2018 is having the worst flu season for seven years. Influenza continues to make a lot of us feel very ill, and it can of course be fatal. Wendy Barclay, Professor Virology at Imperial College London, has spent many years trying to learn everything she can about the way flu viruses behave. These microscopic infectious organisms are formidable foes - they mutate all the time, making it hard to predict which strain is going to be the one to make us sick and therefore to design effective vaccines a...
Jan 30, 2018•28 min
Nothing annoys Eugenia Cheng more than the suggestion that there is no creativity in mathematics. Doing mathematics is not about being a human calculator, she says. She doesn't spend her time multiplying big numbers in her head. She sits in hotel bars drawing (mainly arrows) with a fine quill pen, thinking about how ideas from different areas of mathematics relate to one another and hoping to reveal a unifying, underlying logic to the whole of mathematics. Her area of research, Category Theory, ...
Jan 23, 2018•28 min
When Eben Upton was in his twenties, he wanted to get children thinking about how computers think, to boost the number of people applying to read computer science at university. He dreamt of putting a chip in every classroom. The result was Raspberry Pi, a tiny gadget, little bigger than a credit card, that can be hooked up to any keyboard and monitor, to create a programmable PC. And it's cheap. Raspberry Pi Zero, sticker price just �5, was given away free with a computer magazine in 2015. Eben...
Jan 16, 2018•28 min
As a young man Adrian Thomas took to the skies in order to better understand the mechanics of flight. He's a paragliding champion and a Professor of Zoology who specialises in the dynamics of insect flight. On a typical day, he can be found inside a wind tunnel that's been custom-made to study insects instead of jumbo jets. Using lines of smoke and high speed video cameras, he measures exactly how different insects flap their wings. When he's not writing academic papers, he's inventing clever ma...
Oct 31, 2017•28 min
When Ellen Stofan was just four years old, she witnessed the worst rocket launch-pad disaster in NASA's history convinced that her father, (who was a rocket engineer) was on board. He wasn't. Nonetheless, for many years NASA was not her favourite place. In 2013, however, she became she became their chief scientist, a post she held for 4 years. Barak Obama dreamt of putting people on the red planet by 2032 and Ellen did everything she could to develop a realistic plan to make this happen. (A 2032...
Oct 24, 2017•28 min
Professor Tim Birkhead talks to Jim Al Khalili about his 40 years of research on promiscuity in birds, his love of Skomer Island and its guillemots, and the extraordinary musical talent of the male bullfinch. Tim Birkhead is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist at the University of Sheffield. The primary focus of his research has been reproduction in birds. He pioneered the study of promiscuity or extra-pair mating in birds, and one of its evolutionary consequences - sperm competition. In...
Oct 17, 2017•40 min
Steve Cowley has said that "fusion is arguably the perfect way to power the world". But he's had to add that "it is hard to make fusion work. Indeed, after more than 60 years of fusion research, no device has yet made more energy than it consumes". But Steve Cowley isn't giving up. He's spent over 30 years working towards making nuclear fusion a viable way of generating energy. Steve Cowley has done theoretical research on how to contain the incredibly hot material you need to get fusion going. ...
Oct 10, 2017•28 min
Lucie Green studies the sun - that giant, turbulent ball of burning gas at the centre of our solar system. Her first ambition was to become an art therapist, but she soon switched from art to astrophysics, and before long had fixed her gaze on our local star. It may be 93 million miles away, but the sun's extensive and ever changing magnetic field determines the 'weather' throughout our solar system. Under a worst-case scenario, bubbles of super-hot plasma and streams of high energy particles - ...
Oct 03, 2017•28 min
Marine ecologist Tracey Rogers talks to Jim Al Khalili about her research on one of Antarctica's top predators. This is the leopard seal - a ten foot long killer which glides among the ice floes in search of prey ranging from other seals to penguins to tiny krill. Tracey's research has encompassed the animal's prolific and eerie underwater singing to radical changes in its diet that appear to be linked to climate change. Now a senior researcher at the University of New South Wales in Australia, ...
Sep 26, 2017•39 min
Jennifer Doudna's research has transformed biology. And this is not an understatement. Her work has given us the tools to edit genes more precisely than ever before. Her scientific career began with work to understand the actions of RNA, part of the machinery of every cell. But, after a meeting in 2005 with a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, where Jennifer is currently a professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology, she changed her direction of research. Through c...
