Instant Genius

For this instalment in the Everything you ever wanted to know about... series, we’ve sourced questions from Google, our listeners and the Science Focus team to put to experts and help you understand key ideas in science, in short episodes. This week, we're joined by geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, the Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London and one of the recipients of the 2001 Nobel Prize in...

In this week’s episode, I’m talking to Dr Douglas Vakoch, President of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or METI. We talk about whether we should be broadcasting messages into space to signal our existence to intelligent alien species. We also discuss how we could create a message that an unknown species of alien could understand. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Ac...

Our guest this week is Dr Jon Copley. Jon is a marine biologist, specialising in the deep sea. He went on the first mini sub dive to the world’s deepest hydrothermal vents, 5km down on the ocean floor, and also took part in the firs minisub dives to 1km deep in the Antarctic. Jon is also a science communicator and writer, who worked as a science advisor on the iconic BBC series Blue Planet II. He...

Our guest this week is Dr Jon Copley. Jon is a marine biologist, specialising in the deep sea. He went on the first mini sub dive to the world’s deepest hydrothermal vents, 5km down on the ocean floor, and also took part in the firs minisub dives to 1km deep in the Antarctic. Jon is also a science communicator and writer, who worked as a science advisor on the iconic BBC series Blue Planet II. He...

Our guest this week is Dr Jon Copley. Jon is a marine biologist, specialising in the deep sea. He went on the first mini sub dive to the world’s deepest hydrothermal vents, 5km down on the ocean floor, and also took part in the firs minisub dives to 1km deep in the Antarctic. Jon is also a science communicator and writer, who worked as a science advisor on the iconic BBC series Blue Planet II. He...

In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast we chat through the November 2020 issue of the magazine, which is on sale now. Editor Dan Bennett explains why, this month, we’re focusing on food myths. Scientist and writer Professor Tim Spector penned our cover feature to reveal the fact and the fiction surrounding diet and nutrition, and some of his research may have results that surprise you. Talki...

In this week’s episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we talk to Professor Linda Scott, an expert in women’s economic development and Emeritus DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Oxford. Her book, The Double X Economy, has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2020. In it, she argues that when we economically empower women, we all succeed. Lin...

In this week's episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we talk to Dr Kat Arney about cancer.  Kat is a science writer and broadcaster, and founder of the science communication consultancy First Create The Media. Her book, Rebel Cell is out now. She reveals how tissue becomes a tumour, how cells migrate to help cancer spread, and what scientists are doing right now to better understand the disease. L...

In this week's episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we talk to Hugo Zeberg, a geneticist working at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  Hugo has just published a paper that suggests those of us with a certain set of genes inherited from Neanderthals may suffer from more severe effects of COVID-19. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your...

Today‘s podcast episode is a special one, with not one, not two, but three fantastic guests. We’ve teamed up with the three spoken nerds – Matt Parker, Steve Mould and Helen Arney – to bring you an episode of unnecessary details all about… ice. Steve explains how instant coffee is made, Matt gets irate about eight-pointed 'snowfakes' and Helen talks cryonic freezing. To hear more from the three sp...

The fungal kingdom is vast, and yet much of it remains unknown to us – it’s estimated that only about 6 per cent of all fungal species have, so far, been described. But if fungi are all around us, why do we only know the names of a few? We might use yeast in baking, mushrooms in our cooking, or have been treated with penicillin, but biologist Merlin Sheldrake says there is much more wonder to be f...

In today’s episode, we’re chatting to Professor Sue Black, an anatomist and forensic anthropologist. You might’ve seen characters doing her job on television, in shows like NCIS or Silent Witness – although, they’re not quite an accurate portrayal, as you’ll find out. Over the course of her career, Sue has worked with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the United Nations, helping to identi...

For decades, Stonehenge, the mysterious prehistoric circle of stones built on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, has left scientists scratching their heads. Who exactly built it and what was it used for? In the latest attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery, a team of engineers based at the University of Salford have 3D-printed a scale model of the ancient monument in order to investigate the...

Everyone does bad things. We know deep down are wrong, but we do them anyway. Sometimes, people do things so bad that we call them evil. Criminal psychologist Dr Julia Shaw says there’s no such thing as evil. In her book Making Evil, she argues that we should ditch the idea altogether, and try to understand so-called “evil” people. In this week’s episode of the Science Focus Podcast, she talks abo...

We know how important good hygiene is. It protects us from viral infections and diseases, but what if, by washing, soaping and scrubbing, we’re actually damaging our health? Dr James Hamblin, journalist and professor of public health, stopped showering five years ago. In his new book, Clean (£16.99, Bodley Head), he reveals how our skin is affected by the products we apply. The overuse of soap and...

The end of the Universe may be a common feature in science fiction, but this one isn’t a crisis that can be averted by a team of superheroes. The Universe really will come to an end one way or another, and we have an idea how – five ideas, actually. In this week’s episode of the Science Focus Podcast, astrophysicist Dr Katie Mack talks to us about the future of the cosmos. She dives into these fiv...

For many, the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown restrictions has isolated us from the people we love, reducing our social life to screens and Zoom meetings. But even with the added visual, communicating online still isn’t as straightforward as being in-person. It can feel like jokes fall flat when everyone has their microphone off, and the jittering of poor signal can make anyone’s face hard to re...

A recent study carried out at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCLH, on confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients has found neurological complications of the virus can, in some rare cases include delirium, brain inflammation, stroke and nerve damage. We spoke to Dr Rachel Brown, an MRC Clinical Research Training Fellow involved with the study to find out more. Subscribe to the ...

Many of us have found solace in nature over the last few months, relishing our time outdoors, especially when it was limited to one form of exercise a day. A recent report by the RSPB found that people see access to nature as being important for health and wellbeing during and in recovery from the coronavirus crisis. One man who has always been connected to the natural world is David Lindo. Known...

If, like us, you love to read a good science book, (and thanks to this podcast we’ve read a fair few over the years), you’ll probably recognise the feeling of having more questions about its subject at the end of the book than before you even turned page one. It’s because of this that we decided to launch the Science Focus Book Club, where we pick out what we think is an excellent, thought provoki...

If I asked you to build a robot, the first materials you would probably reach for would be some metal bits and plastic bobs. However, mechanical engineer Ritu Raman designs machines made with biological material, and has created all manner of wonderful machines, including a walking robot made with muscle tissue. In this week’s episode of the Science Focus Podcast, she tells us about how to integra...

In a previous episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we discovered how a team of scientists harnessed the combined power of hundreds of thousands of players of the massively multiplayer online game Eve Online to help in the search for exoplanets. Now, the next phase of this programme, called Project Discovery, is turning its sights from the stars to the coronavirus pandemic. This week we speak to s...

In 1969, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people ever to walk on the Moon, a feat over the next three and a half years only 10 other space explorers would go on to achieve. Now it has taken nearly 50 years, but NASA once again has ambitions to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024. The Artemis Program is a wide-reaching effort by numerous space...

Not so long ago, English scientists believed that they could study differences between people and that certain ethnicities were ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than others – of course, white Europeans were put at the top of any list. In the 19th Century, anthropologist and statistician Francis Galton took this even further when he coined the term ‘eugenics’, the idea that science could better the human race b...

Brendan Walker originally trained and worked as an aeronautical engineer, but now has a far more thrilling job title, quite literally - he’s a thrill engineer. He’s been working with theme parks to help create the most exciting rollercoasters, using design principles to craft extreme, human emotional experiences to the rides. He tells us why people have a love/hate relationship with rollercoasters...