In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we hear from renowned travel writer and science communicator, Bill Bryson. Beloved by readers around the world, his works have included Notes from a Small Island, an observation of life in England, and the best-selling science book A Short History of Nearly Everything. His new book is called The Body: A Guide for Occupants (£25, Doubleday), where he turns inward to look at the mechanisms that keep us alive. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on t...
Oct 23, 2019•45 min
Scroll through Facebook or Twitter and you’ll notice that many people type in a particular style: full of lols and emoji, and rarely using punctuation or capital letters. Does this mean that we’re losing the ability to use our language correctly? Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet (£12.99, Penguin Books), says absolutely not: in fact, internet users have collaboratively developed a style of language that makes communication much richer. Here’s Gretchen talking to BBC Science Focus on...
Oct 16, 2019•30 min
In this week’s podcast, we speak Robert Elliott Smith, an expert in evolutionary algorithms and researcher of artificial intelligence. His latest book, Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All (£20, Bloomsbury), explores how the harmful effects of bigotry, greed, segregation and mass coercion are finding their way into the AI that runs our lives, without us even realising it. He tells us how powerful algorithms have been manipulat...
Oct 09, 2019•40 min
Today on the Science Focus Podcast, we’re talking to Professor Monica Grady, planetary and space scientist, ahead of World Space Week. World Space Week runs from 4 to 10 October, and this year’s theme is ‘The Moon: Gateway to the Stars’. Events to celebrate World Space Week are being held in the UK and across the world, including Monica’s talk at the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. Monica’s research spans to the Moon and beyond, and Asteroid 4731 is named Monicagrady, in honour of her contributions ...
Oct 02, 2019•38 min
Science and art have not always been separately defined. Leonardo Da Vinci studied anatomy, neuroscientist Cajal created beautiful drawings of the cells in the cerebellum and hippocampus, and the painter John Constable observed the skies with an almost scientific study. Though their pursuits have diverged into distinct fields, the relationship between art and science has remained tightly woven together. Documenting the history of this tumultuous relationship is The Art of Innovation. Comprised o...
Sep 25, 2019•41 min
Richard Dawkins is considered one of the top British intellectuals of the 21st Century. He’s known for his opinions on atheism and his books on evolution. In his most recent book, Outgrowing God, he talks about his own experience with religion, and how science offers us a far more convincing and concrete view of the world we live in. We sat down with Richard to discuss his views on faith, flat-earthers and Facebook. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever yo...
Sep 18, 2019•43 min
When Apple launched its health tracker app HealthKit in 2014, they promised users the ability to track everything from their blood pressure to their copper intake – but not their periods. This seems like a startling oversight, but Apple aren’t alone in failing to consider women’s needs. For example, it wasn’t until 2015 that the EU required new cars to be tested on a female crash-test dummy. Caroline Criado Perez, whose book Invisible Women (£16.99, Chatto and Windus) has been shortlisted for th...
Sep 11, 2019•42 min
Launching a rocket into space doesn’t come cheap. That much won’t surprise anybody, but what goes into the planning, construction and the science before the mission even gets off the ground? And when it’s up there, what does it do, and what makes it a success? One man that knows how to put a space project together is Mark McCaughrean, senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. During his 10 years at ESA, he’s worked on numerous projects, including the Rosetta missio...
Sep 04, 2019•53 min
The largest organ in the body isn’t the lungs or the brain, but the skin. Our skin performs a vast array of functions for us, from protecting us from disease to helping us make friends. Dr Monty Lyman, author of The Remarkable Life of The Skin (£20, Bantam Press), calls skin the ‘Swiss Army Organ’ because of all the tasks it carries out. Monty talks to BBC Science Focus Online assistant Sara Rigby about what the skin is for, why vanity is good for you, and what kind of creatures inhabit our skin...
Aug 28, 2019•44 min
If you grew up on a steady stream of Hollywood blockbusters filled with killer robots, alien invasions and apocalyptic natural disasters, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the future looks pretty bleak. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be that way. In fact, according John Higgs, a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, the group of adults of school-leaving age might be just the sort of individuals we ...
