Lithium-ion batteries were a technological breakthrough, powering everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles, but as funding is poured into researching alternatives, are we on the verge of something safer, faster, and more efficient?

Also this week, we learn about the “dark oxygen” potentially being produced in the deep ocean and friend of Inside Science, Anjana Ahuja, brings us her favourite science stories of the week, including a new material described as ‘chainmail on steroids’ and contagious urination.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

It’s already being used in healthcare, but recent studies have exposed both strengths and weaknesses.

We’re joined by Dr James Kinross, a surgeon and researcher at Imperial College London, to discuss the positives and the pitfalls.

Also this week, we talk all about what a Trump presidency might mean for science; why powerful winds are driving the deadly fires in LA – and anyone for science-optimised pasta? Marnie is helped by a physicist to make the perfect Cacio e Pepe.

Spoiler alert: Recipe below!

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Sophie Ormiston & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

Science-backed Cacio e Pepe:

For two servings: - 240 g pasta - Black pepper - 160 g pecorino cheese - 4g corn starch in 40ml water

Dissolve the corn starch in water and heat until it forms a gel. Let this cool before combining it with the cheese and black pepper. Cook the pasta, then drain, keeping some of the water. Let it cool then mix the pasta with the sauce. Enjoy!

Marnie Chesterton is joined by a panel of science watchers to discuss what we can expect from the year ahead. We'll talk big science, small science - and the plain cool. What will science do for us in the coming year?

On the Inside Science panel, we have:

- Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times - Shaoni Bhattacharya, former acting science editor of The Observer & freelance editor at Research Professional News - Penny Sarchet, commissioning editor at New Scientist

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

Live from the Hay Festival Winter Weekend, Marnie Chesterton is joined by laughter expert and neuroscientist, Professor Sophie Scott, and an expert in making people laugh, comedian Miles Jupp, in this side-splitting panel show.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

This festive season, we look at the science of games and, of course, play some ourselves.

It’s presenter Marnie Chesterton versus producer Florian Bohr at Marnie's kitchen table.... Who will win the Inside Science games special?

Irving Finkel from the British Museum tells Marnie about the Royal Game of Ur, one of the most ancient board games which is strikingly similar to more modern examples of race games. Also, why we play games with author and neuroscientist Kelly Clancy, and why we struggle to comprehend the randomness of dice with author Tim Clare.

To finish it off, mathematician Marcus du Sautory explains the geometry behind the game Dobble and leaves listeners with a Christmas puzzle: Can you figure out the symbols on the two missing Dobble cards?

If you think you’ve found the solution, please email [email protected]

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Florian Bohr Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth    To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

From the biggest stories to the unsung and the plain fun, Inside Science presenter Victoria Gill hosts a special panel, featuring:

- Libby Jackson, head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency - Penny Sarchet, managing editor of New Scientist - Mark Miodownik, a materials scientist from University College London

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

We digest the last year of bird flu changes with virologist Tom Peacock and public health journalist Melody Schreiber.

Also this week, we address the absurd problem of transporting something that can't be touched, we find out how animals make their epic migratory journeys, and Victoria Gill visits a town which has learnt to ward off a fearsome predator, polar bears.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth  & Josie Hardy

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

The online posts, attacking Arla Food’s trial of Bovaer with three big supermarkets and 30 farms in the UK, have had millions of views.

So, what do we know – what is this additive and how is it going to tackle burpy cows? And what is the evidence it is safe?

We interrogate the science with Sharon Huws, professor in animal science, and food scientist Dr Stuart Farrimond...

Also this week, are billionaires really deserting Earth for space? What is the upshot for our plastic waste problem after global talks on a treaty ended in failure? And why, just why, are orcas being spotted wearing salmon hats?

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

But, it's nothing new. Pontypridd was severely flooded just four and a half years ago – and these are scenes that play out around the UK every winter.

So, is the way we warn people about floods failing?

We’re going to unpick exactly how floods are forecast – and what went wrong – with natural hazards researcher and hydrologist, Professor Hannah Cloke.

Also this week, sharing your microbiome with friends, alternative plastics, and was the most recent climate summit good COP or bad COP?

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Gerry Holt, Sophie Ormiston & Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

What is the carbon footprint of war?

How significant is the impact – and is it crass to even talk about it? We’re joined by Benjamin Neimark from Queen Mary University in London.

Also this week, we chat to the incoming DG of Europe’s particle-smashing facility Cern, what have we learnt by defrosting an extinct big cat and, the beetle that could ruin Christmas...

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Florian Bohr, Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

If you want to test your climate change knowledge, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University to take the quiz.

Exactly what these nuclear medicines are and how they are made is key to understanding the national scarcity. So, we’re going back to basics and learning all about medical isotopes.

We also speak to world-famous conservationist and primatologist Jane Goodall who, now aged 90, continues to travel the globe campaigning to protect the natural world.

Dame Goodall reflects on a life of studying our closest living animal relatives, chimpanzees, and as COP29 gets under way, speaks about the “closing window of time” to turn the tide on climate change and nature loss.

Also this week, we answer the listener question “Why don’t we just throw nuclear waste into volcanoes?” and can Marnie spot AI vs real poetry?

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

So where does this leave COP29, the upcoming UN climate conference in Azerbaijan?

This week Inside Science is asking, are climate summits really working? What is the point of them - and are they doing enough?

Joining Marnie Chesterton to discuss this are:

- Joanna Depledge, expert on international climate negotiations at the University of Cambridge - Mark Maslin, climate change professor from University College London (UCL) - Jim Watson, professor of energy policy, also from UCL

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

If you want to test your climate change knowledge, follow the links on this page to The Open University to take a quiz.

We find out what you can see in a dark, dark Halloween night sky with space-watcher and Professor of astrophysics Tim O’Brien.

Also this week, we meet some blood-sucking leeches, the horrors of pumpkin waste and could zombies ever be real?

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

The thinnest and strongest material known to exist – and better at carrying electricity than any metal – its discovery was hailed as revolutionary.

But two decades on, it doesn’t seem to have changed the world, or if it has, it is doing so very quietly.

So, what happened?

We go on the trail of graphene, meeting Nobel Prize winner and Godfather of Graphene Andrew Geim, and learning what it has – and hasn’t – done and what might be next...

Also this week, how to kill an asteroid and we talk the “other” COP with chief scientific adviser to the government, Dame Angela McLean.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

Also this week, why a psychologist won the Nobel Prize in Physics, the culprit behind the second biggest mass extinction event, and does playing video games make you smarter?

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber, Anna Charalambou Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

That’s the bold claim from US company Colossal Biosciences, who say research is under way that will make this possible.

But even if we have the technology to bring back a long dead species, should we? We hear the arguments for and against de-extinction.

Also this week, what will Europa Clipper find when it heads to one of Jupiter’s icy moons and how to win a Nobel Prize.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

The UK’s last coal-fired power station has closed, ending Britain's 142-year reliance on coal.

But what difference will the closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar make – and could it mark a new dawn for clean energy?

After 20 years of research into microplastics and headline upon headline on their potential harms, how much do we really know about these tiny particles?

Also this week, Marnie turns lab rat for a navigation experiment, and why are we all so obsessed with Moo Deng?

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

If you want to test your climate change knowledge, head to bbc.co.uk - search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University.

What effect is space travel having on our climate?

We're used to delving into the carbon footprint of Earth-bound travel – so this week we’re going to explore the impact of the rapidly growing space industry on our climate.

How does a rocket launch compare to a flight taking off? Do we even know the true cost yet – and if it’s significant, what might the solution be?

Also on the programme, a personal perspective from a remote island on worrying seabird declines, the results of a project to refreeze Arctic sea ice, and why new evidence unearthed about the Falkland Islands suggests it may once have looked very different...

Presenter: Vic Gill Producers: Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis Studio Manager: Rhys Morris

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

If you want to test your climate change knowledge, head to bbc.co.uk - search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University.

But is it too good to be true? And will people even eat it?

In this special episode of Inside Science, we take a deep-dive into lab-grown meat; visiting a production facility to see how it's made, hearing about the nuanced perspectives of British farmers, asking if this new industry can learn from the failings of GM foods, and trying to figure out what the true environmental costs of entirely new way of producing food really is.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis

All eyes were on businessman Jared Isaacman and engineer Sarah Gillis as they ventured outside a Space X capsule.

But is this an historic space exploration milestone - or just a very exciting holiday for a billionaire? We'll find out more from the BBC’s own expert space-watcher Jonathan Amos.

Also this week, we visit Sellafield which processes and stores more radioactive material per square metre than any other site in Europe. But it is getting full.

So where is our nuclear waste going to go in future? As the UK searches for a new potential site, we look at the science of what we do with nuclear waste and why.

We’ll also delve into the fascinating world of nuclear semiotics. How can we communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to people living 100,000 years from now?

Presenter: Vic Gill Producers: Sophie Ormiston & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Studio manager: Cath McGhee Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis

We ask Richard Hull, an expert in chemistry and fire science who’s been following the story, why it was used in the first place and what made it so dangerous.

Also this week, the neuroscience of the Oasis queue, the technology powering Paralympic athletes and strange sounds from space...

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Studio Manager: Emily Preston Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis

A drug – lecanemab – that can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease has recently been approved for use in the UK, but the healthcare regulator NICE has said that it won’t be available on the NHS. But what is behind this decision, and what makes creating an Alzheimer’s drug so difficult? Professor Tara Spires-Jones from the University of Edinburgh talks us through the science.

And could ‘smart paint’ supersize our fruit and veg? Reporter Roland Pease heads over to the experimental greenhouses of Cranfield University’s crop science unit to see if the technology works.

Thee Paralympic Games are now underway in Paris, with athletes competing across 22 different events. But as competitors have a range of different impairments, how is it ensured that there's a level playing field? Professor Sean Tweedy from the University of Queensland calls in from Paris to explain how athletes are sorted into categories for competition.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Sophie Ormiston and Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Andrew Lewis

Our panellists: Peter Smithers, an entomologist and fellow of the Royal Entomological Society Aaron Thomas, co-founder of Yum Bug, which makes meat out of crickets Dr Emily Porter, a dietician and gut health specialist for the NHS and The Gut Health Clinic

What else should we explore – and where else should we visit? Send your suggestions to [email protected]

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Sound manager: Mike Cox Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Marnie visits the site to learn more about the benefits they bring - but beavers are just a drop in the river of urban rewilding. We find out what the practicalities and pitfalls of letting nature take back space in our cities are.

Do you feel like your dog is watching you? You're probably right. Zoologist and broadcaster Jules Howard ponders on the human-watching acuity of our beloved pets.

And our guts are not the only places where bacterial communities thrive, new research tells us that our microwaves also have a microbiome. Should we be worried?

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston and Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinators: Jana Bennett-Holesworth and Andrew Rhys Lewis

Inga Doak, the Head of Sustainability at The Royal Mint, reveals how the company plan to ‘urban mine’ gold from household electronic waste and turn it into jewellery. But with tens of millions of tonnes of e-waste piling up every year, the environment policy adviser at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Izzi Monk unpacks how the UK can clean up its act.

Vic puts her stable boots on to visit some very pampered thoroughbred foals to find out what their poo can reveal about their future success on the racecourse.

From horses to humanity, sports geneticist Alun Williams discusses how our genetic make-up could determine whether or not we are destined for gold at the Olympics.

Plus, Roland Pease channels his inner child to investigate his youthful obsession with Mars as NASA looks for new microbial life on the red planet.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Ben Mitchell and Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

It might sound like an out-of-this-world problem that we don’t need to worry about here on Earth – but is it?

As we send more and more metal in the form of satellites up into space, scientists are warning it is becoming more of a risk both here – and up there.

We dig into the problem and what’s being done to clean it up.

Also this week, we answer a listener question about oceans and their influence on global temperatures, and we ponder the use – and sometimes abuse – of scientific language.

And with the Paris Olympics well under way, how much does sex affect sporting performance?

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

A place on the podium or disappointment in the Olympics can come down to the precise position of a foot or angle of the hips. Science reporter Ella Hubber visits the University of Bath to check out the motion capture tech that makes these measurements. New research suggests our close cousins, the chimpanzees, chat just as fast as humans. Professor Cat Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews tells us what chimp chats can teach us about the evolution of language.

75 years after making a groundbreaking discovery, Rosemary Fowler has finally been awarded with an honorary doctorate. University of Bristol chancellor, Sir Paul Nurse, shares how important it is to celebrate and recognise Rosemary’s achievements.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Ella Hubber and Sophie Ormiston Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

But with visitor numbers at a record high, how does tourism fit into that – and what kind of impact is it having on its fragile ecosystem? We discuss whether tourists – and even scientists – should be allowed to go at all.

Swimming in the Seine has been banned for more than a century because of pollution concerns. The main culprit? Human waste. We find out if it really will be safe in time.

And every summer we ready ourselves for 'flying ant day' – that one day where winged ants take to the skies across Britain. Or do they?

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber and Gerry Holt Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Just how important is science to cultivating the perfect playing surface?

Also this week, we discuss the aims and ethics of human stem-cell-based embryo models in research after a new code of practice for the UK made headlines.

And we answer a listener question about whether white paint could help tackle climate change.

Send your burning science questions to [email protected]. Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston & Gerry Holt Editor: Colin Paterson Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

We chat seagulls with Professor Paul Graham on Brighton beach and find out why they are so misunderstood - from what we call them to why they pinch our chips.

We bust some sun safety myths with dermatologist Dr Jess Felton and find out why ice cream is such a chemical marvel with chef Terri Mercieca.

And we join in the festivities at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber & Gerry Holt Editor: Colin Paterson Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Japanese scientists have developed artificial skin for robots made from real human cells. Inside Science producer Dr Ella Hubber digs into the uncanny invention.

Inside Science reporter Patrick Hughes goes on the trail of methane emissions from landfills.

And, as a heatwave smothers the UK, physiologist Damian Bailey helps us figure out what the perfect temperature for a human is.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Gerry Holt, Sophie Ormiston Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

We’re joined by the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring and Cardiff University's Professor Martin Innes to talk the science of tracking election disinformation on social media.

What’s in the election manifestos? BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh explains all.

And Marnie dashes to Kew Gardens to meet horticulturalist Solene Dequiret, hoping to be in time to see two very foul-smelling plants in very rare bloom.

Nose pegs at the ready...

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Gerry Holt, Katie Tomsett & Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Zoologist Jules Howard ponders the strange effects drugs in our sewage have on frogs from his garden pond.

How do we measure the distance to distant galaxies? Astrophysicist Edward Gomez answers a listener's burning question.

And a 101 on blood groups from Dr Lise Estcourt.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Gerry Holt, Sophie Ormiston Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Marine biologist Helen Scales joins us in the studio to talk about her new book “What the Wild Sea Could Be” which uses changes in the Earth’s past to predict what we can expect to happen to our oceans in the coming years.

Cosmologist Andrew Pontzen speculates on what happens in and around the extreme environment of a black hole as news of the first observations of the “plunging zone” comes to light.

And as the EU head to ban smoky flavoured crisps we ask what the science behind this decision is with Food scientist Stuart Farrimond.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber and Hannah Robins Researcher: Caitlin Kennedy Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

We all instinctively know that sleep is incredibly important but science doesn’t actually have a satisfying answer for why we need to sleep. There are multiple theories, but now, new research from Imperial College London has suggested that the leading idea might actually be incorrect. Science journalist Ginny Smith explains.

Nearly 80 years ago, one of the rarest elements in the world, promethium, was first discovered, but it’s properties have only now been revealed. Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at University College London, tells us what this means.

What’s the scariest animal on the planet? Lions, crocodiles, or maybe tigers might come to mind. Yet a recent study has found that animals around the globe fear our voices far more than sounds of any other predators. Professor Liana Zanette explains how her research could help conservation efforts.

Finally, we answer one of your questions. Listener Mary Evans got in touch to ask: ‘do you think it's likely that people who are widely travelled and used to eating local food and drinking tap water would have more diverse bacteria in their gut?’ Expert on all things microbiome, Megan Rossi, joins us in the studio to answer Mary’s query. If you have any questions you think we can tackle, you can always email us at [email protected].

Presenter: Liz Bonnin Producers: Hannah Robins, Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston Researcher: Caitlin Kennedy Editor: Martin Smith

As the UK strives to achieve net zero by 2050, nuclear energy is looking more and more likely as a key player in reaching this goal. But it’s not just massive power plants like Hinkley point C - there’s are newer smaller reactors on the scene: small and micro modular reactors. 100 to 1000 times smaller than a conventional reactor, faster to build, and put together entirely in a factory before being shipped out, theoretically, anywhere: are micro modular reactors the future of nuclear energy or too good to be true? Dean of Engineering at the University of Liverpool, Eann Patterson, has just published a paper proposing a fleet of micro modular reactors to bear the burden of our energy load and he joins us to discuss the reality.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Science writer, broadcaster and now egg expert Jules Howard joins us to answer this age old question. His book Infinite Life tells the story of how the egg propelled evolution – whether it’s bird, insect, or mammal.

This month, scientist Alexandra Freeman’s appointment to the House of Lords was announced. With a background in risk and evidence communication, Alexandra tells us why she applied, what she hopes to achieve, and how the public can get involved.

Presenter: Liz Bonnin Producers: Hannah Robins, Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

The exhibition “Bees: A Story of Survival” opened at the World Museum in Liverpool this month. Part of the show explains the how honeybees communicate through vibration. Physicist Martin Bencsik, who collected and studies these vibrations, plays us a few and explains their meaning.

And did you get a chance to see the auroras that covered a large part of the Northern Hemisphere last weekend? The intense solar activity that caused them has some people alarm. Jim Al-Khalili, who has written a science fiction novel based on the concept, talks what is protecting us from solar flares and what could go wrong.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston and Hannah Robins Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Last week, the Sumatran orangutan Rakus made headlines when he was spotted by researchers treating a wound with a medicinal plant. A first for a wild animal. But he’s not the only animal to show self-medicating behaviour. Biologist and author of Wild Health, Cindy Engel, talks healing in the wild and what we can learn from the animals that do it.

And it’s that time of year again: the Eurovision Song Contest. In fact, this year marks the 50th Anniversary since ABBA won the 1974 contest with the iconic track Waterloo. Psychology and behavioural researcher Harry Witchel tells us what gives songs at Eurovision a winning edge and tries to predict a winner based on his criteria.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Hannah Robins, Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston Researcher: Caitlin Kennedy Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Are ugly animals getting the short end of the conservation stick? Whilst a few beautiful creatures, like tigers and panda bears, get good marketing and attract the most conservation efforts, comedian and biologist Simon Watt argues that the endangered animals which are less pleasing to the eye are being forgotten.

Also this week, we answer a listener’s question about the accuracy of using bug splats on cars to measure insect populations. Lead data analyst from the Kent Wildlife Trust, Lawrence Ball, gives us the details about the national citizen science survey, Bugs Matter, which sees people around the country measure insect splats on vehicle number plates as a marker of insect abundance.

And science journalist Roland Pease discusses the unprecedented scientific opportunity hurtling towards Earth in the form of asteroid Apophis. It will just miss our planet – in astronomical terms at least – but its proximity has astronomers excited.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston and Hannah Robins Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, exposes the pain a break up can cause. Heartbreak is a common theme in music and art – but what does science have to say about it? Florence Williams, science journalist and author of Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, talks us through the research on what actually happens in our bodies when we go through a break-up.

The nomadic Avar empire ruled over eastern and central Europe from the sixth to the ninth century but very little was known about them – until now. From studying ancient DNA, researchers have discovered a wealth of information about how the Avars lived. Dr Lara Cassidy, Assistant Professor in Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, explains the findings, and how it’s even possible to learn so much from ancient DNA.

We all know how bees great are – but what about all the other pollinators? Dr Erica McAlister from the Natural History Museum in London speaks out in defence of the fly.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins and Sophie Ormiston Editor: Martin Smith

The last few weeks seem to have been a non-stop cycle of depressing climate stories, with floods in Pakistan, mass coral bleaching and last month being the hottest March ever recorded. It's perhaps no surprise that many people are anxious about the news. Vic Gill is joined by Prof Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath, and Tom Rivett Carnac, an author, political strategist and co-host of the podcast Outrage + Optimism. Together they discuss climate anxiety, and how to stay engaged with the news without feeling overwhelmed.

And with all this wet weather, how are our precious insects faring? It turns out, bumblebees might have a trick up their fuzzy sleeves when the ground gets flooded - at least according to a new experiment led by Sabrina Rondeau from the University of Ottawa. We also get bumblebee expert Dave Goulson on the line to tell us more about these charismatic insects.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Ella Hubber and Hannah Robins Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Also this week, thousands of eyes across America were turned to the skies to catch a glimpse of the total solar eclipse. But this event isn’t just a spectacle for the eyes – it’s a real scientific opportunity. Space physicist and electrical engineer Dr Nathaniel Frissell reveals his unusual approach to studying the eclipse via radio. And BBC reporter Georgina Rannard, who has been following the eclipse this week, tells Vic what other research scientists investigated during the four-minute window of darkness.

And don’t turn your eyes away from the sky just yet, as another celestial spectacle is set to occur. About 3,000 light-years away, a pair of orbiting stars called T Coronae Borealis are not normally visible from Earth. But every 80 years or so, one of the stars in the binary system explodes, creating a ‘new’ star in our night sky. But you’ll only have a day or two to spot it. Astrophysicist Dr Rebecca Smethurst joins Vic in the studio to talk about this once-in-a-lifetime star explosion.

And to close the show, the life and work of a legend. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs has died at the age of 94. Higgs’s biographer Professor Frank Close tells us how Higgs predicted the existence of a particle that’s fundamental to our understanding of the Universe and reveals the legacy he’s left behind.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

In this episode, Victoria Gill visits palaeontologist Dr Emma Nicholls at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, who shows her those very fossils that launched the new science of palaeontology. Danielle Czerkaszyn then opens the archives to reveal the scientific illustrations of Megalosaurus by Mary Morland, which helped shape Buckland's description.

But this was just the beginning. Over the coming decades, remains kept being discovered and scientists were gripped with dinosaur mania, racing to find species. Now, in 2024, we're finding new dinosaurs all the time. Victoria travels to the University of Edinburgh to meet Professor Steve Brusatte and Dr Tom Challands as they start extracting a dinosaur bone from a piece of Jurassic rock - could this be a new species? Together, they reflect on how palaeontology has changed over the last 200 years and ponder the ongoing mysteries of these charismatic animals.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Hannah Robins Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth  Editor: Martin Smith

Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has died at the age of 90. Widely acknowledged as one of the world's most influential psychologists, his many years of study centred on how and why we make the decisions we do. In 2011, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. We’re joined by presenter and author Claudia Hammond to unpick his legacy.

The price of lab monkeys has plummeted. Used for drug development and testing, their value skyrocketed during the vaccine development period of the pandemic. But when the boom for vaccines died, the demand for (and value of) these monkeys plunged. Journalist Eleanor Olcott provides the full picture. 

Are there alternatives to animal testing? Marnie visits a lab in Cambridge to find out about neural organoids, cellular clumps grown from stem cells made to replicate the brain. Developmental biologist Prof Madeline Lancaster shows her around and Dr Sarah Chan from the University of Edinburgh digs into the ethics of this cutting-edge branch of science.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Florian Bohr, Hannah Robins, Louise Orchard and Imaan Moin Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

A new company has launched which aims to mine Helium-3 on the moon to sell on Earth. This rare isotope is used for supercooling quantum computers and some scientists dream of using it in nuclear fusion as a new source of renewable energy. But is this ambition realistic and, if so, could it be within reach anytime soon? Planetary scientist Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum explains all.

There are many moons in our solar systems, but one of the strangest is Titan; the largest moon of the Saturn system. It gets colder than -100 degrees Celsius and has a thick atmosphere that creates weather. But its biggest mystery is the enormous, coffee-coloured dunes that cover a large part of its surface. Where did they come from? Planetary scientist Bill Bottke has a cunning theory.

In our universe, some stars are twins. They originate from the same molecular clouds and should be identical, but some pairs are not as similar as you’d expect. Marnie speaks to astrophysicist Yuan-Sen Ting about his new paper which illuminates how this difference might occur. His theory is that one of the stars, perhaps the evil twin, has been busy eating up vulnerable planets...  Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Louise Orchard, Florian Bohr and Imaan Moin Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Also, Marnie speaks to Dr Chris Thorogood of the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens about his new book Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers. Called “Rafflesia” plants and found in the remotest parts of South East Asia, their flowers burst from the rain forest floor the size of pumpkins and are critically endangered. Chris talks of his world of extreme fieldwork and hair-raising expeditions, braving leeches, lizards and lethal forest swamps, to discover the rarest of rare blooms.

Plus, the Wildlife Trust’s Making Friends with Molluscs campaign starts today, and I’m sure many gardeners will declare this an impossible task! We visit some allotments in Bristol to find out how people are managing slug and snail populations. And chat to Brian Eversham from the Trust of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, who explains why these garden creatures should be considered our friends, not foes.

And finally, Dr Stewart Husband from last week’s programme returns to answer more of your burning questions about your tap water.

Also, new research indicates that bumblebees can show each other how to solve puzzles too complex for them to learn on their own. Professor Lars Chittka put these clever insects to the test and found that they could learn through social interaction. How exactly did the experiment work, and what does this mean for our understanding of social insects? Reporter Hannah Fisher visits the bee lab at Queen Mary University in London.

And finally, more than 20 million years ago, our branch of the tree of life lost its tail. At that point in time, apes split from another animal group, monkeys. Now, geneticist Dr Bo Xia at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard thinks he may have found the specific mutation that took our tails. Marnie speaks with evolutionary biologist Dr Tom Stubbs from the Open University about why being tail-less could be beneficial. What would a hypothetical parallel universe look like where humans roam the earth, tails intact? And what would these tails look like?

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Louise Orchard, Florian Bohr, Jonathan Blackwell, Imaan Moin Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Animal welfare charities have been celebrating a ban on donkey skin trade, agreed to this month by 55 African countries. This will make it illegal to slaughter donkeys for their skin across the continent, where around two thirds of the world’s 53 million donkeys live. Victoria Gill tells Marnie that the demand for the animals' skins is fuelled by the popularity of an ancient Chinese medicine called Ejiao, believed to have health-enhancing and youth-preserving properties and traditionally made from donkey hides.

Lastly, Dr Jess Wade, physicist and science communicator at Imperial College London, discusses Breaking Through: My Life in Science. It’s the memoir of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Dr Katalin Karikó, whose passion and dedication to mRNA research led to the development of the life-changing COVID mRNA vaccines.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Florian Bohr, Louise Orchard Assistant Producer: Imaan Moin Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

As a new 'meaty rice' is created and Fortnum & Mason launch a scotch egg made with cultivated meat that they hope to have on sale as early as next year, we investigate the world of laboratory-grown meat.

Mark Post made the first ever synthetic meat in 2012 to the tune of £200,000. He tells us how these lab-grown meats are made and how, he thinks, they could play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and feeding a growing population. Jenny Kleeman, author of Sex, Robots and Vegan Meat, is more sceptical, citing concerns over food security and if the public really want to eat this stuff.

A stingray called Charlotte has become pregnant, despite there being no other stingrays in her tank at the Aquarium & Shark Lab in North Carolina. Marine biologist Dr Helen Scales considers how this may have happened.

And cosmic minerologist Sara Russell from the Natural History Museum tells us how astronomers tracked and found a particularly unusual asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere and what we might learn from it. 

Presenter: Professor Ben Garrod Producers: Hannah Robins, Florian Bohr, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Jonathan Blackwell Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Is CERN finally going to get a gigantic new particle accelerator? Almost exactly one decade ago, Roland Pease reported from Switzerland about the very first meeting about the successor of the Large Hadron Collider which was used to discover the Higgs Boson. Now there’s an update to the story. Roland is back to tell Vic how far along CERN is with their plans, and how much more time and money it will take to build the Future Circular Collider.

Lovers of certain famous, creamy French cheeses could be in for a bit of a shock. Camembert and Brie are facing extinction as we know them! The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris has stated that, over the last 100 years, the food and farming industry has placed too much pressure on the production of these types of cheeses. Now, the fungus traditionally used to grow the famous, fluffy white rinds has been cloned to a point where the lack of diversity in its genetic makeup means it can no longer be reproduced. Turophiles must learn to appreciate more diversity of tastes, colours and textures to protect the cheeses’ future.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Florian Bohr, Louise Orchard, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell  Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Following this week’s launch of NASA’s PACE satellite, NASA scientist Dr Susanne Craig tells us how the mission will be giving our planet a health check.

Bird flu is still an issue. This month, scientists have reported that hundreds of penguin chicks have died from the virus in the Falklands. Meanwhile, in Argentina, avian flu has killed huge numbers of elephant seal pups. Professor Wendy Barclay, a virologist from Imperial College London, tells us more about the virus and how it can jump between species.

Sunday 11th February is International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Physicist Dr Jess Wade, who has written hundreds of Wikipedia biographies of women and underrepresented scientists, reveals one of her favourite scientists that people haven’t heard of.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Florian Bohr, Louise Orchard Assistant Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Researcher: Imaan Moin Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Plus, game changing smart technology gets a run out as Rugby Union’s Six Nations Championship kicks-off. This year, all players will be wearing “Smart Mouth Guards.” These are intelligent gum shields containing miniature gyroscopes, accelerometers and Bluetooth, which provide - with incredible accuracy - a measure of the magnitude and frequency of forces experienced by players. An athlete making their international debut in this competition could have their entire collision history mapped from now until retirement, providing invaluable information for training and treatments. Crucial not only for elite squads, but ultimately for community and schools rugby where the technology will eventually land, leading to a safer game.

And finally, it turns out that we can actually understand chickens even if we’ve never met them before! After assessing a group of around 200 volunteers, a team at the University of Queensland has discovered that humans with no experience of chickens at all, could understand the birds’ calls of satisfaction, or frustration. The research has serious implications for what’s known as precision farming, an area of livestock farming with little, to no, human interaction that requires automated systems of welfare detection using sound recognition.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Louise Orchard, Florian Bohr, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Almost 25 years ago, Dr Marc Lammers stumbled across a mystery. The humpback whale singing he was recording via an underwater microphone near the shore was quieter during the day than at night. But he wasn’t able to answer why. Many years later, a PhD student, Anke Kuegler, joined his research team and took on the task of uncovering what was really going on. Using multiple ways of listening to and tracking the whales, she found out that the singing humpbacks were moving off-shore during the day, and closer to shore at night. Part of the mystery was solved, but it raised an even bigger question: what is driving this behaviour?

Plus, a recent study has shown that terrestrial hermit crabs around the world are using non-organic materials, like plastic bottle caps, as their homes. Professor Marta Szulkin and her team at the University of Warsaw looked through social media photographs and videos (known as iEcology, or Internet Ecology) to find evidence for this new behaviour. Marta has theories about why the crabs are doing this, but it will take many years of research to uncover the long-term effects on hermit crab populations and their evolutionary trajectory. And, resident materials expert, Mark Miodownik, chats to Viv about what we can, and cannot, solve about the global plastic emergency.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Florian Bohr, Louise Orchard Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

When looking at clear ocean water, you might assume that, aside from fish and some algae, there isn’t much living in it. But Prof Carlos Duarte knows it is full of life. In fact, his new study shows just how many different microbes – bacteria, viruses & fungi – live in all parts of our ocean. He and his team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia have created the largest ocean genome catalogue to date. Prof Mark Blaxter from the Wellcome Sanger Institute joins us to discuss this new study, the benefits of hypothesis-free science, and why he believes cataloguing the code of life of all the species on earth is an important endeavour.

And, lastly, an old dinosaur fossil in New Mexico has been re-examined. What was believed to be of the infamous Tyrannosaurus rex may have been a different species all along. But not all palaeontologists agree. How do scientists even tell a dinosaur species from a fossil? Prof Stephen Brusatte tells Vic that it’s all about comparing bones.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Florian Bohr, Louise Orchard, Hannah Robbins Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

And, if you’ve been procrastinating over the housework – or should we say, mousework? - take a leaf out of a little rodent’s book. Apparently, mice do like to keep things clean, but a video that went viral this week seemingly takes this idea to another level entirely! You may well have seen the footage of a Welsh mouse gathering up objects in a shed and placing them neatly inside a box, night after night. It’s certainly very cute - Tidy Mouse carrying out its mousekeeping..but what’s the scientific explanation behind this curious behaviour?

Finally, how do exercise and video games affect cognitive performance? Professor Adrian Owen is launching a new experiment to find out and he needs your help.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Louise Orchard, Florian Bohr, Hannah Robbins Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

It’s been more than fifty years since the last manned mission to the Moon was completed. But that’s about to change with NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission. This will not only be the first manned lunar flyby of the Moon since 1972, but also the first mission to have a woman and person of colour on board. Reid Wiseman, Commander of the Artemis II manned mission explains more about the mission and even lets us into a few secrets about what culinary delights await astronauts in space.

But it’s not just NASA going to the Moon in 2024. China’s Chang’e 6 mission is lifting off in May, aiming to collect samples of rock from the far side of the moon. Quentin Parker, Director of the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong has a unique insight into China’s mission and has been following progress.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Hannah Fisher Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Twelve of the biggest moments of the year in science include discussion about a very special treefrog discovered in the Ecuadorian Andes. We also hear about two new promising drugs for Alzheimer’s disease.

An astronomer and visualisation scientist tells us about three new sonifications of space data.

There’s more on the discovery of a 476,000 year-old wooden structure found earlier this year in Zambia and how it has changed archaeologists' understanding of ancient human life.

The year has also seen 5,000 new species discovered in a deep ocean abyssal plain. Saturn has 62 new moons and is now the planet with the most moons in our solar system.

A report was published deeming 75% of UK rivers as posing a risk to human health. We gathered together experts from Natural Resources Wales, Cardiff University, Bangor University and the Wye and Usk Foundation who discussed why the help from citizen science is essential for their work.

And a new record has been set which is really worrying scientists - the highest average global ocean surface temperature, which reached 20.98 degrees centigrade.

Other notable moments from the year include: a Japanese twelve-legged robot, eighteen video-calling parrots, proposals for the 10km long Einstein telescope and the theory behind why one player in every football team views the world slightly differently.

To help us along the journey the BBC’s Radio Drama Company put all the science together into a brand-new rendition of the well-known 12 days of Christmas song.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton & Victoria Gill Producer: Hannah Fisher Assistant Producer: Emily Bird Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Staying in the South Pole, neuroscientist John-Antoine Libourel, talks about his latest research into the surprising sleeping habits of chinstrap penguins.

And after weeks of intense earthquake activity, the volcano on the Reykjanes peninsula of south-west Iceland has erupted. Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya, our go-to volcanologist, provides an update. Plus, a nod to the festive season, as composer and AI artist, LJ Rich, explains why Christmas music makes us feel all fuzzy.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins, Harrison Lewis & Louise Orchard Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth   

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

The way we look after our oceans, measures needed to ensure food security and an agreement to transition away from fossil fuel dependence were some of the big themes of the summit.

The BBC’s climate reporter Georgina Rannard takes us through the final agreement.

We hear from Glada Lahn, senior research fellow at international affairs think-tank Chatham House, who explains how we might one day wean ourselves off so-called ‘brown energy’.

Farming is also a source of greenhouse gases. Growing, processing and packaging food account for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. How we feed the 8.1 billion of us on the planet continues to be a contentious issue. Casper Chater from Royal Botanic Gardens Kew explains what we can do to adapt our existing crops to cope with more frequent flood and drought events.

Oceans are warming, losing oxygen and acidifying. Sea levels are rising. We speak to Ko Barrett, a senior climate advisor at the US's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, about the role oceans have played so far in helping us mitigate the worse effects of climate change. And we meet Mervina Paueli, a 25-year-old Tuvaluan negotiator, whose small archipelago in the South Pacific is on the frontline.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Louise Orchard, Hannah Robins and Harrison Lewis Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

As former Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives his testimony, we hear the latest from the UK Covid-19 Public Inquiry with BBC Health Reporter Jim Reed.

