milne take a tour of the archive to evaluate some of the biggest hits on Inside Science's jubilee list. What did we miss? Presented by Marnie Chesterton. Assistant Producer E...

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June 23, 2022

Monkeypox, Pompeii aDNA, and Elephant Mourning Videos

Why are non-African monkeypox cases causing concern? Also, the first complete human genome from a Pompeiian cadaver, and how YouTube is aiding animal behaviourists. As cases of monkeypox appear strangely dispersed around Europe and elsewhere in the world outside of Africa, BBC health and science co...

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June 16, 2022

Buried Mars Landers, Freezing Species, and Low-Tide Archaeology

Since 2018, Nasa's InSight Mars lander has been sitting on the surface listening to the seismic rumbles of the red planet's deep interior. But this week, plans were announced to finally phase down its activity, as martian dust obscures too much of its solar panels to power it through the forthcoming...

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June 9, 2022

Running Rings Around Matter

Astronomers have captured the first image of Sagittarius A*, the gargantuan black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Dr Ziri Younsi, University College London, shares what it took to capture a picture of a supermassive black hole that is 26,000 light-years away and from which (almost) nothing, not ev...

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June 2, 2022

Precious Metals, Earlier Eggs, and Meaningful Meteorites

With the cost of living spiralling, many are probably thinking more about the price of food than lithium, titanium, copper or platinum. But the volatility in the global market for these materials - partly because of the pandemic and geopolitical unrest - is causing 'chaos' in the technology supply ...

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May 26, 2022

The Ebb and Flow of the Tidal Power Revolution

This week, we begin with a disturbing medical mystery. Since the start of the year, almost 200 children worldwide have fallen ill with hepatitis—or liver inflammation—without any apparent cause. Most of the children are under five, and nearly half of the cases were in the UK. Vic Gill asks clinical ...

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May 19, 2022

Building Better Engagement

Victoria Gill and guests ask why does scientific communication matters in society and how it might be done better, with Sam Illingworth, Berry Billingsley and Ozmala Ismail. The climate crisis and Covid-19 have shown over the recent years the importance of reliable, relatable, transparent and trust...

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May 12, 2022

A Trip-Switch for Depression?

Could magic mushrooms be the key to a revolution in treating depression? Professor David Nutt, director of the Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research, thinks so. He tells Vic Gill about recent research suggesting that psilocybin - the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms - triggers rewiri...

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May 5, 2022

Declining Data, Climate Deadlines and the Day the Dinosaurs Died

Covid-19 infections in the UK are at an all-time high. But most people in England can no longer access free Covid-19 tests, and the REACT-1 study, which has been testing more than 100,000 individuals since the pandemic began, ended last week after its funding stopped. Martin Mckee, Prof of European ...

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April 28, 2022

How can the UK get to zero carbon?

Energy is essential: every living thing needs energy to survive, and today’s industrialised societies consume enormous quantities of it. At the moment, the vast majority of this comes from burning fossil fuels that emit carbon. But the government is committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions by...

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April 21, 2022

Racial inequality in UK science

This month the Royal Society of Chemistry released a shocking report on racial inequality at all stages of academia, from research funding to career progression. Black scientists in particular are unfairly disadvantaged when it comes to funding allocation. This is bad for them, bad for science, and ...

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April 14, 2022

Global food security during Ukraine conflict

The Russian conflict in Ukraine is already causing hunger there, and as Ukraine and Russia are huge grain exporters, the crisis will be far reaching. Food prices everywhere are expected to rise, and there’s fear that the war could affect food supplies in some of the poorest parts of the world. Tim L...

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April 7, 2022

High Seas treaty talks and discoveries from the deep

The High Seas make up most of our oceans but belong to no-one and are largely unregulated, leaving them at risk of plunder. UN talks start afresh this week with the aim of protecting the marine biodiversity of these vast swathes of living ocean. Covid-19 can shrink our brains and lead to cognitive...

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March 31, 2022

Cyber frontlines in Ukraine

As conflict continues in Ukraine, there are invisible ‘cyber frontlines’ running in parallel to the physical fighting. We hear how the country’s tech scene is responding to the Russian invasion, as Mike Sapiton, Tech Editor at Forbes Ukraine gives us a view from the ground, and Professor Madeline Ca...

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March 3, 2022

Inside Science is now first on BBC Sounds

Looking for the latest episode? New episodes of Inside Science will now be available first on BBC Sounds for four weeks before other podcast apps. If you haven’t already, you can download the BBC Sounds app to listen to the Inside Science podcast first. BBC Sounds is also available in lots of othe...

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February 24, 2022

World’s largest Jurassic pterosaur found on Skye

In a week of exciting fossils finds we get up close to a 170 million year old pterosaur, found on the Isle of Skye. And over in the States, some fossilised fish hold the clue to what time of year the dinosaurs, along with three quarters of life on Earth, met their end. We hear from researcher Melan...

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February 17, 2022

COVID-19: Beginnings... and endings?

With the prime minister proposing an end to self-isolation requirements as early as the end of the month, we thought we would check in with all things pandemic-related this week. We hear from mathematical biologist Dr Kit Yates from the University of Bath and UCL’s Professor Christina Pagel, who...

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February 10, 2022

Fusion energy smashes world record

This week the UK-based JET Laboratory broke its 25-year-old record for energy extracted by nuclear fusion - the process that powers the stars. Using temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun, nuclear fusion has the potential to provide vast amounts of energy at a very low carbon cost. But re-creatin...

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February 3, 2022

The Continuing Story of the Nuclear Waste Bill

Whilst energy prices are shooting up due to gas demand, in the UK the plans for the next generation nuclear reactors are moving ahead. The costs of eventually decommissioning these, and the spent fuel products they will create is all part of the new contract. But what is to be done, and how far have...

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January 27, 2022

Predicting Long Covid, and the Global Toll of Antimicrobial Resistance

Prof Onur Boyman, Director of department of Immunology at University Hospital, Zurich, this week published a paper in the journal Nature Communications that presents a way of quantifying the risk of a Covid patient going on to develop Long Covid (or PACS as some call it) based on certain symptoms, b...

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January 20, 2022

The 'perfect' depth for a destructive eruption

Why was the blast from the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano so explosive? Where are we on the global climatic thermostat? And how you can get involved in the Big Repair Project. Gaia Vince speaks with Auckland University volcanologist Prof Shane Cronin, one of the few human beings to have visited ...

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January 13, 2022

The Rutland ‘Sea Dragon’, An Astronomer's Christmas and some Animal Magic

After 20 years of planning, preparation and a nail-biting build up fraught by delays The James Webb Space telescope finally launched on Christmas day 2021. Anxious astronomers across the globe looked on as the JWST then completed even riskier manoeuvres to unfurl the 18 hexagonal components that mak...

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January 6, 2022

Deep ocean exploration

UCL 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...

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December 30, 2021

A new space age?

Dr Kevin Fong convenes a panel of astronautical minds to discuss the next decade or two of space exploration. 2021 was an eventful year in space. Captain James Kirk a.k.a William Shatner popped into space for real for a couple of minutes, transported by space company Blue Origin's tourist rocket N...

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December 23, 2021

The Origin of Celtic Culture in Britain?

Victoria Gill hears of ancient DNA evidence for an unrecognised mass migration from continental Europe 3,000 years ago that may even have brought the Celtic languages with it. In a paper in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers have gathered hundreds of middle-late Bronze Age DNA...

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December 16, 2021

The James Webb Space Telescope

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is only days away. Scheduled for lift off on 24 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...

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December 9, 2021

Initial Omicron Lab Data, Creative Naps, and Fishy Sounds.

T-Cells in vaccinated people may be holding the fort, or at least fighting serious illness, against the latest SARS CoV2 variant. Also, how the briefest of sleeps aids creativity. Prof Penny Moore, of South Africa’s National Centre for Infectious Disease and Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg...

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December 2, 2021

When Pandemics Collide

As virologists around the world race to investigate the latest SARS CoV2 variant of concern, the UN’s World AIDS Day this week reminds us of the other global pandemic raging for some 40 years. Much of the work achieved over the last two years on SARS CoV2 has been achieved because of the investment ...

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November 25, 2021

Malaria: what's in it for the mosquito?

Malaria, a disease that infects hundreds of millions of people and kills hundreds of thousands each year. It is caused after a plasmodium parasite is passed from a blood-feeding mosquito into a human host. Subject to much research over hundreds of years, of both host and parasite, one of the evoluti...

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November 18, 2021

Yet More Space Junk; COP-up or COP-out; The End of Bias.

Earlier in the week the current ISS crew had to prepare to evacuate after Russia tested an anti-satellite weapon, spreading thousands of high velocity shards of ex-satellite into a reasonably low-earth orbit and potentially endangering many other earth observation and communication satellites of all...

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November 11, 2021

Propane: Keeping Your Cool as the World Warms Around You

How propane might prevent air conditioning and refrigeration becoming an even bigger burden as our planet warms. Also, covid antiviral pills, and how we forgot to breathe properly. The Montreal Protocol is famous for reducing CFC emissions to help protect the Ozone Layer. We only started using thin...

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November 4, 2021

How Whales Farmed For Food, COP progress, and The Last Stargazers

Gaia Vince hears how blue whales' huge appetites and energetic eating behaviours helped generate more food for themselves. Also, an update from COP26, and Emily Levesque on The Last Stargazers. New research published this week in the journal Nature reveals new insights into blue whales eating habit...

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October 28, 2021

Atmospheric Pollutants and Where to Find Them

This week London's Ultra Low Emission Zone was extended to 18 times its previous size. In an effort to cut levels of various nitrogen oxides and other gases dangerous to humans from urban air, cities encouraging lower emission vehicles is a trend soon stretching across the UK and other European coun...

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October 21, 2021

The Possible Impact of false-negative PCR Tests

As many as 43,000 PCR tests for people living in and around the South West of England could have been wrongly returned as negative recently, thanks to a seemingly unknown error, or errors, at a laboratory near Wolverhampton. For an extraordinarily long time the mistakes went undetected, and every da...

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October 14, 2021

Early Alzheimer's Alert

Marnie Chesterton hears of a simple test for the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease. She finds out about UK scientists using robots to map radiation at Chernobyl, and talks to Merlin Sheldrake about fungi. Roland Pease travels to Bath University to meet scientists who may have developed a way to...

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October 7, 2021

Surprising choice for Nobel prizes in a pandemic?

This week saw the announcement of the Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine, chemistry and physics. None of them reward research connected with Covid. Roland Pease, science journalist and Nobel watcher, and Gaia Vince discuss the decisions, which some have said are controversial in this pandemic ...

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September 30, 2021

Covid vaccine boosters; why we don't have a tail; cassowary domestication; Royal Society Science book prize shortlist

Booster vaccines are now being offered to people in England most at risk of Covid, who had their second jab at least 6 months ago. Most people are getting an mRNA vaccine as a booster, mainly the Pfizer one. Dr Andrew Ustianowski, national clinical lead for the UK COVID Vaccine Research Programme, ...

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September 23, 2021

La Palma volcano; wind energy in the UK; origins of SARS-Cov2; Formula 1 safety

Thousands of people have been forced to flee the path of the lava that has been spewing from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma since Sunday 18th September. Dr Rebecca Williams of Hull University is an expert on the geology of the Canary Islands and tells Gaia Vince that eruptions are regular even...

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September 16, 2021

Perseverance drills on Mars; space tourism; Australian fire debris and algal blooms; DNA vaccines against Covid

NASA's Perseverance rover has been trundling around the Jezero crater since it landed successfully in February 2021. A few weeks ago it made its first attempt at collecting a sample of rock. Unfortunately the rock turned out to be so crumbly it disintegrated away. But Perseverance lives up to its n...

