Naturebang

The mystery of consciousness has been one of the most unsolvable problems across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. How can a lump of matter come to be aware of itself? Is consciousness real, or an illusion? And even if I'm pretty convinced by my own conscious experience, how can I possibly know if something else is conscious too? Are you conscious? Is my dog conscious? Is the universe cons...

For African Wild Dogs in the Okovango Delta, living with the pack has its ups and downs. You get help with the hunting, and there's safety in numbers, but there's also a lot of compromise. When the pack leaves, you leave, even if you were in the middle of a nap. All social-living animals from ants to zebras (and humans) have to figure out how to make decisions as a group, and the dogs have a parti...

Jackpot! Lights are flashing, bells are ringing, and you collect your big reward. No, this isn't Vegas, but it might as well be. We're in a specially designed casino for rats, where they gamble in pursuit of the Big Win: delicious sugar pellets. For both rats and humans, a finely tuned ability to assess risk against reward is essential for navigating an unpredictable world. We're pretty good at it...

What if all the ideas and values surrounding our lives are like pieces of sediment in a river? Some never quite settle and get swept away, lost to the currents of time. But some take hold, solidify, become part of the cultural bedrock that underpin our lives. With the help of a geologist and a philosopher, Becky Ripley and Emily Knight dig deeper into this metaphor, to unearth the sedimented histo...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight look to the animal world to question why we "power pose". Anteaters are masters of it. When feeling threatened, they rear up on their hind legs and extend their arms out wide to show off their huge claws. It is a posture that is designed to make them look more intimidating to predators or competing rivals. Does it work like this for us? If we take up more space in a p...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight discover the hairy history of the human kiss. Where did it come from? Why do we like doing it? And how is it good for us? Featuring Dr Adriano Lameira, primatologist turned evolutionary psychologist from the University of Warwick, and Dr Dean Burnett, neuroscientist, lecturer, and author of The Idiot Brain and The Happy Brain, among others. Produced and presented by E...

How do we extract the maximum amount of power from the sun? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight enlist the help of a giant, thousand-year old clam. And end up in the depths of space... Featuring Professor Alison Sweeney at Yale University, and Mike Garrett from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley

Why do animals move the way they do? And why do we humans love to run? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight enlist dogs, horses, armadillos, and some uncooperative rabbits to find out. Featuring Professor Lewis Halsey from the University of Roehampton, and Dr Andrew Yegian from Harvard University. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Do lower voices demand more power? Do we take them more seriously? And is this a bias that needs to be challenged more in today’s world? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight compare the bellowing roars of red deer stags to dig deeper into the psychology of human and animal voice. Featuring David Reby, Professor of Ethology at Jean Monnet University, and David Puts, Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvan...

Why do we help each other out? Even when it gets us nothing in return? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight explore the existence of altruism, with the help of some mischievous magpies. Featuring Professor Dominique Potvin from the University of the Sunshine Coast, and Dr Abigail Marsh from Georgetown University. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight dig deep into the underground web of plant roots and mycorrhizal fungi networks. Here lies a 400 million year old market economy, founded on the trading of resources. Nutrients are traded for carbon. Carbon is traded for nutrients. And the exchange rate between the two is constantly in flux, to level supply with demand. This highly-evolved symbiosis between plant and...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight explore whether we can ever know what others know, and how we figure out if they're telling fibs. Beneath the surface of the ocean, darting around in the dappled sunlight of the reef, you can find some of nature's most prolific liars. The cephalopods. Squid, octopus and cuttlefish; filthy con artists, the lot of them. They communicate with each other, and with both pr...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight tackle a topic we love to fight about: parenting. How should we raise our kids? How much love is too much? Good parenting begins at home. And 'home', in this case, is a decomposing mouse corpse, rolled into a ball and buried 5 inches beneath the soil of the forest floor. Naturally. This is the home of one of nature's most diligent little parents, the black and orange...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight explore the ancient origins of medicine. What makes us sick? What makes us well again? And do animals medicate like we do? Deep in the rainforest of Sumatra, one clever orangutan called Rakus has pretty much got it figured out. Astonished researchers spotted him making and then applying a plant-based medicinal paste to a painful wound. It was anti-bacterial, anti-fung...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight dive into the watery world of rainbowfish to confront the age-old myth that fish have bad memories. In actual fact, they are much more intelligent than we like to think, with an incredible capacity for learning and memory, as seen in almost all fish species. Their ability to remember complex things over a long period of time means they can build social relationships,...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight tackle a serious question. One of supreme scientific importance: do animals get wasted? From drunk moose stuck in trees, to wasted wallabies asleep in opium fields, to dippy dolphins puffing on toxic pufferfish; stories abound about animals who seem to be using their free time to get sloshed. But do these stories, delightful as they are, stand up to scrutiny? In the n...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight find out what it takes to learn the language of your people, with the help of some extremely chatty little birds. The song of the zebra finch has been compared to a 90's dial-up modem running triple-speed, or an alien fax machine. But to a female zebra finch, it's a song of irresistible seduction. The males learn their song in a very similar way to the way we learn la...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight investigate physical fitness in the animal kingdom, and ask why animals never seem to have to go to the gym. Consider the Barnacle Goose, getting ready for one of the most phenomenal physical challenges of the animal world: the annual migration. They leave their sedentary summer life, floating about eating reeds, and take off to fly 2,700 miles. And what do they do to...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight dive into the underwater world of killer whales, where tight-knit family pods are led by the eldest post-reproductive matriarch, to better understand why we have a menopause. Matriarchal killer whales usually stop being able to reproduce in their thirties or forties, but continue to live for decades longer. This phenomenon of having a long post-reproductive life is kn...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight look to the giggles and guffaws of the animal kingdom to ask where human laughter has come from. At least 65 species have been identified as making 'play vocalisations', a sort of animal version of laughter, according to a recent UCLA paper studying animals at play. Rats giggle in ultrasound, elephants have a play-specific trumpet, and kia parrots cackle from the tree...

Rhythm is everywhere in the biological world. The rhythm of heartbeat, the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of gait and walking. In fact, in 'The Descent of Man', Charles Darwin wrote that the perception of rhythm is "probably common to all animals and no doubt depends on the common physiological nature of their nervous system.” And yet, recent studies have shown that even our closest living relati...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight look to the freeze-thaw abilities of the North American wood frog to ask whether we can freeze ourselves in order to return to a future world... Early March is breeding season for the North American wood frog. They are frisky because they’ve just thawed out having spent the winter not just in hibernation, but frozen at -18°C. How do they do it, and still survive? And...

You may think 'culture' is one of those peculiar things unique to humans, like dancing to pop music or yelling at the TV. But you'd be wrong. Animals may not flock to the Opera, but they absolutely do have 'culture'; habits; traditions; ways of doing things that are passed down from one generation to the next. Animal culture has been studied in fish, mammals and even insects, and one of the longes...

We've all seen the Attenborough documentaries, full of the hurrying and scurrying of life on earth, the drama constantly unfolding. The natural world is a BUSY place... Or is it? The surprising truth is, away from the cameras, most animals spend most of the time doing absolutely nothing at all. It's not just the sleepy sloths and the cat-napping cats, even the critters with reputations for being t...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight ask whether giving legal rights to things like rivers and forests changes how we think about the world that lives around us. The Whanganui River, in New Zealand, is a legal person in the eyes of the law. It is legally defined as a living whole, from the mountains to the sea, and two local Maori tribe members speak on its behalf as its legal representatives. Other nati...