A new study reveals that, contrary to a commonly-held view, the brain does not have the ability to rewire itself to compensate for the loss of, for example sight, an amputation or stroke. This is despite what most scientists believe and teach. Moreover, the assumption that it has this ability has led to all manner of erroneous treatments for amputees, stroke victims and other conditions, the study suggests.

We’re joined by the study’s authors, Professor John Krakauer from Johns Hopkins University and Professor Tamar Making of the University of Cambridge. We’ll also hear from one of Tamar’s key case studies, Kirsty Mason, an amputee from the age of 18 who advanced the scientists’ experiments exponentially.

  Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins and Louise Orchard Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

This winter, the Northern Lights are going to be the most spectacular they’ve been in twenty years. With the aurora borealis already appearing as far south as Stonehenge, Katie Herlingshaw, a space physicsist from the University Centre in Svalbard, explains what’s happening.

The Conference of the Parties, or COP28, begins in Dubai. BBC’s Georgina Rannard gives us the rundown of which countries are the best and worst for sticking to climate goals and assesses the UK’s own standing after Rishi Sunak rowed back on key climate commitments earlier this year.  

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry hears from some of the most important ministers this week as key government ministers give evidence. BBC Health Reporter Jim Reed gives us the update.

Presenter:  Marnie Chesterton Producers: Hannah Robins, Louise Orchard and Hannah Fisher Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

NASA has managed to let loose a tool kit in the Earth’s orbit -- and you can even see it in the night sky with binoculars. Lucinda King explains how this is possible and if space junk is getting out of control.

The United Nations has warned we’re heading towards 3 degrees warming and another Conference of the Parties, known as COP, is about to take place. The BBC’s Georgina Rannard reminds us there is still hope for our planet to curb global warming.

The winner of the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize was announced on Wednesday night. It’s Ed Yong for his book ‘An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us’. Marnie Chesterton was at the ceremony and nabbed Ed as well as Chair of the Judges Alain Goriely to find out what made this book the winner.

Presenter:  Marnie Chesterton Producers: Harrison Lewis, Hannah Robins and Louise Orchard Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England and Sir Patrick Vallance, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government are due to appear at the Covid-19 Inquiry next week. It’s the next stage of the public inquiry that began proceedings in July last year. Now it’s focussing on the key questions surrounding how science and the scientific community informed government strategy before, during and after the pandemic. BBC Health Reporter Jim Reed has been attending the inquiry and explains what we know from the evidence that’s been given so far – and what to expect next week.

David Quammen discusses his book ‘Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus’. It's a thriller-style narrative revealing how scientists responded to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s our final shortlisted book for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. The winner will be announced next week.

Presenter:  Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins, Harrison Lewis, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings    Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

We also hear about an unusual snail that’s looking for love, with the help of matchmaking academic Dr Angus Davison. He’s hoping to find a suitor for the mollusc. Marnie talks to Lev Parikian, author of Taking Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing, which has been shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Geneticist, Professor Giles Yeo, who recently cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats with two glucose monitors attached to his arms, gives us an update on his research. He wanted to find out how diet and exercise affected his body’s sugar levels.

Presenter:  Marnie Chesterton Producers: Hannah Robins, Harrison Lewis and Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Roma Agrawal breaks down our modern world into seven essential basic inventions in her book Nuts and Bolts which has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. She talks to Marnie about the surprising history behind some of these inventions. 

And, as a cryogenic tank of bull semen is stolen from a farm in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, it got us thinking: how can selective breeding help reduce carbon and methane emissions from cattle? Professor Eileen Wall from Scotland’s Rural College tells us more.

Presenter:  Marnie Chesterton Producers: Harrison Lewis, Hannah Robins and Patrick Hughes Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West in collaboration with the Open University.

A major mapping project has revealed worryingly high levels of PFAS across thousands of sites in the UK. Experts are concerned that not enough is being done to reduce these chemicals from drinking water. They’re urging the government to re-evaluate current regulation. This week we dive into the properties of these chemicals: how dangerous are they and what can be done to protect public health? Professor Crispin Halsall, an environmental chemist from Lancaster University, tells us more.

As charges are brought against four people for stealing and selling on US$1 million of dinosaur bones, we find out about the illegal – and legal – trade in fossils from palaeontologist Professor Steve Brusatte.

New research has discovered the Moon is 40 million years older than we previously thought. Professor Sara Russell, a cosmic mineralogist and planetary scientist from the Natural History Museum, tells us more.

And is there something we can we learn from animals about how to age better? Nicklas Brendborg discusses his book, Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature’s Secrets to Longevity, which has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Presenter:  Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins, Harrison Lewis and Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Whole words and phrases from crushed and carbonised scrolls can be read for the first time in almost two thousand years. The documents, uncovered from Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town close to Pompeii which was buried under volcanic ash, have been made legible thanks to 3D scans and artificial intelligence. Dr. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples, tells us more about this exciting discovery.

Kate Zernike discusses her book The Exceptions, which tells the story of a group of 16 women who used their scientific know-how to inspire radical change. It’s been shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize.

And finally, this month marks exactly a year since beavers became a protected species in England. BBC Inside Science goes to Devon in search of these charismatic animals and we ask what effect they have been having on the countryside.

Presenter:  Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins, Harrison Lewis, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Patrick Hughes Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

A sample recovered by NASA from the Bennu asteroid hurtled back to earth recently. This week we saw what’s been retrieved from 200 million miles away. Studies on the dust and rock are just getting underway. Professor Tom Zega, one of the mission scientists, reveals why this sample will be important for many years to come.

We also hear from Ed Yong who has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. He tells us about his book, An Immense World, where he encourages us to think beyond the confines of our fleshy bodies.

People experience the world in many different ways. It all comes down to perception. We speak to Professor Fiona Macpherson who, along with neuroscientist Professor Anil Seth, are co-leads of The Perception Census which aims to document the differences. Fiona reveals how this could help shine a light on consciousness and what it means to be human. The census closes at the end of the month and everyone’s welcome. You can take part here: https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world

  Presenter:  Marnie Chesterton Producers: Harrison Lewis and Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

We hear from Karen Olsson-Francis, a microbiologist who focuses on the tiny living things that have managed to occupy Earth's most hostile environments. Her research is helping shape space missions that are looking for evidence of life elsewhere in our solar system.

Also on the panel is Libby Jackson, head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, who specialises in preparing humans for the extremes of interplanetary travel.

Finally, we hear from Tim O'Brien, associate director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. He’s explored parts of the Universe that no human can travel to by making the most of the radio telescopes based at Jodrell Bank.

Get the latest ‘inside’ scoop on how the UK is assisting with the search for life beyond Earth.

Presenter:  Victoria Gill Producers:  Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Harrison Lewis Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

We’re kicking off our series of programmes covering The Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. Chair of the judges is Alain Goriely, Professor of Mathematical Modelling at the University of Oxford. He gives us a rundown of this year’s shortlisted entries.

This week, scientists at CERN in Switzerland announced they have observed how antimatter behaves in the presence of gravity. Particle physicist Jeffrey Hangst, who led the Alpha experiment, tells us why this is a big deal.

We also have the latest on OSIRIS-REx mission, the first NASA mission to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth. The capsule parachuted down into the Utah desert this week. It contained a precious cargo of rock and dust samples taken from an asteroid named Bennu. Jon Amos, the BBC’s science correspondent is in Utah and witnessed the return. He tells Victoria all about it.

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Presenter:  Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins, Harrison Lewis, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings    Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

The reaction has been mixed, ranging from endorsements from fellow politicians in the Conservative Party to criticism from opposition parties and environmental groups. The business community is also split. So why has Mr Sunak changed his policies on climate change - and why now? Gaia Vince speaks to Ian Dunt, editor of politics.co.uk We hear about an astonishing finding by archaeologists who have discovered expertly manufactured interlocking wooden structural parts that are half a million years old. What do they tell us about our early human ancestors in Africa? Gaia speaks to Professor of Archaeology Laurence Barham and Professor of Geography Geoff Duller about their extraordinary discovery. Approximately two billion tonnes of dust is lifted into the Earth’s atmosphere each year and it is both dangerous to human life and essential to the oxidisation of our oceans and rivers. We relentlessly attempt to rid our homes of dust but it always seems to come back. Why do we hardly ever discuss dust? A new book by Jay Owens, ‘Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles’ does just that. Jay talks to Gaia about why we should we be as fascinated as she is by tiny airborne particles.

As we emit CO2 into the atmosphere, a significant amount - around a third - is taken in by the oceans. With growing interest in carbon removal interventions, ocean scientist Dr David T. Ho tells Gaia about undertaking an exciting experiment. Listen to this bonus content in the podcast. Presenter: Gaia Vince Producers: Laura Northedge and Emily Bird Research: Patrick Hughes

Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Editor: Richard Collings

In July, a new chair was elected to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. Professor Jim Skea is a leading figure in the global push to decarbonise, adapt and innovate our way to net zero, and previously led Scotland’s Just Transition Commission. He speaks to Gaia about his new role and the importance of the IPCC.

And this week we mark the death of renowned embryologist Professor Sir Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly the sheep in 1996. Gaia is joined by Roger Highfield, Science Director of the Science Museum Group, to discuss the scientific and cultural impact of the world’s first cloned mammal from an adult animal cell.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producers: Laura Northedge, Hannah Robins, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Emily Bird. Research: Patrick Hughes

Also this week, the UK has now rejoined Horizon Europe, the EU’s £85bn flagship research funding programme. Gaia caught up with the Royal Society’s vice-president Linda Partridge to find out what this means.

Early this week, the Indian space agency, ISRO, launched its solar mission to study space weather. But in addition, its lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, also powered down. Gaia speaks to Mahesh Anand, a planetary scientist at the Open University, to find out more about India’s space ambitions.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, many of us have been sweltering in heatwave conditions and communicating weather dangers have become a key focus for forecasters. Helen Roberts, the Met Office’s first ever sociometeorologist, explores how cognitive biases affect our responses to warnings.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producers: Hannah Robins, Laura Northedge, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Research: Patrick Hughes Editor: Martin Smith

Guests are:

Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter;

Lucy Easthope, professor in practice of risk and hazard at the University of Durham and a leading adviser on emergency planning and disaster recovery;

Professor Guillermo Rein, an expert in fire science at Imperial College London; and

Michael Szoenyi, head of flood resilience at Zurich Insurance. He explains why climate change has become such an important factor for business and individuals planning for the future – and why it’s essential we don’t leave big decisions about where we should live to the last minute. Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Clem Hitchcock Content Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings

So how are UK rivers doing? And what needs to happen to help those waterways that are drowning in pollution?

Joining the BBC's Marnie Chesterton on stage at Green Man Festival in Wales to discuss all this is:

Dave Johnston, team leader of environmental reporting at Natural Resources Wales, whose responsibility it is to monitor Welsh rivers.

Joanne Cable, head of organisms and environment division at Cardiff University, whose focus is on biodiversity and what we at home can do to support our rivers.

Simon Evans, chief executive of The Wye and Usk Foundation, who runs citizen science projects to support these two rivers local to the festival.

Christian Dunn, wetland biologist at Bangor University, who is keen to explain the power of wetlands and has also done some surprising research into the river near Glastonbury Festival.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Harrison Lewis and Hannah Robins Research: Liam Collins-Jones Studio Managers: Mike Cox and Duncan Hannant Editor: Richard Collings

Victoria then heads to the Lake District to witness the release of water voles into the ecosystem.

Next up, Professor Lewis Griffin, a computer scientist from University College London, tells us how bad we are at distinguishing between real and deepfake voices. He then reveals what implications this might have for scams.

Finally, Dr Helen Pilcher tells us all about the intriguing ways that animals can bend time. You can find out more in her book, How Nature Keeps Time.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Hannah Robins Content producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Research: Patrick Hughes Editor: Richard Collings

The BBC’s South America correspondent Katy Watson sends us an update on the summit from Belém, Brazil.

We also hear from Brazilian scientist Joice Ferreira who tells us why the Amazon is so important for the entire planet.

Next up Victoria Gill finds out more about how British Sign Language is adding key scientific concepts to its dictionary in order to open up science communication to a broader community of people. There are still many words and phrases that have not yet been ‘signed’.

Now did you know that the inhalers used by asthmatics emit a tiny amount of greenhouse gas with every puff? Victoria speaks to Dr Veena Aggarwal, a GP registrar and former member of Greener NHS, about whether the government’s new plan for environmentally friendly inhalers will help.

Finally Victoria catches up with palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger. He’s written a book that tells a harrowing tale about his trip into a labyrinth of underground tunnels to find out more about an ancient human-like creature called Homo naledi.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Hannah Robins and Harrison Lewis Content producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Research: Patrick Hughes Editor: Richard Collings

Next Victoria travels to the sunnier shores of Spain where orcas have been ramming fishing boats. She speaks to one of the sailors who witnessed an attack. To find out more about the orcas’ behaviour, she interviews Dr Luke Rendell, a whale and dolphin expert from the University of St Andrews.

We then move to Skomer, off the coast of West Wales. This important seabird colony has recently recorded an avian flu outbreak. Reporter Roland Pease speaks to Lisa Morgan from the Wildlife Trust for South and West Wales.

To finish the show Dr Stuart Farrimond is back with the final instalment of his science of gardening series.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Hannah Robins Research: Patrick Hughes Editor: Richard Collings

Previously on Inside Science we've looked at how and why temperatures are soaring across the globe. Now we're homing in on one of the most visible effects of that.

First, BBC climate and science reporter Georgina Rannard paints a picture of the link between these fires and climate change.

Next up we hear from Professor Stefan Doerr, director of the Centre for Wildfire Research at Swansea University, on whether Europe is prepared for a future where these blazes are more frequent and intense.

Another effect of climate change you might have heard about this week is the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream. Georgina explains why leading researchers have reservations about the science behind that claim.

We investigate a sometimes overlooked and under-reported source of pollution: particles from vehicle tyres. Dr Marc Masen from Imperial College London tells us about the impact they’re having on our health.

And pollution from tyres is affecting flora and fauna too. Dr Paul Donald, senior researcher at Birdlife International, explains how vehicles on our roads have impacted wildlife in the environment.

Finally, from four wheels to two wheels! Geneticist and body weight scientist Dr Giles Yeo is cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats with two glucose monitors on his arm. He tells us what he's hoping to learn.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Hannah Fisher Content producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Research: Patrick Hughes Editor: Richard Collings

In previous editions of Inside Science we’ve explored the effects of heat on our health. This week we’ve zoomed out to get a wider perspective on the impacts of soaring temperatures.

First up, Rebecca Tobi from the Food Foundation reveals how this weather will impact the range of foods we are used to seeing on supermarket shelves.

Next we hear from Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University. She explains how the jet stream – which plays a large role in the UK’s weather – is affecting extreme weather patterns.

Another country experiencing particularly extreme weather at the moment is China. BBC correspondent in Hong Kong, Danny Vincent, tells us how record temperatures could have wide-ranging effects beyond China’s borders.

Changing heat patterns could even unlock new habitats for wildlife. Jo Lines, professor of malaria and vector biology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says that we need to be aware of mosquito-borne diseases that could take hold in Europe.

Then it’s off to Reading University, where reporter Harrison Lewis chats to meteorologist Dr Rob Thompson and senior researcher Dr Natalie Harvey, to find out more about how weather balloons can help with storm forecasting.

Finally, we’re heading back to Trowbridge, near Bath, where Dr Stuart Farrimond explains exactly how our gardens can help in the battle against climate change. Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Harrison Lewis Content producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Assistant producer: Robbie Wojciechowski Editor: Richard Collings

With all these apps at our fingertips, it’s never been easier for us to discover new people to follow, keep in touch with our friends and stay up to date with the latest news about our favourite celebrities. But Professor Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, is concerned about the harmful effect that all these apps could potentially be having on the health of young people. She talks to Marnie Chesterton about why they should be better regulated in order to protect our children. Marnie is then joined by Professor Andrew Przybylski from the University of Oxford who says that more studies need to be carried out.

Next up we find out more about phages – ‘good’ viruses that infect and destroy bacteria and could hold the key to fighting disease. Tom Ireland, author of a new book, The Good Virus, tells Marnie about the history of phages and their potentially exciting future.

This week the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of middle-distance runner and Olympic champion Caster Semenya in a case related to testosterone levels in female athletes. Marnie speaks to developmental biologist Dr Emma Hilton about what causes differences in sexual development and the impact they can have.

We also hear from Dr Stuart Farrimond who explains how the microclimates in your garden can affect the plants you can grow.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Harrison Lewis Content producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Assistant producer: Robbie Wojciechowski Editor: Richard Collings

Professor of Cosmology at UCL, Andrew Pontzen, joins Marnie Chesterton to discuss the lot of them. Euclid took to the stars on Saturday, carrying a wide-angle space telescope that promises the opportunity to create a far larger and accurate 3D map of the universe to anything ever seen before. Gravitational waves detected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOgrav) provide insight into the role black holes play in galaxy formation. And neutrinos recorded in the remote ices of Antarctica have been detected from the centre of our Milky Way.

Dr Stuart Farrimond also joins us for the next few weeks with his pitch on the science of gardening. He’ll be digging up facts and tips that will help make the most out of summer blooms. This week Stu unearths how the pH of your soil could be hindering the flowerbeds.

And visit a Welsh quarry with reporter Ella Hubber to hear how a mere 462 million years ago new species were exploding onto the scene. Palaeontologists Dr Joe Botting and Dr Lucy Muir stumbled across the most abundant and rare deposit of soft bodied fossils on record, scoring an archaeological jackpot!

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Harrison Lewis Content producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Assistant producer: Robbie Wojciechowski Editor: Richard Collings

In this episode Gaia Vince investigates what causes heatwaves and how hotter weather impacts our health. She finds out how we can prepare ourselves as the temperatures rise.

Gaia is joined by Peter Stott at the Met Office Centre for Climate Prediction, who reveals more about the forecast and what causes heatwaves.

She also speaks to Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate and the Environment, who gives us the lowdown on the UK’s heat health warning system and says what the future could look like if we continue to miss climate targets.

In addition, Dann Mitchell, professor of climate science at the University of Bristol, discusses the health impacts of extreme heat.

Guillermo Rein, professor of fire science at Imperial College London, explains what sparks wildfires and how they spread.

Elsewhere, Germany has launched a high-tech heat health warning system to warn people when the temperatures are rocketing. Gaia speaks to Andreas Matzarakis, from Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg, who developed the system.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Harrison Lewis Content Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Assistant Producer: Robbie Wojciechowski Editor: Richard Collings

Gaia Vince visits the Dear Earth exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre where she interacts with the ‘Tell It To The Birds’ artwork by Jenny Kendler. This piece transforms spoken word into birdsong, which Jenny hopes will help raise awareness of threatened species. She is joined by Dr Patricia Brekke from the Zoological Society of London who reveals more about the threats faced by birds.

We then visit the Knepp Estate to meet ecologist Penny Green, who reveals more about the value of audio for her work.

Gaia then speaks to Dr Alice Eldridge, an acoustics expert from the University of Sussex, who has spearheaded the Wilding Radio project at the Knepp Estate in Sussex. She was curious to find out whether the sounds in the environment would change following the introduction of beavers to the estate. In collaboration with arts cooperative Soundcamp, she built high-quality, solar-powered equipment to continuously broadcast the soundscape from above and below the water.

While we can record animals which we currently share the world with, what about those that have been lost forever? Cheryl Tipp, the British Library’s curator of wildlife and environmental sounds, looks after the library’s audio collection of more than 250,000 species and habitat recordings. She shares the heartbreaking tale of a now-extinct bird and explains why sound is such a valuable resource.

Finally, Dr Tim Lamont, a marine biologist from Lancaster University, tells us why a degraded coral reef sounds different from a healthy one. He explains how broadcasting the sounds of a healthy reef can help attract more marine wildlife to an area.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Hannah Fisher Content Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings

Nine days after the disaster Gaia looks to the future alongside Kira Rudyk, Ukrainian MP who is also leader of the opposition party Golos and Laura Wellesley, senior research fellow in the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House.

Earlier this week the three-year inquiry into COVID began, seeking ‘to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and learn lessons for the future.’ Eyes are on the inquiry from many angles. Inside Science looks at what scientists hope to contribute and learn from it, with author and broadcaster Philip Ball.

Also, a spike in North Atlantic sea temperatures has sparked concern among scientists. Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met Office, talks through the factors that have coincided to form the anomaly.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Harrison Lewis Assistant producer: Robbie Wojciechowski Editor: Richard Collings

Gaia is joined in the studio by science journalist and marine biologist Olive Heffernan. She dives into the controversy regarding the potential of mining in deep oceans and discusses whether the seas could become the location for Industrial Revolution 2.0.

We’re used to seeing seaweed wrapped around our sushi rolls but it’s so much more than that. As well as being a tasty addition to what we eat, seaweed plays a vital role in absorbing CO2. Gaia speaks to Vincent Doumeizel, a senior adviser on oceans to the UN Global Compact; he’s also the food programme director at the UK-based charity Lloyd’s Register Foundation. He’s confident that seaweed could enable us to sustainably feed a growing global population in the coming decades.

Phytoplankton – microscopic species of algae that exist on the surface of the sea – also absorb huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Sir David King, founder and chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and former chief scientific adviser to the UK Government has the radical idea that artificial whale poo could boost phytoplankton growth, leading to an increase in fish stocks and, consequently, improved biodiversity in the oceans. He tells Gaia about his project and the potential it has for carbon capture.

When we think of energy generation from the oceans, we tend to think of offshore technology such as wind turbines. But what about generating electricity using the water itself? Gaia speaks to Eco Wave Power’s Inna Braverman who reveals how her project harnesses the power of the waves by attaching to existing coastal structures such as piers and jetties, to provide a source of clean, renewable energy.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Hannah Fisher Content Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings

One of the signatories was Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called ‘godfather of AI’. He’s become so concerned about the risks associated with artificial intelligence that he recently decided to quit his job at Google, where he had worked for more than a decade.

But are these concerns justified, or is it overblown scaremongering? And should we start prepping for a Terminator-style takeover? To get the answers, presenter Gareth Mitchell is joined by computational linguist Prof Emily M. Bender from the University of Washington along with Dr Stephen Cave, Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI).

Next up, we hear from Prof Carl Sayer at UCL, along with Dr Cicely Marshall and Dr Matthew Wilkinson from the University of Cambridge, to dig into the science behind wildflower meadows and whether they can boost biodiversity and even help ease climate change.

Finally, have you heard about Balto the sled dog? He was part of a life-saving mission in the 1920s and now he has the chance to be a hero once more. His DNA has been studied by the Zoonomia project, which is using databases of genomes from hundreds of mammals to build a better picture of evolution. This data could then be used help identify those animals that are at the greatest risk of extinction.

Presenter: Gareth Mitchell Producer: Harrison Lewis Content Producers: Ella Hubber and Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings

Muriel Rabone and Dr Adrian Glover from the Natural History Museum have compiled an extensive checklist of all the species present in the remote Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which is an area twice the size of India, five kilometres deep in the Pacific Ocean. While you might expect this part of the sea to be devoid of life, the organisms that live there are surprisingly diverse, and we still know little about them. But the region is also chock-full of in-demand rare-earth metals.

And we are joined by Dr Katie King to talk over some of her favourite science stories of the week, followed up by Helen Keen, who gets the kettle on to reveal more about the surprising physics behind a cup of coffee. Milk and two sugars for us, please.

Presenter: Gareth Mitchell Producer: Hannah Fisher Content Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell

In this episode, Victoria Gill takes a trip to the society to pore over some of the most intriguing artefacts within its vaults. While there, she finds out more about the formation of the Royal Society and how science has been shaped over the centuries. Along the way, she considers the role of women in science, and asks whether their contributions have been historically overlooked.

She is joined by the Royal Society’s Louisiane Ferlier and Keith Moore, along with Prof Uta Frith, a Royal Society Fellow and psychologist, and Dr Stephen Webster, a senior lecturer in science communication at Imperial College London.

As part of its Science in the Making project, the Royal Society is currently digitising all of its collections, for everyone to browse through and enjoy. You can find out more on the Royal Society website.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Harrison Lewis, Hannah Fisher Content Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell

But do all natural events have to turn into a disaster? Is there anything we can do to mitigate their impacts? Gaia Vince speaks to Anastasios Sextos, Professor of Earthquake Engineering at the University of Bristol to find out how we can engineer buildings to withstand earthquakes, and Bruce Malamud, Executive Director of the Institute of Hazard Risk and Resilience at Durham University, to learn how we can build models to forecast the risk of a natural disaster occurring.

Lucy Easthope is a leading advisor on emergency planning and disaster recovery and a Professor in Hazard and Risk at Durham University. She joins Gaia in the studio to discuss her experience of being one of the first responders to disasters and how in fact, the way they unfold is more predictable than we might think. Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health at UCL, also joins them to discuss the importance of social resilience, long-term planning and effective alert communication in managing and mitigating the aftermath of these events.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Hannah Fisher

Step seven years into the future with Gaia. The UK has achieved its biodiversity goal, but what does wild Britain look like?

Richard Benwell, CEO of wildlife and Countryside Link, Meredith Whitten, a researcher and urban environment planner at LSE, Hugo Tagholm, CEO of Oceana and George Monbiot, an environmental writer whose book Regenesis explores sustainable agriculture, describe this radical new world.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Harrison Lewis

Now, 70 years after the discovery of DNA’s structure, it is perhaps time to rewrite the tale.

New evidence has now been unearthed, in the form of an overlooked news article and an unpublished letter, that shows that Franklin was truly an equal contributor to the discovery, and Watson and Crick were not as malicious as previously assumed.

Together with Matthew Cobb of the University of Manchester, Nathaniel Comfort from Johns Hopkins University, and Angela Creager of Princeton University, Gaia Vince discusses this tantalising tale and finds out more about how this discovery could bring a whole new twist to the story of DNA.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Harrison Lewis Assistant Producer: Jonathan Blackwell

Have viruses, bacteria, and microorganisms influenced humanity more than we know? Author of new book, Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History, Dr Jonathan Kennedy discusses how germs and disease have shaped human evolution, history and culture and what we can learn from the COVID pandemic.

And from unconventional life in space to psychoactive spinning apes, Vic and BBC Climate Reporter Georgina Rannard bring you the best scientific stories from the past couple of weeks.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Harrison Lewis Content Producer: Ella Hubber BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

This week junior doctors are half way through their 4 day walkout, with senior NHS figures suggesting the cancellation of between 250,000 and 350,000 appointments/operations. Victoria Gill is preparing to debate her way through the science of disagreement and identify what qualities make for the perfect negotiator.

Associate Professor Sunny Lee, Deputy Director of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at University College London helps guide Victoria through the basic building blocks that help resolve conflict, with expert commentary from Camilla Born peeking behind the curtain of COP26, and finally negotiating with elephants? Dr Josh Plotnik at City University of New York suggests that some animals may be actively seeking out conflict with humans.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Harrison Lewis

Presenter: Vic Gill Producer: Emily Bird

And there’s money to be made from private health testing, the growth of Covid testing has been followed by an upsurge in private screening for cancer in particular, but how useful is it really? BBC Health correspondent Matthew Hill takes a look.

Every cell in out body carries an electrical charge. In her new book, We Are Electric: The New Science of Our Body’s Electrome, Sally Adee discusses how this facet might be harnessed for the detection of illnesses, medical treatments and whether it will allow us to develop hidden powers.

The World Wood Web is a concept showing how trees communicate with each other through an underground fungal network. The idea was first proposed by Suzanne Simard, Now professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, who tells us how she came up with the concept and about her work on the hidden relationships of trees.

Beethoven’s genome has been reconstructed from samples of his hair. It reveals some of his medical history, but also unexpected findings on his paternity. We discuss the ethics of such genetic analysis with Tom Booth who studies ancient DNA at the Francis Crick institute.

And microbes may help us survive and thrive in space according to Astrobiologist Rosa Santomartino, not only that but their recycling capabilities could also help us on earth

Penny Johnes from Bristol University discusses the use of phosphorus in agriculture, it’s a key component of fertilisers, but global supplies may run out in a few years, despite this overuse of phosphorus in agriculture is also creating problems.

And Chat GPT has had a makeover, a new version of the chatbot was rolled out this week. Chatbots seem to be getting a lot of press at the moment, but are they really something we will all be using in the future? Technologist and composer LJ Rich who works with the UN on artificial intelligence gives us her analysis.

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

In 1963, in a now famous speech at the Labour Party conference in Scarborough, Labour leader and soon to be Prime Minister Harold Wilson promised a new Britain would be forged in the “white heat" of a "scientific revolution". Nick Thomas Symonds, Labour MP and political biographer, discusses how that idea was put into action.

Scientists in Bristol have published a detailed "future flood map" of Britain - simulating the impacts of flooding as climate change takes its toll. Paul Bates from Bristol University explains how the new flood risk maps give a level of detail that could help people to plan and adapt. Vic Gill visits the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, a place that’s suffered repeated flooding in recent years, where the community is taking matters into its own hands.

New fossil findings from China have led scientists to re-evaluate their classification of tiny tentacled sea creatures from half a billion years ago and declare that they are in fact seaweeds says Martin Smith, a paleobiologist from The University of Durham. And this re-classification isn't unusual, fossils are constantly re-examined in light of new evidence and insights. Susie Maidment a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum takes us through some of her favourite contentious fossils.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Julian Siddle and Emily Bird BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University

The head of the US FBI has suggested the Covid 19 pandemic may have been started through a leak from a laboratory. No evidence has been offered. The ‘lab leak ‘ theory is the counter idea to Covid having a natural origin.

We hear from three scientists who have been to China to investigate different aspects of the virus origins story.

Journalist and microbiologist Jane Qui visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the lab at the centre of the lab leak theory.

Marion Koopmans from Erasmus University in Rotterdam was a member of the WHO mission to China to investigate the origins of Covid 19.

And Eddie Holmes from the University of Sydney visited the market in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak.

Besides inflating party balloons helium gas has a vast range of industrial uses, particularly as a coolant. There’s a world shortage, and helium is only extracted with fossil fuels such as coal and methane gas. Earth scientist Anran Cheng at the University of Oxford has developed a method to look for helium deposits without the fossil fuel connection.

And ever wondered how heavy all the animals in the world might be ? We have the answer thanks to Ron Milo and Lior Greenspoon from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Julian Siddle

Often the Arctic dominates conversations around polar warming but this week, with the help of climate modelling expert Tamsin Edwards, Kings College London, we’ll be tackling these questions and more. We’ll hear from British Antarctic Survey researcher Nadia Frontier, a marine biologist spending the summer at Rothera research base in the Antarctic. We join her as she traverses snow and ice to study the inhabitants of Adelaide island and the surrounding waters. Rachel Tilling from the Cryospheric Sciences Lab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center helps us explore the continent from a different vantage point, explaining her work using satellite data to understand sea ice thickness. And climate reporter Georgina Rannard takes us through an artistic interpretation of polar sounds, Dr Geraint Rhys Whittaker uses underwater microphones to capture the impact of human activity on polar wildlife.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Julian Siddle and Emily Bird BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with The Open University.

A Hippo butchery site reveals that distant human ancestors have been using stone tools far longer than researchers previously thought. This archaeological site in Kenya revealed that ancient hominins Paranthropus have probably been using stone tools to prepare food and weapons since 2.9 million years ago. Professor Tom Plummer at Queens College, City University of New York take us through the discovery and what it reveals about hominin evolution.

A study released this week reveals just how much of a burden sons are on killer whale mothers. Michael Wiess, research director at the centre for whale research, fills us in on their findings which are a product of nearly 40 years studying the southern resident Orca population. This long-term Whale census project began in the 70s, championed by researcher Ken Balcomb, who was passionate about understanding and protecting killer whales and who sadly passed away late last year. We hear from Ken and his team out on the water studying the southern residents, more of which can be found in BBC Radio 4 documentary The Whale Menopause.

Presenter: Victoria Gill

Producer: Emily Bird

BBC Inside Science is made in collaboration with the Open University

Energy is vital for every aspect of our society, and the energy cost of extraction, processing, manufacture and transport is priced into every product we buy. Today’s energy crisis is having a huge impact, from affecting diplomatic relations between nations to the availability of food.

How can our energy systems evolve and what could cheap abundant energy mean for us, our relationship to the natural world, and each other?

We discuss these issues and more with;

Rachel Kyte CMG, Dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University, who has previously worked for the UN on sustainability issues.

Jim Watson, Professor of Energy Policy at UCL. He’s advised government on the low carbon energy transition.

And Dr Hannah Richie, Head of Research at Our World in Data, based at Oxford University, who looks at food, agriculture and energy in relation to global development trends.

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

Last week the UK passed an emergency exemption allowing sugar beet farmers to use a controversial neonicotinoid pesticide called Thiamethoxam. This is the third year in a row that the exemption has been in place and the decision came just days after the EU banned such exemptions across Europe. A discussion in parliament yesterday saw MPs criticise the move due to the impacts of neonicotinoids on already crashing Bees populations. We spoke to Dr Richard Gill at Imperial College London about exactly how these insecticides impact bees.

There are volcanic islands dotted across the globe but exactly what caused their formation and how might they change in the future? Professor Ana Ferreira at University College London is a seismologist leading an ambitious study to measure deep vibrations and disturbances around volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean. She told us about the challenges of recording from the ocean floor and the other unexpected disturbances they detected.

As humans our eyes are one of our most valuable and expressive social tools. The whites of our eyes or sclera enable us to follow each others gaze and look our for minute changes in mood, a feature that until recently was thought to be unique to humans setting us apart from animals in our ability to communicate. But Anthropologist Aaron Sandel at The University of Texas in Austin has noticed that white sclera is in fact present in one of our closest relatives; the chimpanzee.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producers: Julian Siddle and Emily Bird

Inside Science is produced in Collaboration with the Open University

We’re not talking about making school dinners entirely vegetarian — just 3 lunches a week.

We discuss the benefits and practicalities of such a shift with :

Tim Lenton, Professor of Climate change at the University of Exeter.

Economist Marco Springmann Senior Researcher, Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, University of Oxford.

Nutritionist Collete Fox from Proveg international an organisation working directly with schools in the UK to encourage the provision of healthier school meals.

And Henry Dimbleby founder of the Leon fast food chain is now an advisor to government, responsible for drawing up national rules on school dinners.

We also visit Barrowford primary in Lancashire, which has successfully rolled out more vegetarian school dinners.

BBC Inside Science is produced is partnership with the Open University.

Using and conserving energy in the home is one theme the report tackles.

We discuss home insulation with Colm Britchfield , policy advisor at E3G. His recent report found those in some of the worst housing , in the private rented sector could save hundreds of pounds a year if their homes were properly insulated. But what is the incentive for landlords to pay for insulation?

Electric heat pumps have been heralded as an alternative to gas boilers, but they are currently more expensive and finding an installer is not easy. Rebecca Dibb-Simkin from Octopus Energy tells us how they are working to make the technology more available.

And what is the role of local authorities in the strive for net zero? We hear from Polly Billington, chief executive of UK 100 – a network of local government leaders committed to sustainability policies.

How do you catch a poacher? One way might be through their own mobile phone. Another is using a camera trap which sends a signal to game wardens. These are technologies developed by Tim Van Deursen and Thijs Suijten from Hack the Poacher.

And we look at new findings on one of Australia’s Iconic species – Echidnas. Dr Christine Cooper at Cutin University in Western Australia, found this marsupial is actually remarkably heat tolerant, and capable of handling temperatures which were previously thought to be lethal.

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

The 1922 backbench committee on business, energy and industrial strategy is recommending free electricity for locals residing within 1 mile of onshore wind farms. Richard Black, senior associate at Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, joins Marnie to discuss whether or not there is evidence of residents requiring incentives to accept renewable developments whilst governments strive to increase the implementation of green technologies.

Do you tap your toes to Paul Simon or rock out to Led Zeppelin? Even if you have two left feet, your ability to recognise rhythm is unique in the animal kingdom. To help determine the human origins of musical appreciation, Teresa Raimondi and her team at Turin University, have been researching primates. Their singing lar gibbon, appears to share similar traits to us that might shed light on where our ability to keep the beat evolved from.