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September 9, 2021

Climate change and oil and gas exploration; cutting methane emissions; African wild dog populations; freezing eggs and sperm

We’re just weeks away from the big international climate talks in Glasgow, where governments will be trying to figure out a workable plan for how to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees. Gaia Vince explores a couple of strategies to tackle climate change. By far the biggest source of the ...

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September 2, 2021

Rugby and the brain

Victoria Gill talks to Professor Damian Bailey who's leading research at the University of South Wales into the potential risks to brain health in contact sports players, from impacts to the head and body sustained during play. His latest study found that over the course of a 31 game season, the br...

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August 26, 2021

Window to solve pandemic origins closing

Virologist Marion Koopmans is one of the independent researchers appointed by the World Health Organisation to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The team visited China in January this year as a first step to answer how, when and where SARS-Cov-2 first infected humans. Professor K...

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August 19, 2021

Mammoth Journey

A 17,000 year old tusk contains a remarkable story of the lifetime travels of a woolly mammoth which roamed the grasslands of Ice Age Alaska. The animal travelled 70,000 kilometres over the course of three decades before his premature death north of the Arctic Circle. The University of Alaska's Matt...

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August 12, 2021

IPCC report - extreme weather events

Victoria Gill talks to climate scientist Friedericke Otto about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new landmark report. The report this week states that the evidence for humanity's role in changing global change is now unequivocal. Dr Otto was a lead author on the chapter on extreme ...

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August 5, 2021

Bees and multiple pesticide exposure

Victoria Gill looks at the latest stories from the world of science. In this week's episode: the threat to bees from multiple pesticide exposure, how bee colonies can evolve defences against the varroa parasite, more problems for the Starliner space capsule, and what may be the oldest fossil animal...

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July 29, 2021

Covid 19 – reaching the unvaccinated

In the UK we have seen a recent fall in Covid 19 cases. Good news, but we don’t know yet if this will be sustained. The virus is now thought to be spreading predominantly amongst the under 30s, most of whom remain unvaccinated. Young adults are the demographic most likely to be vaccine hesitant or ...

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July 22, 2021

A life-changing database

Proteomes, the sequences of protein within the DNA of every living thing, are notoriously difficult to model. The usual chemical methods can take months, but a new computational model using the ability of artificial intelligence to learn the complex sequences is able to predict structures within a ...

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July 15, 2021

Covid19 - should we test everybody ?

Epidemiologist Julian Peto is advocating mass testing as the key part of a plan to stop the virus spreading. Studies where everyone has been tested have picked up asymptomatic cases. With the addition of isolation and contact tracing this method of testing has been able to massively reduce the spre...

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July 8, 2021

Covid and our ancient ancestors

A global project looking at the genomes of over 2 million people has found a number of distinct genetic markers which seem to either make Covid infection more likely or the symptoms more severe. Some of these markers are known to be associated with susceptibility to cancer and lung disease. However...

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July 1, 2021

Gene editing gets real

For the first time the gene editing technique CRISPR has been used by injecting the CRISPR instructions into the bloodstream rather than directly into the affected organ. In a trial, six adult patients showed improvements after the treatment was used to prevent the expression of deformed proteins as...

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June 24, 2021

UK science policy shake-up; Ivermectin & Covid; black fungus in Indian Covid patients; many hominins in Siberian cave

The Prime Minister has announced his desire for the UK to become a 'science superpower'. A new office within the cabinet to look at science will work alongside existing science strategy and funding structures. So far it's unclear where the responsibilities between the various science policy bodies l...

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June 17, 2021

Cov-Boost trial; SARS-Cov 2 infection in action; sapling guards; why tadpoles are dying

Scientists are now looking at the question of third doses of vaccines against SARS-Cov2, and this week the Cov-Boost trial was launched. It’s being run from University of Southampton and is going to be using seven different vaccines, some at half doses, in people over the age of 30 who were early re...

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June 10, 2021

Covid vaccines in children; preventing dengue; algal blooms; supersonic flight

Should we be vaccinating children in the UK against SARS-Cov 2? Children are rarely seriously ill if they catch Covid but infections mean missed school, and they can pass it onto older vulnerable people. The US, Canada, Israel and Dubai are some places that are already vaccinating the under 18s and ...

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June 3, 2021

Lab origin theory of SARS-Cov2; gene for obesity; dark matter map; rock art in Scotland

Sars Cov2, as the Covid19 coronavirus is called, probably began as the vast majority of new diseases do, when an animal virus infected a person – perhaps in a market or farm. There’s a large animal market in the city of Wuhan that sold wild as well as farmed animals, and studies have shown that diff...

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May 27, 2021

Human use of plants beyond the limits of history.

Human impact on planet earth’s plant life might be detectable several thousand years back in fossil pollen cores taken from mud columns around the world. As Suzette Flantua and Ondrej Mottl describe in a paper published in the journal Science, a rapid acceleration in the changes in pollen species go...

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May 20, 2021

Blood Clot Cure, Synthetic Fuels and Coal Mine Heat Pumps

Vic Gill talks to scientists who have cured a vaccine-induced blood clot patient, and meets a former top F1 chief engineer who wants to transform the fuel industry. Scientists in Vienna have been continuing to look at the rare blood clots associated with the AZ Covid-19 vaccination. Paul Knoebl des...

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May 13, 2021

Microplastics in UK river beds

Untreated wastewater "routinely released into UK rivers" is creating microplastic hotspots on riverbeds. That is the conclusion of a study in Greater Manchester, which revealed high concentrations of plastic immediately downstream of treatment works. The team behind the research concluded: untreated...

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May 6, 2021

Early burials, diversity in Tudor England, a malaria vaccine, and rogue brain waves

Despite being home to our early ancestors, attempts to find evidence of early burials in Africa have proved unsuccessful. That is until now. Professor María Martinón-Torres explains how findings from a 78,000-year-old Kenyan grave shed light on how our ancestors related to the dead. In keeping wit...

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April 29, 2021

Dragonfly on Titan, Retreating Glaciers, Surge Testing, Acoustic lighthouses

Now that NASA engineers have successfully flown a helicopter remotely on Mars planetary scientists are exploring how to use the technology elsewhere. Marnie Chesterton talks to Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle, from Johns Hopkins University who is working on a mission to fly a drone, called Dragonfly, above ...

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April 22, 2021

Coronavirus variants and vaccines, climate change resistant coffee, dare to repair and how to get rid of moths

This week has seen a huge surge in Covid- 19 in India leading to concern of a "double mutant" variant, but what do we know about this B.1.617 as it is otherwise known. It was first described in October and is now in other countries including the UK. Virologist Dr Muge Cevik looks at the emerging ev...

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April 15, 2021

Blood clots, grieving and the emotion of screams

The story of what we understand about the rare cases of blood clots associated with certain Covid-19 vaccines is constantly evolving. In today’s programme Professor Beverley Hunt looks at the emerging evidence. How have the restrictions due to Covid 19 affected how we grieve? Professor Claire Whit...

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April 8, 2021

Disobedient particles, noisy gorillas, sharks and fictional languages

In 2016, an accelerator physics centre called Fermilab acquired a massive circular 50 foot magnet from a lab in New York. Too big for the roads, the magnet had to take a 2000km detour via New Orleans to get to its new home. This was the start of the “muon g-2” experiment. Last week, Fermilab announc...

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April 1, 2021

Science funding cuts; Mice get Covid-19; Native oyster reintroductions

Scientists were delighted earlier this year to find they would still have access to the EU Horizon 2020 funding and collaborations. Now, it has been revealed that membership of this group, which was previously paid for through fees to the European Union, may come directly from the science budget, at...

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March 25, 2021

Halfway to net zero; hydrogen as a fuel; Fagradalsfjall, Iceland’s active volcano

The UK is reportedly halfway towards meeting its 2050 target of "net zero" carbon emissions. How did we get there and how will we achieve the next stage? ‘UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 were 51% below 1990 levels, according to a new Carbon Brief analysis. This means the UK is now halfway to m...

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March 18, 2021

Human embryo research and ethics; sperm whale social learning; Antikythera mechanism

We still know very little about exactly how the embryo forms out of a mass of dividing cells in those crucial first weeks after conception. This is also the time when many miscarriages occur, and scientists want to understand why. Couples going through IVF donate spare embryos for research and scien...

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March 11, 2021

China's green growth plan

On Friday 5th March China published a draft for its 14th five-year plan in Beijing. The document acts as a national economic blueprint and was expected to provide an outline as to how the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions planned on tackling its target of reaching net zero emission...

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March 4, 2021

Blue carbon; inside Little Foot's skull; reading locked letters

With global warming continuing to increase at an alarming rate, we need all the help we can get to lock up the carbon that we’ve released into the atmosphere. Fortunately, plants have evolved to do just this, but there’s a whole class of plants that often get forgotten: the mangroves and seagrasses ...

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February 25, 2021

Good COP Bad COP, Shotgun Lead Persistence, and Featherdown Adaptation

On Thursday, The UN Environmental Programme published a report called Making Peace With Nature. It attempts to synthesise vast amounts of scientific knowledge and communicate “how climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of the Sustainable Developm...

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February 18, 2021

Nasa's Perseverance - will it pay off? And spotting likely hosts for future pandemics.

On Thursday 18th Feb 2020 Nasa’s Perseverance Rover is due to touch down – gently and accurately – in the Jezero crater on Mars. Using similar nail-biting Sky Crane technology as its predecessor Curiosity, if successful it will amongst many other things attempt to fly the first helicopter in the thi...

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February 11, 2021

Meeting Mars, Melting Ice, Ozone on the Mend Again, and A Sea Cacophany

Victoria Gill and guests discuss the signs and symptoms of melting ice and anthropogenic climate warming, illicit CFC production and the racket we make in the seas. As two robotic missions from UAE and China arrive at Mars , and a third from NASA arrives next week, UK astronaut Tim Peake talks of ...

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February 4, 2021

Putting a number on biodiversity

Ahead of the COP summit in Glasgow at the end of the year, this week an important study was published that attempts to enumerate the value of biodiversity in the economics of humankind. Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta's review makes it clear how essential and yet vulnerable it is. Trees play a large part ...

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January 28, 2021

Next Gen Covid Vaccines; Man's Oldest Bestest Friend; Bilingual Brain Development

A year after the first SARS-Cov2 sequences were received in the vaccine labs, Dr Alex Lathbridge and guests look into ongoing development and what next year's booster shots might be like. Prof Robin Shattock's team at Imperial College are still working on their vaccine technology - called 'Self Am...

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January 21, 2021

Vaccine Hesitancy and Ethnicity; The Joy of catnip; Lake Heatwaves

Reports this week talk of some BAME ethnic minorities being significantly less likely to take a covid vaccine if offered. Vittal Katikireddi and Tolullah Oni both sit on the SAGE ethnicity subgroup, and they discuss with Alex Lathbridge where the figures come from and quite what they might mean. Som...

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January 14, 2021

UK Science post Brexit; GMOs vs Gene Editing regulation; Identical Twins That Aren't Indentical

In the new EU-UK deal, the UK is to be an associate member of the latest EU research funding round, known as Horizon Europe. Costing around £2bn to take part, what can UK scientists now do and what has changed? UKRI CEO Otteline Leyser and the Wellcome Trust EU specialist Beth Thompson discuss ways ...

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January 7, 2021

Vaccine Dosing and Biodiversity Soundscape Monitoring

After the decision by the UK government last week to change the spacing between dosings of vaccine from the recommended 3 weeks to 12 weeks, immunologists around the world have been discussing with some urgency the wisdom of such a move. The FDA and the WHO are deeply sceptical, and the manufacturer...

