Futureproof Extra

Guest: Professor Andrew Daly, Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Galway.

Here Jonathan McCrea speaks with Jared Farmer, historian, geohumanist and author of “Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees”, who studies landscapes and environments. Listen and subscribe to Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.    Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.     You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the...

Now, when you lay your heads down to sleep at night, you might do so with the lingering hope that you’ll have sweet, and pleasant dreams. But so often dreams are bizarre and non-sensical,  but why do we do it? What is it that causes us to hallucinate while unconscious? Is it some sort of biological inheritance that serves no function or are we being trained by our minds to expect anomaly and chang...

What if we managed cancer treatment like a chronic disease? Bob A. Gatenby, chairman of the Department of Radiology at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Co-Director of the Cancer Biology and Evolution Program is on the program to discuss his work and a different approach to treating cancer.

How can something be in two places at once? How can objects in completely different locations affect each other instantaneously? These are just some of the questions that quantum physicists must try to answer? And indeed, many have tried! So what conclusions have they arrived at? Jonathan asks Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex and Author of Six Impossible Things, John Gribbi...

Medical science is one of our greatest accomplishments as a species. The ability to fight disease and infection is perhaps one of the primary reasons we have managed not just to survive but to flourish. But what if the ability to combat disease was not just one we humans had? What if insects could do the same? Jonathan is joined by Jaap de Roode, Associate Professor of Biology at Emory University...

Humans have an instinctive fear of large cats, or bears, or crocodiles, essentially anything big enough to maul us to death. It makes sense. But why are we afraid of spiders, snakes or insects? It almost certainly comes down to one of evolution’s great levellers. Venom. So what exactly is Venom? How does it work and how can we turn it to our advantage? Jonathan is joined by John Dunbar from the Sc...

When you think of a telescope you might picture a long tube with lenses, mirrors and a tripod picking up the light that is visible to us. But there are actually several different types that pick up other wavelengths we can’t see. Dotted across Europe, the The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope network is attempting to map the entire night sky, and one of them located right here in Ireland...

Dr Michael Leach, full time wildlife author and photographer, joins Jonathan to discuss his time living with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda.

Jonathan speaks to Jacob Bellmund - Cognitive Neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences - about how the brain's navigation system works. We're also joined by Dr Shane Bergin and Dr Susan Kelleher for all the latest science stories for Newsround, plus Jonathan responds to all your texts and tweets.

Jonathan discusses recent developments in Alzheimer's Disease research where a bacteria linked to gum disease could lead to results in treating the disease.