When Martin Sweeting was a student, he thought it would be fun to try to build a satellite using electronic components found in some of the earliest personal computers. An amateur radio ham and space enthusiast, he wanted to create a communications satellite that could be used to talk to people on the other side of the world. It was a team effort, he insists, with friends and family pitching in and a lot of the work being done on his kitchen table. Somehow he managed to persuade Nasa to let his ...
Apr 20, 2021•29 min
We all know how to be more healthy. And yet we are also remarkably good at NOT doing what we know is good for us. We keep meaning to get fit, but the sofa seems so much more appealing than a run. We know we shouldn’t have another slice of cake, but we do. Behavioural psychologist, Professor Dame Theresa Marteau wants to understand why, despite the best of intentions, so many of us fail to adopt healthier lifestyles. She talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her life and work and why, after studying the ...
Apr 13, 2021•27 min
Inside the mind of a forensic botanist, Mark Spencer tells Jim Al-Khalili how he uses plant evidence to help solve crimes. By studying the vegetation at crime scenes, Mark can tell how long a dead body has been laying in the ground. Brambles can be particularly informative, he says. And by looking at tiny traces of plants under the microscope, he can link suspects to victims, or particular locations. Mark tells Jim Al-Khalili how he came to be a forensic botanist. After working in bars and clubs...
Mar 09, 2021•29 min
What would happen to our carbon emissions if we all went vegan? Astrophysicist, Sarah Bridle tells Jim Al-Khalili why she switched her attention from galaxies to food. A rising star in the study of extra-galactic astronomy, Sarah was a driving force behind one of the most ambitious astronomy projects of recent times, the Dark Energy Survey of the universe. A few years ago, she started trying to calculate the carbon emissions from different foods so that she could make more informed choices about...
Mar 02, 2021•28 min
For a long time people who heard voices or suffered paranoid delusions were thought to be too crazy to benefit from talking therapies. As a young man working on a prison psychiatric ward, Richard Bentall thought otherwise. Together with a small group of clinical psychologists, he pioneered the use of the talking therapy CBT for psychosis and conducted rigorous randomized controlled trials to find out if and why it worked. Turns out, having a good relationship with your the therapist is at the he...
Feb 23, 2021•41 min
Mice, like humans, prefer to be treated with a little dignity, and that extends to how they are handled. Pick a mouse up by its tail, as was the norm in laboratories for decades, and it gets anxious. Make a mouse anxious and it can skew the results of the research it’s being used for. What mice like, and how they behave, is the focus of Professor Jane Hurst’s research. Much of that behaviour, she’s discovered, can be revealed by following what they do with their noses - where they take them and ...
Feb 16, 2021•28 min
Public health has been on all of our minds during the pandemic and Prof Dame Anne Johnson has spent more time thinking about it than most of us. She studies the human behaviours that enable viruses to spread and is an architect of a highly influential report on Covid-19 published in July 2020 by the Academy of Medical Sciences, Preparing for a Challenging Winter. For many years Anne was uncertain about a career in medicine. But the time she spent in the slums of Caracas and working as a GP in so...
Feb 02, 2021•31 min
Many of us think we’re in control of what we eat and that, coupled with what we do, dictates our shape and size. It’s physics after all - if you eat too much and move too little, you put on weight; do the opposite, and you lose it. Genes, the theory goes, have minimal if any effect on our size. But what if we’re wrong? What if our genes have a powerful influence over how we put on weight, and why many struggle to lose it? Over the past two decades, this once controversial idea has gained accepta...
Jan 26, 2021•28 min
Professor Cath Noakes studies how air moves and the infection risk associated with different ventilation systems. Early in the pandemic, she was invited to join the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE and asked to study the transmission routes for Covid-19. In July, together with many other scientists, she urged governments around the world and the World Health Organisation to recognise that Covid-19 could be transmitted in tiny particles in the air, even if the risk of ...
Jan 19, 2021•30 min
Chris Jackson is the kind of scientist who just loves to get out into the landscape he loves. He’s often introduced as ‘geologist and adventurer’. For the past five years he’s been Professor of Basin Analysis in the Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering at Imperial College London and he’s now about to move back to the University of Manchester, where he studied as a student, to become Professor of Sustainable Geoscience. As a child growing up in Derby, Chris learned to love the outdoors on...
