BBC Inside Science

Food Standards Agency report reveals 70% of supermarket chicken contaminated. Chicken: It's the nation's favourite meat. But today, a report released by the Food Standards Agency has revealed that around three quarters of that chicken is infected by campylobacter - a family of bacteria, 12 species of which are known to cause food poisoning. The estimated cost to the UK economy is £900 million per...

Philae lander detects organic molecules on Comet 67P Rosetta scientist, Professor Monica Grady from the Open University discusses the latest news from last week's historic comet mission. Philae, the Rosetta robot probe, made history last week when she finally landed on the surface of Comet 67P. But she ended up lying on her side, and only in partial sunlight. Her batteries were on borrowed time. A...

Rosetta After a nail-biting, bumpy, bouncy landing, European Space Agency's Rosetta probe - 'Philae' -lands on the comet 67P. It's already collecting data and beaming back some very impressive images of this dusty, icy space projectile. BBC Space correspondent Jonathan Amos fills us in on the latest news. Thought-controlled genes Brainwaves from human participants activated a light, which in turn...

What is ageing? In 1900, the global average life expectancy was 31, today it's 70, and the number of people over 85 in the UK is predicted to double in the next 20 years. How has ageing evolved, and do we know what is happening in our cells as we age? Professor Richard Faragher, University of Brighton, explains. Sticking plaster-like needle replacement Microneedles on a sticking-plaster-like patch...

It's the nearest and most dominant object in our night sky, and has inspired artists, astronauts and astronomers. But fundamental questions remain about our only natural satellite. Where does the Moon come from? Although humans first walked on the Moon over four decades ago, we still know surprisingly little about the lunar body's origin. Samples returned by the Apollo missions have somewhat confo...

It's 10 Years since an unusual skeleton was unearthed on the island of Flores. This species, Homo floresiensis, dubbed 'the Hobbit' because of its short stature, offered a whole new picture of human evolution and has been causing divisions among scientists ever since. Lucie visits Professor Chris Stringer in the Natural History Museum to pick over the bones of a controversial find. Tall parents te...

Ebola Outbreak As the World Health Organisation announces that the situation in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone is deteriorating, with widespread and persistent transmission of Ebola Virus Disease, the UK has introduced screening measures at Heathrow airport for passengers arriving from Ebola-affected countries. How has this particular outbreak become so widespread, and where did it start? Lucie...

Nobel Prizes 2014 The annual Nobel Prizes for Physiology or Medicine, Physics and Chemistry were announced this week. The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to UK-based researcher Prof John O'Keefe as well as May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser who discovered the brain's "GPS system". They discovered how the brain knows where we are and is able to navigate from one place to anoth...

Royal Society investigates the decline in their awards to female scientists Last week, the UK's national science academy, the Royal Society, announced its latest round of University Research Fellows (URFs). And they are almost all fellows - in the male sense of the word. Out of 43 new posts, only two of them are women. These positions are for early-career, post-doctoral researchers. But, at the to...

BICEP - gravitational waves and dust One of the biggest scientific claims of 2014 has received another set-back. In March this year, the BICEP2 research team claimed it had found a swirling pattern in the sky left by the rapid expansion of space just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. This announcement was quickly criticised by others, who thought the group had underestimated the confoundin...

European Ancestry New genetic investigation of ancient human remains, combined with archaeological evidence, is shedding new light on the origins of the early European populations. The international team has provided a detailed analysis of waves of immigration from the near east into Europe, and the emerging agricultural practices that came with it, which has come to dominate the traditional pract...

Jack the Ripper "identified" Some of us are morbidly fascinated by the legend of Jack the Ripper - not the world's first serial killer, but the one that coincided with the birth of mass media, and set the ghoulish tone for the 20th century's obsession with murderers. This week a shawl acquired at an auction in 2007 is in the spotlight. Claimed to be found in 1888 at the murder scene of a woman ass...

Bardarbunga A group of earth scientists was in Iceland performing annual maintenance of its equipment, when the volcano Bardarbunga erupted. Professor Simon Redfern has now joined them and speaks to Adam Rutherford from the slopes of neighbouring volcano Askja. He explains how all this recent volcanic activity is the expression of Europe's tectonic drift away from America. And rather than this bei...