And finally, figures from the water regulator suggest that in England and Wales 1 trillion litres of water was lost last year to leaks. BBC Inside Science presenter, Vic Gill, goes in search of what might be a robotic solution.

This programme was made in partnership with the Open University.

Is laziness a particularly human trait? Apparently not according to Dr Daniella Rabaiotti from the Zoological Society of London. Her research shows many animals engage in behaviour akin to laziness even within groups where others might be very active. There’s evidence for this from animals as diverse as wolves, frogs and pheasants. Dani says it’s a factor worth considering in animal behaviour studies, simply are we biased towards the more active and outgoing animals as they are the ones we tend to see?

Victoria Gill speaks to the founder and CEO of Nature Metrics Dr Cat Bruce and Katie Critchlow about the tools they use to help companies measure biodiversity at their worksites. From taking water or soil samples it’s possible to detect the DNA of a multitude of organisms from large animals down to microbes. The technique should help map the biodiversity of a given area and inform decisions on development and conservation.

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University

The Greenland ice sheet is melting, raising global sea level at an alarming rate. Marnie took to the ice with researcher Jason Box in September, and questions how current carbon emissions will influence melting in the future.

Gaia revisits UN talks from March that attempted to put in place regulations capable of protecting the marine biodiversity of the high seas. Negotiations were unsuccessful at the time, but further talks have been held since. How much progress has been made?

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

We take a trip down the river Wye with ecologist Steve Ormerod who tells us why the river is a microcosm for some of the global issues being discussed at the UN Biodiversity summit in Montreal. BBC Environment Correspondent Victoria Gill gives us the latest on the state of negotiations there.

And the current surge in infections associated with the streptococcus bacteria has led to deaths in a few cases. It is usually a seasonal infection, worse in the spring. We ask microbiologist Dr Claire Turner from Sheffield University why we seem to be seeing a surge of infections now and her research on strep vaccine targets.

BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

We meet leading figures involved in the negotiations, including:

Elizabeth Mrema, the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity

Inger Andersen Executive Director of UN Environment Programme

Indigenous leaders Viviana Figueroa and Lakpa Nuri Sherpa

And scientists

Professor Sandra Diaz from the University of Cordoba

Dr Marla Emery Scientific Advisor with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

We also discuss emissions we can’t see, bacteria and even microplastics which are now present in the air. Catherine Rolph from the Open University tells us where we might find them.

And we reveal the winner of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. You can find interviews with all the shortlisted authors in our previous programmes.

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University.

Spending time in green spaces has been linked to mental and physical health benefits. But just how green is your nearest city centre? New research has ranked urban centres in the UK based on their ‘greenness’ and Jake Robinson, from Flinders University in Australia, revealed who came out on top. We hear about initiatives to enhance ‘greenness’ including the citizen-science led GroundsWell programme with Elly King, from the University of Liverpool, and living walls with Brenda Parker, at UCL.

And from the Royal Society science book prize, we’re talking sex and gender with primatologist Frans De Waal whose new book is entitled Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender.

And we head to the houses of parliament in the company of a group of teenagers who are putting their concerns over climate change to a panel of politicians. Julia Ravey went to meet them.

We hear from author Nick Davidson about how the discoveries of 3 unlikely characters in the 19th century formed the basis of geological science. His book The Greywacke is shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize.

And a scientific analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite gives us some clues as to the possible origins of life on earth. Natasha Stephen from Plymouth University is one of the many scientists who analysed the composition of the rock fragments.

Often the effects of climate change are felt the strongest in countries least responsible for creating the emissions. This year we’ve seen a range of extreme weather events including drought and flooding which scientists have attributed to man-made climate change. The idea of providing funding for such human-induced disasters has long been discussed informally at COP summits. Finally the issue is formally on the table. It's fraught with diplomatic difficulties, not least over who should pay and how much.

We discuss some of the issues in getting a solution on this initiative known as ‘Loss and Damage’ with contributions from Josh Gabbatiss from the website Carbon Brief, Rachel Kyte, the Dean of Tufts University, Linnéa Norlander Assistant Professor of human rights and sustainability at the University of Copenhagen and Hyacinthe Niyitegeka, coordinator of the Loss and Damage Coalition.

And we look at methane with Drew Shindell, professor of Climate science at Duke University and Author of the UN Environment Programme’s Global Methane Assessment, who tells us a reduction in methane could give us a quick fix in terms of efforts to stabilise global temperatures.

The COP 27 climate summit kicks off next week. To discuss some of the issues we are joined by Simon Lewis, Professor of global change science at University College London and Swenja Surminski, Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute and a member of the UK's Committee on Climate Change.

Mark Miodownik, the UCL Professor of Materials & Society, tell us the results of his citizen science project looking at composting plastics.

And from the short list for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize, we hear from Professor Rose Anne Kenny on her book Age Proof: The New Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life.

What was it like to advise the government during the height of the pandemic? How soon did experts realise the colossal impact Covid would have? Were mistakes made? The latest in our series of interviews with those shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Book prize, Vic sat down with co-authors Sir Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja to talk about their book Spike: the Virus vs the People.

Anne-Claire Fabre Assistant Professor at the University of Bern and Curator of mammals, Natural History Museum Bern turns her scientific curiosity toward a surprising and perhaps perturbing behaviour in one of her research animals as she spoke to us about her paper published in the Journal of Zoology this week. Whilst investigating the Aye Aye, a nocturnal primate with two long thin fingers Anne-Claire witnessed the creature putting them to good use picking its nose and went on to uncover a big gap in our understanding of this icky behaviour.

Presenter Victoria Gill Producer Emily Bird

Victoria Gill is joined on stage by four people who give us an audio tour of that media future.

Lewis Pollard the curator television and broadcast at the museum.

Dr Karen Thornton programme leader teaching film and television production at the University of Bradford.

Bill Thompson technology commentator.

Gemma Milne writer and researcher interested in how science and technology impacts all of us. And author of Smoke and Mirrors - how hype obscures the future and how to see past it.

BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University

David Steel, Nature Reserve Manager on the Isle of May relates his observations of the effects on seabirds. And Nicola Lewis, Director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre at the Francis Crick Institute tells us why this particular stain is so severe.

Climategate was a strange kind of scandal, based entirely on misinformation pushed by climate change deniers. In his new book Hot air, shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment science book prize, Climate scientist Peter Stott assess the impact of their campaign.

Pong was a very basic video game developed in the 1970s, now Australian researchers have trained human brain cells in a dish to play the game, Dr Brett Kagan from Cortical Labs explains why.

The Nobel prizes were awarded this week. Science Journalist Philip Ball looks at the winning discoveries and the scientists behind them.

And shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science book prize, we hear from Henry Gee, author of A Very Short History of Life on Earth.

We also look at more practical aspects of fracking in the UK with Professor Richard Davies from Newcastle University, asking how to viably extract shale gas in the UK and whether, with concerns over climate change, we should really be contemplating this at all.

The production of Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a medium sized European country. Benjamin Jones from New Mexico university and Larisa Yarovaya from Southampton Business School explain why generation of the cryptocurrency has come to require such huge amounts of energy.

And we hear from Maria Fitzgerald, chair of the panel for the Royal Society book prize on what makes a good science book

Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University

The Scott Polar Institute in the UK has been studying these forests for years in collaboration with Moscow university, but this year’s field work has been cancelled. We spoke to Olga Tutubalina and Gareth Rees who have been running the collaboration since the 1990s.

Will the cost of living crisis lead to an increase in food poisoning ? it’s a concern for food researcher Ellen Evans from Cardiff Metropolitan University, in particular the potential for listeria to grow in our fridges if we don’t have the temperature low enough.

And if you like maths how can you get better? Mathematician and Author Simon Singh, tells us about his new global Maths Circles initiative to connect maths enthusiasts around the world.

The British Science Festival is taking place in Leicester this week, and diversity and inclusion is one of the top priorities. Many groups are still alarmingly under-represented in STEM including women, Black and Minority Ethnic people Angela Saini and Dr Kate Clancy explain how we got here and just how alienating science can feel. To explore possible solutions we spoke to the incoming president of the British Science Association and CEO of Stemettes Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE, Early career Engineer and Chairperson of Stemette Futures Youth Board Floriane Fidegnon-Edoh and Physicist Dr Jessica Wade who works in public engagement in STEM and advocacy for women in physics.

Finally, are colourful birds more vulnerable? Researcher Dr Rebecca Senior from Durham University takes us through how the pet trade affects bird conservation.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Emily Bird, Julian Siddle and Harrison Lewis

Craters from meteorites aren’t always easy to find, they can look similar to other geological features. However techniques more closely associated with forensic science are helping to provide clues. it’s all in the way the incoming asteroid or meteorite burns everything in its path says Dr Ania Losiak from the Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Science.

The Greenland ice sheets are melting, a new analysis paints a concerning picture about the impact on sea levels. Researcher Jason Box takes us out onto the ice to see this process in action.

And why do chimpanzees drum? Language researchers Catherine Hobaiter and Vesta Eleuteri have been following them around the jungles of Uganda to find out.

What influence do Scientific Advisors really have on government? We explore the tricky issue with science writer Philip Ball.

Are there just too many satellites now orbiting the earth? Astronomers are increasingly finding their presence is interfering with astronomical observations. Jane Chambers reports from Chile.

And what is mucus actually for and how did it evolve? Omer Gokcumen, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and Stefan Ruhl, Professor of Oral Biology at the University at Buffalo reveal its origins in our aquatic ancestors and its vital role in mouth hygiene.

Presented by Alex Lathbridge Produced by Julian Siddle Assistant Producer Emily Bird

We look at two very different approaches to marine conservation , and discuss how the combination of monitoring and surveillance technology and engaging with local people could help preserve many marine species .

And it's festival time in Edinburgh , but we take a look at its more sinister side. How when the city became a centre for the study of anatomy it also developed a dark underbelly of serial killers and body snatchers. A new exhibition clears up some of the myths associated with this period.

And the Royal Society has announced its annual medals, a variety of awards for leading scientists. This year there is a special award for Laboratory technicians, the unsung heroes of science experiments. We speak to the winner and also the BBC journalist who as a student destroyed one of his experiments.

Back in January, the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai volcano in Tonga erupted explosively, triggering a massive tsunami across the Pacific. Now, engineers are remotely scanning the volcano from 16,000km away in Essex. Ashley Skett from SEA-KIT International and Dr Mike Williams from NIWA describe how a robotic vessel is mapping the Tongan seabed.

And we get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding a 500-million-year-old fossil…quite literally. The microscopic, fossilised beast, which has no anus, was previously thought to be our earliest known ancestor. Emily Carlisle from the University of Bristol explains how the theory was debunked.

Presented by Victoria Gill Reporting by Emily Bird Produced by Alex Mansfield

Also, new evidence for a possible biomarker of ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - a condition associated with debilitating tiredness and brain fog similar to Long Covid. The microclots, described by Professor Doug Kell at the University of Liverpool and Professor Resia Pretorius of University of Stellenbosch, suggest a possible inflammatory cardiovascular element to the disease which might one day forge a path towards new treatments.

And how can trees help us in a heatwave? Vic joined Dominik Spracklen from the University of Leeds on a stroll around a Cumbrian forest to explore the cooling potential of forests.

Presented by Victoria Gill Reporter Emily Bird Produced by Alex Mansfield

Christiana Scheib, of the Universities of Cambridge and Tartu, is part of a team who seem to have pinpointed in time the moment the Herpes virus that causes cold sores first spread across human populations. By obtaining genomes of HSV1 from four individuals who died between the iron age and medieval times, their analysis suggests an initial emergence sometime in the Bronze age. The intriguing hypothesis that accompanies the discovery is that the variant's emergence was facilitated by a new trend among bronze age folk of romantic kissing. But as she describes, it's hard to be certain for "there is no gene for kissing".

One way of restricting the spread of many viruses is of course various forms of PPE. The last few years have seen billions more items of PPE used on our planet, often without a clear plan for their disposal, and they get accidentally dropped and even deliberately dumped all over the world. Alex Bond of the Natural History Museum at Tring observes and catalogues rubbish affecting wildlife. He took the BBC's Victoria Gill on a walk down a canal in Salford to discuss the issues with the tissues.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield

What has the recent hot weather done to the plants in our gardens, and the crops in our fields? Dr Nicola Cannon from the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester tells us the low-down. Expect your potatoes to get more expensive this autumn. The RHS want to know about how the heatwave has affected YOUR garden. You can help science by answering on this survey https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/NVNH5FN

What if we could use all the excess heat from summer, and store it to heat our homes in winter. It's something a team in the Netherlands and Austria have been looking at, using a thermochemical battery. Wim van Helden from AEE Institute in Gleisdorf in Austria explains how they made a prototype, and what the stumbling blocks are to widespread use of their system.

Is this thermal battery the holy grail of heat supply? We run it, and other options, past Michael de Podestra. An ex-measurement scientist at the National Physics Laboratory until his retirement two years ago, he has since become an expert in retrofitting his house to try and make it carbon-neutral.

Glacier Collapse In Italy this month eleven people were killed when Marmolada glacier collapsed. A few days later, hikers recorded another huge glacier collapse in Kyrgyzstan. Is there any way of monitoring glaciers to give us a warning of these events? Glaciologist Liam Taylor, a researcher at Leeds University explains to Gaia our options for monitoring vulnerable glaciers, and why a black spot in those observations is about to open up.

Pees and queues. Lower urinary tract symptoms are common and affect an estimated 60% of men and 57% of women. These can be detected using a gadget called a uroflowmetre, but patients often face delays getting to clinics to use one. Dr Lee Han Jie and Professor Ng Lay Guat, with colleagues at Singapore General Hospital and the Singapore University of Technology and Design have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that is trained to listen to patients pass urine. From just the noise of peeing, the AI is able to identify abnormal flows and could be a useful and cost-effective means of monitoring and managing urology patients at home.

Heatwave Records Richard Betts from the Met Office explains why the official highest temperature is only 40.3C, whereas many of us have clocked temperature in the mid forties in our cars and on patios.

This week NASA invited President Joe Biden to help them publish the first of five images of full scientific value from the newest super telescope now operating a million miles away from us. It is capable of gazing as far deep into the sky as humans have ever gazed. That first image, an upgrade of one of the Hubble Telescope's "Deep Field" shots from some years ago, shows some of the oldest matter ever seen, including light distorted into smudges and whorls by the gravitational field of galaxies in line of sight from us, much nearer and younger than the light being bent around them.

The other images show even more of what the telescope is capable of seeing. Dr. Stefanie Milam of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US and BBC Science correspondent Jonathan Amos talk to Gaia about this new, exciting phase in astronomy.

This month marks 40 years since the International Whaling Commission decided to pursue a moratorium on commercial whaling. Many whales are still struggling, but scientists have seen several species recover since then. The moratorium followed campaigning in the 1970s by such groups as Greenpeace, and even the commercial success of audio recordings of humpback whales, released by Drs. Roger and Katy Payne. Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler describes to Gaia the motivations behind the original Save the Whale campaign, and some of his memories of intercepting a Russian whaling ship in 1975.

Since 1982, cetacean science has come a long way, and scientists know far more about whale's behaviour, vulnerabilities and interaction with ocean climate and ecosystems than we did back then. Dr. Asha De Vos of the University of Western Australia describes the science, including some recent findings on the continued perils of anthropogenic noise to these giants of the deep.

Presenter Gaia Vince Assistant Producer Joleen Goffin Produced by Alex Mansfield

The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is on until Sunday 10th July, it is free to attend and there are many activities and events online too.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield

Prof Frank Close, whose new book - Elusive - is published this week, is a friend of Peter's. The book describes the background to Higg's idea, and how a generation of physicists worked to test it and identify it. He and Prof Malcolm Fairbairn of King's College London discuss the significance at the time, what we we've learned since, and what we might in the future.

As covid cases are on the rise again in the UK, Prof Jonathan Ball gives Marnie his observations on the current variants. Prof Trevor Cox, acoustician at Salford University describes his part in a collaboration to design a new type of DIY facemask that still allows people to see your lips moving as you speak, whilst also muffling your words far less. It was developed with collaborators at University of Manchester, and also by Salford's Maker Space, and you can download plans and a video and have a go yourself at the link from our programme page.

An article in Nature food recently suggested that our estimates of food miles, the carbon footprints we assign to the foods we eat, may have been underestimated and could be 3.5 times what was previously thought. But does that change the choices we make in what we buy?

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Alex Mansfield

As this programme went out, scientists and engineers eagerly wait for new images of the planet Mercury to arrive, snapped from a speeding probe passing just 200km from the surface, as it desperately tries to shed some velocity on its seven-year braking journey. ESA/JAXA's BepiColombo mission to Mercury is using gravitational swing-shots (just four more to go) to lose enough energy to eventually, in Dec 2025, enter orbit around the planet closest to our sun.

Dr Suzie Imber of Leicester University has skin in the game, being co-investigator on one of the instruments that will eventually be able to teach us more than we've ever known about this bizarre world.

Suzie is also last year's winner of the Royal Society's Rosalind Franklyn Award, and works hard doing science outreach talks and events to help inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Thurs 23rd June is International Women in Engineering Day, celebrating remarkable engineering as a career option. Report Emily Bird goes along to the Great Exhibition Road Festival to see how science festivals such as this one can help raise the profile of engineering and scientific endeavours in the society of tomorrow.

One thing most kids like is Space. The other is dinosaurs. But what about long-dead Mammals? Prof Steve Brusatte of Edinburgh university is a palaeontologist and author whose last book on dinosaurs even led to him being consulted for the latest film in the Jurassic Park franchise. Why then does his new book focus on furrier beings in The Rise and Reign of The Mammals? He tells Marnie of the exciting millions of years of evolution that led to us, after the dinosaurs croaked their last,.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Reporting by Emily Bird Produced by Alex Mansfield

Philp Ball's latest book, The Book of Minds, explores the work still to be done on our conception of what thinking is, and what it might mean in non-human contexts. Beth Singler is a digital ethnographer - an anthropologist who studies societal reaction to technological advancement. They discuss the story this week that a google AI engineer has been suspended on paid leave from his work with an experimental algorithm called LaMDA. He rather startlingly announced his belief that it had attained sentience, publishing some excerpts from interactions he has experienced with it.

Prof Dame Julia Slingo this week has published a proposal in Nature Climate Change, co-authored with several of the world's greatest climate scientists, for a multinational investment in the next generation of climate models. Currently, models of the global climate have a resolution of something like 100km, a scale which, they suggest, misses some very fundamental physics of the way rain, clouds and storms can form. Zooming into 1km resolution, and including the smaller physical systems will allow scientist to better predict extreme events, and crucially how water interacts in a real way with rising temperatures in different climes.

And can zooming in on taxonomy reveal insights in conservation and biodiversity? Researchers in the US and Malaysia have described a species of breadfruit that has hitherto been considered one species by mainstream science. Locals have long described them as different species, and the genetics proves that view correct. Can more local, granular knowledge help us get a better handle on the conservation status of our planet's biodiversity? Emily Bird Reports.

Presenter Marnie Chesterton Reporter Emily Bird Producer Alex Mansfield

Dr Anders Bjorn from Concordia university in Montreal talks us through ‘Renewable Energy Certificates’ explaining how they can sometimes be disconnected from real-life reductions in emissions. As he explains in a paper in Nature Climate Change this week, this is a problem, with businesses buying renewable energy certificates that may, even with the best of intentions, mean that corporate estimates of how much they have transferred to renewable energy could be out by as much as two-thirds. For example, in Poland, where much of the grid is powered by fossil fuels, a company can buy RECs from energy producers in Norway, where so much of the grid is de-carbonised and users feel no need to purchase such a certificate. As negotiations on the New Greenhouse Gas Protocol get underway, and delegates in Bonn discuss COP 26 progress, yet more food for thought.

In the UK, some long term collaborations and research structures are under threat as the ratification of UK membership of Horizon Europe continues to be delayed. This has led to some researchers running out of funds, some having to relinquish membership, and others moving to different institutions in Member Countries.

Professor Nicky Clayton at the university of Cambridge has for many years run a “Corvid Palace” where she keeps very clever birds and examines their thinking. It is threatened with closure, and she is searching for funding to keep the research going, even setting up an open letter from academics around the world in support of this globally renowned facility.

Carsten Welsh, a physicist at Liverpool University has also been impacted, facing a difficult decision about whether to give up leadership of his newly funded project or leave the country to pursue it.

EU Horizon is one of the most ambitious and well-funded research and international collaboration schemes in science and with every EU nation signed up and countries like Canada and Japan keen to join too, it's no wonder the UK wants to take part. Martin Smith, head of policy lab at the Wellcome Trust explains what’s getting in our way and what might happen next for British scientists who rely on Horizon to fund their research.

And finally, celebrations last weekend for the celebration of Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee were seemingly led by a holographic queen riding in the Golden State Coach at the head of the pageant in London. At least, that was how it was reported. But was it really? BBC Inside Science managed to track down the leader of the team that made it – whatever it was – happen, and in a generous world exclusive, Willie Williams, head of Treatment Studio, kindly spills the magic beans on quite how you make a Royal Hologram.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Assistant Producer: Emily Bird Producer: Alex Mansfield

Presented by Marnie Chesterton. Assistant Producer Emily Bird Produced by Alex Mansfield

As cases of monkeypox appear strangely dispersed around Europe and elsewhere in the world outside of Africa, BBC health and science correspondent James Gallagher outlines to Vic the symptoms and some of the mysterious elements of this outbreak.

In Pompeii, scientists have for the first time managed to sequence the whole genome of an individual killed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD. Serena Viva of the University of Salento describes the site of two individual's tragic demise all that time ago, one female aged around 50 years, and a younger male, both leaning on a couch in a dining room. Geneticist Gabriele Scorrano describes how the ancient DNA (aDNA) was preserved and extracted, and how the male individual's genome was so well preserved it could be sequenced in full. As they suggest this week in Nature, there weren’t too many surprises in what they found, but the ability to do this sort of science opens up a new era of Pompeiian archaeological treasure.

Faced with covid lockdowns and unable to observe in the wild, elephant conservationists Nachiketha Sharma and Sanjeeta Sharma Pocharel decided to see if videos uploaded to YouTube could enlighten science on rare behaviours of Asian elephants. African Elephants are known to have a strange fascination, even respect, for the death of other elephant individuals, especially those near to their families such as calves and parents. Asian elephants’ thanatological (death related) behaviour is less well observed however. But the researchers turned to videos of strange grieving-like behaviour to begin a catalogue of the different reactions such as carrying dead calves, standing guard, or vocalizing. They dedicate their work, published by the Royal Society, to the elephants involved.

This sort of research, using video observations captured and shared by members of the public are proving rather useful to zoologists and animal behaviourists. Ximena Nelson of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand was one of the first scientists to suggest the usefulness of trawling the internet for odd video of animals and explains a bit more to Vic.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield

50 years of observations across Australia's northern tropical forests suggest yet more bad news for the climate. Trees’ mortality has, it seems, doubled since the 1980s. As Oxford University's David Bauman tells Vic, it seems to be linked to a drying of the air as temperatures rise, and if the trend is also true across the world's other moist tropical forests, they could rapidly slip from being carbon sinks, to carbon sources.

Conservationists say we’re losing animal species faster today than at any point in the last 10 million years of Earth’s history. And one approach aims to save as many of those lost animals as possible – after they’ve died. Biobanking – saving frozen tissue from dead animals for future cloning or other reproductive technologies could buy us time to prevent extinction - or even reverse it. Vic visits Nature's Safe, where technology used in pedigree breeding is being deployed to preserve the cells and tissue of endangered species when individuals die or are euthanised, for possible research in the future, or even cloning.

Meanwhile, 2.5 miles off the coast of Jersey, archaeologists are holing up in a medieval fortress waiting for the few lowest tides of the year to give them access to the Violet Bank - an area of reef thought once to have been home to Neanderthal populations, but which now is for most of the year submerged by the sea. Marnie Chesterton has been talking to UCL’s Matt Pope between the ebbs and flows.

Presented by Victoria Gill

Reporters: Marnie Chesterton and Jonathan Amos

Produced by Alex Mansfield

The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is restarting after three years of upgrades. Roland Pease visits the European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN, to see how things are going, and looks back on some of the team's past successes.

Also, how do you investigate the mysterious deaths of the world’s biggest fish when their bodies sink without trace? That’s the quandary facing marine scientists who’ve been trying to figure out what exactly is killing whale sharks. Freya Womersley, UK Marine Biological Association, shares how satellite tracking technology is helping us solve the mystery.

And finally, what’s in a name? As our inventory of Earth’s biodiversity progresses, the number of species given a Latin name is also growing. So, where do scientists find their naming inspiration? In Royal Society Proceedings B this week, an analysis of nearly 3,000 parasitic worm species uncovered some intriguing patterns and worrying biases. Samara Linton reports.

Presenter Victoria Gill

Produced by Alex Mansfield and Samara Linton

This week more evidence that spring is springing earlier, as Vic heads to what might be the most studied woodland in the world: Wytham Woods in Oxfordshire. Ella Cole, Oxford University, explains how climate change is causing birds to lay eggs three weeks earlier than they did in the 1940s. And Chris Perrins, of Oxford University, shares his thoughts on the changing woodland.

And from new life to the very stuff of life. Could the building blocks of DNA have first been delivered to earth on a meteorite? In a paper in Nature Communications, scientists announce the discovery of the last two of the five key nucleobases locked in meteorites dating to the formation of the solar system. Samples of the Murchison Meteorite, a specific type of soft, loamy rock (CM2 carbonaceous chondrite) that fell to earth in 1969, have been re-examined, and the confirmation extends the ongoing debate around the nature and composition of terrestrial life's original crucible. Sara Russell, Professor of Planetary Sciences at London's Natural History Museum, helps Vic unravel the complicated and surprisingly controversial history of space rocks and primordial soup.

Presented by Vic Gill

Producer: Alex Mansfield Reporter: Samara Linton

Also on the programme, with a huge tidal range, Wales and the west coast of England have become the focal point for a new generation of tidal power plans. So, is the tidal energy revolution finally happening? Roger Falconer, Emeritus Professor of Water and Environmental Engineering at Cardiff University, and Andrew Scott, CEO of Orbital Marine Power, which has demonstrated a working tidal stream turbine - called O2 - off Orkney, share their insights.

And fancy eating an insect burger? Or how about adding seaweed smoothies or mycoprotein meatballs to your diet? Fellow BBC science correspondent Helen Briggs shares how lab-grown proteins could make our diets much kinder to the planet.

And a recent study has found that a fifth of reptile species are at risk of extinction. Conservation scientist and study co-author Monika Bohm, Indianapolis Zoo in the US, tells us how, despite the gloomy findings, she remains hopeful.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield and Samara Linton

The climate crisis and Covid-19 have shown over the recent years the importance of reliable, relatable, transparent and trusted science communication. But just like science itself, it comes in different forms and takes different approaches. Always keen to keep you up to date, BBC Inside Science takes a moment to discuss good practice and how it might be done better.

Dr Oz Ismail is a dementia researcher who also finds time to do stand-up, public engagement and a podcast called Why Aren’t You A Doctor Yet?

Sam Illingworth is an Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University who investigates science and communication between disciplines. He is also a poet and writer, and has a podcast called The Poetry of Science.

And Berry Billingsley is Professor in Science Education at Canterbury Christchurch University. Erstwhile science broadcaster, she looks at ways science education could be enhanced through building what her team call Epistemic Insight - transforming the nature of science education in society's younger members.

Presented by Victoria Gill

Produced by Alex Mansfield and Samara Linton

Nanobodies. That's the name scientists have given to the tiny antibodies found in the blood of camelids like llamas, alpacas and camels. Reporter Samara Linton heads to Berkshire to meet the llamas whose nanobodies were recently found to neutralise the Covid-19 virus. We hear from Professor Gary Stephens, University of Reading, who is responsible for the llamas' safety and well-being, and Professor James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute which is carrying out the pioneering research with engineered nanobodies.

And just as the James Webb Space Telescope is poised to peer deep into the universe, we look at a recent image captured by its great predecessor, Hubble, which has thrown down a telescopic gauntlet. Astronomer Dr Emma Chapman, author of the book “First Light” guides us through these incredible pictures of the furthest, faintest, most ancient of stars yet seen.

Presented by Victoria Gill Reporter: Samara Linton Producer: Alex Mansfield

This week, the UN's latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has unveiled a to-do list of ways to save the planet from climate catastrophe. How do scientists reach a global consensus on climate change amid war, an energy crisis, and a pandemic? Vic Gill speaks to report co-author Jo House, University of Bristol, and Ukrainian climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska who took part in signing off every line of the report while sheltering from the war in Kyiv.

And from our planet's present and future to its ancient past. Scientists working on the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota in the US have dug up a dinosaur's leg, complete with skin and scales. Is this 66-million-year-old fossil, alongside similar nearby victims, the key to unveiling those transformative minutes after the infamous Chicxulub asteroid struck the earth and ended the era of the dinosaurs? BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos has seen the fossil and speaks with Paul Barrett of London's Natural History Museum about the significance of this un-reviewed new finds.

And from earth to Mars. After a year of analysing audio recordings from NASA's Perseverance rover, scientists have found not one but two speeds of sound on Mars. Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford, guides us through this sonic wonder, and how sound may become a key tool for exploring distant worlds.

Mars audio credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ISAE-Supaéro

While we await the government’s energy strategy, Inside Science looks at how to solve the problem, finding the best possible ways to meet our energy needs while slashing our carbon emissions. Joining us to discuss this are Alice Bell, co-director of the climate charity Possible, and Jan Rosenow, director at the Regulatory Assistance Project.

We also hear from Chris Stark of the Climate Change Commission on how the government might meet its decarbonisation targets, visit a Cornish field that might be a rich source of homegrown lithium for batteries, and talk to Jonathan Atkinson from People Powered Retrofit about how to make our homes greener and warmer.

Both of Earth’s poles were hit by heatwaves this week. The Arctic was 30 degrees above average for this time of year, and the Antarctic was an unprecedented 40 degrees above average. We are seeing more extreme temperatures everywhere on earth, but for both poles to experience such heatwaves at the same time is highly unusual. Ed Blockley of the Met Office’s Polar Climate Group explains what’s going on.

One of the simplest ways to improve your local environment is to plant a hedge, which not only helps wildlife but can reduce flooding and pollution. But what kind of hedge should you plant? Scientists at the University of Reading and the Royal Horticultural Society are beginning a two year experiment to see which combinations of hedges bring the most benefits. Dr Tijana Blanusa tells us why planting hedges and generally greening our gardens is so important in the current climate.

Presented by Gaia Vince Producer Cathy Edwards Assistant Producer Emily Bird

Lead is highly toxic to humans and other animals. One source of lead in the environment is the bullets and shot used to hunt wild game, and new research shows that lead shot has a significant effect on birds of prey such as eagles, buzzards and vultures across the whole of Europe. One of the study’s authors, Professor Debbie Pain, explains the research.

Many of us have spent the past two years anxiously following Covid graphs, but from next month the government is cutting funding to several surveillance programmes. Mass free testing will also end, though the Office for National Statistics survey will continue. Given that case numbers are rising, is reduced monitoring wise? Professor Adam Kucharski from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discusses how important surveillance has been in the pandemic.

The last crewed mission to the Moon was half a century ago, and no one has made that one small step since. But a new NASA programme aims to change that, and tonight is the rollout of Artemis I, the first stage on a journey to return humans to the moon, including the first woman on the moon and the first person of colour on the moon. BBC science correspondent Jon Amos paints a picture of what we’ll see tonight.

Covid-19 can shrink our brains and lead to cognitive decline, even in mild cases, according to a new study out this week. Professor Gwenaëlle Douaud, who led the research, explains how they used hundreds of brain scans to discover the effects of Covid infection.

A completely different discovery this week was made at the bottom of the sea; we hear how, after 107 years, scientists have finally found The Endurance, the lost shipwreck of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.

How might the Russian invasion of Ukraine affect international space exploration? After a Twitter spat between a former NASA astronaut and the Russian space chief, we’re joined by BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos and BBC Russian’s Nikolay Voronin to discuss how science in Russia and the rest of the world may be impacted by the current conflict.

And finally, the stunning discovery of a 330 million-year-old vampyropod fossil, the earliest known relative of modern-day octopuses and vampire squids, gives us an opportunity to imagine the world it inhabited, a third of a billion years ago.

A major report published this week speaks to a different kind of crisis: climate change. There are stark warnings for humanity and the planet, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessing the impacts of global heating on people and places, as well as how we can adapt to a drastically changed world. One of its lead authors, Professor Richard Betts, reflects on the report.

Russia is one of the world's biggest producers of coal, gas and oil, so what might their invasion of Ukraine, and the ensuing sanctions, mean for global energy supplies? Simon Evans, deputy editor of the climate website Carbon Brief, discusses whether we're more likely to see a push towards renewables and energy efficiency, or further reliance on fossil fuels.

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Predictions for how our climate will change over the coming years are essential in setting and meeting emissions targets, however human behaviour is usually left out of climate model equations. Fran Moore and Katherine Lacasse explain why and how they factor public opinion, habits and political trends into their climate model.

And finally, why is it so important we clean up after our pets? Dog poo is incredibly nutrient rich, and Professor Pieter de Frenne has been looking into the surprising negative effect any waste left behind can have on woodland and nature reserves.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Producer Cathy Edwards Assistant Producer Emily Bird

Made in association with The Open University

We hear from mathematical biologist Dr Kit Yates from the University of Bath and UCL’s Professor Christina Pagel, who, like many scientists, are concerned about the consequences of relaxing protective measures. However, epidemiologist Professor Irene Petersen tells us why she feels it is the right time to loosen restrictions.

A new omicron sub-variant has been making headlines this week. Professor David Male takes us through what we know about omicron BA.2 so far.

And from possible endings to the pandemic’s origin story. Roland Pease spoke to Beijing-based journalist Jane Qiu who’s gained unprecedented access to the Wuhan scientist at the centre of lab leak theories.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Producer Samara Linton Assistant Producer Emily Bird Made in association with The Open University

We discuss the Advanced Research and Invention Agency ( ARIA. The ARIA bill is about to go through the final stages of parliamentary approval and will have a budget of £800 million to play with over four years. But it’s not without its critics. Many in the science community have questioned ARIA’s transparency and accountability to the public, because the government have decided to exempt ARIA from Freedom of Information Requests. We hear from UKRI head Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser and Professor of Research Policy James Wilsdon.

And from blue skies research to blue seas research, scientists have found a surprising seabed community that lives in the cold nutrient-sparse waters under the central arctic ocean: giant sponges. And it turns out these resourceful organisms have been feasting on the thousand-year-old remains of now-extinct worms. We hear from Teresa Maria Morganti from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and Autun Perser from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research.

You may feel that spring seems to come earlier each year. Ulf Buntgen and colleagues at the University of Cambridge have been using data from "Nature's Catalogue", a database of observations going back as far as the c18 to determine the dates each year that certain species of UK native plants first flower. And they have found a clear signal that plants are indeed flowering earlier due to climate change, some as much as a month earlier, on average, since the pre-1986 average.

Aaron Rice of Cornell University speaks fish. But not fluently.

His field of marine bioacoustics is growing fast. The oceans are, it seems, babbling with fish and other animal chatter. But does everything down there make a noise? In a paper published recently his team have traced evolutionary patterns in the ray-finned fish (which means nearly all the things most people would think of as a fish) and found that the ability to produce fishy sounds, be it bone vibrations, swim bladder vibrations or various other techniques, has likely emerged 33 times in this clade alone. Such convergent evolutionary history clearly suggests a strong selective pressure to do so. Aaron describes how much work there is to be done listening to fish, and how it can be used to help find out how life works, and how it may help us preserve it.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily Bird

Made in association with The Open University

Dr Claire Steves, of Kings College London, whose previous work on symptom gathering Onur's team have built upon, agrees this is a promising bit of work, and also discusses some other potential clues to the Long Covid mystery.