Sep 19, 2017•28 min
To volcanologist Tamsin Mather, volcanoes are more than a natural hazard. They are 'nature's factories', belching out a rich chemical cocktail of gases. It's these gases or 'plumes' that fascinate her the most. She likes nothing more than crouching on a crater's edge collecting a smouldering mix of ash and gases, a clue to what's brewing deep inside. As Professor of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, her work is helping to not only predict when a volcano may erupt, but to understand how volcan...
May 30, 2017•28 min
Tim O'Brien has earned the nickname 'the awesome astrophysicist dude from Jodrell Bank' He is Professor of Astrophysics at Manchester University, and the associate director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, best known for the giant, iconic radio dish of the world-famous Lovell telescope which sits majestically on the Cheshire plain, where he carries out research on the behaviour of transient binary stars called novae. For twenty-five years Tim O'Brien has been telling the public about astronomy, and ...
May 23, 2017•28 min
To the untrained eye, a plant's existence may seem rather uneventful. It spends its days rooted to the spot, seemingly at the mercy of its environment. Not so, plant biologist Ottoline Leyser explains to Jim Al-Khalili. Plants are intelligent creatures that possess a unique ability to adapt in ways we animals can only dream of. They can alter their entire body plan of roots and shoots, when required, in response to their surroundings. Now Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory & Professor of P...
May 16, 2017•28 min
For a long time Fay Dowker was mathematically precocious, but emotionally uncertain. These days, despite working in an area with few academic allies, she is more confident than ever. Her approach to a Theory of Everything, known as causal set theory, acknowledges the quantum nature of the universe and takes the arrow of time more seriously than Einstein. Bye bye time travel. Fay started her Life Scientific working on the assumption that the texture of the universe was continuous and smooth, with...
May 09, 2017•28 min
Tiny tree dwelling snails, partula, were so abundant across French Polynesia that garlands of partula shells would be presented to visitors to the islands. But when immunologist Dr Ann Clarke joined her husband, the late evolutionary biologist Professor Bryan Clarke, on expeditions to research the unique way this species had developed, a study in speciation turned, before their eyes, into a study of extinction. Ann witnessed first-hand the terrifying speed that biological controls, another mollu...
May 02, 2017•28 min
The food we eat is the greatest cause of death and illness worldwide. The main culprits - salt, sugar and fat - are now so embedded in our diet, in the form of processed foods, that most of us consume far too much. Yet Professor Graham MacGregor doesn't believe it's up to us to reverse this situation. It's up to the food industry, he says, who manufacture the processed foods, to take the 'rubbish' out. Now Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine, Gr...
Apr 25, 2017•28 min
Professor Liz Sockett studies an extraordinary group of predatory bacteria. Bdellovibrio may be small but they kill other bacteria with ingenious and ruthless efficiency. Liz has devoted the last fifteen years of her career as a microbiologist to work out how this microscopic killer invades and consumes its victims - victims which include a host of disease-causing bacteria which have also acquired resistance to antibiotics which once killed them. As well as studying the numerous tricks and weapo...
Apr 18, 2017•28 min
Nick Fraser regularly travels back in time (at least in his mind) to the Triassic, a crazily inventive period in our evolutionary history that started 250 million years ago. Wherever there are ancient Triassic creatures buried underground, Nick is never far behind; and his 'fossil first' approach to life has been richly rewarded. In 2002, he unearthed a new species of gliding reptile in Virginia, USA. Last year in southern China, he identified the remains of a creature so utterly odd that the pa...
Apr 11, 2017•28 min
Daniel Dennett has never been one to swallow accepted wisdom undigested. As a student he happily sought to undermine the work of his supervisor, Willard Quine. Only one of the most respected figures in 20th century philosophy, a thinker eminent enough to appear on US postage stamps. Later in Oxford, he became frustrated by his fellow philosophers' utter lack of interest in how our brains worked and was delighted when a medical friend introduced him to neurons. And so began an intellectual quest ...
Apr 04, 2017•28 min
C. elegans is a rather special worm, so-named for the elegant way it moves in sinusoidal curves. It's studied, and much loved, by thousands of scientists around the world. Alison Woollard joined this exclusive club of worm scientists when she moved to the world famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, also known as 'worm Mecca' in 1995. She started her career working as a lab technician, having dropped out of university. After later graduating from Birkbeck, she worked on yeast. But ...