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December 31, 2020

Brian Cox and Alice Roberts on a decade of extraordinary science

As a new decade ticks over, Dr Adam Rutherford, Professor Alice Roberts and Professor Brian Cox look back on a decade of science that has transformed perceptions of our medicine, our history and our universe. From advances in genetics that have brought personalized medicine to reality, and revealed...

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December 24, 2020

Space Rocks, Aquatic Dinosaurs and Global Temperatures; 2020 science reviewed

Nobody could have failed to notice the one story dominating the science news this year - but what about the discoveries that have been overshadowed in 2020? This week, Dr Adam Rutherford eschews all mentions of the pandemic as he invites dinosaur researcher Dr Susie Maidment, climate scientist Dr Ta...

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December 17, 2020

Covid mutation; On the facial expression of emotions; A mystery object

Dr Alex Lathbridge with your peek at the week in science. This week in the House of Commons Matt Hancock announced a new variant in the Covid virus, discovered to be spreading through the south east of the UK. As Professor Jonathan Ball of the University of Nottingham describes, there have been man...

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December 10, 2020

Future risk planning; Millennium Seed Bank; Urban trees

Dr Alex Lathbridge brings you the week in science. As the first COVID vaccines are delivered this week hastening the first glimmers of a return to normal life, is it too soon to be thinking about other future threats to humanity? James Arbuthnot, chair of a House of Lords select committee tasked to...

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December 3, 2020

Protein folding; Hyabusa sample return; Holiday Covid testing

Has one of the biggest problems in biology been solved by AI? Dr Alex Lathbridge brings you the week in science. This week google's Deep Mind team presented results of their latest efforts at cracking the 50 year old problem of Protein Folding. AlphaFold has built on previous success at predicting ...

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November 26, 2020

26/11/2020

Last weekend a joint European-US satellite blasted into space to begin its mission - monitoring the oceans back here on earth. Sentinel 6 Michael Freilich is one of a long line of satellites and has a striking design – appearing like a bright gold farmyard barn with a big pitched roof. Anand Jagatia...

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November 19, 2020

COVID Operation Moonshot; Big Compost Experiment; Gulf of Mexico meteorite and new life

Earlier this month, the government rolled out a pilot in Liverpool for ‘Operation Moonshot’, their proposal to spend £100 billion pounds to regularly test the entire UK population for SARS CoV 2. Anand Jagatia speaks to screening expert Dr Angela Raffle and medical test evaluator Professor Jon Deeks...

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November 12, 2020

mRNA vaccinations; bacterial space miners; Artemis accords

Scientists this week announced hopeful results in two of the big COVID-19 vaccination trials. Trudie Lang, Professor of Global Health at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford, describes some of the methodology used, what the efficacy statistic means, and how the novel approach of inserting mRN...

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November 5, 2020

COVID in families; earthquake under Aegean Sea; Camilla Pang wins science book prize

We know that children can catch the SarsCov2 virus, even though adverse side effects are incredibly rare. But what isn't clear is how likely they are to transmit the virus? If you’re a parent, are you in danger of catching the virus, maybe brought home from school by your child? A large study, using...

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October 29, 2020

A new saliva gland, Bill Bryson on the Human Body, and the return of the Dust Bowl

Marnie Chesterton presents an update on the week's science. Behind your eyes, above your mouth but below the brain, two 3cm saliva glands have been hiding since anatomy began. So reports a new study by Matthijs Valstar and Wouter Vogel of The Netherlands Cancer Institute. They describe to Marnie ho...

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October 22, 2020

COVID reinfections, Susannah Cahalan questions psychiatry and sense of smell and COVID

If you contracted COVID will you then be protected from further infections and illness from SARS-CoV-2 in the future? We’re starting to hear about cases of people being infected by the novel coronavirus for a second time. A handful of these cases have been published in peer reviewed journals. Not...

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October 15, 2020

Test and trace - how the UK compares to the rest of the world; Linda Scott's book The Double X Economy

From the very start of the COVID pandemic, test and trace has been the mantra. But here in the UK it was started, then abandoned as the number of cases rose too high to manage. It’s now been reintroduced and we’re all being encouraged to download the ‘NHS COVID-19’ phone app which can detect whether...

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October 8, 2020

08/10/2020

Claudia Hammond looks at the neuroscience behind our sense of touch. Why does a gentle touch from a loved one make us feel good? This is a question that neuroscientists have been exploring since the late 1990's, following the discovery of a special class of nerve fibres in the skin. There seems ...

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October 1, 2020

Brian May's Cosmic Clouds 3-D; How fish move between waterbodies and Jim Al-Khalili's take on physics

There are few images as awe-inspiring as those of the deep cosmos. Photos of the stars, galaxies, constellations and cosmic nebulae are difficult to improve on, but a new book might have done just that, by making them stereoscopic. David Eicher, Editor-in-Chief of Astronomy Magazine teamed up with a...

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September 24, 2020

Royal Society Science Book Prize - Gaia Vince; Biodiversity loss and Science Museum mystery object

The Royal Society’s Insight Investment Science Book Prize’s shortlist has just been announced. Over the next few weeks, Marnie and Adam will be chatting to the six authors in line for the prestigious prize. They’ll be getting a guided tour of ‘The Body – a Guide for Occupants’ with Bill Bryson; Di...

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September 17, 2020

COVID-19 in Winter, Acoustics of Stonehenge and Dog years

As it starts to get colder and we crank up the central heating in our homes, what will the effect be on the SARs-CoV-2 virus? As a respiratory virus like the common cold and influenza, will the coronavirus have a distinct season and will the incidence of COVID get worse in the winter? A pre-print st...

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September 10, 2020

Coronavirus: The types of vaccine; How the UK is scaling up vaccine production

Vaccination has eradicated smallpox, a disease that decimated populations through the 20th century. Polio is almost gone too, and measles is no longer the pervasive childhood threat it once was. It’s clear that vaccination is our best tool to halt the threat of SARS CoV 2, and allow the return to a ...

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September 3, 2020

Bird and dinosaur skull evolution; the wonders of yeast and Science Museum mystery object

Skulls give researchers a great deal of insight into how an animal might have evolved, and skulls can be sensibly compared between species and groups of animals. The 10,000 species of bird around the world are what’s left of an even more diverse group, the dinosaurs. But research on their skulls has...

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August 27, 2020

What does the science say about the COVID risks of schools reopening? Dolphin ear autopsy

Over the next couple of weeks almost all children in the UK will be back to school. But the pandemic hasn’t ended, and we are far from having a complete understanding of how this virus works, including how it is transmitted and how it affects younger people. Pretty much everyone is in agreement tha...

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August 20, 2020

Smart bricks, The Royal Academy of Engineering awards for pandemic engineering solutions and detecting SARS-Cov-2 in sewage

Red clay bricks are among the most ubiquitous building materials worldwide. Julio D'Arcy, a chemist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, describes to Adam Rutherford how he and his team have turned ordinary house bricks into energy storage units that can power home electronic devices – ...

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August 13, 2020

Land use and zoonoses, California's earthquake risk and the Tuatara genome

COVID19 is a chilling reminder of how pathogens from animals can jump into humans. But it’s not the first time. SARS, Ebola, West Nile virus and bubonic plague are all serious infectious diseases that sat in a host species before crossing to us. But what causes this to happen? Individual case stud...

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August 6, 2020

How sperm swim, the theory of soil & the Big Compost Experiment update

Adam reveals new research which overturns received wisdom about how sperm swim. More than three centuries after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek peered down his early microscope to observe human sperm or ‘animalcules’ swimming with a ‘snakelike movement, like eels in water’, high-tech observations now revea...

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July 30, 2020

Science Museum mystery objects; home security camera security and Rosalind Franklin at 100

The Science Museum Group looks after over 7.3 million items. As with most museums, the objects you see on display when you visit are only the tip of the iceberg of the entire collection. Up until now, many of the remaining 300,000 objects have been stored in Blythe House in London. But now the colle...

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July 23, 2020

Pre-prints over peer review during the COVID pandemic and roads and birds

A pre-print is a way for scientists to get their work out quickly for other scientists to comment on and debate. But pre-prints are not peer reviewed; they have not undergone the scrutiny of reviewers and journal editors. They're generally seen as a good thing, but are just a step on the way for sci...

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July 16, 2020

Science Fraud & Bias, Immunity to COVID-19

Science is all about self-reflection. Scientists constantly check themselves, share their work, and check each other’s data. But how robust is the science upon which civilisation is built, the science which has mapped genomes, cured diseases, split atoms and sent people to the moon? Adam talks to ...

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July 9, 2020

Satellite navigation in the UK; the science of the World Wide Web and Neolithic genomics

Is the UK losing its way when it comes to satellite navigation? There's GPS from the US, but other countries and regions, including Russia, China, India and Japan, either have, or are building, satellite navigation systems of their own. The EU has Galileo, but with Brexit, Britain is no longer invol...

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July 2, 2020

Preventing pandemics, invading alien species, blood types & COVID-19.

As we’re beginning to understand more about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, we’re hopefully starting to get some clues on how to deal with the next viral pandemics, and even look at ways of stopping them from happening. To do this, we have to go back to where the virus jumped from its an...

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June 25, 2020

The Human Genome Project's 20th Anniversary

Adam Rutherford is back to celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the most ambitious and revolutionary scientific endeavours of all time - the Human Genome Project. Its scope and scale was breath-taking, set up to read every one of the 3 billion nucleotides, or letters of genetic information, co...

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June 18, 2020

Coronavirus conspiracy, Listeners' mask questions, Solar Orbiter gets close to the Sun

Throughout the pandemic, we've seen an explosion in information about the science of the virus, SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it causes, COVID-19. An article online, or a text forwarded, could be true and sounds about right, but how do you know that it's accurate? When scrolling through your social ...

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June 11, 2020

Engineering out of lockdown and should we castrate male dogs?

As the UK gradually begins to ease out of lockdown, Marnie explores how engineers are hoping to reduce the spread of Covid-19. We’ve learned how infected people exhale droplets and aerosols, containing the virus, and how we can then either inhale them, or transfer them to our faces by touching cont...

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June 4, 2020

Back to School and Covid-19 and Ordnance Survey and the pandemic

As the lockdown eases and some children, in preschool and primary years, start heading back to school, what impact will this have on the pandemic, how will we know and is there anything we can do about it? Marnie Chesterton talks to Professor of Mathematical Biology at Cambridge University, Julia ...

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May 28, 2020

Testing & Tracing the coronavirus, and the traces our movements leave behind

Inside Science this week is all about our information - the stuff we volunteer and the traces our everyday movements leave behind. With the launch of NHS Test and Trace across England, if you start to feel unwell with suspected Covid-19 and call a new NHS hotline 119, you’ll be tested for the virus...

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May 21, 2020

Coronavirus-free science, the impact of lockdown on climate change and the odds of both life and intelligent life existing.

In response to listeners who have expressed coronavirus fatigue in recent weeks, Marnie Chesterton brings us up to date on some of the best and brightest breaking science we might have missed, with BBC’s Non-Covid-19 Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos. Inching back to pandemic news, Marnie investi...

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May 14, 2020

Coronavirus R number, genome study of Covid-19 survivors and using aircraft messages to assess aviation

R seems to have found its way into the newspapers and on Radio 4 as if it’s a word, or a letter, that we should all be familiar with and understand. As part of the government’s briefing on Sunday, it appeared in a pseudo-equation, the infographic - 'COVID alert level = R + number of infections' - th...

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May 7, 2020

Should the public wear face masks? Did SARS-Cov-2 escape from a laboratory in Wuhan?

Advice about whether the public should wear face masks, to protect against infection by the coronavirus, differs around the world. In Europe, policy recommendations are mostly geared towards homemade masks. As this country waits to find out how we’ll venture out of lock down, should we be wearing f...