But Covid of course is not the the only major cause of death in the world today. A major paper in the Lancet recently is one of the first deep estimates of the global health burden of Antibiotic Microbial Resistance. And it suggests that 1.25 million people died in the world in 2019 because many bacteria are evolving a resistance to our favourite antibiotics. As Prof Chris Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington who led the massive collaboration explains. The surprisingly huge number points to a massive and growing problem that political and health leaders around the world must address.

And finally, the genetics of fingerprints might be a bit better understood thanks to work published in Cell recently. Dr Denis Headon of the Roslyn Institute at the University of Edinburgh talks to Gaia about a huge survey he and colleagues have done looking at the hints certain genes can give as to the types of fingerprints you grow. The genes that seem to govern the general form of your prints are the ones that shape your limb development, rather than skin patterns as perhaps might be expected. And a pro-tip if you want to search the literature for more info on this: use the word "dermatoglyph" rather than the overused and progressively meaningless word "fingerprint".

Presented by Gaia Vince Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily Bird

Made in Association with The Open University.

Gaia Vince speaks with Auckland University volcanologist Prof Shane Cronin, one of the few human beings to have visited the now-disappeared volcanic land bridge that stretched until last week between the islands of Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha'apai. It was destroyed in the disastrous eruption of the volcano beneath it last week that has wrought such devastation to the nation of Tonga, and whose effects were felt in the Americas and detectable all around the world. Why was this submarine eruption quite so explosive, given that the eruption itself was not one of the biggest or longest in living memory?

Previous eruptions - notably Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 - released huge amounts of particles and sulphates into the stratosphere such that they had a cooling effect on the atmosphere globally, lasting 2-3 years. Prof Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the UKs Met Office tells Gaia how current estimates of the recent eruption's emissions suggest it will not have such an affect, their being around ten times less than the 1991 event.

Richard was one of the contributors to the UK Government’s Climate Risk Assessment 2022 which was published this week. He describes to Gaia some of the modelling that went into it, and the urgency of cutting CO2 and similar emissions it describes.

Last year Prof Mark Miodownik, head of the Institute of Making at UCL made a series for Radio 4 called Dare to Repair, looking at the vanishing art and practice of repairing our old and malfunctioning consumer devices, rather than binning them and buying new ones as most of us do these days.

At the end of 2021 Mark, together with representatives from manufacturers, consumers, and other groups, took part in a round-table meeting to discuss possible challenges and measures to increase the so-called Right to Repair, towards building a circular economy in the UK for recycling plastic and metals. In this week's show he launches a new citizen science project aimed at gathering granular data on UK citizens views and practices when it comes to "disposable" electronic devices. To take part in The Big Repair Project, to record successes and failures, even to share how impossible it can be sometimes to change a battery, follow the link on the BBC Inside Science homepage.

Presenter Gaia Vince Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily Bird

Made in Association with The Open University

Fresh from a TV spot on BBC Two’s Digging for Britain this week, Dr Dean Lomax and PhD candidate Emily Swaby share their excitement unearthing Rutland’s ‘Sea Dragon’ and explore what this find could tell us about Ichthyosaurs. At over 10 meters long this ancient ocean predator is the largest complete fossil of its kind to be discovered in the UK. Ichthyosaurs are commonly associated with Dorset and Yorkshire coastlines where fossils are often revealed as surrounding rock is eroded by the elements. Finding an ichthyosaur fossil inland is unusual but not unexpected as the higher sea levels 200 million years ago would put the east midlands underwater.

And whilst the palaeontologists have been struggling through the Jurassic mud, cognition researchers at the University of Cambridge have been wowing their birds with magic tricks.

Professor Nicky Clayton FRS, Professor of Comparative Cognition, explains what we can learn about the way jays think by assessing their reaction to different sleight-of-hand tricks. Corvids, the family to which these feathered friends belong, have long interested researchers due to their impressive cognitive abilities and Nicky’s team has shown that their Jays are not fooled by all of the same mis-directions as we are, but are fooled by some. And it could be down to not being able to tell the difference between a finger and a feather.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily Bird

Made in association with The Open University

Helen's guests are Adrian Glover of the Natural History Museum in London, Kerry Howell of Plymouth University and Alex Rogers, scientific director of REV Ocean.

They discuss the dramatic revelations made by deep ocean explorers in just the last forty years, and the profound connections that the deep sea floor has with life at the Earth's surface. They also consider the threats to the ecosystems down there from seabed mining and climate change.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

BBC Inside Science is made in association with the Open University.

2021 was an eventful year in space. Captain James Kirk a.k.a William Shatner popped into space for real for a couple of minutes, transported by space company Blue Origin's tourist rocket New Shepard. Elon Musk's Space X ferried more astronauts and supplies between Earth and the International Space Station, using its revolutionary resuable launchers and Dragon spacecraft. On Mars, the latest NASA robot rover landed and released an autonomous helicopter - the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

2022 promises even more. Most significantly NASA plans to launch the first mission of its Artemis programme. This will be an uncrewed flight of its new deep space vehicle Orion to the Moon, propelled off the Earth by its new giant rocket, the Space Launch System. Artemis is the American space agency's project to return astronauts to the lunar surface and later establish moon bases. China has a similar ambition.

Are we at the beginning of a new space age and if so, how have we got here? When will we see boots on the Moon again? Could we even see the first people on Mars by the end of this decade? Even in cautious NASA, some are optimistic about this.

Kevin's three guests are:

Dr Mike Barratt, one of NASA's most senior astronauts and a medical doctor, based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas Dr Anita Sengupta, Research Associate Professor in Astronautical Engineering at the University of Southern California Oliver Morton, Briefings editor at The Economist and the author of 'Mapping Mars' and 'The Moon'

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

BBC Inside Science is made in association with the Open University

In a paper in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers have gathered hundreds of middle-late Bronze Age DNA samples to identify a moment in pre-history when half the ancestry of people living in southern Britain became continental European. Sometime around 1000 BC, continental Europeans living in Kent spread rapidly into what is now England and Wales. As Prof Ian Armit tells Vic, the spread need not have been one event, and likely spanned around 200 years, but by the start of the Iron Age, Britons' DNA was 50% changed. The researchers suggest further that this may have been the time when Celtic languages spread from the continent into the islands too.

Data are starting to be published that suggest the Omicron variant of SARS CoV-2 may be a little less awful than was first feared, though it clearly is still a lethal foe. Prof Penny Moore, one of the scientists in South Africa who helped alert the world to the new virus is very tentatively relieved that death and hospitalisation numbers there and in the UK are beginning to show clinically some of the resilience that earlier strains and vaccines may have bestowed on populations. Three "Glimpses of Spike", either through prior infection and survival or vaccination and boosting seem to be accompanied by improved survival rates.

Gaia Vince has been to the Arctic Circle to talk climate change and reindeer. Sami language and culture in Lapland is under strain as climate change rapidly changes alters the predatory threats reindeer farmers face, increasing numbers of wolves and even sea-eagles that prey on young reindeer calves.

And over at UCSC in California, recordings of elephant seal pups have been played to maternal harems to ascertain how well mothers recognize their own. Caroline Casey and colleagues report in Royal Society journal Biology Letters, how they can spot their own offspring from their call alone in as little as two days after birth. But if they can do that, why then do so many lactating females feed pups that aren’t their own? Elephant seal mothers fast throughout lactation and lose a huge percentage of their own body weight, quite what the evolutionary driver is for this behaviour remains uncertain, but it can’t now be a case of mistaken identity.

Presenter Victoria Gill Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily Bird

Made in Association with The Open University

James Webb is so huge that it has had to be folded up to fit in the rocket. There will be a tense two weeks over Christmas and the New Year as the space giant unfurls and unfolds. Its design and construction has taken about 30 years under the leadership of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

With its huge 6.5 metre-wide primary mirror, the giant observatory promises to extend our view across the cosmos to the first stars to shine in the early universe. That’s a vista of Cosmic Dawn: the first small clusters of stars to form and ignite out of what had been a universe of just dark clouds of primordial gas. If the James Webb succeeds in capturing the birth of starlight, we will be looking at celestial objects more than 13.5 billion light years away.

Closer to home, the telescope will also revolutionise our understanding of planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system.

BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos reports from the European Space Agency’s launch site in French Guyana from where James Webb will be sent into space. He talks to astronomers who will be using the telescope and NASA engineers who’ve built the telescope and tested it in the years leading to launch.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

BBC Inside Science is made in association with the Open University.

Image: James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, NASA animator

Prof Penny Moore, of South Africa’s National Centre for Infectious Disease and Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, joins us again this week to give us an update from the front line of scientists trying to get the data we need to try to predict the seriousness of the omicron variant. These early data, published as pre-prints and not yet peer-reviewed, seem to suggest that for those in the world lucky enough to have "seen a spike" three times (double vaccination plus booster, or double vaccination plus recovered from infection) the chances of serious illness remain similar to earlier variants.

One chink of hope continues to be the fascinating response of the "killer" T-Cells. Prof Danny Altmann of Imperial College London attempts to give us a T-Cell 101 course. This other division of the body’s defences, besides the binding antibodies of which we hear so much, may be more resilient to the sorts of mutations the virus has shown so far, and also perhaps have a slower waning in their ability to recognize it at all.

What did Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison have in common? A fondness for the occasional creative nap. And this week scientists suggest they weren't wrong.

Delphine Oudiette, a sleep researcher at the L’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière in Paris, has been experimenting with the idea that just a small nap, where you doze off for a few seconds but don't fall into deep sleep statistically helps you solve creative or mathematical problems. Her results are published in the journal Science Advances.

Meanwhile, in shallow seas off Indonesia, attempts to regrow coral reefs previously pounded to rubble by fishing with explosives, really sound like they are recovering. How do scientists know? By swimming about with microphones of course.

Dr Tim Lamont, a marine Biologist at the University of Exeter has been listening to thousands of recordings of fish and other marine animal noises and talks Vic through some of the odder ones that so far can't be recognized. He says the sheer number and frequency of the odd sounds point to an ecosystem beginning to thrive. The coral rebuilding strategy there won't work for all the world's dwindling corals, but this new way of monitoring success or failure makes for a great listen.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer: Emily Bird

Made in Association with The Open University

Prof. Penny Moore, of South Africa’s National Centre for Infectious Disease and Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, is one of many virologists who transferred from HIV to coronavirus research, and hers, like hundreds of labs around the world, is racing to clone the parts of the omicron virus to enable research into its transmissibility and severity as soon as possible. She describes to Vic what we yet know and what we don’t about it, and also how it is high time to bring the same sense of urgency back to HIV research.

Nottingham University’s Prof. Jonathan Ball is another virologist who suddenly transferred experience over to coronaviruses early on. He outlines something of what is really happening when viruses mutate, and how the arms race between host and invader can play out.

Our regular Inside Science listener will be interested to know that this week Merlin Sheldrake was awarded the Royal Society’s Science Book Prize, sponsored by Insight Investment, and the hefty cheque that accompanies it, for his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. Merlin is one of several high profile advisors to something called the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks - SPUN. They have received funding recently to begin an international mission to map the world’s subterranean fungal mycelial networks, including the infamous Wood Wide Web. SPUN Co-Founder Prof. Toby Kiers of VU University in Amsterdam tells Vic about the need to preserve, map and cherish this unseen yet essential part of the global ecosystem.

And could rising sea levels paradoxically be used to help fight climate change? Researchers up in St Andrews took Vic for a squelch about the salt marshes reclaimed recently by the sea in an estuary near Grangemouth, where flora and fauna are thriving just a few years since the seas were allowed back in.

Finally, you may have thought that wasps eat meat whereas bees eat honey and nectar. But this week we learned that some bees eat meat, preserving it in honeycombs to feed young and augment their own nutrition. Intrepid field entomologist Laura Figueroa of Cornell University describes to Vic her work in the jungle with Vulture Bees, social bees that over evolutionary time seem to have rescinded their vegetarian instincts and now are happy to enjoy a bit of “chicken on the side”. Laura found that they can digest their flesh because of big adjustments to their gut microbes, including acid-loving bacteria also found in other carnivorous animals.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer, Emily Bird Made in Association with The Open University

Ann Carr, working with Laurence Zwiebel at Vanderbuilt University, reports in the journal Nature Scientific Reports how they managed to discover a mutual symbiotic relationship between the plasmodium and the mosquito. Using advanced sequencing technology they discovered that the infected insects can live longer, and have enhanced sensing (olfaction) and egg positioning than their uninfected brethren. This, in turn, could help them finds meals better, bestowing higher numbers of infection opportunities for the parasite, and benefitting both.

NASA this week successfully launched its DART mission, which will next year attempt to nudge an asteroid in its orbit by smashing a mass into it. Could this method allow future humans, endangered by an impending collision push an asteroid out of the way to save the planet? It is billed as human’s first ever “earth-defence mission”, but as relieved-sounding mission leads Nancy Chabot and Andy Rivkin of Johns Hopkins University told the BBC, it is perhaps finally time to stop talking about these sorts of things and have a go.

Less relieved perhaps are astronomers around the world, as the James Webb Space Telescope team announce a further small delay to its launch to sometime after December 22nd. The BBC’s John Amos a few weeks ago stood in the presence of the telescope before it was coupled to the launch vehicle, and spoke with ESA’s Peter Jensen about its cost and complexity. BBC Inside Science is planning a special episode devoted to the instrument to accompany the launch of this successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Watch, as they say, this space...

And finally an insight perhaps into the origin of words and language. Apart from onomatopoeia, where a word can sound like the noise of a noise-making thing, can a word sound like other properties, such as for example its shape? In the late 1920s psychologists found that different people would match certain made-up words with the same abstract shapes. This “Bouba/ Kiki” effect has been studied since, where the word “Bouba” is associated with rounded blobby shapes, and “Kiki” with spikier, angular forms.

But there wasn’t so much evidence whether or not the effect worked across different languages or different written alphabets, until now.

Aleksandra Ćwiek of Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin tells Gaia of her international study (published in Royal Society Phil. Trans. B) looking at the effect in 25 different languages and cultures. The effect is robust across the different writing systems and locations, so the link is not simply about the shape of a letter b or letter k when written in a latinate alphabet, but could allude to something much deeper.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer, Emily Bird

Made in Association with The Open University.

Simon Evans, deputy editor of the website Carbon Brief, was one of many attending the COP26 summit which ended at the weekend. How do all the declarations, promises and the "Glasgow Pact" itself add up in the great carbon ledger we all need to worry about?

And the last of BBC Inside Science's Royal Society book prize nominees, Jessica Nordell talks to Gaia about writing her book "The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias". Her investigation into the science of all of our preconceptions and unacknowledged prejudices surprized even herself.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield Studio production by Anna Buckley and Bob Nettles

Made in Association with The Open University

The Montreal Protocol is famous for reducing CFC emissions to help protect the Ozone Layer. We only started using things like CFCs as refrigerants in our fridges and air-conditioning because they weren't as flammable as many alternatives. They were mainly replaced by HFCs, though these are also on the way out. The reason? Their huge greenhouse warming potential (or GWP). Propane has long been thought to be an alternative because of its comparatively tiny GPW, but the safety standards haven't been in place in much of the world for many of the types of application that would make the big difference. Sophie Geoghegan, Climate Campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency, and Asbjørn Vonsild who has been working on some of the new standards, due to become normal in Europe next year tell Gaia what greenhouse savings there are to be made, both in terms of efficiency and the contents of the systems themselves. If public opinion and consumer choice can drive the transition as our cities heat up.

This week two new Anti-viral pills that are designed to fight SARS CoV2 infections have made headlines in the UK. Professor Penny Ward is Chair of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine’s Policy Expert Group, and explains how they work, how they were developed, and when they will be properly available.

And in the penultimate of our 2021 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize shortlisted authors, science journalist James Nestor describes his book, Breath: The new science of a lost art. The book documents James’s journey around the world investigating traditional eastern practices, the latest pulmonology research, and learning from the palaeontology of ancient skulls, and he attempts to cure himself with better breathing habits.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in association with The Open University

New research published this week in the journal Nature reveals new insights into blue whales eating habits. Matthew Savoca and colleagues suggest these biggest of marine animals actually eat up to three times the mass of krill previously estimated. And they do this by finding the blooms of krill and using a spectacular lunging approach to open their massive mouths and filter the gulp of seawater for tonnes of food.

But how come, since the near destruction of their population by commercial whaling in the twentieth century, are current krill populations lower than when the voracious whales themselves were far more numerous? Shouldn't there be more krill now than then?

The answer, as Victor Smetacek, of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, describes to Gaia is that whales themselves help to keep iron in the upper waters of the southern oceans, re-fertilizing it for the lower ecosystem member like phytoplankton, and their powerful diving lunges and defecation effectively plough the waters, akin to herds of bison treading manure into prehistoric grass plains.

Former GSO David King, of the Centre For Climate Repair at Cambridge University, is beginning experiments next year that seek to mimic this whale-defecation effect to bring about eventual repopulation of whales and fish to allow the oceans to restart this historical cycle.

From Glasgow, above the hubbub of delegates and dignitaries CarbonBrief's deputy editor Simon Evans talks to Gaia about his perceptions of progress so far at the COP26 climate summit. Amongst the flurry of declarations so far this week, what are the details and how do they add up towards our eventual recovery back down to the 1.5C rise everybody is talking about?

And in the latest of Inside Science's interviews with shortlisted finalists of this year's Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize, Prof Emily Levesque, an astronomer at Washington State University tells Marnie Chesterton of her adventures and astronomical anecdotes at some of the world's most famous observatories. Researching her book, "The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers", she interviewed hundreds of practicing and practical astronomers, many of whose jobs, she suggests, will soon be transformed as the act of observation becomes more remote, automated, and data-heavy.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in Association with The Open University

As COP26 begins in Glasgow, a wealth of climate science is being published and publicised. Victoria Gill describes a couple of stories this week that point out quite how complex the science is, let alone the diplomacy and economics. Whilst the world's forests taken as a whole undoubtedly still capture more CO2 than they release, research this week shows that ten of Unesco's World Heritage Forests - making up for an area twice the size of Germany - have in the last ten years actually moved from being a carbon sink to a carbon source. There are several reasons, land use pressure being one of them, but also extreme climate events like wildfires (and even a hurricane in one instance) have tipped the balance, and show what how sharp the knife edge is for natural resilience. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that scientists have found an unexpected outflow of methane into the atmosphere from a site very close to the COP26 conference centre in Glasgow, highlighting just how great a challenge net zero will be.

Alongside some of humans' most earth-changing achievements, the domestication of the horse stands as something outstanding in human history. Without it, war, traded and culture would be unrecognizable. But quite when and where the modern horse originated has been something of a mystery. In Nature this week, researchers have published an extensive study into ancient DNA that seems to pinpoint finally a moment and a place where this happened, 4,200 years ago. Geoff Marsh takes Marnie for a canter through the mystery.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Alex Mansfield

Made in association with The Open University

To discuss the numbers and difficulty in calculating the full tragic consequences of the events, Marnie Chesterton speaks to Dr Deepti Gordasani of Queen Mary, University of London, and Dr Kit Yates, of Bath University.

How many people may have died as a result of this? BBC Inside Science's back-of-the-envelope suggests 500-1000 preventable deaths, and counting..

As accusations of fossil fuel lobbying begin to encircle the pre-negotiations of the COP26 negotiations, we heard last week of the sad death of Dutch climate scientist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. Listeners to BBC Science programmes will recognise his work from earlier this year, as flash floods and heatwaves ravished Europe and North America, when he and his colleagues at the World Weather Attribution Initiative were able to say unambiguously that these events could only have happened because of anthropogenic climate change. Roland Pease looks at Geert Jan's work and legacy.

And the latest of the Royal Society Book Prize finalists to speak to BBC Inside Science is Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist at Kings College London. His book explores the murkier corners of science as a process. Certainly the so-called replication crisis has dogged psychological sciences for several years, but in "Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth" Stuart outlines quite how deep some of the flaws in the modern experimental reporting and publishing model go, and in almost all fields.

However, as he explains to Marnie, there may be ways of rescuing the great achievement of the scientific method by tweaking some of our peer-review norms.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in association with The Open University

Roland Pease travels to Bath University to meet scientists who may have developed a way to diagnose Alzheimer's in the earliest stages of the disease. Dr George Stothart, has led the team in the development of this simple 2 minute test.

Prof Thomas Scott of Bristol University and team develop robotic techniques to scan areas of high radiation that would otherwise be unsafe for humans to enter. Their rolling, quadruped or even flying robots have recently been deployed in and around the reactor building at the Chernobyl disaster site. Authorities there have recently been licensed to begin disassembling remains inside the vast concrete shield, but as they do so, areas of intense radiation are likely to shift from day to day. Being able to map these changes in 3D at the end of each working shift should enable workers to avoid the areas of biggest danger.

Dr Merlin Sheldrake is one of the nominees for this years Royal Society Insight Investment Book Prize. "Entangled Life - How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures" is a rich tale of interconnectedness and subtle intrusion and extrusion between different living things, and particularly fungi's huge influence on human existence, from beer, bread and psychedelia to the whole history of life on earth.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in Association with The Open University

The BepiColombo space craft, a joint European and Japanese mission, has just completed its first fly-by of Mercury, after a three year journey. Professor Dave Rothery, a planetary geologist at the Open University, who’s been involved since the early days of the mission in the 1990s, talks about what Mercury's cameras have seen and what the mission aims to find out when it finally gets into orbit around the planet in 2026.

Plants remove carbon from the air during photosynthesis, and forests will be a key part of meeting our climate goals. But there’s a lot of uncertainty about how forests will react as temperatures and CO2 rise. Now researchers at University of Birmingham have bathed ancient oak trees in the sort of carbon dioxide concentrations we expect in 2050, and measured the impact. Anna Gardner led the research from a forest in Staffordshire.

The shortlist for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize for 2021 was announced last week. Inside Science will be featuring the six authors. The first is The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O’Sullivan. She's a consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, who’s been described as “a detective of the mind”. Suzanne O’Sullivan specialises in epilepsy but this leads her to see a number of patients with symptoms such as unexplained paralysis or blindness. For The Sleeping Beauties, she travelled around the world investigating what is often referred to as psychosomatic illness. Sometimes whole groups of people have been affected in mysterious ways. Claudia Hammond spoke to her about the strange case of refugee children in Sweden who fell asleep for years at a time.

Why don’t we have a tail? We share that absence with our primate cousins, the great apes. What made the difference genetically speaking has eluded scientists, until now. Professor Jef Boeke of NYU Langone Health tells Gaia Vince why it was a change in just one gene that caused us to lose our tail.

New research just published in PNAS pushes back the origins of farming by thousands of years. Professor Kristina Douglass of Penn State University and team studied 18 000 year old eggshells of cassowaries, found in human shelters in New Guinea. She explains how the finds suggest that these Pleistocene people had domesticated these large flight less birds.

And six authors this week learned that their books have made the shortlist of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize for 2021. Chair of the judges, Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin, tells Gaia how the panel made their choices from the 350 books entered.

There's been much discussion about where we are going to get our energy from in the UK. Gas prices are soaring, a fire has knocked out a key power cable, and the weather has affected the amount of power that can be generated from our wind turbines. And to meet our climate targets we're going to become ever more dependent on renewable, and variable, sources. Tom Butcher from the Met Office talks about wind forecasting. He says that the winds have been between 10% and 20% lower in intensity this summer.

Professor Deborah Greaves, of Plymouth University and Head of the Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy Hub, explains how the UK is planning to increase the number of wind turbines, moving into deeper waters.

A team from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, investigating bats in caves in Northern Laos, has found bats that are infected with a coronavirus that’s genetically almost identical to the one now causing Covid in humans. Lead researcher Dr Marc Eloit discusses what they have discovered and how coronaviruses could move from bats to humans.

Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen had what looked like a very serious crash at their recent Formula 1 race in Italy. Max Verstappen’s car landed on top of Lewis Hamilton’s, but amazingly Hamilton got out unscathed. The safety features on these cars which can travel at more than 200 mph, are very sophisticated. Nick Wirth, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering who has many years experience of engineering in the F1 world, describes the Halo which saved Lewis Hamilton's life.

The Inspiration 4 mission has just blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center with 4 civilian astronauts on board. Unlike previous billionaire space flights, which have shot up far enough to officially cross into space before immediately returning, these four are going further out than the International Space Station, where they will orbit the earth for three days. BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos talks about the recent boom in space tourism, and about the Chinese rover on Mars.

The terrible Australian wildfires of the summer of 2019/20 had a devastating impact, burning across more than 18 million hectares and causing loss of life and livelihoods.. Now, it turns out the impacts stretched far beyond Australia. Climate scientists have been looking at satellite images of the vast Southern Ocean, which plays a major role in controlling the global climate, and found massive algal blooms, fertilised by debris blown thousands of kilometres from the fires. Gaia discusses the observations with Nicolas Cassar of Duke University, one of the authors on a recent Nature paper, and what they tell us about geoengineering to cool down the earth.

This month India licensed the world’s first DNA vaccine against Covid. Jonathan Ball, Professor of Virology at the University of Nottingham, is involved with a DNA vaccine that is just starting in clinical trials. He explains the pros and cons of this kind of vaccine. It could be of benefit to those who are needle phobic.

By far the biggest source of the rise comes from the release of greenhouse gases when we burn fossil fuels, like coal, oil and gas. So it’s no surprise that we need to cut back on this habit - but much of the discussions are over how much of our reserves countries can continue to burn. Earlier this year, a landmark report from the International Energy Agency said there must be an immediate end to new fossil fuel exploration, and that current production must drop by 75% by 2050 if we are to stay within emissions targets. Daniel Welsby from UCL talks to Gaia about his just published massive analysis of fuel reserves and extraction. His study doesn’t go as far as the IEA’s, but still says that 60% of the remaining oil and gas, and 90% of coal reserves must stay underground if we are to keep below that 1.5C temperature rise.

Natural gas, or methane, has a much stronger effect on temperature than carbon dioxide, but because it doesn’t last very long in the atmosphere before converting into carbon dioxide, it’s been a bit overlooked by governments. Two recent reports, from the IPCC and the UN, have pointed out that cutting methane emissions would be a quick win in reducing global heating. Most of our methane emissions are because of leaks from the oil and gas industry, or from landfill sites and agriculture. Gaia discusses tackling methane with Drew Shindell, of Duke University in North Carolina, the author of the Global Methane Assessment from the UN Environment Programme.

Climate change is already having an impact on life everywhere. We’ve all seen the powerful pictures of polar bears on melting ice, but global warming is also causing problems for species in the tropics. Dani Rabaiotti of the Zoological Society of London explains how climate change is having an impact on African wild dogs, a species which is already endangered.

This week the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority A recommended that the time limit for using frozen eggs, sperm and embryos, should be extended from 10 years to 55 years. Shahnaz Akbar, a fertility expert at Luton and Dunstable Hospital, explains what has changed in the science of preserving eggs from when the law was originally passed.

Also in the programme:

How food waste may help with the development of a more sustainable generation of batteries, with Imperial College chemist Magda Titirici. Professor Titirici was awarded this year's Kavli Medal by the Royal Society for her research on new sustainable energy materials.

The bones of people who died in 79 AD during the eruption of Vesuvius have revealed in extraordinary detail what the citizens of Herculaneum ate, and how the diets of men differed from those of women in the town. With bioarchaeologist Oliver Craig of the University of York.

How the babbling of baby bats is comparable to babbling in human babies. Both are about learning the skills of communication, according to zoologist Ahana Fernandez of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.

Also in the programme:

Is the practise of feeding the birds in our gardens creating losers as well as winners, and causing the numbers of some woodland birds to decline? Conservation biologist Alexander Lees visits Victoria in her garden to discuss the question, and reveal the truly dark side of the Great Tit.

A new study of the impact of street lighting on nocturnal insects shows that the local impacts on moths can be dramatic. According to entomologist Douglas Boyes, street lights deter female moths from laying their eggs and make them more vulnerable to predation by bats. He's found that artificially illuminated areas are home to half the number of moth caterpillars compared to dark areas.

Also in the programme: The search for storage capacity underground for all the hydrogen we'll need for a net zero carbon economy, with geoscientists Katriona Edlmann and Eike Thaysen of the University of Edinburgh.

How the 1987 Montreal Protocol (which phased out CFCs) saved us from an even worse climate crisis than the one we're facing, with climate scientist Paul Young of the University of Lancester.

Probiotics may protect corals from death by bleaching, with marine biologist Raquel Peixoto of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia.

Also in the programme:

Immunological evidence to support a covid vaccine booster programme in the UK, with virologist Jonathan Ball of the University of Nottingham.

Faecal transplants that rejuvenated the memory and the brains of elderly mice, with neuroscientist John Cryan of University College Cork.

A website for the public to report their sightings and upload their videos of ball lightning, with electrical engineer Karl Stephan of Texas State University, San Marcos.

Forget lab rats, how about lab cats? Leslie Lyons from the University of Missouri says we’ve long neglected the genetic similarities between cats and humans. And that understanding how the diseases we share in common affect our feline friends will help with treatments for ourselves.

If you take lots of medicines wouldn’t it be great to have them all in one pill? That’s the aim of Ricky Wildman’s project at Nottingham University – a personalised pill that can be 3D printed to order,

And we look at the life of Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, famed for his beautifully simple explanations of complex science and also his love of a good argument.

Genetic engineering, the promise and perils, is the subject of a new series with Matthew Cobb on Radio 4, called Genetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares. He tells us about the dilemmas now faced by researchers who on the one hand have the potential to send terminator genes into malaria spreading mosquitoes – but who are also aware of the huge unknowns surrounding the release of such technology.

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Hayley Fowler has been researching the links between weather systems, climate change and the heat and floods we are currently experiencing.

And could we reduce the incidence of SARS-Cov2 with a different vaccination strategy? Julia Gog has modelled different scenarios, as the number of infections continues to rise. A strategy to target those who are mixing the most, whether socially or through their employment, may be more effective than one targeting the most vulnerable.

There’s a question over which type of test is best to use for mass testing. At the moment many of us do lateral flow tests at home. Although they give instant results their accuracy has been shown to be strongly linked to how well the tests are conducted - hence the need to back up any positive findings with the more accurate PCR test. PCR takes longer and needs sophisticated lab equipment. However a compromise could be to use RT Lamp tests, they are accurate, give results in around 20 minutes, do require a very basic lab, but without the expensive equipment of PCR. A number of RT lamp tests have now been developed for SARS-Cov2. Kevin Fong has been to see the developers of one of them, the OxLAMP test.

And with the lifting of restrictions how are you going to judge your own personal risk from Covid? It’s a question that interests philosopher of science Eleanor Knox. She says government mandates on mask wearing and social distancing have allowed us to avoid tricky questions around our own potential risk from the virus and risks our own behaviour might pose to loved ones. Now there’s a lot more to think about in terms of balancing our desires to return to some semblance of normality while levels of Covid infection continue to rise.

One area that’s come into sharp focus over lockdown is exercise. Some people have been unable to exercise due to Covid restrictions while others have discovered a whole new interest in moving more. A new book ‘Move’ by Caroline Williams explores the links between brain function, evolution and movement. She says staying active is a fundamental part of what makes us human.

The Royal Society Summer Exhibition has just opened. And this year its an opportunity for more people to get involved than ever before – the event is taking place online. There are a number of workshops and interactive games. We speak to a couple of the participants. Caroline Orr from Teesside University talks about research using supercomputers to make microbes produce a range of biofuels that could replace petrol and diesel, and Tony Peyton from Manchester University tells us how the electromagnetic properties of materials are bring harnessed to improve mine clearance in former war zones.

And we go to another exhibition, the Royal College of Art graduate show, and ask the age old question - is it art ? Students Kukbong Kim and Bahareh Saboktakin show us their work with recycled concrete and 3d printing - which looks more like science to us.

In the near future domestic gas boilers may be replaced by heat pumps. However, a district heating system in London is already installing the pumps in a scheme which should see 50% reductions in their carbon emissions. We visited the Citigen site to see how the plan would work, and discussed the potential for domestic heat pump roll out with Simon Evans from Carbon Brief.

And why watermelons, wildflowers and pollinating insects can benefit from less attention. Evidence from Florida on how reducing methods associated with intensive farming chime with initiatives here in Britain to replace grass verges with banks of wildflowers. Researcher John Ternest picks up the story.

A major new trial has been announced into the effectiveness of the drug Ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19. There's controversy surrounding the drug, which was designed to kill parasitic worms. It showed some promise against the virus in very limited lab studies. For many reluctant to vaccinate these studies seemed to suggest an alternative way to treat the virus. However, regulatory bodies disagree. It's hoped the new study and a range of other wide scale trials will give a more rounded view on the potential if any for Ivermectin as a Covid 19 treatment. Jack Goodman from the BBC News Misinformation Unit has been looking at the controversy surrounding Ivermectin. Scientists researching it have been subject to abuse and in some countries it has been rolled out as a treatment despite the lack of evidence on its effectiveness.

There have been reports of a number of cases of Black Fungus in patients with Covid-19 in India. What exactly is this unusual but life threatening fungal growth? Dr Nitin Gupta, Assistant Professor in Infectious Diseases at Kasturba Medical College in Manipal, South West India, explains why this previously rare infection is now on the rise..

Gaia Vince talks to Elena Zavala of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany about how she and her team have managed to extract DNA from samples of earth from the Denisovan cave in Siberia. Some years ago fragments of bone recovered from the cave revealed a new hominin species, called the Denisovans. Now DNA analysis of the layers of earth built up over hundreds of thousands of years are painting a picture of the vast variety of early people who used the cave, which included Neanderthals and early humans as well as Denisovans.

Once we've breathed the coronavirus into our lungs, how does it spread through our bodies, despite our immune defences? Remarkably, scientists have managed to film the virus in the act of infecting lung cells and spreading between them. They then added some antibodies and watched what happened. Alex Sigal of the Africa Health Research Institute tells Gaia Vince what they saw.

The UK government has pledged to plant some 2 billion trees to help get us to net zero – and that’s an awful lot of plastic casing to be littering the countryside with. A team at the Institute of Making at UCL decided to look at the overall environmental impact of these tree protectors. This is quite a complicated calculation as it involves looking at the entire life cycle of the trees and the plastic, including the carbon and water and energy used. Gaia finds out from Charnette Chau, the life cycle assessment expert on the team, and Professor Mark Miodownik what they found. Across the US, people have been reporting ponds full of dead tadpoles: mass mortality events. It seems that a parasitic infection previously associated with disease in marine oyster populations, may be to blame: severe Perkinsea Infection. The big fear is that it will spread further, to places like Panama in Central America, which has seen such a drastic decline in frog populations that researchers have begun captive breeding some species as “assurance populations” to protect them from extinctions. Tom Richards, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at the University of Oxford, reports on what he discovered when he went to Panama to see if the infection had reached its precious hoppers.

Dengue fever is a widespread tropical disease caused by a virus spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Until now, there’s also been no way of preventing dengue aside from trying to get rid of mosquitoes, which is pretty tricky. Gaia hears from the World Mosquito Programme’s Dr Katie Anders about some positive news from a large trial in Yogyakarta in Indonesia, where mosquitoes infected with a harmless bacteria called Wollbachia, were deliberately released. The researchers found a 77% drop in cases of dengue in the areas where the infected mosquitoes were released. Hospitalisations were 84% lower.

This week the first attempt to map algal blooms globally has been released, and it also charts how blooms have changed over the last thirty years. And the news isn’t good. Henrik Enevoldsen of the UN who’s based at the University of Copenhagen, has spent thirty years studying these phenomena and he explains how the growth in aquaculture has had an impact on the rise of algal blooms in some parts of the world.

Nearly twenty years after Concorde last flew, a company called Boom is promising to bring back supersonic passenger flights in the next few years. They say it’ll all be environmentally sustainable. The company has sold some new jets to the US airline United. Gaia talks to Dr Guy Gratton, an engineer and pilot at Cranfield University, about how green supersonic flight can be.