Jan 12, 2021•28 min
More of us have been exposed to so more science than ever before during 2020. And our insatiable appetite for science shows no sign of diminishing. Back in 2019, most scientists struggled to get any media attention. Now scientists involved in fighting the pandemic are generating headlines almost daily. On top of working harder than ever to further our understanding of the virus, many have become public figures. Some have been caught in the headlights. Others have stepped into the footlights. Man...
Dec 15, 2020•39 min
Neil Ferguson is known to many as Professor Lockdown. The mathematical models he created to predict the spread of Covid-19 were influential but, he says, it took him quite a long time to be persuaded that full lockdown was a good idea. A physicist by training, Neil switched from studying string theory to the spread of disease and presented scientific advice to government during the BSE crisis, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in livestock in 2001 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. In Janua...
Sep 22, 2020•37 min
Sarah Gilbert started working on a vaccine for Covid-19 just as soon as the virus genome was sequenced. Within weeks, she had a proof of principle. By early April, her team at the Jenner Institute in Oxford had manufactured hundreds of doses ready for use in clinical trials. In phase one of these trials, completed in July, this vaccine was shown to be safe for use in a thousand healthy volunteers, aged between 18 and 55. It also provoked exactly the kind of immune response to Covid-19 that Sarah...
Sep 15, 2020•30 min
Steve Haake,has spent much of his career using technology to help elite sports people get better, faster and break records. He has turned his hand to the engineering behind most sports, from studying how golf balls land, to designing new tennis racquets and changing the materials in ice skates. He’s now Professor of Sports Engineering at Sheffield Hallam University and was the Founding Director of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre there. Since the 2012 London Olympics, Steve has also been w...
Sep 08, 2020•28 min
When Francesca Happé started out as a research psychologist thirty years ago, she thought she could easily find out all there was to know about autism – and perhaps that wouldn’t have been impossible as there were so few papers published on it. Francesca’s studies have increased our knowledge of how people with autism experience the world around them, and their social interactions. She’s looked at their brains using various imaging techniques, studied the families of people with autism to explor...
Sep 01, 2020•28 min
Professor Heather Koldewey wants to protect our oceans from over-fishing and plastic pollution. An academic who is not content to sit back and let the science speak for itself, she wants to turn science into action and has found conservation allies in some unexpected places. Working with a carpet manufacturer, she created Net-Works, a business that turns old fishing nets into high-end carpet tiles and she has collaborated with Selfridges department store to give marine conservation a make-over. ...
Aug 25, 2020•29 min
Professor Dale Sanders has spent much of his life studying plants, seeking to understand why some thrive in a particular environment while others struggle. His ground breaking research on their molecular machinery showed how plants extract nutrients from the soil and store essential elements. Since plants can’t move, their survival depends on these responses. In 2020, after 27 years at the University of York, he became the Director of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, one of the premier plant re...
Aug 18, 2020•33 min
Professor Andrew Fabian from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy has spent his career trying to unravel the mystery of how some of the most dramatic events in the universe can profoundly influence its evolution. For over 50 years he’s been examining our universe using X-ray satellites orbiting way above earth’s atmosphere . He’s built up compelling evidence that supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies are the engines that drive the movement of energy through the universe and provide the...
Aug 11, 2020•28 min
It’s amazing what we can learn from a pile of old bones. Having worked as a paediatric surgeon for several years (often doing the ward round on roller blades), Alice Roberts spent a decade teaching anatomy to medical students and studying human remains. A niche interest in the collar bone and how it has changed since we evolved from the common ancestor we share with other apes 6 million years ago, led her to some of the biggest questions in science. Who are we? And where do we come from? She is ...
Aug 04, 2020•33 min
Why does violence break out in some crowds and not in others and what can the police do to reduce the risk of this happening? Professor Clifford Stott tells Jim Al-Khalili about his journey from trouble maker to police advisor and explains why some policing strategies are more successful than others. As a teenager Clifford was often in trouble with the police. Now he’s a professor of crowd psychology who works with the police suggesting new evidence-based strategies for public order management. ...