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April 30, 2020

Testing for immunity to COVID-19 and Citizen science on BBC Radio past and present

This week, the Government’s target to be testing 100,000 a day for COVID-19 looks like it won’t be met. But we’ve heard about many people who experienced the virus mildly, or who’ve tested positive with no symptoms at all. If you really want to know who has had the virus, the only way to tell for ce...

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April 23, 2020

Understanding Covid-19 death rates; Contact tracing apps; Whale sharks and atomic bombs

Every death is a tragedy for grief-stricken families, but every set of statistics is an opportunity to understand the virus and the disease Covid-19 a bit more. In fact gathering these data, quickly and accurately, is a priority at the moment, up there with developing a vaccine and rolling out wides...

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April 16, 2020

Lockdown lessons for climate change and the carbon neutral Cumbrian coal mine

While the world is dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, those who are concerned about the environment are saying that an arguably bigger crisis is being side-lined. Climate change, or climate breakdown, is still happening. Just like the Covid-19 pandemic, it will be the poorest people in the poore...

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April 9, 2020

Testing for asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, Human Cell Atlas, and invasive parakeets

You can’t build up a picture of Covid-19’s spread throughout the UK without testing those who might have it and those who might have already had it. Britain currently is only testing people who are hospitalised, some healthcare workers and a handful of exceptions. The upshot is that we don't have re...

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April 2, 2020

Coronavirus: Models & being ‘led by the science’; Mars500 isolation tips; Kids’ science - singing glasses

Marnie Chesterton reveals how important the models and graphs are in informing government strategies for the Covid-19 pandemic. Christl Donnelly, Professor of Statistical Epidemiology at Imperial College London and Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford, and Dr Kit Yates, Senior...

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March 26, 2020

Coronavirus - Lockdown efficacy; viral testing; surface survival; dog walking safety

Last week, we promised we’d tackle your coronavirus and associated Covid 19 questions and you came up trumps. So this week we’re be talking about the latest from the lockdown, why there are bottlenecks in the testing system, how long the virus lives on your door handles and whether your dog can spre...

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March 19, 2020

TB vaccination to replace culling in badgers; Neil Shubin on the wonders of evolution

The government have announced that the controversial cull of badgers across England will begin to be phased out in the next few years. It will be replaced by vaccinating badgers for bovine TB. The cull is intended to cut tuberculosis in cattle and has killed at least 100,000 badgers since 2013. TB i...

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March 12, 2020

Biology of the new coronavirus

Adam Rutherford explores what makes the new coronavirus so effective at making us ill. Jonathan Ball, Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, explains the structure of the virus and how it gets into our lungs. Evolutionary virologist at Cambridge University, Dr Charlotte Houldcroft talks t...

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March 5, 2020

Banning lead shot for hunting; UK Fireball Network and Extremely thin gold

We have known for centuries about the toxic properties of lead, and we have known since at least 1876 that birds die of lead poisoning when they eat lead gunshot (which they do, thinking its grit). To address this, in 1999, the use of lead ammunition in England was restricted. These Regulations proh...

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February 27, 2020

The Big Compost Experiment; Using AI to screen for new antibiotics; Science of slapstick

Composters - we need you! Or rather materials scientists at UCL, Mark Miodownik and Danielle Purkiss, need you to take part in their Big Compost Experiment. Launched back in November, the team asked members of the public to fill in an online questionnaire about their composting and recycling habits....

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February 20, 2020

Coronavirus questions; HMS Challenger and ocean acidification; Sean Carroll's quantum world

Adam Rutherford is joined by Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, Jonathan Ball, to help answer some of your questions on the latest coronavirus outbreak. Will it become endemic, and once infected and recovered how long are we resistant to the virus? And can face masks and alcohol hand ge...

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February 13, 2020

Ordnance Survey - Britain's 220-year-old tech company; Launching synthetic voices and personality test

For the past 220 years, Ordnance Survey have been mapping Great Britain with extraordinary accuracy. But as Gareth discovers when he visits their HQ in Southampton, GB's master map is not a static printed document. It's a 2 petabyte database which is updated up to 20,000 times a day. This adds up to...

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February 6, 2020

Solar Orbiter launch; Mutational signatures in cancer; paleo-oncology

The latest space mission to the Sun is due to launch on Sunday. SolO, the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, will loop around our star in an elliptical orbit, sling-shotting around Venus. Professor Richard Harrison at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory has been on the mission from its conception...

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January 30, 2020

Coronavirus update, Typhoid Mary and 200th anniversary of the first sighting of Antarctica

With the recent coronavirus outbreak spreading around the world, and concerns about people being infectious before they exhibit any symptoms. Professor of Virology at Nottingham University Jonathan Ball explains infection rates, quarantines and why he's worried about it spreading to the developing w...

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January 23, 2020

Coronavirus outbreak in China; Genetic diseases in Amish communities and getting an Egyptian mummy to speak

With news reports moving as quickly as the virus may be spreading, the latest coronavirus outbreak which is thought to have started in Wuhan in central China is fast becoming a global health concern. Adam Rutherford speaks to BBC Inside Science's resident virologist Professor Jonathan Ball from Nott...

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January 16, 2020

Reproducibility crisis in science; Aeolus wind-measuring satellite; electric cars

Science is built upon the idea that results can be verified by others. Scientists do their experiments and write up their methods and results and submit them to a journal that sends them to other scientists, who check them and if they pass muster, the study gets published for further scrutiny. One o...

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January 9, 2020

Australian bush fires; Veganuary and LIGO

2019 was the hottest and driest year on record in Australia. The Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode weather systems, plus existing drought conditions, all primed the continent for the horrific fire season currently raging in the east and south east of the country. Climate scientist at...

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January 2, 2020

The hidden history in our DNA - Part 2 - Travel and Culture

Our genomes are more than just an instruction manual for our bodies. They are maps, diaries, history books and medical records of our and our ancestor's lives...if you know how to read them. In the second part of BBC Inside Science's special, series, Adam Rutherford, UCL geneticist Lucy van Dorp and...

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December 26, 2019

The hidden history in our DNA - Part 1 - Sex and Disease

Our genomes are more than just an instruction manual for our bodies. They are maps, diaries, history books and medical records of our and our ancestors' lives.....if you know how to read them. In this programme and the next Adam Rutherford is joined by UCL geneticist Lucy van Dorp and other scientis...

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December 19, 2019

Ten years of Zooniverse; what happened to volcano Anak Krakatau and visualising maths

Adam Rutherford talks to Chris Lintott about the citizen science platform he set up ten years ago. Zooniverse is a place where the public can help scientists analyse huge swathes of data. Projects such as spotting distant galaxies, counting penguins and tagging WW2 diaries have all has a huge boost ...

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December 12, 2019

Earliest hunting scene cave painting; animal domestication syndrome

A cave painting in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has been dated and is at least 43,900 years old. The mural portrays a group of part-human, part-animal figures (called therianthropes), hunting large mammals with spears and ropes. It is thought to be the oldest representation of a hunting scene in human histo...

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December 5, 2019

Global Carbon Emissions; Parker Solar Probe and simulating swaying buildings

Reports from the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 25) in Madrid are saying that global warming is increasing and that we're not doing enough, fast enough, to change things. The World Meteorological Organisation's provisional State of the Climate 2019 report lists atmospheric carbon dioxide reaching...

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November 28, 2019

What's the problem with palm oil and should we be supporting sustainably grown oil? Virtual reality skin

Palm oil is now such a dirty word for household products and processed food, that it often hides behind a list of dozens of pseudonyms (from the ubiquitous sodium laureth sulphate to the slightly more obvious palm kernel oil, to the totally opaque vegetable oil). It’s becoming a major global concern...

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November 21, 2019

Noise pollution and wildlife; No till farming; Cornwall's geothermal heat

The effects of human-made noise on the natural world has been surprisingly little studied. Hanjoerg Kunc at Queen's University in Belfast has collected all experimental data on the effects of anthropogenic noise on wild animals and found it to be overwhelmingly harmful., And Cambridge University's P...

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November 14, 2019

Soils and floods, Air pollution and ultra-low emission zones, detecting the drug Spice

The UK's soils are the first line of defence against flooding, but the condition of the soil is vital to how well it can soak up and slowly release rainwater. Jane Rickson, Professor of soil erosion and conservation at Cranfield University, explains to Adam what makes a healthy soil and what farmer...

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November 7, 2019

Fracking moratorium; Bloodhound; Big Compost Experiment; transit of Mercury

The Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced an indefinite moratorium this week on mining of shale gas by hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, in the UK, citing fears of earthquakes and seismic activity caused by fracking in the past. In August this year, a 2.9 magnitude earthquake was recorded at the ...

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October 31, 2019

African genomes sequenced; Space weather; sports head injuries

Since the human genome was first sequenced nearly 20 years ago, around a million people have had theirs decoded, giving us new insights into the links between genes, ancestry and disease. But most of the genomes studied have been in people of European descent. Now a decade-long collaboration between...

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October 24, 2019

Organic farming emissions; Staring at seagulls; Salt and dementia

Switching to 100% organic food production in England and Wales would see an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Although going fully organic would produce fewer direct emissions than conventional farming, researchers say it would limit food production. Making up the shortfall with imports ...

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October 17, 2019

Ebola model, Partula snails, Malaria origin

Zoonotic diseases are infections that transfer from animals to people, and include killers such as bubonic plague, malaria, ebola and a whole host of others. Trying to understand how diseases make the leap from animals to humans – so called spillover – and how outbreaks occur is a crucial part of pr...

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October 10, 2019

Extinction Rebellion, UK net zero emissions and climate change; Nobel Prizes

Extinction Rebellion is in the news with its stated aim of civil disobedience and protest, and goal to compel governments around the world to act on the climate crisis. Meanwhile, the UK government this week announced that it was overruling its own Planning Inspectorate, by approving in principle ne...

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October 3, 2019

HIV protective gene paper retraction, Imaging ancient Herculaneum scrolls, Bill Bryson's The Body

In November 2018 news broke via YouTube that He Jiankui, then a professor at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China had created the world’s first gene-edited babies from two embryos. The edited gene was CCR5 delta 32 - a gene that conferred protection against HIV. Alongside...

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September 26, 2019

Oceans, ice and climate change; Neolithic baby bottles; Caroline Criado-Perez wins RS Book Prize

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report on the oceans and cryosphere makes pretty grim reading on the state of our seas and icy places. Ocean temperatures are rising, permafrost and sea ice are melting, sea levels are rising and marine life is either moving or suffering the e...

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September 19, 2019

MOSAiC Arctic super-expedition, Likely extinction of the Bahama nuthatch, Tim Smedley's book on air pollution

On Friday, 20 September, a powerful icebreaker called The Polarstern will set sail from Tromsø, Norway, with the aim of getting stuck into the polar ice. The plan is for the ship to spend the next year drifting past the North Pole, and this should enable scientists to collect unprecedented data on t...

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September 12, 2019

Model embryos from stem cells, Paul Steinhardt's book on impossible crystals, Mother Thames

One of the most fundamental developmental stages we humans go through is extremely poorly understood. The first few days of the embryo, once it's been implanted in the womb is incredibly hard to study. Yet it's the time when the majority of pregnancies fail. Professor Magdalena Zernika-Goetz at Camb...

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September 5, 2019

Inventing GPS, Carbon nanotube computer, Steven Strogatz and Monty Lyman discuss calculus and skin

Global Positioning System, or GPS is perhaps the best known of the satellite navigation systems, helping us find our way every day. Back in the 1970's Bradford Parkinson and Hugo Fruehauf were two of the inventors who miniaturised atomic clocks and launched them in Earth orbit satellites. This was p...