We know that obesity runs in families but because parents and children live in the same environment and eat the same food it is difficult to tease out how much of this relationship is inherited genetically. Researchers at Cambridge University have been working with the Children of the 90s cohort of people based in Bristol, and they’ve have found that a mutation in a single gene drives obesity in some families. The gene in question is called MC4R. Professor Stephen O’Rahilly, who is one of the researchers, explains that the mutation is remarkably common and has a significant impact on individuals, from an early age.

Last week, researchers released the biggest and most detailed map of how matter and dark matter have spread across the universe since the Big Bang. The problem, is that the dark matter is more smoothly distributed than expected according to Einstein’s theory. Some are now saying physics is broken. Was Einstein wrong? Astrophysicist Catherine Heymans, who is a Dark Universe expert, and has just been appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland, the first woman to hold the role, talks about the implications of the new map of dark matter and her plans to encourage the public to appreciate the night sky.

For the first time figurative rock art over 4000 years old has been discovered in Scotland. Up till now all that’s been found have been marks such as cups and rings. The new images are detailed portraits of deer, with antlers, on a capstone of a burial mound, or cairn, in Kilmartin Glen on the west coast. It’s a well-studied archaeological site but the rock art hadn’t been spotted before. Gaia asked Tertia Barnett, Principal Investigator for Scotland’s Rock Art Project at Historic Environment Scotland, about who may have produced this art.

One of the biggest impacts on the earth’s flora today is of course influenced by our meat consumption. The BBC’s Melanie Abbott has been to see a new exhibition opening at Oxford University’s Musuem of Natural History. Produced in association with the University’s Livestock, Environment and People research programme, this exhibition “Meat the Future”, seeks to raise awareness of the issues for health and the environment around eating – or not eating meat - and is open until January 2022. At the same time, a travelling interactive experience called Meat Your Persona will be moving around the UK, starting in Cardiff. And there's an online interactive questionnaire you can try from home. See the links at the bottom of the BBC Inside Science programme page.

Researchers in the US are working on devices that might be able to connect with people’s brains to allow them to manipulate robotic or digital devices to regain abilities lost to disease or injury. As Dr Frank Willett and Prof Krishna Shenoy - both at Stanford University’s neural prosthetics translational laboratory - describe in the journal Nature, they have managed to create a device that allows one patient to create text using just thought. Rather than trying to guide a cursor over a keyboard, their technique works by learning which letter the patient is thinking of drawing by hand, despite being unable to wield a pen.

And Jacob Dunn, associate professor at Anglia Ruskin University describes his team’s work which finds that tamarin monkeys will use the “accent” of another species when they enter its territory to help them better understand one another and potentially avoid conflict. His paper, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, describes findings in the Amazon rainforest near Manaus where a species that ordinarily use quite distinct long distance calls subtly change their call to sound more like a neighbouring species’ equivalent call when they are sharing the same area of forest. Not so much an aggressive intrusion as a polite lingua franca, it may be that the shared understanding reduces unnecessary and costly territorial fights between the two species.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield

Scientists in Vienna have been continuing to look at the rare blood clots associated with the AZ Covid-19 vaccination. Paul Knoebl describes to Vic his paper describing the diagnosis and successful treatment of a patient who developed a fever whilst skiing six days after taking it. Whilst the side effect is still condsidered incredibly rare, Paul tells Vic that a relatively simple cure - after early diagnosis - should remove any lingering hesitancy of taking a vaccine.

The Science Museum reopened this week with a new exhibition looking at the science of Carbon Capture. Inside Science took former Formula One technical champ Paddy Lowe to have a look round. He is interested in Carbon Capture because he has started a new company - Zero Petroleum - that aims to do nothing less than kick start a synthetic (hydrocarbon) fuel revolution.

Using carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere, he and colleague Prof Nilay Shah believe they can use renewable electricity and other feedstocks to tranform captured carbon into fuels, and create a whole new petrochemical supply that could close the loop on the industrial revolution - especially for those energy uses where batteries could not currently work, such as jet engines and heavy remote machinery.

Meanwhile, up in the north east of England, Charlotte Adams of the UK's Coal Authority describes progress on measures to convert disued Coal mines to geothermal heatpumps, providing reliable steady heating for new-build homes across many parts of the UK, and taking strain off the elictircal grid.

Presenter Victoria Gill Producer Alex Mansfield

Jamie Woodward takes Vic Gill wading in the River Tame in Greater Manchester to show some of the sites they studied, while co-author Rachel Hurley talks from Norway on the wider global questions of where microplastics get into our environment and what harm they do.

The origin and location of the radioactive pollution that so devastated the lives and livelihoods of those affected by the Chernobyl disaster 35 years ago is not a mystery. But recently it has become apparent that in one small inaccessible room within the massive sarcophagus at the ill-fated power station, the nuclear fission still happening is getting slightly faster.

As Neil Hyatt describes to Vic, the reason may be because the new concrete shell, unlike its predecessor, is doing a better job at keeping the rain out, and nothing to worry about for the time being.

Meanwhile, Jim Smith and colleagues have been trying to demonstrate that agricultural products could help the besieged economy of surrounding areas. Using apples grown in regions where investment is illegal, they have developed a spirit drink - called Atomik - with which they hope to demonstrate a viable market outside of the Ukraine, perhaps providing jobs and export business, and maybe even useful profit with which to help the area.

And finally, Dr Kim Dienes describes from Swansea the health and psychological benefits of something so many hundreds of millions of people in the world have been missing this year: a nice hug.

Presenter: Vic Gill Producer: Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer: Samara Linton.

In keeping with the theme of clues from the past, Cardiff University academics have been studying the remains of crew who drowned on King Henry VIII’s favourite ship, the Mary Rose. As it turns out, Tudor England was more ethnically diverse than we previously thought.

Victoria Gill speaks with University of Oxford researcher Dr Mehreen Datoo about a promising new malaria vaccine which was shown to be 77% effective in early trials. And Dr Nir Grossman, explains how his team at Imperial College London has been synchronising electrical pulses with rogue brain waves to treat tremors.

A new report that has measured the state of over 200 000 of the world's glaciers has just been published. Bob McNabb of the University of Ulster explains why it's not good news as glaciers are melting at a faster pace than before. He says it could have a particular impact on people who live in low lying areas.

At the start of April cases of the South African variant of SARS-Cov 2 were found in a number of London boroughs. In order to stop the further spread of these variants, a programme of surge testing was announced. It’s just come to an end and Marnie finds out from Public Health England’s regional director for London, Professor Kevin Fenton, how it worked.

Birds aren’t very good at adapting to human additions to the landscape, particularly tall buildings. Could extra sonic elements - so-called acoustic lighthouses - help? From William and Mary University in Virginia, Timothy Boycott and John Swaddle joined Marnie to explain how these can make a difference.

Clothes moths do enormous damage to our jumpers and carpets, Marnie finds out how best to protect your clothes. And we hear from Mark Miodownik about the right to repair.

How have the restrictions due to Covid 19 affected how we grieve? Professor Claire White, an expert in grief and mourning, is investigating what it means to the grief process when the traditional ways of acknowledging death are changed.

Sascha Fruholz has the unenviable task of listening to people scream all day, but he has made some surprising discoveries about which types of scream people are best able to identify.

Mountain gorillas are among the most impressive and powerful primates alive today. Living in the dense forests of eastern and central Africa, they are able to communicate with other gorillas a mile away by cupping their hands and beating their chests. Primatologist Edward Wright and colleagues have been studying male silverback gorillas and explains how gorillas use chest beating to attract potential mates and suss out competitors.

And Professor Corey Bradshaw from Adelaide, South Australia sheds light on a more fearsome animal: sharks. His research has investigated the likelihood of shark attacks around the Australian coast into the future, up to 2066, and asked what would happen to those figures if everyone wore an electrical emitter that interferes with the sharks electrical senses. He finds that shark attacks are remarkably low already, but these emitters could reduce bites by up to 3000 over the next 50 years.

Super fans around the world have learned to speak fluent Klingon, a fictional language originating from Star Trek. In a quest to understand the science behind these languages often dismissed as gobbledygook, Gaia Vince has been speaking to some of the linguists responsible for creating these languages. It’s time for her to relax the tongue, loosen those jaw muscles and wrap her head around the scientific building blocks embedded in language and what languages like Klingon tell us about prehistoric forms of communication.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Rory Galloway

Native oysters help to filter coastal waters of the UK of pollutants including nitrates, while also providing habitat for other species. But their numbers have declined by 95% throughout their British range. Now, the Zoological Society of London is placing thousands of mature oysters under pontoons in marinas across the UK to let them breed, and encourage the return of the species to their former numbers.

And the new coronavirus mutations that are worrying us all have been found to affect mice in experimental studies at the Pasteur Institute in France. Marnie asks if this change to the infectivity of the new variants has implications for human health and our ability to combat the virus.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Rory Galloway

‘UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 were 51% below 1990 levels, according to a new Carbon Brief analysis. This means the UK is now halfway to meeting its target of “net-zero” emissions by 2050.’ Simon Evans explains his predictions from the report, outlines how we define net zero and what is required from the next few decades to ensure that the UK meets its 2050 goal.

Much of Europe is attempting to replace fossil fuels, transforming transport and domestic heating to run on electrical alternatives, such as batteries and heat pumps. But where electrification isn’t possible or cost effective, such as in many homes, an alternative is still needed. Natural gas is responsible for over 30% of the UK’s total carbon emissions. Hydrogen would, theoretically, appear to be the perfect alternative, as combustion only produces water as a by product. Gaia discusses the options with hydrogen strategist, Dr Jenifer Baxter, and Dr Angela Needle of Cadent explains the pilot projects the company is carrying out to introduce 20% hydrogen into gas going into our homes.

Last Friday, Fragradalsfjall began erupting for the first time in 800 years. The volcanic system is located in the West of Iceland close to the capital city of Reyjkavik. Dr Evgenia Ilynskaya of Leeds University has been out measuring the gases emitted by the eruption and she describes the experience of working on an active volcanic system.

There are other ways of studying this early development that don’t involve growing an actual embryo, and that’s by using just a few stem cells from it. These are cells that haven’t yet specialised into any type of body cell and so they have the potential to become any cell type. Researchers can grow these cells into structures that resemble embryos, although they could never survive inside a woman’s womb, and these artificial embryos aren’t subject to the 14 day rule. Gaia talks to Dr Naomi Moris of the Crick Institute in London about her work on what she calls gastruloids.

Whaling was a huge industry in the 19th century, and populations of sperm whales plummeted, as hunters sought the oil in their heads that was used everywhere for lighting. The whalers who were hunting in the North Pacific kept meticulous records that have been recently made public. Biologists have been studying them, and picking out unexpected changes in the patterns of whale capture. Dr Luke Rendell of St Andrews University explains how he and his colleagues worked out that that the whales seemed to be learning from each other how to avoid the boats.

A piece of intricate Ancient Greek engineering called the Antikythera mechanism, that was found by sponge divers in 1901 in the Mediterranean, has fascinated many people. Last week a team from University College London published the latest explanation of how the device worked. Science writer Jo Marchant herself became so obsessed with the mechanism that she published a book on it called Decoding the Universe and she talks to Gaia about the object and what the new research tells us about how the Greeks understood the cosmos two thousand years ago.

Since the late 1980s conservationists have used captive breeding to prevent the extinction of North America’s only native ferret species, the black footed ferret (Mustela nigripes). Now, an individual called WIlla, who died without leaving any offspring over 30 years ago has been cloned. Her genes represent 300% of the current genetic diversity of the species, and could help boost the chances of these animals. Dr Bridget Baumgartner works with one of the teams that took part in the successful cloning project, she describes how this novel process could bolster and prop up the genetic diversity of the dwindling population.

How does one get a closer look at nutrient cycling and water temperature in marine Antarctic conditions? You could always recruit some of the local inhabitants, elephant seals! That’s exactly what Yixi Zheng at the University of East Anglia did. Her furry research assistants have revealed that surface water temperatures around the ice shelves and glaciers of Antarctica are warmer than expected in winter, and this holds implications for nutrient cycling and the productivity of the southern ocean.

And finally, after an ancient rock seized the attention of the residents of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, Professor Sara Russel discusses the rarity of finding meteors here on earth, let alone finding one early in the morning sat on your driveway. We hear what the nearly 400g of space rock that's been found this week could reveal about the origins of our solar system.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Rory Galloway This programme was made in association with the Open University.

Roland Pease reports on the secret journey made by one of the most valuable of human fossils, Little Foot, from Johannesburg to Oxfordshire, where it was scanned at the Diamond Light Source facility – one of the most powerful X-ray machines in the world. He talks to some of the main players about the hush hush voyage, and what they’re hoping to discover.

There are few things more intriguing than an unopened letter, but what about one from 300 years ago? The Brienne Collection is a Postmaster's trunk containing more than 2000 letters sent to the Hague between 1680 and 1706, and more than 600 are still unopened. In the days before envelopes, people used elaborate folding techniques to secure letters, even tearing off a bit of paper and using that to sew the letter shut, effectively locking it. It makes reading those letters very tricky indeed, especially as antiquarians don't want to risk opening them. Instead, researchers hatched a plan to scan the letters in their untouched, still folded state, and generate a 3D image of their insides of such detail it could be used by an algorithm to unfold it virtually. David Mills from Queen Mary University London tells Gaia about how he used a microtomography scanner to peek inside the unopened letters. Presented by Gaia Vince.

Game-shooting, for sport and food, has traditionally used the toxic metal lead for ammunition. In other parts of the world its use has been banned for the dangers to the human food chain and to the pollution in natural environments, and even deaths of wildfowl from poisoning. But not so in the UK. A year ago, as reported on Inside Science at the time, the shooting community announced a voluntary five year transition period to alternative shot materials. But researchers including profs Rhys Green and Debbie Pain from Cambridge University have discovered that a year on, little seems to have changed. Gathering game sold for food across the UK, they found that all but one bird in their sample of 180 contained lead shot.

Meanwhile, up in the Himalayas, Smithsonian scientist Dr Sahas Barva was enjoying the scenery on a cold day off in 2014 when he saw and heard a tiny Goldcrest, thriving in temperatures of -10C. Wondering how such a tiny thing could keep its body insulated, he decided to investigate feathers, and utilizing the huge numbers of specimens in the Smithsonian’s collection he found some striking commonalities in the thermal properties and adaptations of birds everywhere. The higher up they live, the fluffier their coats.

Presented by Victoria Gill

Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in association with The Open University.

So Vic Gill invites you to join her and current Curiosity and future Rosalind Franklin (ESA’s 2023 Rover) team scientists in nervously awaiting the signal of success.

Dr Susanne Schwenzer was so tense during Curiosity’s final approach in 2012 that she managed to draw blood from her own hand from clutching her mobile phone too hard. BBC Inside Science expects nothing less this time round. Dr Peter Fawdon has been part of the team seand examining the landing site for ESA’s Martian lander and Rover, currently slated to launch in 2022. The project has had a complicated history, having been delayed several times. But with so much at stake, it’s worth getting right.

Meanwhile, at Liverpool University, computer scientist Dr Maya Wardeh and virologist Dr Marcus Blagrove have been collaborating to see if Machine Learning and AI can help predict which mammalian species are more likely to harbour the next big coronavirus. Pitting traits and genomes, species similarities, lifestyles and ecosystems of mammals and viruses, they highlight in a paper published in Nature Communications some of the potentially most potent combinations where different coronaviruses could meet and spawn a new breakout. Not just looking for the more quotidian viral mutations the world is increasingly and unfortunately aware of, they have been looking instead for those species where something called homologous recombination between two different viruses, producing a third completely novel type, may occur. It turns out there are many possibilities beyond just bats, which are highly suspected of being the crucible in which SARS-CoV2 was smelted.

To spot whatever comes next we should keep an eye on camels, rabbits, palm civets and even hedgehogs, according to the algorithm.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in Association with the Open University.

As two robotic missions from UAE and China arrive at Mars , and a third from NASA arrives next week, UK astronaut Tim Peake talks of the international collaboration in Mars research that is to come. And continuing BBC Inside Science's look at some of the issues facing COP26 delegates to Glasgow this autumn, Victoria is joined by cryosphere scientist Dr Anna Hogg,

Anna studies – sometimes from space - how polar and Greenland ice sheets are melting and shifting as our climate warms. But those giant volumes of ice and concomitant rising sea levels might not be the only threat to people’s lives. It may be that the recent deadly flash flood in India was a result of a swiftly melting Himalayan glacier.

The Montreal treaty - prohibiting the production of CFCs to allow the man-made polar hole in the Ozone layer identified back in the 1980s to repair - has long been cited as the classic example of an effective international agreement to protect earth's environment. But just a few years ago in 2018 Luke Western and colleagues identified not just that CFC production was suddenly and unexpectedly rising, but that it was mainly emanating from an area in eastern China. It was speculated then that their use in foams for buildings was happening illicitly on a large scale. This week, they happily announce that those emissions seem to have ceased, and that the target of a healthy ozone layer is back on track.

The oceans are, since man first took to the waves, a noisy place. In a comprehensive paper published last week in the journal Science Carlos Duarte and colleagues describe how huge an impact the many anthropogenic noises that echo for miles across the sea beds have on virtually all aquatic life. He argues that it is one stressor, rather like CFCs, that we could and should take swift and effective action to address, that the time for that is ripe, and that doing so will see a swift rebound in many aquatic ecosystems. Humans are not naturally adapted to hear the noise underwater, but to illustrate the point, co-author digital artist Jana Winderen has made an acoustic demonstration for your benefit, of quite how noisy neighbours we are

Also, for listeners on BBC Sounds, the BBC's Roland Pease gives an update on where and how scientists think the covid-19 epidemic began, after a WHO team of scientists report on their recent mission to Wuhan and the infamous market. As Roland and WHO delegate Peter Daszak surmise, we still don't quite know, but it wasn't in a lab.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in Association with The Open University.

Trees play a large part in the biosystems of the planet, and replanting them is often touted as a solution to many of the carbon challeneges of the next century. But a paper and forthcoming conference hosted by Kew points out just how carefully reforestation - let alone afforestation - must be conducted.

Kew tree expert Kate Hardwick tells Victoria about their 10 golden rules of planting trees.

In a forest in Borneo, trees have been planted that will extract the high levels of Nickel from the local soil. It is hoped that the biomass from the trees can then be used to harvest the nickel. It is an attempt to commercialize successfully the dreams of "phytomining" - finding specific crops or traits in plants that can act to "hyperaccumulate" minerals and metals from soils. BBC Inside Science's Harrison Lewis reports how, after some intrepid botany, the idea might just now be bearing heavy fruit.

But finding the plants that do some of what you want them to does not mean they should be planted just anywhere. Lulu Zhang from United Nations University in Dresden, Germany tells Victoria about the Chinese experience of a few decades ago when the Black Lotus tree seemed to be just the ticket for newly foresting huge areas of China to stabilize and neutralize soils. Unfortunately, nobody realized how thirsty the monocultured forest would be, and the thirsty trees deprived the area of much of the rainwater from humans and agriculture.

Meanwhile this week scientists have published work looking at how even the noise from traffic on the roads can disrupt animal behaviour. Chris Templeton of Pacific University in Oregon has been studying how some bird's cognititve abilities can be affected. And Adam Bent describes work at Anglia Ruskin University into how crickets' mating choices can be adversely affected by recordings of the A14 near Cambridge.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in association with The Open University

Prof Robin Shattock's team at Imperial College are still working on their vaccine technology - called 'Self Amplifying RNA' or saRNA. A little bit behind their well financed corporate colleagues, this week they announced that instead of pressing ahead with a phase III trial, they will instead look to developing possible boosters and alternative targets just in case more and more serious mutations happen. But as Prof Anna Blakney explains from her lab at University of British Columbia, the possibilities of saRNA don't stop with coronaviruses.

Researchers in the journal PNAS report this week a new theory as to when and where dogs were first domesticated by humans, and suggest that they accompanied the first humans across the Bering straight into America. Inside Science's Geoff Marsh has a sniff around.

And Dr Dean D'Souza from Anglia Ruskin University describes in Science Advances work he has done looking at certain kinds of development in children who grow up in bilingual households. His work suggests a slightly faster and keener observation of detailed changes in visual cues, and that this seems to be a trait that survives into adulthood.

Presented by Alex Lathbridge

Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in Association with The Open University

Researchers in Japan and Liverpool have been investigating cat's prediliction for the herbs Catnip and Silver Vine. It turns out that there may well be a deep evolutionary reason they have evolved to love rubbing it in their fur so much: a key ingredient is a good mosquito repellent. As Professors Masao Miyazaki and Jane Hurst describe. It could help keep the mozzies away but you might end up being tailed by cats.

And researcher Iestyn Woolway of the European Space Agency Climate Group, at Didcot UK, describes his work modelling the world's lakes' reaction to a warming climate over coming decades. It's not very comforting, with increased duration and intensity of what he calls "Lake Heatwaves".

Presented by Alex Lathbridge Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in associataion with the Open University.

Note: This podcast has been edited since the original broadcast to prevent any possible inference that the Tuskegee syphilis study involved the deliberate infection of subjects. In the Tuskegee study, African American patients who were already infected with syphilis had diagnosis and treatment deliberately withheld from them in order to observe the progression of the lethal disease over several decades (even after a perfectly simple treatment - penicillin - became available).

Of all the ways the UK can now diverge from the EU, DEFRA is currently holding an open consultation on whether to tweak the current GMO regulations so as not to include CRISPR-style Genetic Editing. The EU is coincidentally looking at the same issue. John Innes Centre's Janneke Balk works on making strains of wheat that have a higher level of iron for nutritional fortification. Interim head of the Roslin Institute in Scotland Bruce Whitelaw thinks developing disease resistance in farm animals is a potentially profitable area. Both agree the GMO regulations should be more tightly specified to bring clarity and opportunity for innovation.

In Iceland, Kari Stefansson's company Decode Genetics analyze the genetic codes of most of the population of Iceland. This has allowed them to look at the parents, siblings, and offspring of identical twins, and identify how early genetic differences between them develop. And it's very early indeed. Given that identical twins studies are so often used to address issues surrounding the so-called Nature-vs-Nurture debate, the findings, published in the Journal Nature, are striking.

Presenter by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in association with the Open University.

Clinical Epidemiologist Dr Deepthi Gurdasani and Immunoligist Prof Danny Altmann of Imperial College describe to Marnie how evidence, experience and hunch are combining in the face of the covid crisis, and quite what we know, what we don't and what we could, about this nationwide experiment.

Increasingly, ecologists wanting to monitor remote areas are relying on such things as solar powered audio recorders to measure biodiversity in the sounds of the wild. But how to scrutinize years and years worth of 24 hour, multi-site recordings? Sarab Sethi and colleagues have not only been leaving solar-powered Raspberry Pi recorders out in the jungles of Borneo, they've been using machine learning techniques to look out for species and biodiversity changes from afar. You can listen to some of the Borneo work at the SAFE acoustic website (link on BBC page below).

Presented by Marnie Chesterton

Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in collaboration with the Open University.

From advances in genetics that have brought personalized medicine to reality, and revealed the ghosts of ancestral human species never before identified, to quantum computing lessons that hint at the nature of existence and causation throughout the universe, it has been an interesting time. New observational technologies have revealed fresh windows in time and space. And all of it has been reported by BBC Inside Science.

But what of the next decade?

Programme may contain traces of informed speculation, but (almost) no references to Covid.

Presented by Adam Rutherford Produced by Melanie Brown

Made in association with The Open University.

We journey to the moon and beyond to discuss the many missions that have been blasting and grabbing bits of space rock to bring back to earth and tackle the ongoing debate about whether signs of life have been found on Venus.

Back down on earth, this year could be one of, if not the, hottest years on record, with particularly high temperatures in the Arctic Circle. What might a warming world mean for ice-shelf collapse in Antarctica and how are governments responding? We discuss Joe Biden’s presidency, UK carbon emissions and what China’s recent announcements of net zero by 2060 might mean for the future of the planet.

And despite limitations on travel this past year, exciting discoveries in the dinosaur world have nonetheless continued with what is believed to be the first aquatic dinosaur. The detection of soft shell eggs is also changing understandings of how dinosaurs reared their offspring.

And if that wasn’t enough, Dr Adam Rutherford challenges our experts to predict what big science stories might lie on the horizon in 2021.

This week in the House of Commons Matt Hancock announced a new variant in the Covid virus, discovered to be spreading through the south east of the UK. As Professor Jonathan Ball of the University of Nottingham describes, there have been many slight mutations and changes to the DNA in the virus since it first emerged, and most are of no added danger. But it is important that new ones - and new combinations of them - are tracked through collaborations and networks such as COG-UK, who provide an almost real-time track of the spread of new mutations. The new one this week is of some interest as it involves a slight change to the protein of the binding area on the virus, but much lab work remains to be done,

Is an angry face always an angry face? A paper in the Journal Nature this week uses Machine Learning to scan millions of videos of faces on YouTube to shed light on an old problem - the universality of facial expressions in people. The authors - working with Google - suggest that broadly speaking, in a number of contexts such as weddings and sporting events, people in much of the world tend to pull the same faces. But as Lisa Feldman Barrett - who wrote an accompanying commentary in the same journal - suggests, the way Machine Learning approaches in this area require very human perceptions to train the algorithm in the first place, means care must be taken before inferring too much.

This year BBC Inside Science has been showcasing some of the mystery objects the Science Museum has uncovered in the course of moving its collections to a new home in Wroughton, Wiltshire. Jessica Bradford talks to Alex about our next one. If you have any ideas what it might be for, you can let them know by dropping a note or memory to [email protected]

Presented by Alex Lathbridge Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in Association with The Open University

As the first COVID vaccines are delivered this week hastening the first glimmers of a return to normal life, is it too soon to be thinking about other future threats to humanity? James Arbuthnot, chair of a House of Lords select committee tasked to look at risk planning, and fellow committee member Martin Rees discuss their meeting this week and the assessment of the scientists invited to share their interpretations of future threats like AI, solar flares and volcanic eruptions. They are inviting evidence submissions until January 28th 2021.

The Millennium Seed Bank was setup as a safety net to protect and conserve rare, threatened and useful wild plants for generations to come. As it celebrates 20 years of operation it can claim to host 16 per cent of the world’s bankable flora in its sturdy underground vaults. Alex heads down to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Wakehurst, Sussex, and meets the team coaxing seeds to life to check their viability or using cryopreserving on those seeds less convivial to being preserved. One key project is protecting farmed crops that have lost genetic diversity over time and are at risk from climate change. Through collecting and researching the wild ‘cousins’ of our modern day crops Wakehurst, Kew Gardens and its partners are researching and harnessing the resilient traits found in these less pampered crop relatives.

Treezilla.org is a citizen science project designed to increase understanding of all the urban tress in the UK. Scientists, together with the public, are getting their tape measures out and cataloguing the trees to better ascertain how they influence the environment in towns and cities across the UK, to map their ages, species, sizes and health, and to help future planners to put the knowledge to work. Kate Hand is a researcher at the Open University who is looking at ways to increase our knowledge of the values trees bring to our urban environments – specifically through the lens of Milton Keynes which, it transpires, is quite the urban arboretum.

This week google's Deep Mind team presented results of their latest efforts at cracking the 50 year old problem of Protein Folding. AlphaFold has built on previous success at predicting the 3D structures of biological proteins from just knowing the sequence of amino acids of which it is made. It is a computational problem that thousands of researchers around the world have been trying to solve for decades. There are millions of different proteins doing all the work in living cells, but simply knowing what their constituent chemicals are is not enough to understand how they are shaped, and therefore how they work.

Scientists are optimistic that solving the problem will herald a new era in medicine, agriculture and even sustainable recycling. Prof John Moult, founding chair of CASP - the international body that monitors progress in the field, tells of the remarkable breakthrough being discussed this week.

Whilst China is trying to bring back samples of the moon this week, a much longer-lived space mission to an asteroid hopes this weekend to return samples of the earliest bits of the solar system to earth. Hyabusa 2 will complete a 6 year mission, Japanese scientists hope, this weekend when a small package of asteroid sample drops into the atmosphere above Australia on Sunday morning.

And as students across the UK prepare to make their ways home for the holidays, GP Margaret McCartney and Kavita Vedhara of Nottingham University discuss some of the challenges of fast mass covid testing and false negatives.

Presented by Alex Lathbridge Produced by Alex Mansfield and Melanie Brown.

We journey back to the cosmic ‘Dark Ages’, a period of time that we know hardly anything about. Dr Emma Chapman is an astrophysicist at Imperial College London who has written a book ‘First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time’ to throw light on this illusive chapter in the history of our universe. How close are scientists to finding the first stars?

With ambitious new government targets to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030 how ready are electric cars to fill the gap? One key area many companies are trying to improve are the batteries powering electric vehicles. Peter Bruce, professor of materials science from Oxford University and chief scientist at the Faraday Institution has been working on rechargeable lithium ion energy storage since the 1990s. He speaks with Anand about the current limitations and the most recent developments in battery research and development.

Presented by Anand Jagatia Produced by Melanie Brown

A year ago, BBC Inside Science helped launch the Big Compost Experiment, a citizen science project run by a team at UCL. They asked the public to get involved by providing information about the matter that’s rotting in compost piles around the UK. What do people think about biodegradable plastics and what actually happens to them – do they break down like they are supposed to? Anand finds out about the results so far .from Mark Miodownik, one of the creators of this project,

We travel back in time to 66 million years ago, when a massive meteorite smacked into the Gulf of Mexico bringing the reign of the dinosaurs to a cataclysmic conclusion. It was also the beginning of a new chapter in the history of life on Earth. The impact may have caused an apocalypse of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and the darkness of a nuclear winter; but it may also have created a haven for new life forms to emerge. Roland Pease has been talking to two geologists, David Kring and Tim Bralower, who have found evidence for the return of life in the crater after the carnage of the meteorite strike.

Presented by Anand Jagatia Produced by Melanie Brown

Prof Charles Cockell has been investigating how bacteria might be grown in space on lumps of asteroid to extract precious minerals, and as Kim McAllister reports, his lab is itself in orbit.

And it is just a few weeks since the UK, and several other countries, signed up to a set of bilateral agreements with the US called the Artemis Accords. These are an attempt to update previous outer space treaties on how countries - and indeed companies - might mine and use resources in space, given that no-one can currently legally claim sovereignty. As Dr Thomas Cheney of the Open University and Prof Jill Stuart of the LSE describe, the Accords have been greeted in certain quarters with some discord.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in collaboration with The Open University.

On October 30th a magnitude 7 earthquake under the Aegean Sea created devastation when it struck Turkish city of Izmir. Marnie discusses the nature of the earthquake and why this area is so seismically active with Dr Laura Gregory, a geologist at Leeds University who has studied the rocks in the region. Professor Tiziana Rossetto, an expert in earthquake engineering at UCL, talks about a recent survey and intervention she carried out with the residents of Izmir to help them prepare for earthquakes.

In the last of our interviews with the authors shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2020 Adam Rutherford meets the winner, Dr Camilla Pang. At the age of eight she was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Struggling to understand the world around her, she went in search of a blueprint or a manual that would help her navigate the curious world of human social customs. Nearly two decades on, Camilla has produced one herself, entitled: Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Editor: Deborah Cohen

Behind your eyes, above your mouth but below the brain, two 3cm saliva glands have been hiding since anatomy began. So reports a new study by Matthijs Valstar and Wouter Vogel of The Netherlands Cancer Institute. They describe to Marnie how they found these hitherto unnoticed glands, and importantly how knowledge of these will help people treated for head and neck cancers to get on with their lives in the future. It may be that radiotherapies have been inadvertantly destroying the glands in the past, leading to difficulties eating and breathing.

Bill Bryson is the latest in BBC Inside Science's flick through 2020's Royal Society Book Prize shortlisted authors. He talks to Adam Rutherford about his work, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, and his continuing awe at its complexity.

And Roland Pease reports on evidence of a return to the Dust Bowl conditions that so devastated agriculture and livelihoods in the US mid-west during the 1930s. This time, we can see the dust storms gathering from space. But that doesn't mean that intensive agriculture, extreme weather and climate change aren't combining to do what might be a re-run of some of the disastrous issues from those years.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Alex Mansfield

Produced in collaboration with The Open University.

COVID does funny things to your sense of smell: Adam got a heightened sense of smell, producer Fi totally lost her sense of smell, and Inside Science reporter, Geoff Marsh – well… his sense of smell just got weird. To find out why, Geoff called in Professors Mathew Cobb, an expert on smell at the University of Manchester, and Tim Spector from Kings College London whose symptom tracker app was instrumental in getting changes to sense of smell on the symptom list for COVID.

Presenter – Adam Rutherford

Producers– Fiona Roberts and Andrew Luck-Baker

Produced in collaboration with the Open University

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been stealing a glimpse into this year’s shortlisted contenders for the annual Royal Society’s Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Linda Scott is an Emeritus Professor from the University of Oxford and a consultant to the World Bank Group on gender economics. Her book, The ‘Double X Economy - The Epic Potential of Empowering Women ’ analyses the economics of gender inequality and the hidden economics which is foundational to the more recognised and acknowledged global economics, that is, the work - much of it unpaid - done by women.

Presenter – Adam Rutherford

Producer – Fiona Roberts

Produced in collaboration with the Open University

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

Have you ever thought about how fish arrive in a new pond or lake? Birds fly, other animals walk, or crawl, but fish are somewhat restricted to watery routes, and new lakes don’t necessarily have watery routes that fish can swim down. This question has been puzzling biologists for centuries. Andy Green, professor at the Doñana Biological Station in Spain has finally come up with the answer – a small number of fish eggs can survive in the guts of birds such as ducks.

The Royal Society’s Insight Investment Science Book Prize shortlist was announced last week. And as every year, Inside Science is previewing each of the books, and talking to the six authors in line for this most prestigious literary prize. This week, physicist and Radio 4 brethren Jim Al-Khalili talks to Adam about how his book The World According to Physics shines a light on the most profound insights revealed by modern physics.

Presenter – Adam Rutherford Producer – Fiona Roberts

Produced in partnership with The Open University

Last week the non-COVID news was all about how we’d failed yet again to halt the rate of biodiversity loss. The 2020 Living Planet Report showed that across the globe, the populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have declined on average by 68% since 1970. These declines, and the less well-documented loss of abundance of many plants and invertebrates, mean that our ecosystems are less diverse, less resilient and less able to provide the ecosystem services that we rely upon. Add to this that The Convention on Biological Diversity’s Fifth Global Biodiversity Outlook reports that we have failed to meet in full any of the 20 ‘Aichi Targets’ adopted by the world’s governments a decade ago. We haven’t reduced the loss of biodiversity, addressed the pressures, adequately tackled the underlying drivers or effectively facilitated the enabling conditions. We are not currently on track to meet the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s Vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050. If all this is making you feel depressed and despondent, be reassured that it's is not all doom and gloom, as there are still plenty of reasons for hope and optimism, according to Dr. Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at Birdlife International.

The Science Museum group look after over 7.3 million items. As with most museums, the collection you see on display when you visit is only the tip of the iceberg of the entire collection. Up until now, many of the remainder (300,000 objects) has been stored in Blythe House in London. But now the collection is being moved to a purpose-built warehouse in Wiltshire. The move is a perfect opportunity for curators to see what’s there, re-catalogue long hidden gems and to conserve and care for their treasures. But during the process they have discovered a number of unidentified items that have been mislabelled or not catalogued properly in the past and some of them are just so mysterious, or esoteric, that the Science Museum needs the aid of the public to help identify them, and their uses. This week, Jessica Bradford, the keeper of collection engagement at the Science Museum is asking Inside Science listeners if they recognise, or can shed light on the possible use of the brass object with a folding fan at the end’ in the picture above. Send suggestions to Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producer - Fiona Roberts

We learn a lot about what our ancestors got up to by visualising a scene. Take Stonehenge for example, years of detective work has ascertained that 4,000 years ago, Stonehenge was made up of an outer circle of 30 standing stones called ‘sarsens’, which surrounded five huge stone arches in a horseshoe shape. There were also two circles made of smaller ‘bluestones’ – one inside the outer circle and one inside the horseshoe. But what did it sound like if you were in the middle of all these stones in prehistoric times? Last year, acoustic engineer at the University of Salford, Trevor Cox, and his team built and measured a 1:12 acoustic scale model of Stonehenge to find out. They've now completed the full analysis of those first measurements and Trevor caught up with Adam Rutherford to find out whether knowing the acoustics of a monument can tell us anything about how it might have been used.