Feb 28, 2017•28 min
Alan Winfield is the only Professor of Robot Ethics in the world. He is a voice of reason amid the growing sense of unease at the pace of progress in the field of artificial intelligence. He believes that robots aren't going to take over the world - at least not any time soon. But that doesn't mean we should be complacent. Alan Winfield talks to Jim al-Khalili about how, at a young age, he delighted in taking things apart. After his degree in microelectronics and a PhD in digital communication a...
Feb 21, 2017•28 min
Professor Sir Simon Wessely has spent his whole career arguing that mental and physical health are inseparable and that the Cinderella status of mental health funding is a national disgrace. His current role, as President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has given him a platform to bang the drum for parity of funding, better training for doctors and the need to reduce stigma around mental health (and armchair psychiatrists who think it's OK to diagnose the new American President with a men...
Feb 14, 2017•28 min
How did time and space begin? From the age of ten, Sean Carroll has wanted to know. He first read about the big bang model of the universe as a child. Later, he turned down two job offers from Stephen Hawking. The big bang model of the universe is well established but, as Sean readily admits, the big bang itself remains a mystery. In the beginning, Sean applied Einstein's theories of relativity to this problem. But mid-career and painfully aware that trying to out Einstein Einstein was a tough c...
Feb 07, 2017•28 min
Think of algae and you'll probably think trouble. Algal blooms turned the diving pool green at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Smelly seaweed ruins many a trip to the beach. But Alison Smith, Professor of Plant Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, argues that we should appreciate algae more. They range in size from giant kelp to microscopic diatoms. They are found all over the world from the Arctic to the Tropics, live in water and make energy from the sun by photosynthesis. Alison Smith talks to...
Jan 31, 2017•28 min
Is it true that some people put on weight more easily than others? And if so why? It's a question that's close to many of our hearts. And it's a question that medical researcher, Professor Sadaf Farooqi is trying to answer. In 1997, Sadaf noticed that two children she was studying lacked the hormone leptin. From there, she went on to discover the first single gene defect that causes obesity. For most us, how much we eat is within our control. But for children with this rare inherited condition a...
Jan 24, 2017•28 min
Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology at Leicester University, talks to Jim al-Khalili about the Anthropocene, the concept that humans now drive much geology on the earth. He's one of the leading lights in the community of scientists who are working to get the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, recognised. They discuss the controversy about the date of when it began- some say it was a thousand years ago, or the Industrial revolution, others that it was the Second World War, and yet others that ...
Jan 17, 2017•28 min
The Cassini mission into deep space has witnessed raging storms, flown between Saturn's enigmatic rings and revealed seven new moons. And, thanks in no small part to Professor Michele Dougherty, it's made some astonishing discoveries. For the last twenty years, Michele been responsible for one of the key instruments on board Cassini - the magnetometer. In 2005, she spotted a strange signature in the data during a distant fly by of Saturn's smaller moons, Enceladus and became curious. Now,space m...
Jan 10, 2017•28 min
The US science superstar, Neil de Grasse Tyson grew up in the Bronx, and studied astrophysics at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton Universities before becoming director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. But he's best known for his TV and movie appearances, his books, podcasts and his tweets or 'scientific droppings' as he likes to call them. He has over 6 million followers on Twitter and is often credited with turning millennials around the world on to science. Neil tells Jim al-Khalili ...
Dec 20, 2016•28 min
How do we know where we are? The question sounds simple enough. But there's much more to it than simply looking around. Our sense of place is embedded in the very structure of our brains, in such a way that we can remember the exact place we used to play as a child, even if the neighbourhood has been transformed and few of the original visual cues remain. The park you played in as a child may now be full of high rise flats but somehow you know where your favourite tree used to be. Richard Morris...
Dec 06, 2016•28 min
Plastic Bags and the DNA in our cells are both polymers, very long molecules ubiquitous in nature and in their synthetic form, in materials like polythene, perspex and polystyrene. Professor Dame Julia Higgins has spent a lifetime researching the structure and movement of polymeric material. Trained as a physicist, Dame Julia was one of the early researchers in polymer science and throughout her career worked alongside chemists and engineers. No surprise then that she was the first woman to beco...
Nov 29, 2016•28 min