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August 29, 2019

Amazon fires, Royal Society Book Prize shortlist announced, John Gribben on quantum physics

Satellite data has shown an 85% increase in the number of fires across Brazil this year. There are more than 2,500 fires active across the Amazon region. This represents the most active number of fires since 2010. The increase in fires has been attributed to deliberate deforestation and clearing for...

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August 22, 2019

UK's black squirrels' genetic heritage; nuclear fusion in the UK and the Royal Society's science book prize

Perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to spot the uncommon black grey squirrel in the UK. The bizarre mutation that causes a change in fur colour has finally divulged its historic evolution. Dr Helen McRobie at Anglia Ruskin University studies the black version of the introduced grey squirrel. She explai...

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August 15, 2019

UK power cut, Huge dinosaur find in Wyoming, Micro-plastics in Arctic snow

Following the simultaneous outages of two UK power plants last Friday, affecting nearly 1 million people across the country, we at Inside Science wanted to get back to the basics of electricity and get our heads round how the National Grid keeps the nation running. Keith Bell explains the difference...

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August 8, 2019

Making the UK's dams safe, AI spots fake smiles, How many trees should we be planting?

In the light of the evacuation of the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge due to damage to the Todbrook reservoir dam and the threat of a catastrophic collapse, questions inevitably arise as to how ‘future proofed’ UK dams are? This is doubly worrying in light of climate change and the increasing likel...

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August 1, 2019

Lovelock at 100; Hydrothermal vents and antibiotic resistance in the environment

James Lovelock is one of the most influential thinkers on the environment of the last half century. His grand theory of planet Earth - Gaia, which is the idea that from the bottom of the Earth's crust to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, Earth is one giant inter-connected and self-regulating syst...

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July 25, 2019

False positives in genetic test kits, Impact of fishing on ocean sharks, Sex-change fish

Dr Adam Rutherford uncovers the worrying number of false positive results that the DNA sequencing technologies used by 'direct to consumer' genetic test kits are producing. Many of these tests offer analysis on your ancestry, but some also offer to check you out for the likelihood of you being at ri...

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July 18, 2019

Turing on the new £50 note, Moon landing on the radio, 25 years since Shoemaker-Levy comet

Code-breaker and father of computer science, Alan Turing has been chosen to celebrate the field of science on the new £50 note. Adam Rutherford asks Chief Cashier at the Bank of England, Sarah Johns how and why he was selected and he asks Sue Black, Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evang...

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July 11, 2019

Earliest modern human skull, Analysing moon rocks, Viruses lurking in our genomes

A new study shows that 210,000-year-old skull found in Greece is the earliest evidence for modern humans in Eurasia. A second skull found in the same site is found to be a Neanderthal from 170,000 years ago. These findings suggest that modern humans left Africa earlier and reached further than previ...

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July 4, 2019

X-Rays on Mercury, Monkey Tools, Music of Molecules, AI Drivers

The 2019 Royal Society Summer Science exhibition in London is free to enter and continues until Sunday 7th July. BBC Inside Science this week comes from the Society’s HQ in central London. BepiColombo and the X-rays from Mercury Prof Emma Bunce, has been part of the team that last year launched an ...

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June 27, 2019

Global Food Security, Reactive Use-By Labels, Origins of the Potato

On the day that the UK government launches a year long “food-to-Fork” review of food production in the UK, we present a food themed special edition. Global Food Security Maia Elliot is an analyst and writer for Global Food Security, who recently held a competition for young food researchers to pres...

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June 20, 2019

Rinderpest destruction, Noise and birdsong, Science as entertainment

Rinderpest – Sequence and Destroy Last week the UK’s Pirbright Institute announced that it had destroyed its remaining stocks of the deadly cattle virus Rinderpest. This repository was one of the biggest remaining stores of it since it was announced in 2011 that vaccines had eradicated it in the wil...

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June 13, 2019

Net-Zero carbon target, Science Policy Under Thatcher, Screen time measures

Net-Zero Carbon Target The UK is set to become the first member of the G7 industrialised nations group to legislate for net-zero emissions after Theresa May’s announcement this week. The proposed legislation would commit the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to ‘net-zero’ by 2050, which would mean that ...

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June 6, 2019

CCR5 Mutation Effects, The Surrey Earthquake Swarm, Animal Emotions

Some people have a genetic mutation in a gene called CCR5 that seems to bestow immunity to a form of HIV. This is the mutation which controversial Chinese scientist Jianqui He tried to bestow upon two baby girls last year when he edited the genes in embryos and then implanted them in a mother. A pap...

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May 30, 2019

How maths underpins science

Adam Rutherford and guests at the Hay Festival discuss how maths underwrites all branches of science, and is at the foundation of the modern world. His guests are the following. Professor Steve Strogatz, of Cornell University, the author of a new book on calculus, Infinite Powers. He’s worked on...

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May 23, 2019

New CFC emissions, Cannabis and the Environment, The Noisy Cocktail Party, Automated Face Recognition

New CFC emissions Researchers say that they have pinpointed the major sources of a mysterious recent rise in a dangerous, ozone-destroying chemical. CFC-11 was primarily used for home insulation but global production was due to be phased out in 2010. But scientists have seen a big slowdown in the ra...

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May 16, 2019

Hubble Not-So Constant, Synthetic E. Coli, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt

The Hubble Constant The Hubble constant is the current expansion rate of the universe but it seems to have changed over time. Hiranya Peiris, Professor of Astrophysics from University College London and Adam Riess, Professor of Physics and Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University, are both using diff...

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May 9, 2019

Forensic science provision, optimal garden watering strategy, and a mystery knee bone

A damning House of Lords' report into the provision of forensic science in England and Wales makes for uncomfortable reading for some but is broadly welcomed by those in the field. Prof. Niamh Nic Daeid, one of many who gave evidence to the Science and Technology Committee, gives her reaction and su...

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May 2, 2019

Sex, gender and sport - the Caster Semenya case and the latest Denisovan discovery

In 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) introduced new eligibility regulations for female athletes with differences in sex development (DSDs). These regulations are based on the contention that women with high levels of endogenous testosterone and androgen sensitivity ...

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April 25, 2019

Thought-to-speech machine, City Nature Challenge, Science of Storytelling

Patients who suffer neurological impairments preventing them from speaking potentially face a severely limited existence. Being able to express yourself in real time is a large part of our identity. In the journal Nature this week, scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, report ...

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April 18, 2019

Notre-Dame fire, Reviving pig brains, ExoMars, Evolution of faces

The horror of the blazing Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris has been slightly quenched by the fact that so much of the French landmark has been saved. But what was it about the structure of the roof, with some the beams dating from the 13th century, that meant it burned like a well-stacked bonfire? Guil...

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April 11, 2019

Visualising a black hole, Homo luzonensis, Two ways to overcome antimicrobial resistance

"We have now seen the unseeable" according to scientists who are part of the Event Horizon Telescope group. The international team has released a picture of the first black hole. Data gathered from an array of over 8 radio telescopes has been crunched to create a picture of the super-hot plasma surr...

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April 4, 2019

Cretaceous catastrophe fossilised, LIGO and Virgo, Corals, Forensic shoeprint database

About 66 million years ago an asteroid at least 6 miles wide crashed into the Earth, in the shallow sea that is now the Yucatan Peninsular in Mexico. It gouged the Chicxulub crater 18 miles deep; threw 25 trillion tonnes of debris into the atmosphere, much of which was hotter than the Sun, created h...

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March 28, 2019

UK pollinating insect numbers, Tracking whales using barnacles, Sleep signals

One of the longest running insect pollinator surveys in the world, shows that a few generalist pollinators are on the increase, whereas specialist insects are declining. Using data collected by volunteers across Great Britain to map the spatial loss of pollinator insect species, the study by the CEH...

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March 21, 2019

Where next World Wide Web? Space rocks and worms

30 years ago Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as a way to let physicists share their papers and data on a distributed network. It's changed a lot since then and not all for the better. Dominant technology companies monopolise our data and many, including Berners-Lee are worried about the ...

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March 14, 2019

Rules and ethics of genome editing, Gender, sex and sport, Hog roasts at Stonehenge

When the news broke last December that Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui had successfully edited the genomes of twin girls using the technique known as CRISPR-Cas9, scientists and the public were rightly outraged that such a procedure had taken place. Jiankui is currently being investigated by Chinese...

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March 7, 2019

A cure for HIV? Sleepy flies, Secrets of the Fukushima disaster, Science fact checking

An HIV-1 sufferer, who had developed aggressive cancer, and underwent a revolutionary stem cell transplant, has been declared HIV resistant. It's been 18 months since the 'London patient' underwent a stem cell transplant of donated HIV resistant cells. This has only happened once before, in the case...

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February 28, 2019

Falling carbon and rising methane; Unsung heroes at the Crick

Efforts to cut emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and tackle climate change in many developed economies are beginning to pay off, according to research led by Corinne Le Quere at the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia. The study suggests that policies supporting renewable energy and ener...

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February 21, 2019

Mars - rovers v humans? Forests and carbon, Ethiopian bush crow

Nasa have called time on the 14 year mission with the Mars Opportunity rover. Curiosity is still there. But what's next for our exploration of the Red planet? Adam asks Senior Strategist in Space Systems at Airbus, Liz Seward and BBC space correspondent, Jonathan Amos. Airbus are working with the Eu...

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February 14, 2019

Insect decline, Gut microbiome, Geomagnetic switching

A very strongly worded, meta-review paper (looking at 73 historical reports from around the world published over the past 13 years) has just been published looking at the fate of insects around the world. The researchers have collated other people’s research, including the big 27 year study from Ger...

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February 7, 2019

Sea Level Rise, Equine Flu, Generator Bricks, Iberian Genes

In 2016 some scientists suggested that with climate change so much ice in Antarctica could melt that the global sea level could rise up to a metre. There would be an "ice apocalypse". Now another group has refined the models and in a paper published this week has concluded that the rise will be lowe...

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January 31, 2019

Sprinting Neanderthals, Geodynamo, Spreading Sneezes and Dying Hares

Many physical features of Neanderthals might not be for cold climate adaptation as previously thought. They may be for types of locomotion. Which, according to paleo-ecologist, John Stewart at Bournemouth University, makes the long thigh to calf ratios more likely that Neanderthals were adapted to f...

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January 4, 2019

Ultima Thule, Dry January, Periodic Table

2019 means the opportunity to explore the most distant object yet encountered in our solar system – the brilliantly named Ultima Thule as Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft hit the headlines this week when it flew past an object 4 billion miles away, took photos and sent them back to earth. The stunning...

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November 29, 2018

Gene-edited twins, Placenta organoids in a dish, When the last leaves drop

Claims by a Chinese scientist that he has gene-edited human embryos, transplanted them producing genetically edited twins, who will pass on these changes to their offspring, has the scientific community outraged. The work, which was carried out in secret, has not been officially published or peer re...

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November 22, 2018

Mars InSight mission, Detecting dark matter, Redefining the kilogram, Bovine TB

The Government's strategy to eradicate TB in cattle is a contentious topic. The disease is extremely complicated and lots of people have different ideas on how to manage it. Professor of Zoonotic and Emerging Disease at the University of Nottingham, Malcolm Bennett, helps Adam Rutherford understand ...

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November 15, 2018

Bovine TB and badger culling, Shrimp hoover CSI, Shark-skin and Turing

The Bovine TB Strategy Review has just been released. It contains a review of the science and offers advice and guidance to Government ministers on how to eradicate this costly and hard to manage disease in cattle. Controversially it does not include the results from the on going badger culling tria...