If you own a dog and like to calculate the equivalent human age of your pup, you might think that every year of your dog’s age equals 7 years in humans. So a one year old hound is 7 years old. Not so! As Geoff Marsh investigates - it’s much more complicated than that. Of course it is!

Presenter – Marnie Chesterton Producer – Fiona Roberts

Professor Jonathan Ball, a virologist at Nottingham University, talks Adam Rutherford through the several types of vaccine that are being explored in the effort to stop the coronavirus pandemic, and how they work. These include live attenuated virus vaccines that are genetically modified to appear to be SARS CoV 2 to the immune system, and RNA subunit vaccines that trick the body into recognising the virus. He discusses the way different vaccines work against disease, and how they trigger different types of immune response.

Before a vaccine is approved for general use it has to pass through three trial phases, and Jonathan discusses the vaccines that are already going through phase 2 and 3 in the UK.

If and when a vaccine gets approved, it needs to be produced to exacting standards and in quantities great enough to immunise the whole population. The UK Vaccine Manufacturing Taskforce was set up in May to coordinate the effort to make a vaccine. Steve Bagshaw, part of the Taskforce, explains that some vaccines have already been produced around the UK, prior to clinical approval in an effort to ensure that any approved vaccine is ready to be distributed as fast as possible to those at risk. This is unprecedented, and means the pathway to vaccine distribution could be faster than any that have gone before.

Presented by Adam Rutherford Produced by Fiona Roberts and Rory Galloway

Marnie Chesterton delights Adam Rutherford with what she has recently learned about the single-celled fungus that is yeast. She recently visited the National Collection of Yeast Cultures in Norwich, which stores hundreds of thousands of strains of yeast. She discovered that yeast is not only responsible for the production and subtle flavours of bread, yeast and chocolate, but also that some species of yeast can actually clean carbon dioxide from the air and can be used to feed livestock.

The Science Museum Group looks after over 7.3 million items. As with most museums, the objects you see on display when you visit is only the tip of the iceberg of the entire collection. Up until now, many of the remainder (300,000 objects) has been stored in Blythe House in London. But now the collection is being moved to a purpose-built warehouse in Wiltshire. The move is a perfect opportunity for curators to see what’s there, re-catalogue long hidden gems and to conserve and care for their treasures. But during the process they have discovered a number of unidentified items that have been mislabelled or not catalogued properly in the past and some of them are just so mysterious, or esoteric, that the Science Museum needs the aid of the public to help identify them, and their uses. This week, Jessica Bradford, the keeper of collection engagement at the Science Museum is asking Inside Science listeners if they recognise, or can shed light on the possible use of the ‘glassware’ in the picture above. Send suggestions to Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

Presenter – Adam Rutherford Producers – Fiona Roberts & Rory Galloway

Marnie Chesterton eavesdrops on an aquatic autopsy. We pollute the oceans with noise that has some serious effects on marine life. Remotely via video link up, Marnie witnesses a complex autopsy on the inner ear of a dolphin. She discovers how accurately the death of the sensory hair cells in a cetacean’s ear records the time of damage.

Presenter – Adam Rutherford Producer – Fiona Roberts

As the pandemic continues, we continue to try to find ways to manage it, treat the disease, detect it and cure it. As necessity is the mother of invention, we're currently witnessing some of the most intense periods of scientific innovation in the 21st century. And there have been some incredible discoveries, innovations and inventions in just the last 6 months. The Royal Academy of Engineering announced a special round of awards this week, to recognise the heroics of engineers, designers and scientists to help tackle this pandemic. Professor Raffaella Oconé is Chair of the Awards Committee at the Royal Academy of Engineering, and she told Adam about the range of much needed inventions to tackle COVID19.

The current mantra of 'test, track and trace has so far had limited success in the UK. In part because of the difficulty of testing enough people, tracking their movements and tracing the spread of the virus. By the time someone is displaying symptoms and then being one of the few people to then get a test, they may have spread the virus to many people. But scientists across the UK and abroad are beginning to realise that maybe there might be a cheaper alternative, that gives even earlier warning of a spike in infection - by detecting the virus in sewage.

Presenter: Adam Rutherford Producers: Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

Jessica Bradford, the Keeper of Collection Engagement at the Science Museum, asks for your help with another mystery object that they’ve uncovered during their recent collection move.

Roland Pease reports on the chain of interconnected faults which has stimulated Los Angeles' preparation for “the big one”, after southern California was hit by one of the biggest earthquakes in the area for decades.

Adam also asks Neil Gemmell from the University of Otago in New Zealand about the weird and wonderful Tuatara, whose colossal genome he’s just sequenced.

Presenter: Adam Rutherford Producer: Beth Eastwood

Hermes Gadelha from Bristol University used 3D microscopy, a high-speed camera and mathematics, to reconstruct the true movement of the sperm tail. Much to his amazement, sperm have a highly sophisticated way of rolling as they swim. They do this to counter the numerous irregularities in their morphology which would otherwise send them swimming in circles. In doing so, they are able to propel themselves forwards. This highly complex set of movements, seen in 3D, is obscured in 2D when sperm appear to use a symmetrical eel-like motion to swim.

Also on the programme, Adam gets an update from Mark Miodownik on the Big Compost Experiment, the citizen science project that wants to know what you compost, how you do it and, most importantly, how quickly the stuff breaks down. Mark reveals how confused participants are, about what they can compost, and explains why items marked ‘compostable’ or biodegradable’ won’t compost at home. Staying with soil, healthy soil is being lost at an alarming rate due to intensive agricultural practices. In England and Wales, a recent survey found that nearly forty percent of arable soils were degraded. Inside Science reporter Madeleine Findlay visits Andrew Neil from Rothamsted Research who has devised a new way of thinking about soil. They’ve solved the mystery of why adding carbon through organic material, like compost, improves soil health.

PRODUCERS: Beth Eastwood & Fiona Roberts

People install and use home security cameras for peace of mind. But the very behaviour of the commonly used IP home security cameras (internet-connected security cameras) could be giving away important information about your household to potential burglars. Gareth Tyson, at Queen Mary University London, has been working with researchers in China to explore how we use these home security camera systems and to look for flaws in the security of security cameras.

Last Saturday, 25th July, was a hundred years since the birth of chemist Rosalind Franklin. She is perhaps most famous for her work using X-ray crystallography which helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, a contribution for which she was not credited at the time. But there’s so much more to the scientific story of her life than just being the wronged woman in the DNA story, who died tragically young at the age of just 37. She pioneered work in the coal industry and on the structure of viruses, including the polio virus. And Franklin’s work has resonance today, in this era of COVID-19. Baroness Nicola Blackwood, chair of Genomics England thinks Rosalind Franklin’s legacy is something we should be very proud of today.

Presenter - Gareth Mitchell Producers - Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

The UK has the 12th highest road density in the world, but very little is known about the impact of roads on our wildlife. Now conservation scientists are starting to look at their effects on our bird populations. They call it ‘road exposure’ because they can’t directly measure the impact of road noise, but the noise pollution aspect is very much to the fore. Cambridge University's Sophia Cook has found that roads have a mostly negative effect on most birds in Great Britain. And with that negative effect being stronger in rarer birds this could be adding to the 'simplification' of bird populations and a reduction in biodiversity.

Presenter - Adam Rutherford Producers - Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

#bbcinsidescience

Adam talks to Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist from Kings College London, about his new book Science Fictions which explores everything from biases and human fallibility, to outright fraud. He also talks to microbiologist turned image sleuth, Elisabeth Bik, whose work is revealing that manipulated images appear in scientific papers shockingly often.

Now we are several months into the COVID pandemic, scientists are beginning to share their first insights into whether people retain immunity to SARS-CoV-2 after they've had the disease COVID-19. At Kings College London, Senior Lecturer in Infectious Diseases, Katie Doores and her team tracked the antibody levels over the first months after infection with COVID-19. Their first preprint findings suggest a worrying pattern – antibodies against the virus begin to wane within months of being infected. However it is too early to say if and when a person who’s had COVID-19 could be vulnerable to reinfection. Early findings from Marcus Buggert, at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, suggest that another part of the immune system, the memory T-cells, are active in those who have had the disease, even if they lack antibodies against the virus.

Producers: Beth Eastwood & Fiona Roberts

In an era of cyber-crime, misinformation, disinformation, state-sponsored attacks on rival countries’ infrastructure, government-imposed internet shutdowns in places like Eritrea and Kashmir, the World Wide Web is an increasingly dark and troubled place. Making sense of how the internet has changed from the democratic, sharing, open platform it was designed to be, and predicting what’s next, are the web scientists. Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and a co-founder of the whole field of web science, is hosting an online, annual conference this week. The theme this year is 'Making the web human-centric'.

Communal burial sites tend to suggest an egalitarian society, where everyone is considered equal. And this is what we expected the Neolithic societies that spread across Europe with the birth of agriculture around 6000 years ago would be. But DNA evidence from a single human, NG10, buried in 3200 B.C.E in the vast tomb of Newgrange, 25 miles north of Dublin, in Ireland, shows very strong inbreeding. Couple this with the fact the body was buried and not cremated and placed in a highly adorned chamber. Does this indicate an elite ruling class where marrying one’s close kin was the order of the day? Dr. Lara Cassidy, palaeogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin, decoded NG10’s DNA and she tells Adam Rutherford the story.

Presenter - Gareth Mitchell Producers - Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

The current pandemic may have curtailed a lot of holiday plans but we are still more global than ever before. Food is coming to the UK from all over the world. With movement comes the opportunity for unwelcome hitchhikers to tag along. A new study, published in Biological Reviews, by a team of researchers from 13 different countries warns that alien species invasions are on the rise. Professor Tim Blackburn from University College London talks to Marnie about this increasing threat.

Also on the programme, inspired by a listener question, Marnie asks whether there's any truth behind the idea that susceptibility to COVID-19 could be linked to blood type. Associate Professor of Venom Pharmacology at Reading University, Dr Sakthivel Vaiyapuri, explains what the science says so far.

Producers: Fiona Roberts & Beth Eastwood

Producers: Beth Eastwood & Fiona Roberts

Marnie talks to Jack Goodman of the Anti-Disinformation Unit at BBC Online, a new team set up to tackle the problem. She finds out how science fact turns to science fiction online, and what the team is doing to try to counter this.

Now that wearing face masks are now mandatory in a number of situations, a lot of us are making our own. BBC Inside Science listeners sent in lots of ideas about the design, maintenance and durability of face masks, and other ways to protect against spreading the coronavirus. We asked Professor of Materials & Society at UCL Mark Miodownik in to comment.

In February this year, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, SolO, successfully launched, escaping this planet before most of us went into lock-down. Professor Lucie Green from the Mullard Space Science Lab at University College London, is a solar scientist and part of the team that will be using a telescope to take images of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light. The orbiter is now in it’s ‘Cruise Phase’ which means most of its instruments have now been tested and calibrated, but aren’t yet up and running. One instrument that has been operational since just after launch is the magnetometer, which will collect data on the Sun’s complex and dynamic magnetic field.

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producers - Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

What role does the environment play in our overall risk of becoming infected and what can we do about it? This is the focus of the SAGE Environmental Working Group. Marnie talks to its Chair, Catherine Noakes, Professor of Environmental Engineering for Buildings at Leeds University. Minimising the risks that contaminated surfaces pose is a key challenge that engineers are now trying to address. Marnie asks Birmingham University Research Scientist, Felicity de Cogan, about the surface she created which kills bacteria in seconds. She's now re-purposing the technology to kill the virus that causes Covid-19. If her laboratory studies prove that it kills the virus as quickly, as she hopes, the technology could be used to create antiviral PPE that can be re-used rather than thrown away.

Epidemiology has been thrust into the spotlight in recent months, helping us track the viral threat facing all of us. But companion animal epidemiology - which studies disease in pet populations - is a much younger field. It’s one that’s starting to search for the answers to another puppy-related conundrum that’s been puzzling BBC Inside Science reporter Geoff Marsh - should he get puppy Kevin castrated? Neutering has become a cultural norm in the UK. But the health risks to neutered male dogs include cancers and joint disorders in some breeds. The operation and anaesthetic carries some risk as does the age of the dog when the operation is carried out. The risk of dog populations exploding with hundreds of un-neutered dogs is low, because most owners control their dogs to such a degree the chance of unplanned mating doesn't come up. But neutering can help with some behavioural problems in pet dogs. So what is the answer? Will Kevin remain intact?

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producers - Beth Eastwood and Fiona Roberts

Marnie Chesterton talks to Professor of Mathematical Biology at Cambridge University, Julia Gog, who co-chaired the group that advised the government on the impact of easing school closures. She explains why the limited opening of schools provides a golden opportunity to learn about its impact on the pandemic, and inform what happens in September when the new school year begins.

Marnie also talks to Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London, to find out what parents can do to help control the spread of the virus in their communities. He runs the COVID Symptom Study, a huge citizen science project that’s pinpointing the symptoms most closely associated with Covid-19. Millions of British adults have downloaded the app, to take part in the study, logging how they feel each day and adding symptoms when they feel unwell. The breakthrough that losing your sense of smell, or anosmia, is a common symptom in Covid-19, arose from this app.

While children with Covid-19 tend to have mild or no symptoms, Tim Spector believes that some cases are being missed because many of the symptoms we’re told to look out for in adults, such as fever, are transient or absent in children. Tim explains which symptoms parents should look out for in children, including anosmia and a range of rashes such as ‘covid toe’. If parents log their children’s symptoms each day, the hope is he’ll have enough data to further refine the symptoms most closely associated with Covid-19 in children. Parents will then be better placed to spot them, if they occur, and keep their children at home.

You might be forgiven for thinking that Ordnance Survey (OS), the national mapping agency for Great Britain, would be having a quiet time during the lockdown. But its online OS Map apps have seen a 300% increase in use, with users not only checking out new places and walks in their local area, but using the virtual maps to plan and imagine themselves on walks in more remote and far flung parts of Great Britain. But Ordnance Survey is so much more than just leisure maps. It runs the Master Map of Great Britain, a massive, interactive, geospatial database which can be interrogated by anyone in the public sector with questions on geography, planning, logistics, addresses and more. The list is long. And during the coronavirus pandemic, the Mapping for Emergencies service has been busy helping the NHS find places for blood testing facilities and PPE storage; working out which walkways are wide enough to allow social distancing, working out where the nearest pharmacies to vulnerable people are and much more.

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producers - Beth Eastwood and Fiona Roberts

With the launch of NHS Test and Trace across England, if you start to feel unwell with suspected Covid-19 and call a new NHS hotline 119, you’ll be tested for the virus. Your close contacts will be traced and, if you test positive, you'll be asked to self-isolate for 7 days, and your contacts asked to quarantine for 14 days.

The route to those close contacts is currently through manual tracing - you have to give the details of everyone with whom you’ve been in close contact. But in the coming weeks, the plan is to integrate the NHSX app, currently being trialled on the Isle of Wight. This will pick up close contacts with people you don't know, on public transport, for example, provided they also have the app.

It’s a new way to fight a pandemic, but the pioneers here are the residents of the English town of Haslemere in Surrey who, back in 2017, were tackling a terrifyingly contagious and, thankfully, hypothetical virus spread by ‘patient zero’ Hannah Fry. Created for the BBC4 documentary: Contagion, it was an experiment to see how we could fight the next pandemic. The BBC built an app, which residents downloaded and, crucially, it created a data-set. Evolutionary Biologist Dr Lewis Spurgin, from University of East Anglia, has used this data-set to explore the impact that different control strategies could have on the spread of the virus that causes Covid-19.

In a different case of tracking and tracing, involving some policing by members of the public and journalists, Dominic Cummings’ comings and goings have consumed the nation this week. Just how much are our everyday movements being clocked, monitored and recorded? What traces do our phones, cars and even our faces leave behind? And who gets to see this information? Marnie talks to researcher and broadcaster Stephanie Hare, author of the forthcoming book Technology Ethics.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Beth Eastwood & Fiona Roberts

Inching back to pandemic news, Marnie investigates the fallout of the lockdown from a climate perspective. In many countries, citizens have been asked to stay at home and not to travel unless it’s strictly necessary. As a result, the hubbub of normal life has slowed to a trickle. What impact has this had on levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Corinne Le Quéré, the Royal Society Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia, explains just how dramatically these emissions have been affected around the world.

And the chances that intelligent life exists on other planets. David Kipping, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University in the US, has calculated the odds of both life and intelligent life existing if he were to re-run earth’s history.

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producer - Beth Eastwood

There are so many variables about who will survive Covid-19 and who, unfortunately, will not. Many people will only experience mild symptoms, but a minority will have a severe or even life-threatening response. Whilst some of the difference can be explained by age, or underlying health conditions, the reasons why men and some ethnic minorities and a number of apparently fit younger people become so ill, is one of the great puzzles of this pandemic. Some of the uncertainly is down to environmental effects. But a lot of the variability could be down to our genomes. To try and find out, this week Genomics England announced funding for a study - The GenOMICC - COVID Genomics UK (CoG-UK) Partnership for Severely Ill Patients to sequence the whole genomes of 20,000 severely ill and 15,000 asymptomatic or very mild patients. Led by Genomics England, these genomes will be compared with those held in the 100,000 Genomes Project dataset.

The coronavirus pandemic is really highlighting the need for fast, accurate ways to analyse data on a global and national scale. Be that data on the number of people dying or track and trace data from various apps. But do we realise how much data we leave about ourselves online even in normal times? This is something Professors Tobias Preis and Suzy Moat in the Data Science Lab, at the Warwick Business School get very excited about. They use rapid analysis of big data to try and understand our behaviour as a way to rapidly inform economists and policy makers on how the world works. They have been looking at alternative data sources to give us quicker estimates of what’s happening in the world – travel patterns, economic indicators, how many people have a given disease.

This is going to become invaluable both during and in the aftermath of the pandemic, when understanding the economic fallout will be key to helping the economy recover. Take their latest work – where they’re gathering much quicker estimates on the contributions of air travel to the UK’s GDP.

Presenter – Marnie Chesterton

Producers – Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

Marnie Chesterton asks Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at Oxford University, Trisha Greenhalgh, and microbiologist and Professor of Environmental Healthcare at the University of Southampton, William Keevil, why there is so little science to inform the policy-makers. If the government recommends that we all wear cloth masks, we'll be wearing them for the common good - they’re better at stopping the wearer from spreading the virus than protecting him or her from catching it. Choosing one that fits, made from the right material, and keeping it clean is also crucial. If you’re not really up to making your own mask, Professor Mark Miadownik at UCL’s Institute of Making warns against the single-use surgical masks, now a common addition to the litter scene and a bane to the environment.

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 continues to spread at an alarming rate in the United States, with well over a million confirmed cases and over 70,000 deaths, attention in the White House has been turning to suggestions that the virus originated in the Institute of Virology Laboratory in Wuhan, China and not in the wild where bats are the ultimate suspected source. For years, a group there led by “bat woman” Jungli Shi, have been collecting virus samples and studying them to see if they could infect us humans. This is standard virology, trying to understand where the next pandemic viral threat might come from. But conspiracy theorists have been suggesting that there’s more going on, such as deliberate genetic manipulation of the viruses, weaponising them, or just unsafe management. These ideas have been taken up by President Trump and his team. BBC Inside Science reporter Roland Pease asks the experts what they think. Is there any place for this sort of politics in the pandemic?

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton

Producers - Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

We like citizen science on BBC Inside Science, it’s an opportunity for anyone and everyone to try their hand at some scientific projects, learn about the scientific process and help researchers crunch through masses of data. Professor Chris Lintott co-founded Zooniverse, the biggest citizen science platform over a decade ago. He’s a regular on the programme telling us about the latest Muon-hunting, Penguin-counting, galaxy-searching opportunities they offer. But they’re not the only ones, Butterfly Conservation want you to help them track the timing of butterfly emergence in the UK and Fold.it are asking people to play their protein folding online game to help them find a possible cure for Covid-19. But back in the 1930’s BBC radio producer Mary Adams was running a series called ‘Science in the Making’, where listeners were invited to participate in, what would now be called ‘citizen science’ experiments. With topics as diverse as charting the timing of blackbird egg laying and deciphering the meaning of dreams, a scientist would explain their hypothesis and ask the audience for help. Allan Jones, a senior lecturer in computing and communications from the Open University has been digging into the BBC’s earliest public science experiments, and the woman who decided to broadcast them.

Presenter – Marnie Chesterton Producers – Fiona Roberts and Beth Eastwood

The Covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in modern times. There will no doubt be years of debating over who managed the outbreak the best, which tools and actions were implemented at the right time and in the right way. One small, but important part of dealing with the viral outbreak is contact tracing – discovering who is infected and who they might have come into contact with. This has to be done quickly, so the people an infected person had contact with, can be found and informed to isolate, before they themselves spread the virus further. Some countries used this early on in the pandemic (Singapore and South Korea, have successfully used it to contain their outbreaks, while Germany, which has a far lower case and death rate than the UK, has also worked hard on contact tracing.) Others are hoping to implement contact tracing as a means of easing social distancing or coming out of lockdown. To do this public health agencies will have to start aggressively contact tracing and at a much higher level than they were a few months ago. The UK started using contact tracing then stopped, they are now looking to restart it.

A plausible way of doing this is to make use of the fact that a lot of people carry a mobile phone, so apps that can help are being developed and used. There are biological factors that need to be taken into account (reliable, accessible testing in the first place) but also logistical, practical and security issues… who are we giving our data to? And what are they doing with it? Could it be used to restrict my freedom in ways other than just managing the spread of the virus? Timandra Harkness author of Big Data, Does Size Matter? and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and a member of their working group on Data Ethics helps answer these questions.

Finally, a small bit of good that’s come out of another dark time in our recent history. Atomic bomb tests during the Cold War. The nuclear fallout, doubled the amount of an isotope called carbon-14 in the atmosphere. And that has turned out to be very useful for scientists working on a crucial conservation effort – to age and safeguard the world’s largest fish - the Whale Shark.

Presenter - Gareth Mitchell Producer - Fiona Roberts

Last year, it was announced that a new coal mine in Cumbria was given backing in parliament. The Woodhouse colliery would be Britain’s first new deep coal mine in 30 years, bringing much needed jobs to the community. The colliery, along the coast from Whitehaven, is planned to be producing coking coal for the steel industry. Cumbria County Council claimed the mine, which aims to process 2.5m tonnes of coking coal a year, would be carbon neutral, as locally produced coal, negates the need to ship it in from as far afield as the US, Canada, Russia and Colombia. It’s perhaps unsurprising that climate campaigners think this is a huge step back and that the mine is unnecessary and incompatible with UK climate ambitions and that it will hold back the development of low-carbon steelmaking. BBC Inside Science sent reporter Geoff Marsh to explore the story that highlights the difficulties of balancing carbon costs and accounting, with employment and self-sufficiency.

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producer - Fiona Roberts

You probably think you know your body like the back of your hand, but given that it’s made up of an average of about 37 trillion cells, some sort of guide book might be helpful. This is what the Human Cell Atlas, an international project, is doing. By providing a map of human cell types, aims to help researchers fight diseases, from cancer to covid19. Although every cell in our bodies has the same genetic code – the same DNA; the differences between, for example, muscles cells, brain cells, and fat cells – come down to which bits of the DNA each cell uses - which genes are switched on and off. This gives cell types their different characteristics. The Atlas not only helps scientists understand the precise nature of each cell type but also how they interact with other cells in the body.

There are a lot of myths surrounding the source of the rose-necked parakeets in south east England. The introduction of these noisy green alien invaders have been attributed to Jimi Hendrix, George Michael and even Humphrey Bogart. But where did they really come from?

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producer - Fiona Roberts

The European Space Agency’s Diego Urbina was one of the Mars500 participants. He spent 520 days in a human mission to Mars, shut up in a fake spacecraft with his fellow astronauts. So who better to get tips for home isolation from?

Are you stuck in with the kids and want to try some science experiments that you can do at home? The Royal Institution is about to launch ExpeRimental Live - a live stream of home science experiments, designed to educate, entertain and inform your children with some cheap and easy science. And its existing ExpeRimental series of short films for parents are already available online. They were produced and directed by science teacher and writer Alom Shaha, who helps BBC Inside Science producer Jennifer Whyntie to have a go at making singing wine glasses with her children. Producers - Fiona Roberts and Jennifer Whyntie

On Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the British people to ‘stay at home’. How stringent is the UK’s lockdown compared to other countries, and is it likely to be effective?

The only real way we can know about the incidence and prevalence of the coronavirus is to test. Listener Andrew in Didcot wants to know more about testing and when antibodies appear in us. We discuss how the current testing system works, and why there are limitations on testing.

One question that lots of scientists have been asking is: can people with mild or no symptoms spread the coronavirus? And so we delve into the evidence for asymptomatic spreading.

Listeners Eleanor and Andy have been wondering about passing the virus from person to surface to person. Roland Pease looks into the virus’ survival on surfaces and elsewhere, and asks how that might be affecting spread.

Finally, reporter Geoff Marsh tackles a quandary facing dog owners: Is it safe to walk your pet? Can dogs spread the virus?

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Fiona Roberts and Jennifer Whyntie

Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin at the University of Chicago, is also the author of the best-selling book on evolution – ‘Your Inner Fish’. In his new book, out this week, ‘Some Assembly Required – Decoding four billion years of life from ancient fossils to DNA’, Neil revisits the topic of evolutionary development and explains to Adam how we have now arrived at a remarkable moment—prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multi-billion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention.

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producer – Fiona Roberts

It can be a real treat to watch a meteor shower in the night sky and you can consider yourself lucky if you get to witness a fireball streaking through the atmosphere. But what the scientists in the Global Fireball Observatory really want is to find these fist-sized extra-terrestrial meteoroids where they land on Earth. One of the Fireball UK Network’s leaders, Luke Daly at the University of Glasgow, explains how, if we know where in the Solar system these rocks came from and we can analyse their make-up, we can learn a lot about how our Solar System was made. However surprising few of the 5000 tonnes of meteorites that land on our planet every year are retrieved. Most are sand-sized grains and many fall in the sea. But even tracking down these precious rocks on land is extremely difficult. So the Network has a suite of cameras watching the sky, and together with some clever number-crunching algorithms, they can track these events and narrow down where to search. But they still need the good citizens of Britain to help find them. If you want to get involved (and this is a good one for schools to take part in) email [email protected] or follow @fireballsUK on Twitter.

We are fast learning that elements at the nanoscale have vastly different properties than they do in the form we can observe them. It’s proving to be a rich field for changing the properties of materials, and inventing new substances that might be of use in medicines, in electronics, and much more. Inside Science’s Maddie Finlay went to meet Stephen Evans from the University of Leeds, where they have been tinkering with a substance that definitely doesn’t glister even though it’s gold.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

One particular infectious disease (Covid-19) is dominating the headlines, but it's by no means the only one we should be concerned about. There's an infectious disease crisis that is longstanding, and one of the most significant threats to global health. It’s the on-going antibiotic resistant crisis. Antibiotics kill bacteria, but bacteria evolve resistance very quickly, and because of overuse of antibiotics, we’ve effectively driven the evolution of many disease causing bacteria to be resistant to our best antibiotics, thus rendering them redundant as drugs. On top of that, we haven’t found any new classes of antibiotics for many years. And the cost of developing new drugs is very high – billions, and the financial incentive for developing antibiotics is low. So this is a perfect storm. A new study this week shows a glimmer of light in the quest to find new antibiotics, via artificial intelligence. Lena Ciric, a microbiologist at University College London, explains how the new drug Halicin was found and the promise it holds as a new antibiotic.

Slapstick is one of the most universally appreciated comedy styles. The physical comedy that made Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy and even Mr Bean so popular has transfixed and entertained generations. But how has it endured the test of time? Why do we enjoy seeing characters in pain? Or is it something deeper rooted that it tells us about the human condition? Laughter is a social action – we do it to show we understand a joke and to signal to people that we get along with them. 'Told By An Idiot' is a theatre company exploring the divide between comedy and tragedy who are currently performing a slapstick style show about the relationship between Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, who had been his understudy. Hannah Fisher has been to see the show.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

In the 1870's the scientific research ship, HMS Challenger, sailed all the world's oceans measuring sea temperatures, ocean depths and sampling the geology of the seabed. But it's the seawater samples, containing microscopic zooplankton, preserved for 130 years which intrigued climate scientist Dr. Lyndsey Fox. She has been measuring the thickness of the shells of Foraminifera - tiny single-celled organisms - as a way of measuring how much the ocean has acidified over time. The shells are made of calcium carbonate, that is much harder to accrete when the pH drops.

Theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll is very good at explaining the unexplainable. He chats to Adam about his latest book - Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

Voices on the train, public address announcements at the station, automated telephone banking, Alexa and Siri. We are surrounded by electronic voices. But very little research has been done of how we respond to synthetic speech. To investigate the impact of artificially generated voices in our lives, BBC R&D together with our favourite acoustic engineer, Professor Trevor Cox of the University of Salford, has just launched a study. The Synthetic Voices and Personality Test, is an online test we want you to take part in. Please go to https://voicestudy.api.bbc.co.uk and have a listen

Presenter Gareth Mitchell Producer - Fiona Roberts

If chemicals in cigarette smoke or exposure to UV light played a role in causing a cancerous tumour, we can now see this evidence in the DNA. These and other causes of cancer are being catalogued by a huge international study revealing the genetic fingerprints of DNA-damaging processes that drive cancer development. Professor Mike Stratton, is director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and author of one of many papers released in Nature and associated journals this week that detail the results of the Pan-Cancer of Whole Genomes Consortium.

Cancer is not a modern disease. Evidence in bones and remains reveal our ancient ancestors also suffered. Dr. Kate Hunt is a paleo-pathologist studying paleo-oncology, a very specific, very recent branch of archaeology, looking through ancient burial sites, artefacts and literature for signs of cancer.

Presenter - Marnie Chesterton Producer - Fiona Roberts

'Alice in Typhoidland' is a new exhibition in Oxford recording how that city dealt with typhoid. It’s called that after one of its 19th century residents, Alice Liddell (the girl after whom Alice in Wonderland was named). Her father Henry Liddell was the Dean of Christchurch College and together with his friend Henry Ackland was instrumental in closing off Oxford's open sewers and thereby combating some of the causes of the disease. The exhibition also explores the fate of Typhoid Mary – one of the most famous asymptomatic disease carriers in history.

Exactly 200 years ago, 30th January 1820, at 3:30 local time, the continent of Antarctica was spotted for the first time by a British expedition captained by Edward Bransfield, on the Merchant Ship The Williams. But they weren’t the very first: 3 days earlier - on 27 January - a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev spotted what is now known as the Fimbul Ice Shelf. The UK Antarctic Heritage Trust is spearheading celebrations. Camilla Nichol is its CEO and she describes the history of the icy continent and how it's become the protected scientific reserve it is now.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

The Anabaptist Amish communities are some of the fastest growing populations on the planet. They came to the US from the Swiss-German border in the 18th and 19th centuries and have maintained their plain, simple community-minded way of life. Partly because they all descended from the same geographical area and partly because they tend to marry within their own communities, they can suffer from a particular spectrum of genetic disorders. Professor Andrew Crosby and Dr. Emma Baple from Exeter University have been studying these diseases, including a number new to medicine, and in return they are helping the Amish to understand and treat some of these debilitating diseases.

He may currently sound more like a sheep baa-ing, but in a proof of concept experiment, Professor David Howard, an electrical engineer at Royal Holloway University of London, has been able to scan, 3D print and electronically reanimate the vocal tract of Nesyamum, a 3000 year old Egyptian mummy. The eventual hope is to recreate his tongue and try to get him to sing.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

ESA’s Aeolus mission was launched in August 2018. It’s one of the European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer satellites. The Aeolus satellite uses lasers to monitor the wind by firing an ultraviolet laser beam into the atmosphere and catching the light’s reflection as it scatters off molecules and particles carried along in the air. It was planned to be very much a proof of principle mission, testing the science, with longer-term plans for a whole constellation of wind monitoring satellites. But Aeolus has performed so well in the tests that, unusually for meteorological science, the results are now considered robust enough to be inputted into the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts models.

The UK is aiming to phase out conventional combustion engines in favour of more energy-efficient, less polluting electric vehicles by 2040. In response to a listener’s question on the cleanliness of these machines, BBC Inside Science reporter, Tristan Varela, conducts an investigation in the streets, garages, and laboratories of London. He finds that electric cars are relatively clean in the UK, where energy generation from renewable sources has recently overtaken fossil fuels. However, sales of new electric cars are still heavily outweighed by large, fossil fuel hungry, SUVs. But some people are instead converting existing cars to make their vehicles more environmentally-friendly.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

January is also Veganuary, a chance for you to try being vegan for 31 days. The reasons for giving up animal products in your diet are varied, from reducing your carbon footprint to not eating animals and getting healthy. Reporter Geoff Marsh is interested in the evidence in favour for and against a vegan diet.

A signal in April 2019 picked up by the LIGO Livingston Observatory has been confirmed as the gravitational ripples from a collision of two neutron stars. LIGO Livingston is part of a gravitational-wave network that includes LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), and the European Virgo detector.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

The Indonesian volcano Anak Krakatau, which means 'Son of Krakatoa', was born out of the ashes of the mega volcano which erupted and collapsed in the 1880s. Last year the island volcano Anak collapsed, causing a tsunami which killed 400 people. The collapse of millions of tonnes of rock into the ocean has now been mapped and chunks of rock, the size of office blocks, have been found tossed kilometres from the island. It really brings home how dangerous these volcanoes can be.

BBC Inside Science producer Fi is always scribbling and doodling during interviews. It turns out she is a visual thinker and she compulsively draws the science being discussed. She is not alone: many scientists working in fields involving complex maths and physics resort to pictures to illustrate what's happening. But not everything in science can be reduced down to a 2D sketch and not everyone needs a visual aid. Marnie Chesterton finds the scientists who can look at an equation, and 'see' in their heads, the graph it describes. Others get intensely annoyed at analogies that just aren't quite right - like spacetime being a ball on a rubber sheet. She asks a physicist, a philosopher and a mathematician about the relationship they have between maths, reality and our senses.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

A famous Russian farm fox study has been running since the 1950’s. The researchers essentially took foxes bound for the fur trade and selected for tameness by choosing to keep and breed from the animals that showed less fear and more friendliness towards humans. After years of selection, the tamer foxes also showed physical changes (floppier ears, curlier tails, white spots, redder fur) as well as changes in breeding times. As a way to study the evolution of domestication of animals, this study is taught to students all over the world. However a chance discovery at a Fox Museum on a Canadian Island, shows the original foxes were taken from fur farms in Canada and had already been bred for tameness. Elinor Karlsson at the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard University discusses with Adam whether we have to rethink the Animal Domestication Syndrome.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

“Safe as houses" is a cliché built on the solidity of the buildings we put up. But at Bath University engineers are working in the opposite direction. They are asking just how strong does a building have to be - especially in an age of ever taller sky-scrapers, which inevitably sway, particularly when the wind picks up. It's not that there's any danger they'll fall down - but the movement can be unsettling to the occupants. So they've developed a virtual tower - a windowless cabin not much bigger than a caravan stuck on top of a set of hydraulic pistons with virtual reality screens to mimic window views that allow psychologists to monitor volunteers' experiences of living and working in high, flexible spaces. Our Sun is so much more than a giant ball of burning gas. Its core is a nuclear reactor which creates billions of looping and tangling magnetic fields. Its layers are puzzling variations of hot temperatures and its solar wind has some very peculiar properties. These are just some of the reasons NASA launched its Parker Solar Probe in August 2018 on a mission to get close (3.8 million miles) to our star’s surface and study its properties. The first scientific reports from the mission are out and solar expert Professor Lucie Green at UCL reveals what the car-sized, armour-plated craft has been finding out so far. She says "our Sun is more dynamic than expected and we might be getting clues to why the sun spins more slowly than theory predicts."

