Episode description

The Olympics is all about flying the flag for your home country, shoulder to shoulder with your team-mates. But what if you have no team-mates? At this year’s Olympic games, four countries had just one competitor. Like Sean Gill from Belize, Somalian runner Ali Idow Hassan, or Romano Püntener, a mountain-biker representing Liechtenstein.

This got us thinking about the only one. The panel discuss what it must be like to be an ‘Endling’ – the last remaining animal of an otherwise extinct species, and wonder if there might be ways to bring them back.

We delve into the intriguing psychology behind the urge to collect things, why collectors are so entranced by rare items, and how the psychological pull of ‘exclusivity’ and ‘limited editions’ can make us vulnerable to marketing scams.

And what about a baby, born of only one parent? A ‘virgin birth’ – a miracle perhaps? Not so, as we discover that females giving birth without any help from males is surprisingly common. It is called Parthenogenesis, and although humans cannot do it, a dizzying array of animals can. Alexis Sperling from the University of Cambridge explains the science.

News montage sources: Channel 5 Belize, BBC News

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton with Chhavi Sachdev and Andrada Fiscutean Producer: Emily Knight with Florian Bohr, Julia Ravey Sound engineer: Emily Preston