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November 8, 2018

Oldest cave picture; the Anthropocene under London; a new scientist for the £50 note

What could be the oldest figurative cave paintings in the world have been found in a cave complex in remote Borneo. A reddish orange depiction of an animal that could be a Banteng (wild cattle found in the region) is at least 40,000 years old. Humans are now the greatest force in shaping the surfa...

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November 1, 2018

Repairing potholes, Ozone hole, Internet of hives, Drugs from fingerprints

Potholes are one of the biggest frustrations to any road-user, but why do they keep occurring? Following Philip Hammond’s announcement of £420 million for councils to tackle potholes, Malcolm Simms, Director of the Mineral Products Association’s Asphalt & Pavement group, explains how potholes form a...

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October 25, 2018

Science and Brexit, Antibiotic livestock growth promoters, Bepicolombo goes to Mercury

How might Brexit affect UK Science? Why is feeding a 'last resort' antibiotic to farm animals not a good idea? Why is space probe Bepicolombo going to Mercury? Adam Rutherford is your host. This week, leading British and European scientists wrote to the British Prime Minister and European Commis...

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October 18, 2018

Old Dogs and Physics in Space

How far back can we trace the ancestry of dogs? For just how long have they been following us around? The answer is for a very long time - long before humans settled down and developed societies. Scientists in France have been looking at ancient dog DNA to try and work out whether people tamed and d...

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October 11, 2018

IPCC report, Cairngorms Connect project, grass pea, the Sun exhibition at Science Museum

Adam Rutherford speaks to Dr Tamsin Edwards, a lecturer in Physical Geography at Kings College London and a lead author for the latest IPCC report. Dr Edwards describes what happens in the making of the report, including the summarising of the wealth of scientific literature available into an unders...

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October 4, 2018

Nobel Prizes - Hayabusa 2 latest - IPCC meeting - North Pole science

Adam Rutherford reviews this year's Nobel science prizes, and talks to Professor Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a 2009 laureate and president of the Royal Society, about the experience of being tipped as a Nobel winner. This can included a stressful condition known as Pre-Nobelitis and having unidentifi...

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September 27, 2018

Hyabusa 2 at Ryugu, deadly 1918 flu pandemic; WW2 bombing and ionosphere, teenage brain

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has arrived after more than a three year journey at the Ryugu asteroid which is just over half a mile long. It has successfully sent probes onto the surface and is sending pictures back to Earth. Gareth Mitchell discusses the achievement with BBC Science Correspondent J...

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September 20, 2018

Science of Addiction

The Science Gallery London at Kings College London, right under the Shard, is a brand new venue for the collision of art, science and culture, and its opening exhibition is called Hooked, a series of installations and works by people who have experienced addiction. Adam Rutherford explores the neu...

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September 13, 2018

First human drawing, Cycling genes, Oden Arctic expedition, Hello World

A new discovery of abstract symbolic drawings on a rock has been found in the Blombos Cave, about 300 km east of Cape Town in South Africa. The fragment - which some say looks a bit like a hashtag - puts the date of the earliest drawing at 73,000 years ago. As archaeologist Chris Henshilwood tells A...

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September 6, 2018

Complexity in Biology

Adam Rutherford takes the show to Dublin this week, to wrestle with great matters of biological complexity. Trinity College Dublin has organised a mass gathering of some of the world's leading researchers in the life sciences to mark the 75th anniversary of one of the most influential series of lect...

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August 30, 2018

Electronic brain probe; Rural stream biodiversity; Arctic weather research trip; Science book prize

Scientists have shown how an electronic gadget, implanted in the brain, can detect, treat and even prevent epileptic seizures. Epilepsy is usually treated using anti-epilepsy drugs, but can cause serious side-effects. Researchers at the University of Cambridge, are aiming to create something more sp...

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August 23, 2018

Cavendish banana survival; Guillemot egg shape; Unexpected Truth About Animals; Tambora's rainstorm

The last banana you probably ate was a type called Cavendish. But this, our last commercially viable variety is under severe threat, as the fungus, called Tropical Race 4, is laying waste to swathes of Cavendish banana plants across China, Asia and Australia. Recently, scientists & horticulturalists...

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August 16, 2018

Capturing greenhouse gas, Beating heart failure with beetroot, Why elephants don't get cancer, Exactly - a history of precision

Researchers have found a way to produce a naturally occurring mineral, magnesite, in a lab, that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, offering a potential strategy for tackling climate change. They've accelerated a process that normally takes thousands of years to a matter of days, using panels made ...

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August 9, 2018

New Horizons' next mission, Helium at 150, The Beautiful Cure, Oden arctic expedition

Astronomers this week have been warming up for an encounter as far from the Sun as ever attempted. It's the finale of the New Horizons mission which successfully passed Pluto in 2015 and is now on its way to Ultima Thule - a Kuiper belt object on the edge of the solar system. Marc Buie is just back ...

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August 2, 2018

Parker solar probe, Diversity in the lab, Royal Society book prize, Arctic circle weather

The sun still has many mysterious properties. The Parker Solar Probe, launched next week will be the closest a spacecraft has ever flown to our star. It's a mission that's been on the drawing board for decades which space scientists have only dreamt of. It will fly into the mysterious solar corona, ...

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July 26, 2018

Liquid water on Mars, Early embryo development, Earth Biogenome Project, Marine wilderness

The European Space Agency's satellite Mars Express has identified what we think is a subterranean lake of liquid near the south pole of the red planet. The question of water on Mars has been around for years, and we've known about water ice, and there's been the possibility of seasonal flowing water...

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July 19, 2018

Peatbog wildfires, Coral acoustics, Magdalena Skipper, Fuelling long-term space travel

The wildfires on Saddleworth Moor may well be the most widespread in modern British history. Thanks to herculean efforts by Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service and the military, they are now extinguished, though the peat continues to smoulder. Now the longer term ecological impact is being as...

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July 12, 2018

Out of Africa, Predicting future heatwaves, Virtual reality molecules, Life in the dark

Scientists have found the earliest known evidence of a human presence outside Africa. A set of 96 stone tools has been found in the mountains of south-east China, which is the furthest afield this type of tool has been located. The scientists who found them have put the date of these tools at 2.1 mi...

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July 5, 2018

Northern white rhino preservation, Deep sea earthquake detection, Twitter's rare Heuchera discovery, Human roars

The northern white rhinoceros is the world's most endangered mammal. The death earlier this year of the last male of this rhino subspecies leaves just two females as its only living members. New research out this week has adopted new techniques in reproductive medicine as a last ditch attempt to pre...

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June 28, 2018

Hyabusa mission; ProtoDUNE neutrino detector; Caledonian crow skills; Koala microbiome

Yesterday a small Japanese ion-thruster spaceship arrived at its destination after a three year and half year, 2 billion mile journey. Hyabusa2 is currently floating alongside the asteroid known as 162173 Ryugu. BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos dissects the aims of this audacious sample-retur...

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June 21, 2018

The Large Hadron Collider Upgrade, Voltaglue, Cambridge Zoology Museum, Francis Willughby

It's been 8 years since the Large Hadron Collider went online and started smashing protons together at just below the speed of light. CERN announced this week that they're ready for a massive upgrade, and on Friday last week, there was a ceremony to break ground on what is being called the High lumi...

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June 18, 2018

Antarctic melt speeds up, Antarctica's future, Cryo-acoustics, Narwhals

Adam Rutherford goes totally polar this week with news of accelerating ice melt in Antarctica, two visions of the continent's future, and the sounds of collapsing icebergs and the songs of narwhals. Two hundred billion tonnes of Antarctic ice are now being lost to the ocean every year, pushing up g...

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June 14, 2018

Dinosaur auction, Who owns the genes of the ocean life, Cancer immunotherapy

A spectacular predatory dinosaur fossil was auctioned this week in Paris. It was bought by a private collector at the cost of about 2 million Euros. Academic palaeontologists are not happy about the sale. Anjali Goswami of the Natural History Museum and Steve Brussatte of Edinburgh University air th...

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May 31, 2018

Hay Festival

Adam Rutherford and his guests at the Hay Festival, neurologist Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan, acoustic engineer Professor Trevor Cox and science writer Dr Philip Ball discuss what scientists learn when things go wrong. Suzanne O'Sullivan, author of Brainstorm, talks about how she helps her patients with st...

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May 24, 2018

CO2 and rice, Underground farming, Ancient interstellar asteroid, Microplastics air pollution

New research suggests that rice will be depleted in important B vitamins and minerals by rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Adam Rutherford to talks to Kristie Ebi of the University of Washington, one of the scientists behind the finding, and consults Marco Springmann of the Future of Food project...

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May 17, 2018

Face Recognition, ‘Thug’ plants, Cancer Funding Inequalities, Feynman’s 100th birthday

Facial recognition technology is on the rise and in some places used to fight crime. In the UK the police have been heavily criticised for falsely identifying people using the technology. But are their results really that bad? Professor Hassan Ugail tells Adam Rutherford that – though there is room ...

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May 10, 2018

Rat eradication; elephant talk; the rise of the dinosaurs; physics of snooker

On the remote island of South Georgia, the invasion of rats from passing ships has wreaked havoc on the local wildlife. But the South Georgia Heritage Trust announced this week that all rats have been eradicated thanks to an extensive project. Adam Rutherford speaks to chairman Professor Mike Richar...

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May 3, 2018

Antarctic, Kew, Paleogenomics, Sea birds

The Thwaites glacier in Western Antarctica is twice the size of the UK and accounts for about 4% of sea level rise, but what is unknown is whether the glacier will collapse as a result of environmental change. Adam Rutherford speaks to 2 scientists from a major new study who with the help of seals a...

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April 26, 2018

Human Consciousness: Could a brain in a dish become sentient?

As the field of neuroscience advances, scientists are increasingly growing brain tissue to study conditions like autism, Alzheimer's and Zika virus. But could it become conscious? And if so, how far away is that scenario? Wind, changing water temperatures and salt are all factors known to contro...

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April 19, 2018

Plastic-eating bacteria, Foam mattresses for crops, The evolved life aquatic, The Double Helix

A breakthrough for closed loop plastic recycling? Two years ago Japanese scientists discovered a type of bacteria which has evolved to feed on PET plastic - the material from which fizzy drink bottles are made It was isolated at a local recycling centre. An international team has now characterised t...

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April 12, 2018

Pesticides in British Farming

A few weeks ago, Inside Science featured an item on neonicotinoids and the negative impact these pesticides have on insects like honey bees. The discussion turned to alternatives, including organic farming. Many listeners wrote in about some issues that went unchallenged. So this week, Adam returns ...

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April 5, 2018

Stephen Hawking Tribute

Adam Rutherford presents a special tribute to the science of Stephen Hawking. He is joined by Fay Dowker, a former PhD student of Hawking and now a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College, Professor Carlos Frenk, a long-time colleague and friend and fellow physicist and science communic...

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March 29, 2018

Genes and education, John Goodenough, Caring bears and hunting

A widely reported study published last week suggests that on average children at selective schools have more gene variants associated with higher educational attainment than children at non-selective schools. It also suggests that selective schools achieve better GCSE exam results because their sele...

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March 22, 2018

Data Scraping

The story of how Cambridge Analytica had scraped Facebook data in its attempt to influence voting behaviour has been reported widely this week. Andrew Steele, a medical researcher at the Crick Institute in London, explains how data mining or scraping actually works and how it is used by many scienti...

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March 15, 2018

Buzz kill

As spring and Brexit loom, Adam Rutherford examines what stance the UK might take on neonicotinoids. The pesticide has been shown to harm bee populations by many scientific studies. Now, the largest report of its kind has put pressure on the EU to vote on whether three types of neonics should be ban...

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March 8, 2018

Russian Spy Poisoning

A former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia are in a serious condition after being exposed to a nerve agent on Sunday. The first police officer to attend the scene also remains in hospital. It is being treated as 'a major incident involving attempted murder.' We ask what happens nex...