Producer - Fiona Roberts

Alongside Indonesia, Malaysia is one of the biggest producers of palm oil. As of 2015, the country was covered in over five and a half million hectares of oil palm, nearly a third of which is found in Sabah, the north eastern state in Borneo. Sabah is home to many endangered species, like pygmy elephants and orang-utans. Many of them are found in reserves but they often need to move between these national parks to ensure they have enough food or to find new territories but also to ensure a healthy mix of genetics within populations. To do this, they need to travel through plantations, which can cause many human-wildlife conflicts, especially when they can sometimes cause thousands of dollars worth of damage in one night as they pass through. This is particularly true of elephants, who love to eat the oil palm fruit bunches, but it isn’t isolated to palm oil. Elephants can frighten people or knock down trees in softwood plantations. Graihagh Jackson reports from Sabah.

Virtual Reality has come on leaps and bounds for the visual and auditory senses, but in the realms of haptics, or touch, it’s had to rely on wiring up the user with electrodes which produce vibrations to simulate sensory experiences. But now John Rogers and his team at Northwestern University have developed a wireless soft, flexible ‘skin’ which can be layered gently over the wearer’s own skin to produce a more comfortable and realistic haptic interface with applications not just for gaming, but for tactile social media applications and even for controlling prosthetics.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

Last week we spoke to Jane Rickson at Cranfield University about how healthy soils are a good defence against the effects of, and indeed the process of, flooding. Many farmer listeners emailed in to tell us about their experiences with no till and minimum disturbance agriculture. Simon Jeffery at Harper-Adams University takes Adam through some of the points raised.

Last November, drilling began in Redruth, Cornwall to see if geothermal heat could be tapped from the hot rocks below. Graihagh Jackson went to catch up with the project and met with Lucy Cotton – the project geologist for the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power project.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

"Spice" is a catch-all phrase for a large variety of psycho-active compounds - commonly called legal highs. They interact with the same receptors in the brain as cannabis does. They're commonly sold sprayed onto common herbs that users smoke, so that dose, as well as variety and purity are completely uncontrolled by the time they're taken. And that's where the problems start in A&E departments and the blue-light services, because patients can show up with severe symptoms of psychosis with little clue as to what's caused it. And until now there's been no quick and easy test. Roland Pease went to Bath University where biochemist Chris Pudney and his team have developed some portable kit using ultraviolet to throw light on the spice users are smoking.

The Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) was brought in in London in April 2019 to improve air quality in the centre of the city. In 2020 cities including Bath, Leeds and Birmingham are also bringing in ‘Clean Air Zones. Alastair Lewis is professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York and he explains what these schemes are targeting and whether we can measure whether they are working.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

Bloodhound is the latest British attempt at the supersonic land speed record. All this week Wing Commander Andy Green has been burning across a dried out lake in the Kalahari Desert, as he and his team are building up to break the sound barrier at 740mph, and his own land speed record of 763 mph. BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos reports from the trackside.

The Big Compost Experiment is a new citizen science project about the wonderful, rich, fruity and essential substance you can produce by doing not that much at all. Architect Danielle Purkiss and Mark Miodownik, material scientist at UCL tell Adam why they are launching this experiment.

The planet Mercury, messenger of the Gods, passes between us and the Sun on average just thirteen times a century. This astronomical event will be visible in the UK – weather permitting – next Monday, 11th November. Solar physicist Lucie Green explains how to see the transit of Mercury.

After 7 years of orbiting the Earth and sending us important information about space weather, NASA’s Van Allen Probes are retiring. Professor Lucie Green from UCL explains how the sun can spit out superhot plasma and streams of high energy particles in our direction. We are mostly protected by the Earth’s magnetic field - but not always. The worst-case scenario is that the radiation could disrupt navigation satellites and bring down electrical power supplies. Professor Green will be keeping an eye on space weather with a new spacecraft.

Growing evidence shows that repeatedly getting your head knocked around during competitive sports can lead to long-term serious consequences. The head doesn’t necessarily need to be the target of the blow – a hard tackle can ricochet through your body giving your head a jolt. Roland Pease speaks with sports scientist Liz Williams of Swansea University about a new device to measure these impacts.

Presenter: Gaia Vince Producers: Jen Whyntie and Louisa Field

Seagulls have become notorious food thieves in recent times as they move into towns to find new habitats and sustenance. Scientists at the University of Exeter have found that if you stare at a herring gull, it’s much less likely to steal your chips. Reporter Graihagh Jackson went to Falmouth to meet with researchers Madeleine Goumas and Neeltje Boogert to see the tactic in action.

More than 800,000 people in the UK live with dementia, which is an umbrella term for over 200 specific diagnoses that all involve some form of neurodegeneration. Epidemiological evidence has suggested that high dietary salt intake may somehow be linked to developing cognitive impairment. A study released this week shows a mechanism for how this might occur biologically in the brains of mice who were fed a high salt diet. Professor Carol Brayne is Director of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge, and she explains how this new research fits into the field and our understanding of dementia’s causes.

On the lushly forest islands of French Polynesia, there lives a very special snail. Partula are around 100 species of tiny snails who give birth to live young and feed on decomposing plants. Each species is uniquely adapted to a particular ecological niche. But in 1967, the highly edible Giant African Land Snail was introduced to the islands as a source of food. They quickly became pests, and in response, the French Polynesian government then introduced carnivorous Rosy Wolf Snails - aka Euglandina rosea - to quell the spread of the introduced Giant Land snails. Reporter Naomi Clements-Brode picks up the story with scientist Ann Clarke, along with Dave Clarke and Paul Pearce-Kelly at ZSL London Zoo.

Finally this week, malaria is, as best we can account for it, the single greatest killer in human history. The vast majority of malaria is caused by a type of single celled protozoan called Plasmodium falciparum, carried by mosquitos. But according to new research published this week, it started out around fifty thousand years ago not in us, but as a gorilla disease, and in one particularly unlucky gorilla, two simultaneous infections prompted the mutation and rise of the plasmodium parasite that would go on to kill millions. Dr Gavin Wright from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton lead the team behind this molecular archaeology.

This week has been the annual jamboree and drama of the Nobel Prizes: the announcements of the biggest gongs in science. The Physiology or Medicine Prize went to William Kaelin from Harvard University, Sir Peter Ratcliffe from the Crick Institute in London and Gregg Semenza from Johns Hopkins University for their work on how the body responds to changing oxygen levels. The Physics Prize went to James Peebles of Princeton for cosmological discoveries, and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, then at the University of Geneva, for the 1995 discovery of the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b. And the Chemistry Prize was awarded for the invention of something that we utterly rely on every day, the lithium battery. The winners are John Goodenough, University of Texas at Austin, Stanley Whittingham, State University of New York, and Akira Yoshino of the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Japan. These awards offer plenty to discuss, so Adam is joined by Lisa Kaltenegger, Director of Carl Sagan Institute & Associate Professor of Astronomy, Andrew Pontzen, Professor of Astrophysics at University College, London, and reporter and presenter Marnie Chesterton, who spent some time with chemistry laureate John Goodenough.

The Herculaneum Library is perhaps the most remarkable collection of texts from the Roman era. Discovered two centuries ago in the villa of Julius Caesar’s father in law, many of the papyrus scrolls bear the writings of the house philosopher, Philodemus. Others are thought to be the works of the philosophers and poets he admired. However, the big drawback is that the villa was buried in the eruption that engulfed Pompeii, and the heat from the volcanic ash turned them all to charcoal. To make life even more difficult, the ink the scribes used was also made of carbon – think black on black. However, now a team from the University of Kentucky are hoping to decipher the texts using X-rays, and have just scanned two complete scrolls, and some fragments at the Diamond Synchrotron in near Oxford.

When renowned author Bill Bryson decided to apply his unique eye for anecdote and trivia to the human body he thought he's start at the head and work down. But as he reveals to Adam, it's a lot more complicated and interconnected than that. His book "The Body - A Guide for Occupants" is an indispensable guide to the inner workings of ourselves.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

It's a good job the small, round, spouted clay vessels found in 3000 year old baby graves in Bavaria weren't washed up very well. Crusts of food deposits have shown that these early baby bottles were used to give infants milk from ruminants such as cows, goats and sheep. This discovery, and previous discoveries of even earlier spouted vessels in Europe, indicate that settling down from hunter-gathering to agriculture in prehistoric Iron and Bronze-Age people impacted all ages. Dr Julie Dunne, organic geochemist at the University of Bristol, thinks that this more settled lifestyle with domesticated animals and cereals to supplement a baby's diet, led to earlier weaning and maybe more babies.

Caroline Criado Perez’s ground-breaking gender bias exposé wins the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize. 'Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men' by writer, broadcaster and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez, becomes the 32nd winner of the prestigious Royal Society Insight Investment Science Books Prize. Caroline explains to Adam how a range of case studies, stories and new research highlights ways in which women are ‘forgotten’ on a daily basis. From government policy and medical research to technology, media and workplaces, she exposes the lack of gender-specific data that has unintentionally created a world biased against women

Producer - Fiona Roberts

The residents of the Bahamas are still struggling to come to terms with the devastation of Hurricane Dorian (which hit 2 weeks ago) and also with the additional impact of Tropical Storm Humberto which reached the islands on Friday night, bringing more heavy rain and more strong winds. But the human population is resilient and they will eventually rebuild and resume their lives on the Caribbean islands. But for the Bahama nuthatch, it’s thought that Dorian was the final straw. The endemic bird, is (or was) one of the rarest birds in the western hemisphere, in fact it was already thought extinct (after the damage wrought by Hurricane Mathew in June 2016) until last year when Professor Diana Bell and her team of conservationists from the University of East Anglia rediscovered it. But now, after the hurricane it is feared lost forever, and it may not be the only irreversible ecological loss for the Bahamas.

Tim Smedley's book 'Cleaning the Air: The Beginning and End of Air Pollution' is shortlisted for the Royal Society's science book prize. Tim tells the full story of air pollution: what it is, which pollutants are harmful, and where they come from. It's scary stuff, but there is good news that air pollution can be avoided and drastically reduced with sensible measures.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

Physicist Paul Steinhardt has spent a great deal of his career trying to understand crystals with seemingly impossible five fold symmetries. Most of this was with pen and pencil in his Princeton laboratory. But in his Royal Society Science Book Prize shortlisted book, 'The Second Kind of Impossible', he documents his adventurous quest for these 'quasicrystals' in the wilds of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsular.

In 1957 the River Thames was so polluted it was declared ecologically dead. But since then The Zoological Society of London in partnership with over 30 conservation and research organisations have been working to improve the health of the River Thames and bring back the plethora of life and biodiversity. They are set to publish the first complete analysis of the river in over 60 years this Autumn. They're calling it 'Mother Thames' in recognition of the now nurturing nature of one of Britain's biggest rivers.

Presenter - Gaia Vince Producer - Fiona Roberts

The age of silicon chip based computing could be coming to an end. Difficulties in shrinking silicon transistors, or switches, into ever smaller processors led researchers at MIT to search for alternative semiconducting materials to replace them. Cue carbon nanotubes, tubes of carbon atoms many tens of thousands of times narrower than a human hair. Electrical engineer Max Shulaker and his team have overcome spaghetti-like tangles of CNTs and varying levels of conductivity to create a 16bit processor. He says that rather than a straight forward replacement to silicon, the initial hope is that CNT chip technology can be added to existing silicon wafers.

Steven Strogatz and Monty Lyman have been shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize this year. In "Infinite Powers", Professor of applied maths at Cornell University, Steven Strogatz tells Adam Rutherford the story of calculus and why his book has a warning saying "this book is dangerous, it will make you love mathematics!" And in "The Remarkable Life of the Skin" Dr. Monty Lyman takes Claudia Hammond on an intimate journey across our surface. They discuss advances in skin treatments, new research on the importance of our diet and our skin and the vital role our largest organ plays in our lives.

Producer - Fiona Roberts Presenter - Gareth Mitchell

The 6 shortlisted books have been announced in the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize this year. Judges Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, a computer scientist and best-selling author Dorothy Koomson run through the list: Infinite Powers – Steven Strogatz The Remarkable Life of the Skin – Monty Lyman Clearing the Air – Tim Smedley Invisible Women – Caroline Criado Perez The Second Kind of Impossible – Paul Steinhardt Six Impossible Things – John Gribbin

Science writer and journalist John Gribben takes Gareth through the world of quantum physics when he discusses his book "Six Impossible Things - The Quanta of Solace and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World"

Producer - Fiona Roberts

Nuclear fusion – it’s the energy source of the future, and always will be! Yes, it’s one of those technologies that was about thirty years away in the 1980s when they built a massive fusion lab in Culham in Oxfordshire. And, thirty years on, they’re still trying to crack it. Part of the challenge is building containers that can handle some of the hottest, and trickiest, matter known to humans – plasma. At the Joint European Torus (or JET), they’ve been busy revamping their thirty-five-year-old kit. It’s to keep the fusion research going whilst the scientists wait for a shiny new facility to open up in Southern France. It’s all about working on reactions like those that fuel the Sun – squashing atoms together rather than pulling them apart. A brand new series of landmark tests at JET is kicking off in the months ahead. Roland Pease went to the labs to find out just where the UK is in fusion right now.

The 2019 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize winner will be announced in late September. The shortlisted authors will be announced next week but before then Adam Rutherford chats to two of the judges, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, and best selling fiction author, Dorothy Koomson, about what makes a great popular science book and what in particular the judges are looking for in this year’s competition.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

They’re calling it ‘Mission Jurassic’. A site so full of dinosaur bones that it would most probably keep a thousand palaeontologists happy and enormously busy for a thousand years. The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (TCMI) has signed a 20 year exploration lease on a parcel of the Wyoming dinosaur site, calling on the help of UK associates from the University of Manchester and London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) to assist with the excavations. BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos was invited to the top secret location to take part in what is arguably the country’s biggest dino dig in decades.

There's now good evidence that micro-plastics are present in our oceans and are accumulating in our food chains, but surely they aren’t present in the last pristine environment on Earth? Melanie Bergmann and her team based in Germany compared snow samples from two dozen locations, ranging from the Arctic ice floes and the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard to the north of Germany. Surprisingly, they found 10,000 plastic particles per litre in Arctic snow. But how is the plastic getting there? Melanie provides insight into her ground breaking research unearthing how micro-plastics are capable of travelling such great distances.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

When someone smiles at you, how can you tell whether that smile is genuine or fake and why would you want to know? According to Professor of visual computing at the University of Bradford, Hassan Ugail, it’s all in the eyes! Humans are notoriously bad at picking up fake smiles, because we tend to focus our vision on the upturned corners of the mouth. Focus on specific movement of the eyes and the dynamic progression of a smile, however, and that’s when a genuine smile is evident. Hassan explains how computers are over 90% successful at being able to detect fake smiles, and examines the purposes to which this facial recognition technology may be applied in our daily lives.

Inside Science listener, Thomas from New Zealand, has noticed the sudden surge in nations encouraging mass tree planting and reforestation. But how much of a difference is it all making? Professor of Agriculture, policy and development at the University of Reading Dr Martin Lukac discusses the impacts of, the soot and ash from the recent forest fires in Siberia, deforestation and even makes an educated guess at much forest you would have to plant to counteract the CO2 emissions emitted after using your family car for the year.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

Most hydrothermal vents are in deep water far from land, making them incredibly inaccessible to divers. But in a fjord known locally as Eyjafjörður, off the coast of Iceland, is the hydrothermal vent Strytan. It's close enough that it can be accessed by scuba divers, and the algae and animals living in the hot chemical-laden plumes can be sampled. Geoff Marsh heads out with a team of scientists from the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Southampton to collect creatures living both in the hot vent water and in the icy cold fjord. The idea is to sample the genes to see what adaptations to temperature are evolving.

We are hearing more and more about antibiotic resistance. Overuse of antibiotics has led to more and more bacteria evolving and adapting ways to survive antimicrobial treatments. But did you know that the genes coding for this resistance can also float freely in water and on surfaces in the environment? A couple of recent studies have been sampling freshwater bodies and commonly touched surfaces (like handrails and toilet seats) in and around London and the amount of antibiotic resistance genes (either freely floating or in bacteria) is quite alarming. Environmental engineer at UCL, Professor Lena Ciric, explains to Marnie Chesterton what this means and whether we should be concerned.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

Deep sea pelagic sharks, like the great white, silky, tiger, porbeagle and blue are much more vulnerable than their scary reputation suggests. In fact, many shark species are in decline as a result of industrial fishing rapidly encroaching upon their territories, and an increased value of the sharks themselves. The oceans are big and sharks range far and wide, so understanding these movements is not easy. Professor David Sims, from the Marine Biological Association of the UK and the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, is part of a huge international consortium of marine biologists who have been tracking 11 species of shark all over the high seas using satellite technology. We’ve been fishing for more than 40,000 years, but our exploitation of the seas got serious in the last 50 years.

In nature, sex can be quite fluid, and in some species, sex changes are just a normal part of every day life. Especially in fish. This type of behaviour is called sequential hermaphroditism, and is common in fish. It's been known about for years, but the underlying genetic mechanisms are mysterious, which is strange for such a radical transformation. In the Blueheaded wrasse, when a dominant male is lost from the shoal, the largest female will immediately begin transforming into a male. Neil Gemmell from the University of Otago in New Zealand has lead a study which for the first time has uncovered the genetics of how the sex change happens.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

In 1969, while millions watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on the television, BBC radio was providing scientific and engineering commentary throughout the day. One young scientist brought in to help interpret the lunar landscape was Lionel Wilson, at the time he had just finished his PhD on the mechanics of the Moon's surface. But after seeing evidence of ancient lava fields in the pictures beamed back to Earth, he changed the course of his career and spent the next 50 years studying volcanology on Earth and in space.

25 years ago, the planet Jupiter was peppered with over 20 cometary impacts, this had never been seen before. The comet was Shoemaker Levy 9, which had already broken into icy pieces. Its fiery death had been foretold a year earlier when calculations showed its orbit was due to cross Jupiter's. As D-day approached, July 16 1994, experts wondered whether there would be fireworks, or a fizzle, they weren't disappointed.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

Analysing moon rocks The Apollo missions were scientific explorations, bringing back hundreds of kilograms of moon rock to help us understand the formation of the Moon, the Earth and life itself. We are still studying the rocks that were bought back from between 1969 and 1972. Roland Pease went to the Diamond Light Source Syncotron in Oxfordshire, where scientists are still studying these moon rocks.

Viruses lurking in our genomes When it comes to our genomes, there is no such thing as 100% human. Our genetic code is a patchwork of DNA that we have picked up or lost along the way. 8% of our DNA comes from viruses. So what does this mean? Much of the viral DNA is thought to have been involved in forming our immune systems, fighting against pathogenic viruses. But it's not all good news, new work suggests that these human endogenous retroviruses or HERVs might also be the missing causative link in major 'unsolved' neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis [MS], amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease [ALS] and schizophrenia [SCZ].

Presenter: Adam Rutherford Producer: Caroline Steel

BepiColombo and the X-rays from Mercury Prof Emma Bunce, has been part of the team that last year launched an x-ray telescope on a space probe to Mercury. It will be a long journey, not arriving until 2025. As Emma describes, the MIXS instrument, designed and built in the UK, will analyze the x-rays emitted by the different chemicals on the planet’s surface, and so build a map of the abundancies of different atoms across the terrifyingly hostile world. This is only possible because of the strength of the x-rays coming from the sun that strike the atoms on the surface, eliciting a distinctive signature re-emitted back into space.

Capuchin Monkeys and their Tools Tomos Proffitt and colleagues announced in a recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution their study of archaeological evidence of Brazil’s capuchin monkeys using stones and anvils to smash cashew nuts for at least the last 3000 years. It is not the oldest evidence of non-human primate tool use but it is the oldest for monkeys, and suggests tantalisingly that tool use may have emerged in hominin species independently and on numerous occasions.

Molecular Music Chemistry and music pupils at Ilkley Grammar School in the UK have been working together with The University of Bradford to create music specific to different molecules. As A-Level students Amelia Milner and Matthew Hodson describe to Adam, they took the distinctive frequencies of the bonds in certain molecules found in nature and transposed them onto the chromatic musical scale. Then the musicians composed pieces using only that set of notes that evoked some of the properties of the molecules.

AI Drivers and Machine Learning Genovefa Kefalidou shows Adam a self-driving car circling a track at the exhibition. The technology to identify and track different objects is getting better, and machine learning algorithms can map human actions onto different scenarios to find appropriate responses, but is society ready to trust and accept the benefits they might bring?

Presenter: Adam Rutherford Composers: Amelia Milner, Matthew Hodson (water, aspirin) and Daniel Burgess (cinnamic acid) Producer: Alex Mansfield

Global Food Security Maia Elliot is an analyst and writer for Global Food Security, who recently held a competition for young food researchers to present their work in a compelling way in less than 3 minutes. Maia and the winner, Claire Kanja of Rothamstead Research discuss with Adam the broader issues “Food Security” seeks to address, and also how best to communicate often esoteric specialized interest to a broader audience that includes food-consuming tax-payers.

A Threat to Wheat Claire’s work is looking into a threat to world wheat harvests known as Fusarium Head (or Ear) Blight. She is trying to categorize the proteins that the fungus uses firstly to evade Wheat’s defences, and then to kill the plant cells for its own food.

Food Freshness Sensor Meanwhile, at Imperial College, Hannah Fisher reports on new work to make cheap-as-chips gas sensitive food labels that could detect levels of gases inside a food packet that indicate it is gone off or decayed. You could even read them with the NFC chip in most smartphones.

The Origins and Adaptations of the European Potato Talking of chips, published this week is a genetic history of the cultivated European potato. Using DNA from museum specimens going back centuries, the authors describe a very complicated to-and-froing between continents that enables modern varieties to avoid certain blights and even to form decent sized potatoes when growing in different day-lengths. Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum in London was one of the authors.

Presenter: Adam Rutherford Producer: Alex Mansfield

Oi, You Singin' at My Bird? The delightful song of the European Robin is actually a fierce territorial warning between males that functions to avoid costly mismatched conflict. In fact, the complexity of the song seems to represent the fitness of the singer. Gareth Arnott of Queen’s University in Belfast talks about his investigation into whether noise – including anthropogenic noise interferes with this life-or-death conversation. It sounds like it does.

Science as Entertainment All this week and next BBC2 is hosting a new programme called The Family Brain Games. The games are designed not to test merely general knowledge or conventional measures of IQ, but rather a functional, communicative sort of intelligence that competing families display amongst themselves as a team. But can this sort of nuanced science be properly communicated on TV? Host Dara Ó Briain and neuroscientist Prof Sophie Scott discuss the ins and outs of making science entertaining.

Presenter: Adam Rutherford Producer: Alex Mansfield

Science Policy Under Thatcher 30 years ago a new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, told her officials - in a break from the norm - that she would keep a personal eye on science policy in her government. By 1987, the relationship between government, university research and industrial research would be changed utterly. Prof Jon Agar has been scouring The National Archives and a wealth of hitherto private communications that shed light on how her approach to science policy formed. His new book is out this week and he discusses the events with Prof Dame Wendy Hall, a young scientist in the 80s but now fresh to the programme from hearing announcements at the London Technology Week regarding large investment and an industrial strategy towards Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Screen Time Measures If you are using evidence to inform your policy, you need to make sure that evidence is as robust as you think it is. David Ellis of Lancaster University tells Gareth about his team’s recent work to evaluate a certain type of self-reporting, particularly involving studies into our well-being with regards to technology use. How much time do you spend with your device? Your answer might not be completely aligned with reality, as revealed by actual screen-time data. Unfortunately, many of the headline-grabbing papers we read regarding health and screen time are based on self-reporting questionnaires, which David suggests might require more scepticism.

Presenter: Gareth Mitchell Producer: Alex Mansfield

The Surrey Earthquake Swarm Over the last year several small earthquakes have been detected in one part of Surrey. Many have surmised that these may be caused by oil drilling taking place nearby, but it might be simpler than that. So the British Geological Survey has been monitoring the region. Roland Pease joined Imperial College seismologist Steven Hicks out in the countryside inspecting his detectors to find out more.

Mama’s Last Hug Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading primatologists talks to Adam about his latest book, and the difficulties we as human observers have with studying emotion in animals. Prof de Waal coins a neologism ‘anthropodenialism’ to describe the belief that emotions in animals are incommensurable with human experience. He thinks most mammals, and certainly primates, experience pretty much the same emotions as we do, for similar reasons. Feelings, however, are a different matter.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

His guests are the following.

Professor Steve Strogatz, of Cornell University, the author of a new book on calculus, Infinite Powers. He’s worked on all kinds of problems including some biological ones such as the shape of DNA, how fireflies create light and the grandness of small world theories.

Dr Emily Shuckburgh, is a climate change scientist at University of Cambridge, who has a PhD in maths studying fluid dynamics. She is the co-author of the Ladybird book on Climate Change with Prince Charles,

Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, is President of the Royal Society, and was originally a physicist, who moved into biology, to study the 3-dimensional shape of one of the most important biological structures, the ribosome, for which he won the Nobel prize winner.

Yeast to make cannabinoids In California, where cannabis has become a major cash crop since legalisation there, researchers are trying to evaluate the environmental impacts of large scale agricultural planting. But, as Geoff Marsh reports, other researchers are finding other ways to produce various cannabinoids for potential future sale. Can humble yeast be modified to produce the active substances that some believe to have therapeutic benefits?

Hearing aids for cocktail parties One of the most impressive properties of the human auditory system is the way most of us can overhear or eavesdrop on specific voices in an otherwise crowded room. Most hearing aids can’t help with that: they can sometimes filter out noises that are not human voices, but cannot do the very human trick of sorting one voice from a sea of others. Nima Mesgarani from Columbia University reports in the journal Science Advances a proof of principle for a device that might be able to do just that. Firstly, a new algorithm can separate out one voice from another. Then brain waves from the wearer could be used to recognise which of those voices they are trying to hear. Then it’s a simple case of turning that voice up, and lowering the volume of the others, all in nearly real-time.

Automatic face recognition So called Neural Network computing techniques are revolutionising our lives. They are able to perform a host of tasks that not so long ago would be the preserve of human brains, and to process huge sets of data and “learn” very quickly. One of the things they are proving exceptional at is face recognition; being able to identify faces in a crowd, or on a street, from a set of images provided by a user. But with great computing power comes great computing responsibility. What are the implications for policing and personal privacy? Gareth discusses these issues with Stephanie Hare.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

A synthetic E. Coli genome Jason Chin and Colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have published this week in the Journal Nature their latest work to completely synthesise a new genome of an E. coli bacteria. Not only was the genome designed and manufactured by human means, it was also recoded in a way not used by nature, involving some 18000 edits. In natural DNA, several different codes can do the same job. As Roland Pease reports, the new genome instead uses fewer of these duplicates, demonstrating all sorts of possibilities for future designs of synthetic cells.

Von Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a celebrated Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer. He influenced Darwin and was the first person to describe human-induced climate change, based on his observations from his travels. Yet he has slipped into relative obscurity, at least in the English-speaking world.

Andrea Wulf is an acclaimed author who has previously written about Alexander von Humboldt and is now back with another book about the explorer: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt. It’s a graphic novel (illustrated by Lillian Melcher) that celebrates the 250th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth and depicts his adventures on his 5 year expedition through South America. Adam Rutherford chats to Andrea about her book, why she chose to make it a graphic novel and how Humboldt’s views on the environment can be interpreted today.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

Spring has sprung and it's probably not too late to get the tomato plants in, but should you water them little and often, or more but less often? Madeleine Finlay reports from Wisley, where The Royal Horticultural Society's Janet Manning has set up a new experiment this year to answer that question. Janet is the first Garden Water Scientist at the RHS, and hopes to demonstrate that giving plants less frequent, but more generous, bouts of hydration encourages deeper root growth, building in resilience for those periods when water is harder to come by whilst also allowing gardeners ultimately to use less.

Do you have a fabella? Or maybe two fabellae? Michael Berthaume, "Anthroengineer" at Imperial College London tells us about a curiously under-studied bone that some people have in their knees. Present in certain primates and quadruped mammals, but thought to have disappeared from human anatomy, it seems to have made a bit of a comeback in certain populations around the world over the last century or so. Quite why, quite how, and quite what it's for, seems something of a mystery.

Less than a decade ago, an entirely new branch of the ancient human tree was discovered. These new hominins were named the Denisovans, after the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia where fragments of finger bone and teeth were discovered, and genetic sequencing of a finger bone revealed that they were a new hominin group, an extinct sister group to Neanderthals. This exciting find contained a tantalising puzzle. Traces of Denisovan DNA are found in modern-day population groups like Sherpas, Tibetans and some other neighbouring populations and this includes genetic variants which help them to survive at high altitudes where the oxygen levels are low. The original Denisovan cave is only around 700 metres, so why would such an adaptation be necessary at these altitudes? This week a new paper in Nature slots a big piece into the puzzle. Teams from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have found another Denisovan fossil – this time a mandible, a lower jawbone, still containing teeth – from the vast Tibetan plateau in China. At 2.3 Km above sea level, it’s very high and the air is thin, and 160,000 years ago, which is when the fossil has been dated to, it would have been a very challenging place to live indeed. In fact this jawbone is the earliest known hominin fossil found on this enormous plateau. Adam calls in Professor Fred Spoor, from the Centre for Human Evolution Research at the Natural History Museum in London, to examine the facts and to see if we can work out how far and wide these hominins travelled.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

Around the world this weekend (April 26th-29th 2019) people are being encouraged to participate in the City Nature Challenge, a global effort to catalogue urban wildlife using a free mobile app. Reporter Geoff Marsh travelled to the California Academy of Sciences, home of the initiative, to meet those behind it and how we might all take part.

The third act in our drama is a chat with journalist and writer Will Storr about his new book - the Science of Storytelling - which explores the structure of stories with relation to our evolution and brain structure. Primeval instincts of expectation, subversion and causation intertwine with camp-fire sagas from the beginning of conversation. What can this science of storytelling contribute to the art of telling stories about science? A ripping yarn indeed.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

An experiment to see whether isolated dead pig brains could be preserved at the cellular level in order to study post mortem brains, had a surprising outcome. The BrainEx technology of perfusing the brains with chemicals that should have just halted the rapid degradation of cellular structure in the brain, that occurs soon after death, actually caused them to start firing neurons, reacting to drugs and generally behaving as if they were alive. Although, it has to be stressed, there was no whole-brain connectivity or consciousness achieved, it does raise ethical questions about death, if this method was to be developed for use in humans. Bioethicist at Kings College London, Silvia Camporesi explores the facts that reveal that death is a process rather than a single event and what this might mean for patients that are diagnosed as brain dead.

Where is the Martian methane? This is the question Mannish Patel at the Open University has been left pondering after the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter came up empty handed in detecting the gas on Mars. Methane could be a signature of past of present life on the Red Planet, it's been measured by NASA's Curiosity rover and by telescopes on Earth, but the far more sensitive and specialised TGO has so far failed to detect the gas. It could be because methane levels in the thin Martian atmosphere is a seasonal event, we'll just have to ait for an entire Martian year of surveys to be able to solve this mystery.

Our faces are incredibly important in our lives, we feed through them, they are the conduit for our sensory interaction with the universe, via smell, hearing and vision; we speak, and we convey the subtlest emotions with a raised eyebrow, a wry smile, a clenched jaw or eyes wide open. It is the central importance of these features that has meant we’ve been intensively studying the evolution of the face for decades, to work out why we look the way we do, and how much of our looks reflects adaptations that enhanced our survival, and how much is just down to quirks of evolution. Anatomist, Paul O’Higgins from York University is interested in how all that has influenced our faces.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

A new species of hominin has been discovered in caves at the northernmost tip of the Philippines, on the island of Luzon. The discoverers have called this creature Homo luzonensis, and it's thought to be 50,000 years or older. The teeth, hand and foot bones suggest it could have been a mixture of early modern humans - Homo sapiens- and older ancestors like the Australopithecines. Cambridge University's Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution, Robert Foley suggests some caution with calling this a new species, and explains how populations of hominins isolated on islands could evolve to be different by a mechanism called genetic drift.

The world is facing an antimicrobial crisis. The global fight against infections is looking worrying as more and more strains of bacteria emerge which are resistant to our stocks of antibiotics. Marnie visits to Tblisi, in Georgia to meet scientists who are looking at a different way to fight infections, collecting and using the microscopic phage viruses which infect the bacteria which infect us.

Another way to try and beat antibiotic resistance was the focus for Susan Rosenberg at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Texas, when she thought it might be clever to try and stop microbes evolving resistance to antibiotics . She discovered that when microbial cells are stressed, a number of them actually start to mutate at a greater rate. This means they stand a greater chance of mutating into a form that has some resistance to our drugs. But by learning about the finer details of this mechanism, and finding a drug that can halt it. She and her team hope to skew the evolutionary arms race between microbes and antibiotics and our immune systems in our favour.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

The gravitational wave detectors LIGO and VIRGO have been recently upgraded and made more sensitive to the miniscule signals that denote ripples in gravity - gravitational waves. Professor Sheila Rowan of the University of Glasgow explains to Gareth Mitchell that she hopes that with this third run of the detectors, they will be finding not just one or two signals that provide evidence of massive events in our universe, but hundreds, maybe even thousands.

In the quest to understand how corals are affected by rising sea temperatures we need to understand the symbiotic relationship they have with dinoflagellates, the single-celled algae that live in, and use photosynthesis to make food for the coral. When coral gets too hot and undergoes 'bleaching', this is the algae leaving the coral. Yixian Zheng at the Carnegie Institution of Washington takes Roland Pease on a tour of her coral tanks and explains that she's hunting for a model coral organism to study this process at the genetic and molecular level.

A crime has been committed in the studio. Gareth's tea has been drunk and his biscuits have been nibbled. Luckily evidence was left at the scene of the crime - a shoeprint with distinctive wear patterns. One quick phone call and the director of the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Dundee, Professor Niamh Nic Daeid is on the case. She's asking the public to help build up a database of footwear prints. The project is the largest ever study into the variation in footwear marks made by the same shoes across different surfaces and activities so that the variation observed can be used to explore links between the shoe and the mark it makes. In order to do this, she's asking thousands of individuals to take part in a large-scale citizen science project by taking pictures of their footwear and the marks they make. This will help the Dundee team build a substantial database for use in their research to aid the scientific validation of footwear marks as evidence for use in the criminal justice system.

Producer (and biscuit thief) - Fiona Roberts

Want to know where a whale has been? Just ask the barnacles on its head! Barnacles hitchhike on whales, and they’ve been doing this for millions of years. When barnacles grow they add to their carbonate shells using compounds from their surroundings. As the whales migrate, the barnacles take up compounds from the different oceanic locations. A bit like filling in a travel diary, or collecting passport stamps. If you can decipher the chemical code laid down in the barnacle shells, you can work out where the whale has been on its oceanic migrations. This is what researcher Larry Taylor, at University of California Berkeley, has been doing and he says that the information can even be found in fossilised whales (and barnacles.)

The patterns signals in our brain make when we are falling asleep are quite hard to study. But thanks to a few people who manage to fall asleep in an FMRi scanner, we now know there are multiple stages of sleep. Professor Morton Kringlebach, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford likens the pattern of brain activity, as it enters the various sleep stages, to the choreography of a dance. His friend, Dr. Milton Mermikides at the University of Surrey, goes one further. As a composer and academic expert in jazz, he thought the pattern of brain activity was like chord changes in jazz music. So he put the sleepy brain to music. Marnie listens to the soporific tones and asks if people with disordered sleep, such as insomnia or restless leg syndrome would make different music?