Jun 16, 2020•28 min
Emma Bunce, Professor of Planetary Plasma Physics at the University of Leicester, was inspired to study the solar system as a child by a TV programme that featured Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune. She has spent the last 20 years focusing on the magnetic fields around the outer planets, in particular that of Jupiter. The Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the solar wind to create aurorae, the spectacular Northern lights. Emma’s discovered how aurorae are also produced at Jupiter's poles. Emma Bun...
Jun 09, 2020•28 min
Jane Goodall, aged 86, reflects on the years she spent living with the wild chimpanzees in Gombe in eastern Tanzania and tells Jim Al Khalili why she believes the best way to bring about change is to ‘creep into people’s hearts’. Jane shot to fame when she appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1963 and appeared in a documentary film directed by Orson Welles. Her ground breaking observations introduced us to the social and emotional lives of wild chimpanzees and changed our vie...
Jun 02, 2020•37 min
Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to Liz Seward, Senior Space Strategist for Airbus Defence and Space. Liz's young interest in Science Fiction led to a career designing spacecraft and robots for exploring our own earth, other planets, and the stars. From a library in the US where the science fiction section stood next to the children's section, Liz took inspiration from Robert A. Heinlien and Arthur C. Clarke through a degree in Physics and Space Science at the University of Leicester to begin a ca...
May 26, 2020•30 min
Long before most of us gave air pollution a second thought, Frank Kelly was studying the impact of toxic particles on our lungs. In a pioneering set of experiments on human volunteers in northern Sweden, he proved that pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and particulates, are harmful to our health. And he is the driving force behind an air quality monitoring system in London that is the envy of the world. When in the late 1990s, the UK government was encouraging us all to buy diesel cars to help...
May 19, 2020•28 min
Professor Debbie Pain has spent the last 30 years solving some of the most devastating threats to birdlife, saving many species from the brink of extinction. Her childhood passion for bird spotting drove her into conservation research with the RSPB and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. She’s led scientific groundwork all over the planet: from reversing a dramatic mysterious decline in Asian vultures in the Indian sub-continent through to daring helicopters journeys into remote foggy North-East Ru...
May 12, 2020•28 min
Jim McDonald grew up in Glasgow. He was the son of a rope-maker and the first in his family to go to university. Now he’s the Principal of Strathclyde University, a non-executive director of Scottish Power and President of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He worked in the electrical power industry for many years before becoming an academic. Much of his life has been spent making sure that we all have access to the electricity we need, when we need it. That includes when the sun doesn’t shine an...
May 05, 2020•28 min
Jim talks a man who studies the universe at the largest and smallest scales imaginable. When Brian Greene was just twelve years old, he wandered round Columbia University in New York looking for someone to teach him mathematics, with a letter of recommendation from his school teacher. While his mother wanted him to make money, his father encouraged Brian to pursue his passion, which was trying to understand the nature of the universe. He studied physics at Harvard University and won a Rhodes Sch...
Apr 28, 2020•35 min
Professor Myles Allen has spent thirty years studying global climate change, trying to working out what we can and can't predict. He was one of the first scientists to quantify the extent to which human actions are responsible for global warming. As a lead author on the 3rd Assessment by the International Panel on Climate Change in 2001, he concluded that ‘most of the observed global warming was due to human influence’. More recently, (having established that calculating a safe concentration of ...
Mar 04, 2020•36 min
It’s been estimated that humans are capable of detecting a trillion different smells. How is this possible when we have just 400 types of olfactory receptors located in the bridge of our nose? Matthew Cobb has spent many years studying maggots hoping to get to bottom of this problem. He spent several years studying the flirting rituals of fruit flies in Sheffield before moving to France to study at the world centre for fly research, not far from Paris. There are, of course, a lot of differences ...
Mar 03, 2020•30 min
As a professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University, Anya Hurlbert is one of our most respected researchers into the way we see colour. In a career as a physicist, physiologist, neuroscientist and physician at some of the great research institutes on both sides of the Atlantic, Anya’s investigations into how we perceive the colour of objects has transformed our view of how our predominantly visual brains function. She explains how the multidisciplinary approach to research in vision fr...
Mar 02, 2020•28 min
