Explain that Stuff

Why would "things" want to use the Internet? If you've no idea what people mean by the "Internet of Things," start here... with our quick introduction!

Washing clothes is easy; drying them can be more of a pain. Understanding a bit of science can help you get your clothes dry much more quickly and efficiently!

The climate's in a fix, but can we really fix it with geoengineering - large-scale tinkering with carbon emissions, weather, and the sky?

The hovercraft was an iconic British invention from the 1950s; now we barely hear about it at all. How exactly did it work... and why did it fall out of favour?

From Blaise Pascal and Charles Babbage to Konrad Zuse, Alan Turing, and Steve Jobs... join us on a 2,500-year journey through mechanical calculators (cogs), relay-driven early computers (clicks), and modern microprocessors (chips) as we explore the fascinating history of computers!

You've probably heard the hype about memory foam, widely used in mattresses and cushions, but what's the science behind it and how does it really work?

You've probably heard of graphene, but what is it... exactly? What's so good about it... and will this simple new kind of carbon power out future?

Pagers have been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Can you remember what they were and exactly how they worked?

Will fracking save our skins by helping wean us off coal... or push us ever closer to a climate catastrophe? In this episode, we find out how it works and take a balanced look at the arguments for and against.

With crafty building design, you can heat your home with plentiful, free energy from the Sun. It's called passive solar energy - and here's how it works!

If water's the stuff of life, why do we still live in a world of littered rivers and oil spills? Today, a look at water pollution - and what we can do about it.

How do self-driving cars see where they're going? One way is by using a kind of light-scanning laser called LIDAR - and here's a quick look at how it works.

The ideas we have about ourselves and other people are often well wide of the mark - as 10 amazing experiments from the history of psychology impressively demonstrate!

Are you feeling lost? GPS "satnav" will soon put you right. Today we take a simple look at GPS, Glonass, Galileo, and the other space satellite navigation systems spinning around over our heads!

No, the Wright Brothers didn't invent flying - the idea actually dates back through thousands of years of history. Today, we glide through the story of human flight!

Today we discover how atoms vibrating 9,192,631,770 times a second can help us tell time. Welcome to the wonderful world of radio-controlled, atomic clocks!

From HAL and "Speak & Spell" to Siri, and Alexa, we look at how speech synthesizers work... and why they still don't work perfectly!

Is there still a place for the lone genius inventor - the Edison, Ford, Tesla, or Marconi? Or is invention now solely the province of giant corporations like Apple, IBM, and DuPont?

Hurrah, the Olympics is nearly here! From springy pole vaulters and leaping long jumpers to spinning ice skaters and slippery swimmers, we're going to take a quick tour through the surprising science behind sport!

Let's zip back over two and half thousand years to understand the sparky story of electricity, from Thales and Aristotle to Edison, Marconi, and James Clerk Maxwell!

How goes a gecko stick to the ceiling... why doesn't glue stick to the tube? Today, I'm exploring adhesive and cohesive forces and trying not to come unstuck as I explore the sticky science of glues.

Can you feel the force? Maybe it's gravity - the tingling attraction between everything in the Universe and everything else. Where does it come from? What causes it? How near are we to understanding it?

From anatomy to abnormality, we compare nature's finest marvel (the human brain) with the best that humans have so far produced (the electronic computer). How are they similar and how are they different? Is the Net becoming increasingly brain-like? Will it ever become conscious and self-aware?

What is intelligence and, if it's such an essential part of being human, can we ever really hope to build an "intelligent machine"? What are the different kinds of AI? What's the difference between old-style AI and new-style machine learning? How will we know when we've built a machine that is truly intelligent?

A two-minute introduction to the podcast!