Aug 21, 2019•41 min
Materials scientist Gordon Wallace is the director of ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. He is developing the ‘sutrode’, a medical device made from graphene that combines the electrical properties of an electrode with the mechanical properties of a suture. The device is wrapped around damaged or malfunctioning nerve bundles and used to stimulate them and return their regular function. Though still in its early stages...
Aug 14, 2019•22 min
Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the United States in October 2012, causing $65bn of damage. Remarkably, weather forecasters managed to predict its impact on the US eight days in advance, when it was barely even a storm. How did forecasts get to be so good? It’s a story that begins with the invention of the telegraph and ends with supercomputers. We talk to Andrew Blum, author of The Weather Machine (£16.99, Bodley Head), about the history of weather forecasting, why we shouldn’t trust the ...
Aug 07, 2019•36 min
In mid-July this year, science and music lovers alike donned their Wellington boots and rain ponchos and made the journey to Jodrell Bank Observatory for the fourth annual Bluedot festival. The star-studded line-up included Helen Sharman; the first British astronaut, Jim Al-Khalili; science writer and author, an incredible 3-D concert experience from Kraftwerk and the post-punk sounds of New Order. We sent BBC Science Focus’ new editorial assistant Amy Barrett to the festival, where she chatted ...
Jul 31, 2019•36 min
We can’t reverse the slow march of time, but thanks to the wonders of technology and modern medicine, we have a lot more of it in our lives. But as people live longer, and the birth rate declines, how are we going to manage a world with an ageing population? That one of the questions Sarah Harper, Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford, has been trying to find an answer for. She talks to BBC Science Focus editorial assistant Helen Glenny about how we cope with dramatic shifts in po...
Jul 24, 2019•36 min
In the past few years, traditional male stereotypes have come under increasing scrutiny. These stereotypes often come under the term ‘Toxic masculinity’, which has been widely used to explain certain male actions and characteristics that conform to established gender roles, which do harm to both themselves or the society that they live in. Gary Barker has a PhD in developmental psychology and studies how we raise and socialise boys and men. In the late 1990s he founded Promundo, which carries ou...
Jul 17, 2019•41 min
For most of us, switching off the light and curling up in a warm, cosy bed is the welcome reward for a good day done (or much-needed respite from a bad one). But not everybody can soak up their allotted hours in joyful slumber before the alarm goes off. In fact, according to the Mental Health Foundation, it is estimated that 20 per cent of adults suffer from some form of insomnia, while many more of us experience issues like sleep walking, sleep apnoea and night terrors. Dr Guy Leschziner is a w...
Jul 10, 2019•36 min
This week on the Science Focus Podcast, we spend some time with James Lovelock – the visionary scientist and environmental thinker who this month turns 100 years old. James Lovelock is best known as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that our planet and all the life on it functions as a single self-regulating organism. Less well known is that he also developed scientific instruments for NASA missions to Mars; he invented the electron capture detector, with which he became the fir...
Jul 03, 2019•32 min
The UK government’s official climate advisors recently reported that the country’s greenhouse gas emissions must fall to zero by 2050 in order to tackle the growing threat of manmade climate change. However, it seems unlikely that we will be able to reach this target by simply burning less fossil fuel and cutting down on international travel. So what else can be done? Environmental charity Rewilding Britain thinks that the answer is to let large areas of the country return to their pre-agricultu...
Jun 26, 2019•21 min
We like to think our Science Focus Podcast is something really rather special (really, you should tell all your mates about it). But let’s face it, it pales in comparison to the hugely popular podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, which bagged Apple’s prestigious ‘Best New Podcast’ award in 2014. Numerous awards later, including the 2019 Heinz Oberhummer Award in science communication, they have amassed a whopping 700,000 subscribers for their irreverent podcast about the weird and wacky things they’...
Jun 19, 2019•39 min
After World War II, mainstream science denounced eugenics and the study of racial differences. Yet there remained a staunch group of scientists who continued to research race. For a few decades, these people remained on the fringes of research. Yet now, in the 21st Century, fuelled by a rise in the far right and extremist views, an increasing number of researchers are framing race as a biological construct rather than a social one. Yet even well-meaning scientists continue to use racial categori...
