Instant Genius

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...

Two years to the day the great physicist Professor Stephen Hawking was interred at Westminster Abbey, and at the time of his death, we spoke to one of the people that knew him best, Leonard Mlodinow. Leonard is an American theoretical physicist who worked with Stephen on the books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time, and his own book chronicling their time together, Stephen Hawking: A M...

No matter how open-minded we consider ourselves to be, all of us hold biases towards other people. Dr Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist, ex-academic, and a freelance writer and journalist, who runs a research gender equality think tank The 50 Percent Project. Her new book, Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (£16.99, Bloomsbury Sigma), unravels the way our implicit or 'unintentiona...

Mental health has become a hot topic in recent years, with campaigns asking us to be kind on social media and to reach out to friends who are struggling. It seems now more than ever, we have a better understanding of what it means when someone is struggling with their mental health, but despite this, some people feel that the stigma surrounding it stops them from getting the help they need. Profes...

Our guest Prof Richard Wiseman is a spectacularly creative scientist who started off his career as a magician before becoming a psychologist. Over the last few decades, Richard has studied the art of deception, parapsychology and the concept of good luck alongside many other aspects of the human mind. Richard has a hugely popular YouTube channel called Quirkology, with a mere 2.15m subscribers and...

Christiana Figueres is the former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and it was her work that led to its members signing the 2015 Paris agreement. Together with Tom Rivett-Carnac, she created Global Optimism, an organization focused on bringing about environmental and social change. Their book, The Future We Choose (£12.99, Bonnier), reveals that we are on the pr...

Our guest Prof Richard Wiseman is a spectacularly creative scientist who started off his career as a magician before becoming a psychologist. Over the last few decades, Richard has studied the art of deception, parapsychology and the concept of good luck alongside many other aspects of the human mind. Richard has a hugely popular YouTube channel called Quirkology, with a mere 2.15m subscribers and...

Here on Earth, we take the force of gravity for granted. For years, researchers have neglected to study its influence because of this very reason, but with commercial spaceflight on the horizon, researchers are now racing to discover what living off-Earth might do to our bodies and our brains. In this week’s episode, we hear from psychologist Dr Elisa Raffaella Ferrè. She explains how her studies...

This week we talk to one of the world’s leading pioneers in the field of nanotechnology, Sonia Contera. Nanotechnology is the application of science at a truly nano scale. To put that in perspective, if a nanometre were the size of a cup of tea, a meter would cover the diameter of the whole Earth. Being able to control the world at such an intricate level has the potential to revolutionise medicin...

The first time a fish crawled out of the water and onto land, it was a turning point that led to brand new kinds of life. But this couldn’t happen on its own: that fish would have needed both lungs and legs. Neil Shubin, evolutionary biologist and author of Some Assembly Required (£18.99, Oneworld), says that fish didn’t evolve these traits to help them live on land. In fact, the reason they could...

Prof Jim Al-Khalili answers listeners’ questions about physics, the Universe and everything else. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prof Jim Al-Khalili reveals some of the biggest unsolved mysteries. We talk about the plausibility of time travel, whether there are multiple universes and what we need to discover a ‘theory of everything’. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prof Jim Al-Khalili tackles thermodynamics – the study of energy. Together, we unravel the idea of entropy, talk about the direction of time and muse upon the inevitable heat death of the Universe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prof Jim Al-Khalili demystifies the strange world of quantum physics. We discuss the key experiments, how quantum effects play out in the real world and, of course, Schrödinger's infamous cat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prof Jim Al-Khalili helps us get to grips with the big concepts in cosmology. We talk space time, relativity and, of course, the end of the Universe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prof Jim Al-Khalili breaks down the building blocks of the Universe and reveals what simplicity, beauty and elegance have to do with physics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let your curiosity run wild. No question is off-limits in this new podcast series from the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. In Everything You Wanted To Know About… world-leading experts answer Google’s most searched for queries and tackle questions from our listeners. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adch...

This week we talk to the Sandro Galea, Dean of the school of public health at Boston University. His book, called Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health (£18.99, OUP) takes a deep look at the differences between health and medicine, and looks at how everything from the environment, taxation, education and even luck plays a part in the overall health of a nation. Speaking before...

This week we talk to the philosopher Toby Ord about the end of civilisation as we know it. Ok, it’s not all doom and gloom. As Toby says, he’s an optimistic person, but in his new book The Precipice (£25, Bloomsbury) he explains why we’re at a point in time where we, as a species, are teetering on the edge of extinction. We discuss how much potential us homo sapiens have, what’s putting our contin...

In this week's Science Focus Podcast chef and author of the book The Truth About Fat: Why Obesity is Not that Simple (£9.99, Oneworld), Anthony Warner chews the fat about, well, fat. Pretty much all of us have been tempted at some point in our lives to shed some weight around our midriff, especially when we see our BMI creeping over 25, but what does this actually mean, and is it really a reliable...

Dr Camilla Pang is a bioinformatician, who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when she was eight years old. Her first book, Explaining Humans (£14.99, Viking), is a guide to navigating life, love and relationships using the lessons she’s learned in her scientific career so far. In it she draws on examples from how the different proteins in the human body can reflect the different roles in...

This week we catch up with Kevin Fong about the new series of his award-winning podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon. Whereas the first series celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements, the Moon landing, the new season follows what could have been one of our worst disasters – an explosion aboard the spacecraft Apollo 13. We discuss what happened on this ill-fa...