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March 1, 2018

Weird Weather?

With many parts of the country seeing large snowfalls we ask what's driving our current weather? What factors need to be in place to create snowfalls, and how do these differ from sleet or frozen rain? And we address the impact of climate change, while a series of weather events might show a pattern...

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February 22, 2018

Science after Brexit

The UK is one of the largest recipients of research funding in the EU. Marnie Chesterton discusses what the future of UK science funding will look like with MP Norman Lamb, who chairs the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, and Ed Whiting, Director of Policy and Chief of Staff at the ...

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February 15, 2018

Shipping air pollution; Cheddar Man; Millirobots in the body;Dog brain training

Sulphur belched out of vessels' smokestacks is a serious health problem for coastal communities around the world. Four hundred thousand premature deaths from lung cancer and cardiovascular disease and around 14 million childhood asthma cases annually are reckoned to be related to shipping emissions....

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February 8, 2018

Democracy in Space

This week a US based billionaire launched a giant space rocket and sent a car vaguely in the direction of Mars. As a space mission it was to say the least unconventional, and for those involved in promoting space science it presents a quandary. Is such a mission largely a publicity stunt or is it us...

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February 1, 2018

Scientists on Trial

In 2016 there was an attempted coup in Turkey. This led to many people who the government saw as opposition figures being sacked from their jobs and in some cases held without trial. They include prominent intellectuals, medics and scientists. In recent days there has been a similar crackdown on peo...

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January 25, 2018

Did typhoid kill the Aztecs, DNA stored in Bitcoin, Glow-in-the-dark plants and levitating humans

What killed the Aztecs? In some areas of the Americas, as many as 95% of the indigenous population died of diseases brought in by the discoverers of the New World. Pandemics hit the population who had little immunity to diseases carried by people and livestock. One outbreak responsible for killing m...

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January 18, 2018

African swine fever, Oil spill update, CRISPR gene editing, Rat eradication in New Zealand, Chimp kin recognition

African Swine fever is deadly to pigs and is spreading west from Russia across Europe. The virus that causes it is very resilient and can stick around on clothing, hay and in infected pork products for as long as 150 days. Biosecurity is crucial to preventing its arrival in the UK. If just one pig e...

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January 11, 2018

Sanchi oil tanker, Gut gas-monitoring pill and Chimpanzee portraits

After the Sanchi oil tanker collided with another ship it discharged its cargo of 1 million barrels of condensate oil. This could cause one of the biggest oil disasters in 25 years. What is condensate, can it be cleaned up and how toxic to marine life is it if large amounts of it leak or the tanker ...

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January 4, 2018

Tabby's Star, Space 2018, Mosquito sounds, C diff and food additive link

Adam Rutherford talks to astronomer Tabetha Boyajian at Louisiana State University about the wierd star that's perplexed astronomers since its discovery two years ago. KIC 8462852 has the unique habit of intermittently and sometimes dramatically dimming and then brightening. Some scientists even sug...

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December 28, 2017

Ancient DNA and Human Evolution

Twenty years ago, a revolution in the study of human evolution began. A team in Leipzig in Germany successfully extracted DNA from the bones of a Neanderthal man who died about 40,000 years ago. Thirteen years later, the same group unveiled the first complete genome sequence of another Neanderthal i...

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December 21, 2017

Antisense RNA therapy, Fossils vs Trump, Printing mini-kidneys, Electric eel power

Promising results from a small clinical trial of Huntingdon's disease patients have led to RNA-directed therapy such as antisense RNA being hailed as possibly a turning point in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Adam Rutherford discusses this class of drugs with Heidi Ledford of Nature Ne...

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December 14, 2017

The Future of Coral Reefs, Little Foot, Arthur C Clarke

Oxford is hosting the European Coral Reef Symposium this week. Climate change is seen as the number one threat to the future of coral reefs. Adam talks to Morgan Pratchett of James Cook University about the two recent coral bleaching events that hit the Great Barrier Reef, and to Barbara Brown of Ne...

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December 7, 2017

Trophy hunting, Gene drives, Nuclear lightning, Peregrine falcons and drones

Trophy hunters are always after the lion with the largest darkest name and the stag with the most impressive antlers. Research by Rob Knell at Queen Mary University of London finds that removing a small proportion of these top males can drive whole populations to extinction, if their environment is ...

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November 30, 2017

Prehistoric Strong Women, Semi-synthetic Life, Listener Feedback, Artificial Superintelligence

More than 5,000 years of heavy agricultural labour by women can be read from the bones found in ancient cemeteries from the Neolithic to Iron Age times. Cambridge University anthropologist Alison Macintosh compared the arm bone dimensions and strength of women from these times with those of modern f...

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November 23, 2017

Interstellar visitor, Svante Paabo, Synthetic biology, Plight of the Axolotl

On 19th October, a mysterious object sped through our solar system. It was first spotted by astronomers with a telescope in Hawaii. Its trajectory and speed told of its interstellar origins. It is the first body to be detected from outside our solar system. Scientists are now publishing their papers...

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November 16, 2017

Can we forecast earthquakes?, Britain's space race rocket Skylark, Francis Galton

What might the length of the day have to do with the likelihood of destructive earthquakes around the world? According to Professors Rebecca Bendick and Roger Bilham, there's a correlation between changes in the rate at which the Earth rotates and the incidence of earthquakes of Magnitude 7 and abov...

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November 9, 2017

Boy gets New Skin, The York Gospels, Stephen Hawking's Thesis

Researchers in Italy and Germany have saved the life of a boy with a life threatening genetic skin disease, using a combination of stem cell and gene therapy. 7 year old Hassan had lost 60% of his protective epidermis because of the condition, junctional epidermolysis bullosa. The severe blistering ...

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November 2, 2017

Climate Change and Health; Moth Snow Storm Feedback; Whale Brain Evolution; Pharoah's Serpent

Adam Rutherford talks to researchers on a major global study that aimed to quantify how climate change has already damaged the health of millions of people. Hugh Montgomery is the co-chair of the Lancet Countdown report and says that climate change is the largest single threat to global health. Clim...

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October 26, 2017

Insects disappearing, DNA Biosensor, Dog faces, Bandit dinosaur

The total biomass of flying insects in the environment has decreased by 75% in the last quarter of a century. That's the conclusion of research published at the end of last week in the journal PLOS One. The discovery, made in Germany, has shocked many, but should we in the UK be worried too? The ans...

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October 19, 2017

Colliding Neutron Stars, Krakatoa, Centigrade vs Celsius

Adam Rutherford talks to astrophysicists about the astronomical discovery of the year, if not the last couple of decades: the collision of two neutron stars and the cosmic gold-forging aftermath. The discovery of this long-hypothesized event on 17th August came from the much awaited marriage of the ...

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October 5, 2017

HiQuake, Plate Tectonics@50, Sonic Weapon Puzzle, The Chinese Typewriter

Gareth Mitchell talks to Gillian Foulger of Durham University about HiQuake, the world's largest database of human-induced earthquakes. Professor Foulger and her colleagues have so far compiled close to 750 seismic events for which there are reasonable cases to be made for anthropogenic triggers. Tr...

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September 28, 2017

Gravity wave breakthrough, The antibiotic pipeline, Microbial waste recycling, Fausto - an AI opera

The gravitational waves produced by two massive black holes colliding have for the first time been detected by three gravitational wave detectors. Professor Sheila Rowan of the University of Glasgow explains the importance of this new three way observation. The World Health organisation reports tha...

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September 21, 2017

Cassini's finale; Science and Technology Select Committee; Crick's lecture; Cave acoustics

After last week's Inside Science's edition devoted to Cassini ended, the Cassini spaceship plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn, and became part of the planet it studied. But the project lives on, as the data and photos generated by Cassini right up until contact was lost will be studied and scruti...

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September 14, 2017

Farewell to Cassini, the epic 20 year mission to Saturn

As Cassini's epic journey to Saturn finally ends tonight, Adam Rutherford celebrates the incredible discoveries of a mission that has changed the way we see our solar system. BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos is at Mission Control in Pasadena as scientists assemble to witness the final few hou...

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September 7, 2017

North Korea Bomb Tests, Warming Antarctic Sea Life, the Microbiome, Cuckoo Chuckle

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea claims to have successfully tested a thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb. Tom Plant, director of Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at the Royal United Services Institute, talks to Adam Rutherford about how the boast might be proved by monitoring technology ...

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August 31, 2017

Noxious haze over south coast; In Pursuit of Memory book; technosphere; Big Wasp Survey

Last weekend a chemical ‘haze’ on the East Sussex coast saw 150 people needing hospital treatment after something in the air led to streaming eyes, sore throats and nausea. Leading theories so far include a chemical spill from shipping in the English channel, a localised spike in ozone levels and an...

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August 24, 2017

Killer robots; Myths and superstitions and conservation; Science book prize nominee - Cordelia Fine; Taxidermy

Once again, the ethical side of fully autonomous weapons has been raised, this time by over 100 leading robotics experts, including Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, and Mustafa Suleyman of DeepMind. They have sent an open letter to the United Nations urging them to take action in order to prevent the ...

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August 17, 2017

Antarctica's volcanoes, science book prize nominee - Mark O'Connell, US solar eclipse and 40 years of NASA's Voyager mission

Not so much hiding in plain sight, but tucked under the ice-sheet in Antarctica are 91 volcanoes. This adds to the 47 volcanoes already known on the continent. After a graduate student posed the question,"are there any volcanoes in Western Antarctica?", Dr Robert Bingham, and colleagues, at Edinburg...

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August 10, 2017

European heatwave and climate change, Eugenia Cheng, Next generation batteries for electric cars, Joseph Hooker exhibition.

The current heat wave in Europe is proving deadly. High day and night temperatures, coupled with high humidity, can be a very dangerous combination. A new study has calculated the risk of deadly heat on a global basis, and shown that between 48% and 74% of the world's population will be subjected to...

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August 3, 2017

Gene-editing human embryos, Spaceman's eyes, Science book prize, Sexual selection in salmon

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the heart condition that can lead to seemingly super-fit athletes collapsing with heart failure. It affects one in 500 people, and is a heritable disorder. Scientists using the precise gene-editing technique, Crispr CAS 9, have identified one of the genes responsible f...

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July 27, 2017

Cod fisheries, Our connection to nature, Domestic electricity and Gamma ray bursts

News that the Marine Stewardship Council has reopened the North Sea cod fishery is met by some concern from marine biologist Professor Callum Roberts at the University of York. He says, this may be good news for cod and cod fishermen, but other marine species getting caught up in the drag nets may n...

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July 20, 2017

Genetics and privacy, Global plastic, Great Ape Dictionary, Ocean Discovery X Prize

Should our genomes be private? Professors Tim Hubbard and Nils Hoppe join Adam Rutherford to discuss concerns about data security and privacy of our genetic data. Once our DNA has been extracted, sequenced and stored as a digital file, what is done with it, who gets to see it and what say do we have...

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July 13, 2017

Genetic testing; Pugs on treadmills; Frankenstein

What can genome science do for you? Chief Medical officer Dame Sally Davies recently published her annual report, issuing a plea for a revolution in the use of genetic information in the NHS. She wants DNA tests to be as routine as biopsies or blood tests. Adam chats to geneticist Ewan Birney, head ...

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July 6, 2017

Neonics dispute, Hygenic bees, Hip-hop MRI

The results of the first large-scale field study looking at neonicotinoid pesticides and their impact on bees has caused controversy. It was carried out by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and commissioned and funded by the agricultural chemical companies Syngenta and Bayer. However, both ...