Manipulating mouse memory Optogenetics allows researchers to use light to turn the genes involved in memory, in the brain, off and on. It's a powerful tool for seeing exactly where specific types of memory are formed and processed. Researchers at MIT have been using the technique to manipulate fearful or pleasurable memories associated with a particular location, in mice. This is so they can see h...

TB in the New World Brand new work in comparative genetics is shedding light on the spread of TB. Scientists have shown that the initial spread of the deadly bacterial disease tuberculosis to the Americas didn't come with the European explorers and invaders. Skeletons of pre-Columbian Peruvians have shown signs of TB. So where did it come from? DNA samples collected from the ancient bacteria show...

Anaesthetics. General anaesthetic is an essential part of modern medicine. Millions of surgical procedures, many life-saving, simply could not be performed without rendering the patient unconscious with one of a long list of drugs that induce anaesthesia. But, we don't know how they work. Part of this mystery is because we're not entirely sure what we mean when we say unconscious. But part of it i...

Dinosaur A jumble of bones found in Venezuela belong to a group of very early dinosaurs, that could have been herd animals. Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum explains to Professor Alice Roberts how a jumble of bones found in a 'bone bed' belong to a number of individual Laquintasaura venezuelae dinosaurs. They are an ancient, small, omnivorous dinosaur, which could have survived the Ter...

ExpeRimental There's an online wealth of science demonstrations you can try at home with your kids. But what's sometimes lacking is the encouragement of questioning the science in these DIY experiments. Science teacher and film maker Alom Shaha has devised a series of videos with the Royal Institution showing parents experimenting with home-made lava lamps, bubbles and bottle cannons. He hopes tha...

Face recognition The software that analyses images of your face, captured online or when you're out and about, has rapidly improved. Adam visits Amscreen, to test the cameras they deploy at supermarket checkouts to determine your age and sex, to inform advertisers of the best demographic to target. This raises ethical and privacy issues which Adam discusses with privacy expert Professor Colin Benn...

Plants and bees The relationship between flowering plants and bees is a long-evolved, complex one. Plant scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew are currently conducting field trials to see how Acontium, or Monkshood, uses toxins to protect itself against nectar-thieving, short-tongued bumblebees. But how does it make sure it doesn't poison the helpful, pollinating long-tongued bumblebees?...

Airport security has been tightened recently. Passengers must be able to switch on their electronic devices to prove they don't contain explosives. Inside Science asks about the science behind spotting a potential terrorist. Adam asks whether behavioural profiling works. Can trained security staff tell the difference between a nervous traveller and a potential terrorist? Light and colour in art Pi...

Informed consent Facebook has been under fire for running a controversial 'emotion manipulation' study on 689,003 Facebook users. The experiment, to find out whether emotions were contagious on the social network, involved minor changes to users' news feeds. It's contentious because the users were not informed that they were taking part in an experiment. Facebook says, check the terms and conditio...

Longitude Prize 2014 Winning Challenge Antibiotics resistance has been selected as the focus for the £10m prize. The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned of a "post-antibiotic era" where key drugs no longer work and people die from previously treatable infections. The next step in the challenge is to tackle this resistance, by developing a simple, cheap, quick test that allows you to tell wh...

Antarctic Invasion Antarctica is the most pristine place on Earth, having only been visited by humans in the last 200 years, and being tens of thousands of miles from the nearest land. But these days, around 40,000 tourists and hundreds of scientists visit the Antarctic every year, and with them come stowaways in the form of bugs, beetles and plants. As a result, the ice -free areas of the Antarct...

The first ball kick of the opening ceremony of the 2014 World Cup is taken by a young paraplegic Brazilian, wearing a robotic exo-skeleton, controlled using his mind. Adam hears from Miguel Nicolelis, the neurophysiologist behind the high profile science stunt. Closer to home Sophie Morgan, paralysed for a decade, demonstrates her robot exo-skeleton, or REX, which allows her to walk and stand. Thi...