Naked Scientists, In Short Special Editions Podcast

Over 35 million people worldwide are living with HIV. Treatments cost billions and don't come without significant side effects for the individual. Now, researchers from Emroy University may have found a new drug duo to eliminate the need for debilitating lifelong HIV treatments. Kerstin Gpfrich spoke to Prof Aftab Ansari to find out how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting t...

Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge celebrated its 250th birthday this week. To find out more about the history of the renowned hospital, Georgia Mills was shown around the archives by Hilary Richie, uncovering stories of naughty nurses, torturous medical tools and deathbed champagne. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Levels in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas methane released accidentally by the oil and gas industry might be up to 60% higher than climate scientists had budgeted for. A new method combining long term atmospheric measurements of methane levels with a way of fingerprinting where the gas has come from has enabled scientists at the University of Colorado to make more accurate predictions of the...

What makes dogs man's - or woman's - best friend? Scientists in Sweden gave a pack of dogs an impossible task to do: pushing along a plate that was actually stuck to the floor. The dogs that sought help from their owners were set up a different way genetically from dogs that like to be more wolf-like and independent. Georgia Mills spoke to researcher Per Jensen to hear what he's sniffed out... Lik...

Now you'd "bee" forgiven for thinking that bees are just simple insects that buzz about collecting nectar and fertilising flowers. But it turns out they have emotions just like us. Chris Smith spoke to Clint Perry, who works at Queen Mary University of London... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

For this week's mythconception, Kat Arney investigates the many mysteries surrounding the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There is a centuries old debate about violence between people - is it something we're born with, or a product of our environment? Understanding the causes of violence is important if we want to try and reduce it, and so there have been hundreds of social experiments trying to establish this. But this week, some scientists have taken a different approach, and looked across all mammals for answers,...

Since the 1970s scientists have condemned fats - or lipids - as the culprits that cause heart attacks. But while that's certainly true of some fats, it's not the case for all of them. Because one, called palmitoleic acid, can potently protect arteries against becoming clogged. When it's fed to mice it cuts their levels of arterial disease by over 30 per cent. Ebru Erbay, at Bilkent University in T...

We live in an increasingly mobile society, with many of us owning cars and driving around the place for all kinds of reasons - work, leisure, or visiting family perhaps. And this doesn't change as we get older, especially if we all have to keep working much later in life. But what does change is our ability to drive safely. Yet although there might be the perception that older drivers are less saf...

Air pollution is a growing problem in many parts of the world, as is an increasing incidence of lung and breathing problems. Although the link is clear, it's not known exactly how air pollution damages our lungs at a molecular level. Kat Arney's been finding out. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Is this the dawn of a new era? Or, more accurately, epoch? This week scientists internationally have been voting to create a new geological time defined by our human existence. They're dubbing it the Anthropocene and Chris Smith wanted to find out what it means for our present and our future Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How much gold have you got sitting in your desk drawer or up in the attic? Probably more than you think because a surprisingly large amount of the world's gold supply is tied up in old electronics. But getting it back out is chemically very tricky, meaning large amounts of the precious metal is actually ending up in landfill! Maybe not for much longer though, because researchers from the Universit...

NASA's space probe Dawn has been orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres, which sits between Jupiter and Mars, for the past eighteen months. The probe is sending back data on this small body, which we previously knew almost nothing about. Last week, a whole constellation of papers detailing Dawn's discoveries were published in the journal Science. Laura Brooks asked David Rothery, Professor of Planetary G...

Scientists often study disease by examining thin sections of biological tissue under a microscope - a bit like watching a film in 2D. That's fine for some, but an organ like the brain is really complex, with neurons crisscrossing left, right and centre. Cutting it into thin sections to study diseases like dementia means you lose all that complexity. In an ideal world then, scientists would be able...

Imagine a robot. I'm guessing, after decades of droids and terminators, that the machine you're picturing is something metal, rigid and human-shaped. But this type of robot can only do so much. What we need are soft-skinned robots and this is precisely what a team of Harvard University researchers have built: an autonomous, 3D printed octopus-shaped soft robot nicknamed "octobot." Lucka Bibic spok...

Although empathy is often associated with traits like helpfulness and generosity, not a lot is known about how helpful behaviour and empathy might be linked in the brain. Now, scientists have pinpointed part of the brain thought to drive us to learn how to be more helpful. The findings also suggest that people with higher levels of empathy are quicker to learn what they need to do to help. Patrici...

It's a well-known fact that, as a woman ages, her chances of falling pregnant drop. And this seems to be driven by a fall in the quality of the eggs that she produces. Why this happens though, in an otherwise healthy individual, is a mystery. Now Francesca Duncan, who studies female fertility at Northwestern University, has discovered that older ovaries contain large amounts of fibrous tissue prod...

It's summertime and fields are filled with sunflowers, devotedly following the rising sun. But why do they do it? This is a question that scientists at the University of California, Davis, have striven to answer and Dr Stacey Harmer thinks she has the answer as she explained to Lucka Bibic... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

For the first time, scientists have found a type of arthritis in dinosaurs and this is important because these creatures have an amazing ability to heal themselves from diseases that would normally kill you and me. So, if we can look to animals like this, we might come up with a way to aide and abet healing in groups such as our own, the mammals. Graihagh Jackson caught up with Dr Jennifer Ann, wh...

Cases of Zika virus infection in Florida are continuing to rise, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued travel advice urging pregnant women not to travel to certain parts of the country. The good news is that scientists testing three new types of Zika vaccine have found that they all work safely and rapidly in monkeys. One of the vaccines is made from killed virus grown in...

Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System - a massive 318 times heavier than Earth - and it has been quite the 'hot spot' for news recently. NASA's Juno probe entered into orbit around Jupiter at the beginning of July, while in a new finding, it appears the famous 'Great Red Spot' is kicking up a bigger storm than first imagined. Telescope in hand, Claire Armstrong sought to catch a glimps...

Childhood pneumonia is the number one killer of children under the age of five worldwide. The disease is a particular challenge for those living in developing countries, where there is a lack of clinical expertise and appropriate equipment to diagnose the disease. Adopting a technique called machine learning, scientists at Oxford University have taken clinical data from children with pneumonia to...

One in 20 people develop colorectal cancer in their lifetime, making it the second-most common form cancer in Europe. Surgery is an option for treatment, but this can result in incomplete removal of the tumour. Now, researchers from MIT have developed a hydrogen patch with three types of therapy applied directly to the tumour itself. Their anti-cancer patch was tested on lab mice and caused the ca...

Researchers at the University of Helsinki have developed a chewing robot to study the tie between tooth wear and the dietary patterns of animals. Their shiny stainless-steel chewing machine with 3D printed parts can now show how the paleodiet of the animals and their tooth wear rate affected their lifespan as Aleksis Karme explained to Lucka Bibic. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting t...

People who feel well tend to live well. They have a better immunity against infections and lower susceptibility to ill-health. Stress and depression, on the other hand, are linked to poorer functioning of the immune system, weaker responses to vaccination and, overall, higher rates of morbidity. But how a healthy mind makes for a healthy body wasn't known. Now, by artificially stimulating the rewa...