Naked Scientists, In Short Special Editions Podcast

What was the most momentous bit of science that you heard about this year? Every December the journal Science asks its editorial staff this question and they eventually crown one discovery their "Breakthrough of the Year". Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A plant protein used to communicate with friendly soil fungi has been identified by Cambridge University scientists. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How an Acorn grew into, amongst other things, an Apple: What began as a business making home microcomputers now turns out the processing brain behind 95% of the world's smartphones. Mike Muller has been at the firm since its inception; he explained to Graihagh Jackson how he and 11 other engineers turned the business into one of the world's largest tech firms... Like this podcast? Please help us b...

Researchers have linked a gene with your ability to stop smoking, but not all of the scientific community is in agreement... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

People with the best social networks, who sing in choirs; play instruments; go to church and take part in team sports, all live longer and tend to be happier, studies have shown. People who feel lonely, or isolated, on the other hand, fare less well and are more prone to ill-health. Now a new study, published this week in the journal PNAS and examining the immune systems of lonely people and monke...

Compulsive sexual behaviour, more commonly known as sex addiction, is driven by the huge novelty provided by online material, a new study has found. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The choices we make are often down to past experience and the circumstances, including picking partners. However, for a bird called the ruff, the way it picks up ladies is determined genetically. Some ruffs are territorial and impress using dramatic neck feathers. Less common are the 'girlfriend stealers' who display on the edge of territories and attempt to lure females away. Finally, female mimi...

Music can have a huge impact on your emotions. Research published this week in PNAS has shown that if you apply the same sound properties that convey emotion in music and voices to environmental sounds such as a car engine they will also make people feel emotional. Daniel Bowling, a neuroscientist from the University of Vienna spoke to Rosalind Davies about what the researchers had done, and what...

Can you remember when your voice broke? According to conventional wisdom most men can't, but women have very strong memories of their first period. This means that studies of puberty timing have struggled to investigate effects in men. However, new work from the University of Cambridge has shown that men have much more reliable memories than once thought as Dr Felix Day explained to Connie Orbach....

Cambridge has a rich history of making discoveries about DNA - the genetic code inside each and every one of us. In the 50s Watson and Crick announced that they had unravelled the structure of DNA - the famous double helix shape. Now, 60 years later, another Cambridge scientist - Bill Amos - has made a further DNA discovery - this time about the way the genetic code changes or mutates to allow evo...

Back in August we did a show all about the super material graphene. At the molecular level, a sheet of graphene looks a bit like chicken wire and is only a single atomic layer thick, if you were to pile up lots of these single layers you'd get graphite, just like the led in a pencil. For the first time in the UK more than 40 companies from around the world came together to show the latest in graph...

At the beginning of November, Kat went up to Liverpool for the annual NCRI Cancer Conference, bringing together scientists, doctors, nurses, patients and more from the UK and around the world to talk about the latest progress, ideas and issues in cancer research. On the first night, the charity Breast Cancer Now hosted a heated debate discussing whether after spending so much money investigating t...

Respiratory syncytial virus or RSV is a virus of the respiratory system that infects people of all ages during the winter causing colds, however in infants and young children it can lead to much more severe illnesses like pneumonia. Despite it's huge global impact we still don't have a vaccine for RSV and Dr Ruth Karron from John Hopkins University explains why to Chris Smith. Like this podcast? P...

E-cigarettes seem to be everywhere nowadays. Invented by a Chinese pharmacist and patented in 2004, they first went on sale in 2010 and are now the most popular way to quit smoking in the UK. But although there's no smoke, there's certainly a fire of controversy around e-cigs, as Kat Arney found out when she spoke to Linda Bauld, professor of health policy at the University of Stirling, who chaire...

Cataracts are caused when proteins inside the lens of the eye come together. It's a condition that clouds the vision of approximately one hundred and eighty million people worldwide, with surgery to replace the lens with a plastic one currently the only solution. Twenty million sufferers around the world are blind because they cannot access surgical treatments. But help could be on it's way, as a...

Despite the hundreds of thousands of babies born every day, we still know relatively little about childbirth and how hormones play their key roles in it. A stress hormone, known as cortisol, is involved in inducing labour in animals, but doesn't seem to work the same way in people. A paper this week published in Science Signalling has suggested a potential way cortisol does have a part to play in...

As Winter approaches in some parts of the world, so does the colder weather and the threat of ice on the roads and on your car windscreen. But help is at hand from Kansas State University's Alexander van Dyke. As he explains to Charis Lestrange, he's created what's known as a "biphilic" material that can stop frost from forming so easily on a surface. It consists of two types of material: one hydr...

Steel is used to manufacture a wide range of products from tiny surgical tools to huge ships. However, it can become corroded or contaminated when liquid comes into contact with it. A new method to coat steel with the compound tungsten oxide has been reported by researchers from Harvard University in Nature Communications this week. It enables liquid to slip off the surface while keeping the steel...

There have been many exaggerated reports this week that birth order, whether you are a first or last born, affects how intelligent you will be compared to your siblings. However, the researchers at the University of Leipzig found that this difference in intelligence is very small and the more important finding was about birth order and personality. Charis Lestrange spoke with lead author Julia Roh...

This week the UK science minister, Jo Johnson, was in Cambridge where he announced an initiative to pump 21 million into seven key research programmes intended to tackle some of the leading scientific and engineering challenges facing the world. The funding will come from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the EPSRC. Professor Philip Nelson is the EPSRC's chief executive,...

You know when after a run you feel great? Well previously scientists thought this runners' high was down to endorphins, but this may not be the case. Johannes Fuss from the University of Heidelberg found that mice that ran around all day felt less pain and less anxiety - key features of a runner's high. However, this feel good sensation wasn't down to endorphins, but endocannabinoids - the same ch...

The Human Connectome Project has collected data of hundreds of individuals ranging from brain imaging to genetic and lifestyle information. Now researchers from the University of Oxford have used this information to see how much our lifestyle choices and personality traits are reflected in our brains. Karla Miller explained their findings to Connie Orbach. Like this podcast? Please help us by supp...

Every day millions of people are moving around the world by air, land and sea, but they may be bringing with them more than just their luggage. For example, during last year's ebola outbreak, there were concerns that air travel would spread the disease from west Africa to other countries, sparking a global pandemic. But were these worries justified? By studying the patterns of 187 diseases in 225...

Fossils have long been used to help us piece together the size and shape of extinct animals, but the colours of these animals has, until now, been something of a mystery. Now researchers from the University of Bristol have detected the chemical signatures of the original melanin pigments in ancient bat fossils. Charis Lestrange spoke with Jakob Vinther to hear how... Like this podcast? Please help...

This week, with the Rugby World Cup in full swing, the sports chief medical officer, Martin Raftery has called for changes to be made to the rules in order to cut the number of concussions suffered by players. Concussion occurs when the brain is shaken around inside the skull. This damages nerve cells and blood vessels, and the effects of the damage are worse if a person is already suffering from...