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June 29, 2017

Sex bias in biology, Engineering prize, Olympic bats, Angry Chef

Teams from all over the world have been looking at the differences between male and female mice. They've assessed hundreds of characteristics, from weight changes to cholesterol to blood chemistry. The surprising results show huge differences between the sexes, which have great repercussions for dru...

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June 22, 2017

Forensics Centre in Dundee; D'Arcy Thompson centenary; Scottish science adviser; Coffee and climate

The Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Dundee has expanded to test new psychoactive substances. Adam Rutherford talks to Professors Sue Black and Niamh Nic Daeid, who jointly run the Centre, about how they can keep up with the many new illegal drugs coming onto the ...

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June 15, 2017

Science in Fire Prevention

Applying scientific techniques to reduce fire risk in tall buildings. We look at practical measures to prevent building fires and also how science can improve evacuation plans. Modeling the brain with maths. new research using multidimensional models is helping researchers understand the levels o...

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June 8, 2017

Early Humans Were Even Earlier Than We Thought

Early human fossils from Morocco suggest our ancestors walked the earth much earlier than previously thought. Human ancestral fossils from the area were first discovered in the 1960's, but now a re-examination of these and more recent finds suggests they are from an early form of us - Homo sapiens -...

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June 1, 2017

The Importance of Basic Research

Adam Rutherford discusses the relationship between basic and applied scientific research with guests at the Hay Festival. Adam is joined by the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, physicist Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf, the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University an...

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May 25, 2017

Sherpas - dolphin rescue - quantum computing - hot lavas

The superior performance of Sherpa guides on Mountain Everest is legendary. New findings reveal how their bodies make the most of low oxygen levels at high altitude. Presenter Gareth Mitchell also talks to the Mexican biologist heading a last ditch attempt to save the world's most endangered marine...

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May 18, 2017

Childhood cancers - Ghana telescope - Nano-listening device for cells - Ancient whales

Adam Rutherford goes the pathology archive of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to hear how tumour samples from child patients about one hundred years ago may improve the diagnosis and treatment of very rare cancers in children today. He meets cancer geneticist Sam Behjati of the Wellcome Trust...

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May 11, 2017

Violins - Social networks and cliques in great tits and snow monkeys - Exploring DNA and art

Classical music fans will know well the legendary violins made by the likes of Stradivarius and Guarneri in the 17th and 18th century. But new acoustical research has found that concert goers rated the music of new fiddles higher than that from old and revered Italian violins. Dr Claudia Fritz of th...

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May 4, 2017

The moral brain, stem cell developments, ancient DNA in cave dirt, mangrove forest

Adam Rutherford talks to neuroscientist Molly Crockett about moral decision-making in the brain. She combined brain scanning with a test involving money and electric shocks. Geoff Marsh reports from Japan where stem cell research appears to be bringing regenerative medicine for a common cause of bl...

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April 27, 2017

Homo naledi, First humans in America, Dark matter detector, New theory of dark matter

Controversy has followed the remains of a new species of human, Homo naledi, since it was described in 2015. Buried deep in a South African cave, its primitive features led scientists to believe it was up to three million years old. This week it's been revealed that this estimate was wrong. New dati...

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April 20, 2017

Cassini’s death, scrapping diesel, weather balloon, satellites monitoring volcanos

The Cassini-Huygens mission has been monumental for science. For thirteen years the probe has gathered data on Saturn, revealing more about the gas giant than we have ever known before. But now, Cassini is running out of fuel. Adam Rutherford talks to Professor Michele Dougherty of Imperial College ...

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April 13, 2017

23andMe Genetic Sequencing, Human Knockout genes, Coral Bleaching

23andMe is one of the biggest providers of home genetic testing kits and if you live in the UK, it's the only one that also includes various genetic analyses relevant not just to ancestry, but also to health. After a previous ban, the Food and Drug Administration for the first time approved marketin...

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April 6, 2017

Creation of island Britain, Sleep gene, Mary Kelly forensics, Global Tree Search survey

Adam Rutherford examines a new study published this week which reveals how a megaflood and giant waterfalls severed our connection to what is now France, resulting in the creation of island Britain and the watery moat of the English Channel. Jenny Collier of Imperial College London uncovers the anci...

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March 30, 2017

Climate change and extreme weather; Primate brain size; Earthquake forecasting; Planet 9

Following yesterday's US House Committee on Science,Space,and Technology's controversial hearing on scientific method and climate change, Adam Rutherford meets atmospheric scientist Professor Michael Mann after he emerged from the heated debate and who's just published a new paper suggesting a direc...

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March 23, 2017

Comet 67P images; Etna eruption; Brain navigation; Octopus intelligence

The recent Rosetta mission to image and land a probe on a comet was an astounding achievement. Rosetta took thousands of photos mapping the entire surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko , as it dramatically changed over 2 years. This week analysis of 18000 67P pictures are out of the shade and i...

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March 16, 2017

Boaty McBoatface in Antarctica, Aeroplane biofuels, Bakhshali manuscript, Goldilocks zones

The submarine famously named Boaty McBoatface is deployed this week for its first mission to examine a narrow submarine gap in the South Atlantic. Mike Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey tells Adam Rutherford how this research into the behaviour of deep water at this crucial point in the ocean...

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March 15, 2017

Rise of the Robots: 3. Where is my mind?

From Skynet and the Terminator franchise, through Wargames and Ava in Ex Machina, artificial intelligences pervade our cinematic experiences. But AIs are already in the real world, answering our questions on our phones and making diagnoses about our health. Adam Rutherford asks if we are ready for A...

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March 9, 2017

Cells and Celluloid: Aliens on Film

With Adam Rutherford and Francine Stock.

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March 6, 2017

Rise of the Robots: 2. More human than human

Adam Rutherford explores our relationship with contemporary humanoid robots

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March 3, 2017

Rise of the Robots: 1. The history of things to come

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 period the wealthy showed off their automata. In France in the 15th century a Duke of Burgundy had his chateau filled with automata that played practica...

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March 2, 2017

Earth's Earliest Life, The Benefits of Pollution, Sexuality and Science and New ideas on Evolution

The World's oldest sedimentary rocks reveal traces of our earliest ancestors. New analysis shows life forms existed more than 3.7 billion years ago which were very similar to those found in our deepest oceans today, microbial life around hydro thermal vents. Some pollution might be good for the ...

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February 23, 2017

The perils of fake science news, The neanderthal inside us, What The Beatles really sang - statistically speaking

A woolly story about resurrecting mammoths raises serious questions for medical ethics. News of a scientist's plan to resurrect mammoths has spread around the world. However the story is largely untrue. We look at how this kind of 'fake science news' story can impact on perceptions of real medical r...

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February 16, 2017

Science and cyber security, Dinosaur babies, Winston Churchill and level crossings

Testing cyber security with science. The UK now has a new National Cyber Security Centre. However there is very little scientific evidence against which to test the detection of cyber attacks and effectiveness of measures to prevent them. We ask what is needed to turn cyber security into a more scie...

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February 9, 2017

Measuring human impact on earth, Awards for engineers, Sounds of space junk.

Quantifying the impact of humanity on the earth's natural systems. Why human activity now has a larger effect on our planet than the forces of nature. We look at how mathematical equations can now be used to compare historical natural processes with contemporary man made changes. And we ask where cu...

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February 2, 2017

Wildlife trafficking, New quantum computers, Ancient bird beaks, Glassblowing.

Conservation and conflict. A year long BBC investigation has exposed an illegal animal trafficking network stretching from West Africa to the Middle East and Asia. Traffickers have used fake permits to undermine international conservation efforts. New developments in Quantum computing. Sussex Unive...

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January 26, 2017

Crime, volcanoes, ghosts and how we are influenced by the genes of unrelated others

The genes of unrelated others can influence our health and behaviour. New research suggests the genetic make up of our partners can have a profound influence on our lives. Scientists have quantified genetic influence , in mice at present but the plan is to try to extend this to human interactions. I...

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January 19, 2017

Antarctic science rescue, Killing cancer with viruses, Measuring wind from space and the Last man on the moon

Why the British Antarctic science base is being temporarily abandoned. New cracks have appeared in the Ice shelf on which the Halley research station sits. The promise of viro-therapy for treating cancer. Scientists have successfully used a virus to kill cancer cells. They say this could form the...

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January 12, 2017

The perils of explaining science, Living to 500, What's good for your teeth and The future of stargazing

Why the simplest explanations are not always the best when it comes to science. Where you read about a scientific subject can affect not just what you learn but also how much you think you know about the subject. Quahogs are a kind of clam and they can live for hundreds of years. Analysis of thei...

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January 5, 2017

RIP Granny the oldest Orca - Graphene + Silly Putty - Moving a Giant Magnet - Space in 2017

The world's oldest known killer whale is presumed dead. At an estimated age of 100 years, 'Granny' was last seen with her family in October. The scientists who've followed her and her pod for four decades announced that they believe she has died somewhere in the North American Pacific. Adam Rutherfo...

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December 29, 2016

Listeners' Questions

Adam Rutherford puts listeners' science questions to his team of experts: physicist Helen Czerski, cosmologist Andrew Pontzen and biologist Yan Wong. Queries include gravity on sci-fi space ships, how animals would evolve on the low gravitational field of the Moon, gravitational waves, mimicry in pa...

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December 22, 2016

Inuits and Denisovans, Sex and woodlice, Peace through particle physics, Caspar the octopus in peril?

Can Inuit people survive the Arctic cold thanks to deep past liaisons with another species? Adam Rutherford talks to geneticist Rasmus Nielsen who says that's part of the answer. His team's research has identified a particular section of the Inuit people's genome which looks as though it originally ...

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December 8, 2016

Rock traces of life on Mars, Desert fireball network, Gut microbes and Parkinson's Disease, Science Museum's maths exhibition

Could rocks studied by the Mars rover Spirit in Gusev Crater in 2007 contain the hallmarks of ancient life? Geologist Steve Ruff of Arizona State University talks about what he found in hot springs in Chile which begs that question. He says the evidence is intriguing enough for NASA to send its next...

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December 1, 2016

Alzheimers research, Lucy in the Scanner, Smart bandages, From supernovae to Hollywood

Alzheimers disease is now the leading cause of death in the UK, but there are as yet no treatments to halt or reverse it. There was huge disappointment last week when the drug company Eli Lilly announced that a large, phase 3 clinical trial had failed to show any benefit to mild dementia sufferers f...

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November 24, 2016

Predator bacteria therapy, New money for UK science, Stick-on stethoscope, Taming fears in the brain scanner

Bdellovibrio is a small bacterium which preys and kills other bacteria. A team of researchers in the UK has shown in animal experiments that injections of the predator microbe can successfully treat infections. So how close does this take us to Bdellovibrio therapy for human patients and what part m...

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November 17, 2016

Does Pluto have an ocean, Antarctica's oldest ice, Meat emissions, Swifts fly ten months non-stop

Does the distant dwarf planet Pluto have an ocean beneath its thick crust of ice? It's certainly possible, according to a group of researchers who are analysing the data from the New Horizons Pluto flyby last year. They argue that a deep ocean of water would best explain the position of the great he...

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November 10, 2016

Climate change questions, Animal computer interaction, Sounds and meaning across world's languages

Climate change is in the news this week. The international Paris agreement to curb global temperature rise has just come into effect but President Elect Donald Trump has said he would take the United States out of the process. In BBC Inside Science, Adam Rutherford puts listener's questions and view...

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November 3, 2016

Italy's quakes, Ebola virus, Accidental rocket fuel, China in space

In the past three months, central Italy has been shaken by several large earthquakes. The quake near Norcia on 30th October was the most powerful for decades. In late August, another struck near Amatrice, causing 300 lost lives. Adam Rutherford talks to seismologist Ross Stein about why this part of...

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