Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea

Pain is a deeply subjective thing. When it’s with us it’s all we can think about. So, what is life like then for someone for whom pain never leaves? Haider Warraich, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of 'The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain' joins Jonathan to discuss.

It can be easy to think poorly of humans. When we're not destroying the planet or starting wars, we're likely off somewhere making fools of ourselves on social media. We're not all bad though, as some people dedicate their spare time, and even their lives, to helping others. But can we say the same about other animals? (We're looking at you, cats.) Bob Pitman is a Marine Ecologist at the Marine Ma...

We have covered the lives and behaviors of bees a few times here on the programme. So much so we thought we’ve seen and heard it all. Well, we may have been wrong about that…in particular, with something to do with the dance they perform in the hive and how it relates to their ability to communicate and navigate. Prof. Jürgen Tautz is a bee expert, animal behaviorist and Emeritus Professor at the...

Yiddish author and playwright Sholem Aleichem; the man whose stories formed the basis for 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof once proposed that “life is a dream for the wise but a game for the fool”. So, is modern technology and more specifically “Gamification” making fools of all of us? Adrian Hon - CEO of Six to Start and author of You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use...

Drug development is notoriously slow and expensive to bring a new compound from the lab bench to market. A major cause of this inefficiency is the traditional reliance on testing drugs in animals before they are tested in humans. Animal models often do not accurately reflect human physiology, meaning that drugs that appear to be safe and effective in animals frequently turn out to be harmful or in...

Average adults' heart beats 72 times a minute. In a lifetime it creates enough energy to drive the truck to the moon and back and generates astonishingly 2,5 gigajoules of energy. Yet, cardiac arrests and heart diseases are major causes of death worldwide, despite decades of research. How much further we'll have to go before we solve this problem? To discuss Jonathan was joined by Sian Harding, Em...

If you have acute migraines, your doctor might refer you to a neurologist. If your Asthma is really bad, maybe you’ll be sent to a respiratory specialist. They will then use their expertise to alleviate your symptoms but crucially they won’t be able to tell you what is causing your illness because frankly, they don’t know. So, what if the ultimate cause of these ailments isn’t happening in the bra...

Recently, the Chinese government has been testing a thorium nuclear reactor that uses molten salt as a coolant. Although this radioactive element has been trialed in reactors before, experts say that China is the first to have a shot at commercializing the technology. The Wuwei reactor is designed to produce just 2 megawatts of thermal energy, which is only enough to power up to 1,000 homes. But i...

Depending on your social media proclivities you may or may not have noticed that your feed is awash with images from the JWST. Certainly science Twitter is very excited about it. And so they should be, it’s amazing to see what we can observe of the very big and very far away thanks to the increased resolution of our newest space telescope. In a similar vein the third run of the Large Hadron Collid...

How do you eat an elephant? One spoon at a time, right? Well It's the same with living forever. No one is going to find a magic potion that will make you 20 again but over the years we are slowly, consistently and incrementally improving patient health and preventing diseases associated with ageing. We've nearly doubled life expectancy in just over a century. Doubled! Jonathan caught up with Autho...

A recent Newstalk survey on commuting has found that people are spending longer on their journeys to work since the pandemic. And so all week we’ve been speaking to transport experts, policymakers as well as commuters themselves to hear about the issues being faced on a daily basis as we look to get from A to B. But what does the future hold for commuting and for transport in general? Are the like...

You’ve probably seen the likes of '2012' or more recently 'Don’t Look Up' - disaster movies where there’s a race against time to save humanity. Those films also have a common thread: you have a superset of super-rich people looking to buy their way to salvation. Pretty silly stuff, right? But what if we told you those preparations are happening right now, and that there really is no room at the in...

Sometimes in science, a question can be so hotly debated that attempting to answer it can become a lifetime project. And more often than not these questions are ones that we didn’t even realise were up for debate. In plant biology, the topic getting researchers all hot under the collar at the moment is the question of whether plants can be intelligent or not and this week's guest is just one of th...

Steven N. Austad is the Chair and a Distinguished Professor within the UAB Department of Biology and the author of 'Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives'. He joins Jonathan to discuss what we know about longevity in animals, and what they might be able to teach us humans about extending our own lifespans.

When Leo Szilard conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933 he immediately tried to suppress his own discovery culminating in 1945 with the Szilard petition which advocated a demonstration of the atomic bomb rather than its use in warfare. Szilard knew only too well the awesome destructive power of what he had discovered and knowing what we do about what happened next, what then sho...

Prof. Lee Cronin, Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow joins Jonathan to discuss working on taking the guesswork out of creating the pharmaceuticals that we depend on through the use and development of 'Chemputers', a new method that is capable of reliably synthesising organic chemicals.

Language is fundamental to who we are and what has makes us so successful as a species, and while all species have their own means of communicating, we are the only ones that seem to have mastered it. But where did this ability to share complex ideas using sound come from? And what effect has it had on our development? In this Futureproof special, Jonathan looks to unravel questions about the evol...

Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is a genetic disorder that occurs in approximately one out of every 15,000 births. It affects males and females with equal frequency and affects all races and ethnicities and is recognized as one of the most common genetic causes of life-threatening childhood obesity. To discuss this disorder and what can be done to help people living with it, Jonathan is joined now by...

Most of us could probably put together a list of things we find attractive in a potential partner and a lot of those things will likely come down to our personality or the cultural environment. But what about that initial, almost unconscious, spark of attraction? What causes that and does it have any real impact on whether a relationship with that person will stand the test of time? Paul Eastwick...

There has been a lot said about the extinction of the dinosaurs. But aside from the actual extinction event itself, when it comes to the days, weeks, months, and years immediately following it well, not so much. So, how exactly did any species survive it, and why those specific species? Riley Black is a freelance science writer specializing in evolution, paleontology, and natural history, and the...

In years gone by, if a bee was annoying you, it was usually "bye-bye Mr. Bee" but nowadays, we’re more likely to put out plates of sugary water to help them on their way as in recent years our appreciation for these incredible insects has grown, our understanding of their importance more rounded. But just how intelligent are they? Lars Chittka, Professor in Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen...

Jurassic Park came out in 1993, then "Dolly" the sheep was cloned in 1996, and yet here we are more than two decades later and we still haven’t got a dinosaur theme park. So, what’s the hold-up? Well aside from the many significant ethical issues, the scientific challenges are huge and one in particular that adversely affects much more reasonable de-extinction projects is the simple fact that righ...

While you may be King or Queen of your local park run, no matter how much training you do, even if you were to use performance-enhancing drugs, you'll still never outrun the likes of the common house cat. So, what are the determining factors when it comes to the top speed that can be achieved by animals? Michael Gunther is a Researcher in Biomechanics at the University of Stuttgart, he joins Jonat...

Have you ever seen a ghost, or a UFO, or had some seemingly supernatural experience that you can’t explain? If you haven’t, we'd be willing to bet you probably know someone who has. These experiences are fairly common across cultures and they can’t all be the work of hoaxers and charlatans. So what’s going on? Chris French is Emeritus Professor of Psychology in the Anomalistic Psychology Research...

If you are a pet owner you probably have plenty of experience trying to get a basic message across to your dog or perhaps if you own a cat you gave up on that hope years ago. Yet many of us have had that momentary glimpse of understanding; that sense that we could communicate if we just worked at it. But is animal translation actually possible? Diana Reiss is a Co-Founder of the Interspecies Inter...