Jun 12, 2019•45 min
In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we’re going to try to guess when the end of the world will happen. Don’t worry, it’s not as gloomy as it might sound. Those people waving ‘The End is Nigh!’ placards are probably completely wrong about an immanent doomsday… Probably. There is a formula that has circulated for the last 50 years which suggests we can pinpoint the end of something with a reasonable amount of certainty. It has been used to predict any number of things, including successf...
Jun 05, 2019•39 min
We live in a society that values looks, but only if they fit into a restrictive set of ideals regarding size and shape, age, skin colour, as well as many other features of our bodies. The result is an immense pressure to look a certain way. According to a recent survey by the Mental Health Foundation, one in five adults in the UK had experienced shame over their body at some point in the last year. The rise of social media has provided a platform for a rebellion against these ideals in the form ...
May 29, 2019•30 min
If you were to picture the Moon landing in your head right now, you could probably conjure up images of Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps, accompanied by his inspirational (and often misquoted) speech, despite it happening many years before most of us were even born. But this remarkable achievement did not come easily, and the decade-long mission culminated in the final nerve wracking 13 minutes it took the Moon lander to arrive safely on the surface. This moment, and the people who contribute...
May 22, 2019•31 min
We know a lot. In scientific studies, we can count data, observe trends, infer links and calculate risks. But we also spend a lot of time ignoring noise – the unexplained variations in our results that we can’t account for. Take smoking for example. We all know that smoking kills, but it doesn’t kill everyone, and we can’t predict which lifelong smokers will be struck down by lung cancer, and which won’t. In his new book The Hidden Half (£14.99, Atlantic Books), Michael Blastland discusses how, ...
May 15, 2019•36 min
Two decades ago a group of Swedish researchers chanced upon an intriguing compound with tumour-killing properties hidden within human breast milk. Dubbed HAMLET, short for Human α-lactalbumin, the substance has so far come through in vitro and animal trials with flying colours. With human trials currently underway, could HAMLET be the drug to finally give us the upper hand in the war against cancer? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...
May 08, 2019•24 min
It’s been 500 years since the death of Leonardo Da Vinci, and he’s remembered mainly for his great works of art, like The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But he was also a scientist, working across disciplines like anatomy, engineering, and architecture. Sadly, his scientific research was never published and his engineering ambitions went largely unrealised. However, through his sketches and drawings we can see his anatomical discoveries, his plans for machines, and his investigations into the wo...
May 01, 2019•31 min
In 2012, scientists developed a method to edit any part of the human genome, and the implications were astounding. Now, we’re starting to see the technology’s potential; we will soon cure previously untreatable diseases, but at the same time, rogue scientists are experimenting in ways considered unethical by the wider medical community. So where does gene editing go from here? In this week's Science Focus Podcast, Nessa Carey, author of the book Hacking the Code Of Life: How gene editing will re...
Apr 25, 2019•33 min
Theoretical physicist and science communicator Professor Jim Al-Khalili has taken a break from writing popular science books to write his first novel. Sunfall (£16.99, Bantam Press) is a science fiction thriller set in the year 2041, when the Earth’s magnetic field has started to die, leaving life on Earth vulnerable to threats from space. Scientists and engineers are thrown into a race against time to protect the Earth. All the science in the novel, from the futuristic technology to the apocaly...
Apr 17, 2019•40 min
In this week's Science Focus Podcast, we dive into the world of video games. Over the past couple of decades, video games have often got a bad rap, blamed for everything from aggression and violence to addiction and mental health problems. But what does the research actually say? Dr Pete Etchells is a psychologist at Bath Spa University who researches the behavioural effects of video games. In his first book, Lost in a Good Game (£14.99, Icon Books), he gets to the bottom of our relationship wit...
Apr 10, 2019•34 min
Abracadbra! Prestidigitation! We know that these words hold no intrinsic power, but when we hear them, we are instantly transported away to a land of magic and wonder; where the impossible becomes reality right before our eyes. So why, as rational human beings, are we instantly drawn to magic, and what makes us delight in seeing a rabbit pulled from a hat, despite knowing full well that we are being fooled into thinking it was never already there in the first place? Those are the sort of questio...
Apr 03, 2019•32 min