Producer: Fiona Roberts

BBC Space Correspondent Jonathan Amos has news on some space rocks this week. Ultima and Thule, make up a bi-lobe comet out in the far reaches of the Solar System in the Kuiper Belt. Ultima-Thule was visited by the New Horizons mission in January. More data is being analysed and giving scientists insight into how these two planetary building blocks collided and merged and also on how it got its strange flattened shape. Another rock seems to be a rubble pile. The asteroid Ryugu is currently hosting the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft and landers. Jonathan explains to Gareth what stage the missions' audacious sample collect and return is now at. And there's a shock discovery by spacecraft OSIRIS-REx from asteroid Bennu. The NASA spacecraft analysing the asteroid has observed it shooting out plumes of dust that surround it in a dusty haze. It's a phenomenon never seen in an asteroid before.

Back down on Earth and under the surface of the earth are the earthworms. As any savvy gardener will know, earthworms make a big difference to the health of soil and plants. What isn’t as well understood is how changes to the soil - like climate change and the intensification of agricultural practices - have impacted on the all-important worm population. In fact, scientists don’t even know what’s down there, wriggling underneath the surface. To find out, farmers recently undertook to the first worm survey in the UK. Finding that 42% of fields had very few or completely lacked key types of earthworm, the results suggest that over-cultivation has led to poor soil health in significant amounts of farmland.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

It’s hard to miss the current discussions on sex, gender, and biology. One arena where debates are getting quite heated is sport. In 2016, the International Olympic Committee announced that male-to-female transgender athletes will be allowed to compete in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, without having gender reassignment surgery. They do have to demonstrate reduced blood testosterone levels (usually achieved through hormone therapy). Female-to-male transgender athletes can compete ‘without restriction’. Gerard Conway, Professor of Reproductive Endocrinology at the Institute for Women’s Health at University College London, joins Adam to help us understand many of the issues concerning testosterone and its putative effect on athletic performance.

The festival hog roast has been happening for more than four and a half thousand years. Hundreds of pig bones have been unearthed from henge sites including Durrington Walls near Stonehenge in Wiltshire – and these have helped put together a picture of life in Neolithic Britain, especially when people came together from all over the country, and brought pigs with them for big feasts. Dr. Richard Madgewick at Cardiff University carried out isotopic analysis on the pig bones to work out just how far people travelled with their pigs to attend these social events.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

There are no animals that do not need sleep, yet we're still not sure why we need to sleep. Giorgio Gilestro at Imperial College has been trying to find out more about whether lack of sleep shortens lifespan, by bothering fruit flies and stopping them dropping off. In a carefully designed experiment, he has devised a way of shaking the flies as soon as it looks like they are dropping off. He tells Gareth Mitchell that he's 98% certain the flies were kept awake day after day and discovered that there was no life-shortening effect due to lack of sleep. He cannot rule out the benefit of micro-sleep, but it provides tantalising results which could point us in the direction of finally discovering whether we need those 8 precious hours a night.

Eight years ago, on 11th March 2011, three of the nuclear reactors overheated and exploded at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. This was following the tsunami that killed around 19,000 people. The essentials are known – the reactors overheated when the cooling circuits failed. The overheated steam then broke down into hydrogen and oxygen, which then caught fire and blew the reactor vessels apart. But the details aren’t known. And there’s no way of getting inside the reactors to learn them. So instead researchers are doing a forensic analysis of the radioactive debris scattered around the reactor sites – some of it at the Diamond X-ray facility just outside Oxford. Roland Pease was waiting in the experimental area as one grain of Fukushima dust was brought in from safe storage.

Concerned about a growing number of spurious scientific claims on products and campaigns against vaccinations and the shape of our planet, climate scientist Ben McNeil decided to do something about it. He has come up with a website where anyone can pose a question for scientists to answer. MetaFact.io is just starting up, but Ben's hope is to put the public in direct contact with the scientists with some, if not all, of the answers.

Methane is many times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However, it breaks down much more quickly than CO2 and is found at much lower levels in the atmosphere. During much of the 20th century levels of methane, mostly from fossil fuel sources like coal and gas, increased in the atmosphere but, by the beginning of the 21st century, they had stabilised. Then, surprisingly, levels starting rising in 2007. That increase began to accelerate after 2014 and fast growth has continued. Studies suggest these increases are more likely to be mainly biological in origin. However, the exact cause remains unclear. Some researchers believe the spread of intense farming in Africa may be involved, in particular in tropical regions where conditions are becoming warmer and wetter because of climate change. Rising numbers of cattle – as well as wetter and warmer swamps – are producing more and more methane. This idea is now being studied in detail by a consortium led by Professor Euan Nisbet, at Royal Holloway, University of London. Another, more worrying source for the increase in methane could be that it’s not been broken down in the atmosphere as efficiently. Natural chemicals in the atmosphere, which help to break down methane, may be changing because of temperature rises, causing them to lose their ability to deal with the gas.

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical discovery institute researching the biology underlying human health. This vital research is carried out by some of the best scientists in their field. However, many, many more people are involved behind the scenes. ‘Craft and Graft’ is a new exhibition at the Francis Crick Institute celebrating these ‘unsung heroes’, and opens on 1 March, focusing the spotlight on the technicians, engineers and support staff that are vital in supporting the scientists and their work by ensuring the glassware is washed, the equipment runs smoothly and the cells are all looked after and categorised correctly. Hannah Fisher was granted special access behind the scenes to meet some of the people who inspired the exhibition.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

We know that trees help mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases on climate change by sucking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In fact forests are estimated to lock up 2 of every 10 carbon molecules released. But which forests do it best? Tom Pugh at the University of Birmingham has been looking at the age of forests to try and see if this is a factor. It turns out the pristine, ancient tropical forests like the Amazon, although doing a good job, just aren't as good as the younger, regrowth forests of the Boreal and Temperate zones in the northern hemisphere. It's all down to demographics and the balance between new trees and dying trees.

We keep hearing that this, or that, species is being threatened by climate change, but often the mechanisms are not that obvious. One particularly intriguing example comes in the form of the Ethiopian bush crow. An intelligent, seemingly adaptable bird, living in what seems like a general, widespread habitat in Southern Ethiopia, eating a wide and varied diet. Yet it's range is restricted to tiny pockets of land in a huge area of, what seems like a similar habitat. Ecologist, Andrew Bladon at Cambridge University thinks he has the answer to what's restricting this bird's range and how is a warming climate pushing this bird to extinction.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

It’s quickly being realised that the composition of microbes in our guts is vital to our health. Scientists working on the gut microbiome have discovered and isolated more than 100 completely new species of bacteria from healthy human intestines. It’s hoped that these new techniques to isolate and grow these novel bugs, will give us insight into how our microbiome keeps us healthy.

After covering the story about the Earth’s early core accretion and the clues found in rocks about the early magnetic field, listener Neil Tugwell emailed BBC Inside Science to ask for more information about geomagnetic switching. Are we heading for another flip of the magnetic poles? And what might be the impact on GPS? Adam gets the answers from Dr. Robert Wicks, lecturer in space risk in the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

All race meetings in the UK have been cancelled today following the discovery that three horses have been diagnosed with equine flu, despite having been vaccinated. Expert on equine flu at the University of Nottingham, Dr Janet Daly, talks to Adam about the disease, how the outbreak has come about and the process of making a new vaccine.

What if the walls of your house generated their own electricity? It may sound far-fetched, but one team in the chemistry department of King’s College London is trying to do just that. Reporter Hannah Fisher went to visit Dr Leigh Aldous to discover his invention – a brick, which is hoped to be made out of recycled plastic, that can generate its own electricity. While the project is still in its early stages, it is hoped that the brick will be able to be used in off-grid and remote locations, as well as those affected by natural disasters.

Scientists have analysed DNA samples from people living on the Iberian Peninsula to determine their genetic heritage. Results revealed near vertical stripes running from the north of the peninsula to the south, indicating that at this fine resolution, Spanish people are more genetically similar from north to south as opposed to east to west. Dr Clare Bycroft of Oxford University chats to Adam more about how this fits with what we know about Spanish history.

Earth’s solid iron inner core, liquid outer core and interactions between the two give us our protective magnetic field and are responsible for the ‘geodynamo’ that drives this, as well as volcanism and Earth’s tectonics. But we don’t yet know when the solid core formed. It’s hard to find paleo-magnetic records from early in Earth’s history. But now a group at Rochester University in New York have discovered magnetic particles from 565 million year old Ediacaran Period rocks in Canada and they say that at the time lots of life was evolving on our planet, the geodynamo was low and wobbly. This leads them to believe the solid core formed two to three times later than previously thought.

A typical sneeze will throw out 40,000 tiny droplets loaded with viruses or bacteria, which can hang in the air like a cloud until someone else comes along and inhales some. To a scientist, this suspension is an aerosol, and what goes on inside a tiny droplet can be very different from what happens in a beaker of fluid. But studying those conditions, which can alter whether a germ can survive its aerial journey is hard. Which is why at Bristol University they’ve developed an aerosol trap that can hold droplets mid-air, without contact, with an electric field.

Rabbits and hares across Europe have been declining rapidly over the past few decades. There are a number of factors involved (Agricultural intensification, climate change, hunting and a whole host of infectious diseases.) Myxomatosis in rabbits, which has now jumped into hares, is fairly well known by the public, but there are other viral and bacterial diseases that are jumping between the species and the most recent one Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus 2 (RHDV2) is of particular concern right now. Very little is known about this disease in wild populations. It was seen in hares in Europe a few years back, but it’s now just been identified in the UKs native brown hare population. Biologist Diana Bell at the University of East Anglia wants the public to contact her if they see any hares that look like they’ve died from the disease.

Producer - Fiona Roberts

And For many of us, January is a time to try a bit better. And millions of us decide to give up alcohol. It’s called Dry January. But what does this alcohol break actually achieve? Has anyone scientifically researched the results of a month off the sauce? Marnie Chesterton spoke to liver specialist and senior lecturer at university college London, Dr Gautam Mehta.

And because chemists are celebrating the 150th birthday, or rather birth-year, of the Periodic Table we thought BBC Inside Science should as well. The table is that chart on every science classroom wall. It’s a grid of small boxes, each with a symbol that represents a chemical element. And elements are the fundamental substances that make up everything you can see, and quite a few things that you can’t.

We spoke to chemist Dr Eric Scerri at UCLA, who has written a book on the history and significance of the Periodic Table while Roland Pease visited the lab of Professor Andrea Sella, who is making a physical representation of the whole table, if he can find all the elements that is.

Little is known about the placenta and how it works, despite it being absolutely essential for supporting the baby as it grows inside the mother. When it doesn’t function properly, it can result in serious problems, from pre-eclampsia to miscarriage, with immediate and lifelong consequences for both mother and child. Our knowledge of this important organ is very limited because of a lack of good experimental models. Animals are too dissimilar to humans to provide a good model of placental development and implantation, and stem cell studies have largely proved unsuccessful. But one group of University Cambridge researchers have now created ‘mini-proto placentas’ – a cellular model, growing long-term, in 3D of the early stages of the placenta – that could provide a ‘window’ into early pregnancy and help transform our understanding of reproductive disorders.

The Woodland Trust want you to tell them when you notice a tree, you regularly see, loses all of its leaves. Its part of their long term phonological study, Nature's Calendar . They hope to keep track of the effect of climate change on the timings of annual tree events.

Citizen scientists and their smartphones are being recruited to test the supermassive particle theory of dark matter and dark energy. The CREDO (Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory) project utilises smartphone cameras to take 'dark photos' and hopefully capture a particle collision that could be from the cascaded decay of these early universe massive particles or WIMPS.

Metrologists from across the world have just voted to update the metric system. With the redefinition of the kilogram, alongside the units for temperature, electrical current and amount of substance. For the first time, we now have a measurement system defined by fundamental constants of the universe and not physical artefacts made by humans. Reporter Henry Bennie travelled with the UK's kilogram to Paris for the vote.

NASA's Mars InSight mission lander is expected to touch down on the red planet on Monday. BBC Science Correspondent, Jonathan Amos, explains to Adam just how this stationary science lab will explore Martian geology looking for signs that life could have existed at one time on our neighbour.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

Monitoring the health of estuarine and coastal water ecosystems usually relies on the expensive and time-consuming practice of catching fish to get a view on the health of entire ecosystem. New methods are starting to be used called Environmental DNA sampling, using DNA barcoding techniques. As everything sheds fragments of DNA into the environment, by sampling water or sediment, you can use High Throughput DNA analysis, using special probes to pull out and identify the species you want. It’s a lot quicker and cheaper, but you still have to deal with problems of collection, filtration and contamination. But Professor of Conservation Genetics, Stefano Mariani at the University of Salford, has found an even better way. He's recruited the European brown Shrimp, which eat everything, are found everywhere and can do all the filtering and storing of the DNA for him. All Stefano has to do is catch the shrimp and analyse their stomach contents to get a picture of what is in the environment.

PhD student at Sheffield University, Rory Cooper explains to Adam how mathematical patterns that Alan Turing worked on late in his career are found in abundance in the natural world. The genetic mechanisms of switching on cellular processes that lead to feather or hair emergence have now been found in the formation of shark scales. The pattern relies on genes to switch on a function, such as feathering, but diffuse out to surrounding cells and switch the function off, leading to a uniform, spaced out pattern. As shark species split off from other vertebrates around 420 million years ago, it therefore proves that Turing’s pattern is recycled through other vertebrates.

Producer: Fiona Roberts

Humans are now the greatest force in shaping the surface of the Earth. We now move more than 24 times as much rock, rubble and sediment than all the world’s rivers. Dr Anthony Cooper of the British Geological Society has been weighing this anthropogenic global force. Closer to home, Adam Rutherford speaks to Professor Colin Waters at the University of Leicester, about the weight of human-created rubble he’s found under the City of London.

When the new polymer £50 note is introduced in around a year’s time, it’ll have a scientist on the reverse. Industrialist Matthew Boulton and engineer James Watt will step aside for a British scientist nominated by the public. Sarah John, Chief Cashier at the Bank of England, explains the rules to Adam and science experts, Emily Grossman and Alice Bell debate the merits of some of the more popular front runners.

Roland Pease meets John Able and Professor Simon Potts, to discuss the value of ‘big data’ – in this case, for honeybees. Using a ‘buzz box’ to detect conditions inside and out of the beehive, this data can be transmitted to the cloud and used to keep track of beehive health. This is termed the ‘internet of hives’ and provides a huge amount of high quality data to discover the key indicators of beehive health.

Back in the 1980s, the world discovered that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, which protects the earth, and us, from being fried by the sun’s rays. The 1987 Montreal Protocol banned the use of CFCs, and as we stopped emitting them, the ozone layer started to recover. But there are other gases like carbon tetrachloride that destroy the ozone layer and are also restricted. But Dr Matt Rigby, an atmospheric chemist from Bristol University, has been discovering that there are still sources of carbon tetrachloride.

Testing for illicit drugs usually needs a blood or urine sample, but now it can be done from a sweaty fingerprint. And not only on a living suspect, but on a corpse. Adam Rutherford speaks to the developer of this smart chemistry , University of East Anglia’s David Russell.

This week, leading British and European scientists wrote to the British Prime Minister and European Commission President. They expressed their concerns about the potential impact if there is a no-deal departure by the UK from the European Union. We hear from one of the signatories Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society and from UK Science Minister Sam Gyimah.

Roland Pease reports on the use of the medically valuable last-resort antibiotic, colistin, as a growth promoting substance in agricultural livestock feed in India. He speaks to infectious disease consultant Abdul Ghafur in Chennai, India and microbiologist Tim Walsh at Cardiff University.

The space probe Bepicolombo has begun its 7 year voyage to the planet Mercury. Suzie Imber of the University of Leicester and David Rothery of the Open University tell Adam why the journey will take so long and why Mercury is such an intriguing planet, worthy of exploration by this new probe.

And how many Bosons can you fit in a rocket? As they are rather small particles the answer will be quite a lot, but a team from Germany has succeeded in making a form of mater known as the Bose Einstein Condensate in a small rocket which they launched into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Potentially the success of their experiment could lead to new ways of detecting gravitational waves in space.

Back on earth a group of ‘A’ level students have been looking at or rather listening to data from space, and published a scientific paper on their observation of a solar storm. In a unique partnership with university physics researchers, information on electromagnetic waves around our planet has been turned into audible data. The keen ears of the students identified events that had not previously been detected.

And how incriminating is your washing machine? Digital forensics, the unpicking of the data trails on our digital devices, from phones to TV tuners, even baby monitors and washing machines are now playing a part in criminal investigations, not just cases involving online fraud or cybercrime, but any investigation looking at what suspects were doing and when. A digital trail can act as evidence for time and place.

Cairngorms National Park in Scotland is part of an ambitious project to restore the habitat to its former natural state. Four organisations have joined together as the 'Cairngorms Connect’ project – Scottish Natural Heritage, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Wildland Limited and Forest Enterprise Scotland. Graeme Prest of Forest Enterprise Scotland explains how the project team will start to restore the habitat.

The grass pea is a resilient and highly nutritious legume but it contains varying level of toxins. Marnie Chesterton visits the John Innes Centre in Norwich to meet the researchers working on making the grass pea less poisonous, which could aid food security, particularly in sub-Saharan.

The Sun is technically a G-type main sequence star, which means it’s a giant continuous nuclear fusion reaction plasma, spewing out extremely dangerous matter and energy in every direction, and when it hits the Earth, this can cause all sorts of problems. Adam visits the Science Museum in London to meet Harry Cliff, a physicist and curator of a new exhibition: ‘The Sun: Living With Our Star’, which explores our relationship with the closest star to earth.

Adam also finds out from Professor Chris Scott of Reading University about a citizen science project called Protect our Planet from Solar Storms.

The Japanese space probe Hayabusa 2 dropped an exploratory robot onto the surface of the asteroid Rguyu early on Wednesday morning. The autonomous probe is called MASCOT. With 16 hours of battery life, it landed at one spot on the asteroid's southern hemisphere, took a slew of data and then jumped to another location for more image-taking, temperature and magnetic measurements and chemical analyses of the rocks. MASCOT project manager is Dr Tra-Mi Ho of the German Space Agency.

A critical meeting of the International Panel on Climate Change is underway in South Korea. Scientists and government representatives aim to finalise a policy road map to limit global warming to a 1.5 degree C increase by the end of the century. BBC News environment correspondent Matt McGrath is reporting from the meeting and explains why 1.5 degree C and not 2 degrees is the new preferred target for many scientists and nations. But will scientists and policy makers from around the world see eye to eye?

Physicist Helen Czerski provides Adam with a final report at the end of her 8 week expedition at the North Pole which aimed to explore the interactions of water, ice, atmosphere and life in shaping Arctic weather and climate. The adventure ended with a crunch and the loss of thousands of pounds worth of scientific kit.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

A hundred years ago, the 1918 flu pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide and infected around half a billion. Seasonal flu accounts for about 650,000 deaths per year. As this year’s flu season approaches, there are new insights into how the influenza virus causes disease and why some strains like the 1918 one (a subtype of the avian strain H1N1) are so deadly compared with the seasonal kind. In the most serious cases, there’s an extreme immune reaction in the lungs, and people can effectively suffocate. The latest research from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford has uncovered a molecule that might be behind that immune overreaction. Dr Aartjan te Velthuis explains the findings and the implications for novel treatments.

The massive bombing raids on cities in World War Two lead to terrible human tragedy, Now a historian and a physicist have been looking at how shock waves from some of the major bombing over Berlin caused the upper atmosphere above Slough to wobble. Specifically they’re interested in the layer eighty to a thousand kilometres up that reflects radio waves, the ionosphere. Historian Patrick Major and meteorology expert Christopher Scott, both professors at the University of Reading, tell Gareth about their collaboration and how monitoring changes in the ionosphere today can reveal both man made and natural explosive events.

And Adam Rutherford talks to Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of UCL about her book, Inventing Ourselves: the Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, the last on this year's shortlist for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize.

Adam Rutherford explores the neuroscience, the psychology and the epidemiology of addiction; what the latest research says about what addiction is, and how that can help us treat people experiencing addiction. He discusses these questions with psychologist Dr Sally Marlow and neurologist Professor Mitul Mehta who are both at Kings College and have been involved in the exhibition, and Dr Suzi Gage from Liverpool University who studies the epidemiology of addiction. He also talks to the curator of Hooked, Hannah Redler Hawes, and to two of the Science Gallery Young Leaders, Elly Magson and Mandeep Singh, who show him a couple of the exhibits.

Nearly half the human genome contains genes that regulate what your organs should be doing at a specific time of day, This has enormous potential importance to the efficacy of drugs - what time of day you take them could be a real issue. John Hogenesch from Cincinnatti Children's Hospital has been studying the genes that cycle with our daily lives. His new database of cyclic genes could help plan the best timing for a host of therapeutic interventions

Physicist Helen Czerski has been in the Arctic for the last five weeks, aboard the Swedish research vessel and ice breaker Oden. As the expedition comes to a close we hear about the team's attempts to elucidate the driving forces behind the unusual weather patterns around the North Pole.

Inside Science has been profiling authors shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Society science book prize. This week it's mathematician Hannah Fry's new book, Hello World: How to be human in the Age of Machines. You can hear extracts from it on Book of the Week on Radio 4 all this week too.

Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Seventy five years on, Adam is joined by four of the many scientists delivering their own lectures this week. They tackle subjects of complexity in biology, ranging from the origin of complex life, the increasingly messy structure of life's evolutionary tree, the functioning of the human brain as a network of many component parts, and the place of neuroscience discoveries in the building of artificial intelligences.

The guests are:

Nick Lane, evolutionary biochemist at University College London, Beth Shapiro, evolutionary geneticist of the University of California Santa Cruz, Danielle Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvannia, Murray Shanahan, artificial intelligence researcher at Imperial College London and Google's DeepMind

The podcast version ends with a question and answer session with the show's audience who include a surprise celebrity guest.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Many of Britain’s cleaner urban rivers are home to levels of biodiversity not seen for decades. But rural rivers, even in places without pollution, tell a different story. Up in the hills of central Wales, just north of the Brecon Beacons, lies the Llyn Brianne observatory and its surrounding system of beautiful streams. Professor Steve Ormerod from Cardiff University has been taking stock of the dwindling number of specialist invertebrates and the subtle ways the decline is happening which points to an extinction crisis that has gone unnoticed.

Marnie Chesterton checks in with bubble physicist Dr Helen Czerski. She’s part of a team of researchers aboard the icebreaker Oden research vessel, which is trying to understand arctic weather patterns and how the contents of open water between ice flows influence cloud behaviour. It’s a race against time to gather data before any water refreezes as the arctic winter approaches.

Inside Science has been profiling authors shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Society science book prize. This week it’s the turn of materials scientist Mark Miadownik, His new book “Liquid: The delightful and dangerous substances that flow through our lives” is about fluids and how their particular properties allow life to flourish.

Presenter Marnie Chesterton

Producer: Adrian Washbourne

The extraordinary shape of the guillemot egg is one of ornithology’s great mysteries. This seabird lays something twice the size of a hen’s egg, which looks a bit like an obelisk, blue, speckled and weirdly elongated at one end, with almost flat sides. There have been a handful of theories to explain why it’s evolved. Professor of behaviour and evolution Tim Birkhead, at the University of Sheffield shows in his new research that the answer lies in allowing the birds to successfully breed on the steep slopes of cliff ledges.

Marnie Chesterton meets the next in Inside Science’s series of writers shortlisted for the very prestigious Royal Society’s Book Prize : Lucy Cooke, zoologist, author and broadcaster discusses The Unexpected Truth About Animals which flies the flag for some of the lessons learnt from mistakes made in understanding animal behaviour.

Could the Tambora volcanic eruption in April 1815 be responsible for Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo? A rain-soaked battlefield in June 1815, stopped Napoleon deploying his military might although many have questioned how a volcano could have such an effect on the weather so soon. How was it to blame for a Belgian rainstorm just several weeks after the end of the eruption? Dr Matt Genge from Imperial College, in a new paper out this week, says the answer lies in the phenomenon known as electrostatic levitation.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Adrian Washbourne

What if something as natural as beetroot - or specifically defined doses of beetroot juice - could help alleviate cardiovascular disease and improve the pumping function of failing hearts? That's the idea behind a major trial underway at the Barts Heart Hospital and Queen Mary University in London. Amrita Ahluwalia, co-Director of the William Harvey Research Institute and Christopher Primus a specialist in heart failure, are interrogating the natural nitrates in foods like beetroot and how they could be beneficial to our cardiovascular system.

Cells in our bodies can go wrong and end up proliferating into cancers. Intuition might say the bigger something is, the more cells it has and thus, greater is its risk of developing cancer. But elephants have somehow re-awakened a gene that kills cells that could be cancerous before they have time to cause any damage. Vincent Lynch of the University of Chicago has been looking at the genetics that keeps these giants virtually, immune which could hold clues for tackling cancers in humans.

And we hear from Simon Winchester, the next in our series of interviews with the shortlisted authors for this year's Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Exactly, is an intriguing history of precision, the search for ever greater engineering accuracy and how it changed the world.

Presenter: Gareth Mitchell Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

It's the 150th birthday of the discovery of helium, which, after hydrogen is the second most abundant element in the universe. It's surprisingly rare on Earth, but it makes up much of the content of the gas giants in our local neighbourhood, Jupiter and Saturn. Adam Rutherford hears from particle physicist and Science Museum curator Harry Cliff on how it was first discovered through a telescope rather than in a lab, and Jessica Spake of Exeter University who after an 18-year search has used similar techniques to discover helium around an exoplanet 200 light-years away.

We hear from scientist and author Dan Davis from the University of Manchester, the next in our preview of authors shortlisted for this year's Royal Society book prize. The Beautiful Cure, is the rollicking story of how the intricate immune system came to be understood.

And there's an update from physicist Helen Czerski. She's part of a 40-strong team of field scientists on board the Oden, a Swedish ice breaker and research ship. They're set to find a suitable iceberg, and moor to get to grips with the factors that guide the arctic weather patterns.

Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

We meet two scientists who are making a real difference in promoting diversity and equality in the lab. Physicist Jess Wade has been chipping away at this issue, most recently in a heroic project to write up a Wikipedia entry for a scientist who is also a woman every day for the last 270 days and counting. Emma Chapman is an astrophysicist, and last month won the prestigious Royal Society Athena Prize for her work in driving policy changes about sexual harassment at universities.

Today the shortlist of the most prestigious of the literary prizes for the sciences was announced - the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. This is the 31st prize, and previous winners are a who's who in truly great science writing. Frances Ashcroft, Professor of Physiology at Oxford is the chair of the judges and discusses the books they have selected.

Physicist Helen Czerski and 40 colleagues are now aboard the Oden, a Swedish icebreaker and scientific research vessel that set sail earlier this week. They are en route to spend a month anchored to arctic sea ice to elucidate the mysterious behaviour of arctic weather. Before she set off she gave Adam Rutherford a preview of the research trip.

Producer Adrian Washbourne.

We've been growing embryonic cells in petri dishes for a few years now, to try to fill in the gaps in our understanding of early development, but the tissue that grows never really resembles an actual embryo. Magdalena Zernicka Goetz is a developmental biologist from Cambridge University and in a paper out this week has leapt over this hurdle in developmental biology using three types of stem cell, which - unlike previous efforts - push a ball of cells to becoming an embryo, which could help us understand why pregnancy can fail.

The Earth Biogenome Project aims to sequence the DNA of all the planet's eukaryotes, some 1.5 million known species including all known plants, animals and single-celled organisms. The project will take 10 years to complete and cost an estimated $4.7 billion. Harris Lewin from UC Davis is spearheading this scheme. How will he meet his ambition to curate all the DNA of life on Earth?

For the first time, scientists have assessed how much of the seas are untouched by the impact of human activity. They're referred to as Marine Wilderness, and qualify as such by being relatively untouched by things like fishing, pollution or agricultural run-off. According to the survey, published today, only 13% of the world's oceans remain as wilderness. James Watson from the University of Queensland discusss the action that needs to be taken if these precious ecological areas are to survive.

Producer : Adrian Washbourne.

Coral reefs are noisy places filled with the clicks, pops, chirps and chattering of numerous fish and crustaceans. But a new study conducted on Australia's Great Barrier Reef shows that this noise has been quietened in areas damaged by bleaching and cyclones. Marine biologist Tim Gordon of Exeter University has examined how the changing coral acoustics are impacting on fish communities and whether a "choral orchestra" could help reduce the decline in local reef systems.

Adam Rutherford meets Magdalena Skipper, the new Editor-in-Chief of the journal Nature. It's a longstanding publication, founded in 1869 and is the cornerstone of scientific endeavour. But how will Nature evolve as the demands on research change and scientific publishing continues to undergo a revolution in the digital age?

In order to go very far in space, future astronauts will need some means of creating their own air and fuel. Katharina Brinkert at California Institute of Technology has succeeded in harvesting hydrogen from water in microgravity - overcoming a huge hurdle in the weightlessness of space, that may one day lead to a way to acquire fuel during a long-distance, crewed space mission.

Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

Much of northern Europe has been experiencing a heatwave - notable for its intensity and duration. It's caused by "atmosphere blocking". Can we predict when these blocks will come and how long they will last? Adam Rutherford talks to Jana Sillmann, director of the Centre for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway, author of a new study that has modelled 40 years' worth of heatwaves and blocking, and looked to the end of the century in attempting to predict blocking patterns as the climate changes.

How can researchers get to grips with the shape of molecules in the digital world? Chemists have for years used ball and stick representations of the shapes their molecules come in. But when they publish, they have to flatten it all down onto a 2D a piece of paper losing crucial information. Bristol University's David Glowacki has put the power of virtual reality into the hands of the molecular magicians. Inside Science's Roland Pease went to his virtual lab, to see atoms dance in a molecular space odyssey.

Given that half the world is in the dark half of the time, and the depths of the oceans are perpetually hidden from sunlight, there's lot of darkness to explore. For those of us drawn to the shadows, a new exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London does exactly that. Geoff Boxhall, professor of invertebrate biology, gives Adam Rutherford a tour of Life in the Dark.

Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Earthquakes are scientifically measured with seismometers, but few are present on the sea floor, where earthquakes that can cause tsunamis originate. But could communication cables traversing the oceans fill in the gaps? Giuseppi Marra from the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, discusses his accidental discovery that fibre-optic cables might be registering the earth's vibrations.

For the first time in the annals of science, a tweet was the key reference in a paper reporting on a discovery that a rare wild variety of the gardener's favourite - Heuchera, thought to be limited to a few rocky outcrops in Virginia - is actually abundantly present 100km away. It's all come about because of a picture shared on Twitter. Reporter Roland Pease retraces the tale of the tweets with the key players.

Can the size of a roar be used to accurately determine physical strength?' Or can a roar deceive, and make you sound tougher than you actually are? That's what Jordan Raine from the University of Sussex decided to find out, not with lions or tigers or bears but in us.

Producer Adrian Washbourne.

There's a plethora of neutrinos flowing through your body right now. Adam Rutherford goes inside 'protoDune', the world's latest and largest neutrino detector whose prototype is about to be filled with over 700 tonnes of liquid argon and hopefully pick up a few signals generated by interactions from these elusive particles. We hear from project leader Christos Touramanis who is a particle physicist from Liverpool University.

Caledonian crows craft tools with greater sophistication than most animals, and can learn to modify their tools to make them gradually more effective. This "cultural accumulation" is commonplace amongst humans - where we pass on information socially. But it's extremely rare in other animals to see them passing on knowledge in this way. Sarah Jelbert from Cambridge University discusses her new evidence that suggests crows manage to transmit their tool designing skills from one bird to another in this sophisticated way

Our gut bacteria are emerging as key determinants of our health and the microbiome may even influence our behaviour. The interaction between ubiquitous bacteria and the food wild animals eat is beginning to be studied all over the world. Could manipulating the microbiome prove a new tool for conservation in animals whose food supply is under threat? Ecologist Ben Moore from Western Sydney University has been studying the eating habits of koalas and whether faecal transplants could alter the eating habits of this highly fussy herbivore.

Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Medical surgeons routinely stitch or pin organs and blood vessels with needle and thread and secure medical devices like pacemakers with hooks. But what if you could just use glue? Material scientist Terry Steele from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has devised Voltaglue, a flexible adhesive that works in wet environments by putting an electric current across an inert substance. He explains how this new kind of chemistry could revolutionise many medical procedures.

This weekend Sir David Attenborough will reopen The Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University. It's undergone a five-year redevelopment, showcasing thousands of incredible specimens from across the animal kingdom, and exploring stories of conservation, extinction, survival, evolution and discovery. Adam Rutherford visits the new displays under the watchful eye of conservator Natalie Jones and zoologist and museum manager Jack Ashby.

And Professor Tim Birkhead of the University of Sheffield discusses The Wonderful Mr Willughby - his fascinating new account of 17th century ornithologist Francis Willughby who together with the celebrated naturalist John Ray pioneered the way we think about birds in science.

Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Two hundred billion tonnes of Antarctic ice are now being lost to the ocean every year, pushing up global sea level by 0.6 millimetres a year. This is a three fold increase since 2012. This finding comes from IMBIE, the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise. Leeds glaciologist Andy Shepherd and Durham earth scientist Pippa Whitehouse tell Adam how the project made this startling finding and what it may mean for global sea level rise in the future.

Glaciologist Martin Siegert of Imperial College London has co-authored an unusual Antarctic paper in the journal Nature this week, with other leading south polar researchers. It is a history of the frozen continent, looking back from the year 2070 and charts two different courses that we could be on today.

Satellites above the Antarctic and Arctic can only tell us so much about the melting and collapse of the ice sheets. Oskar Glowacki of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is exploring what extra insights might come from recording the underwater sounds that ice sheets make when they collapse and melt in Arctic seas.

The narwhal, sometimes known as the unicorn of the sea, is one of the world's most elusive and poorly studied cetaceans, primarily because it spends much of its life underwater and under ice in the Arctic. Marine biologist Susanna Blackwell led a team which used sound recorders and satellite tags attached to several narwhals in Eastern Greenland, to follow their lives continuously for an unprecedented length of time.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Who owns the genetic biodiversity of the oceans? One single multinational corporation - the chemicals giant BASF - has registered almost half of all known patents on genetic sequences from marine organisms. This is the headline finding of a survey of marine genetic resource ownership by David Blasiak of the Global Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

Immunotherapies for cancer have been in the news in the last week. Adam talks to cancer researchers Sophie Papa of Kings College, London and Samra Turaljik of the Royal Marsden Hospital about the principles behind immunotherapy and the different approaches in the clinic and under clinical trials.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

Is the future of farming subterranean? Marnie Chesterton visits a farm called Growing Underground for some answers. Specialising in salad and herbs, it is located beneath Clapham Common in South London in an old Second World War air-raid shelter.

Has an interstellar asteroid been lurking in our solar system for more than four billions years? It's a possibility according to the astronomers who've watched and plotted its strange orbit. It travels around the Sun in the opposite direction to most of the planets, asteroids and comets. Asteroid specialist Alan Fitzsimmons of Queens University Belfast talks to Adam about this astronomical oddity and assesses the evidence for it being a traveller from the stars, captured by our solar system during its early childhood.

Stephanie Wright of Kings College London explains about what we do and don't know about the abundance and health risks of microplastic particles in the air we breathe.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Wild flowers are being outcompeted by ‘thug’ plants on our roadside verges, a study by the charity Plantlife has found. Pollution from cars and poor management practices by local councils has meant that nitrogen-loving plants outcompete wildflowers. Dr Trevor Dines explains to Adam Rutherford what actions can be taken to help our verges regain their natural biodiversity.

A new study reveals that for every pound a female scientist receives for her cancer research a male scientist will get one pound and forty pence. This gender imbalance in cancer funding highlights wider issues around women in science and how funding councils operate. Adam Rutherford discusses the problem with chief scientist at Cancer Research UK, Karen Vousden, and Professor Henrietta O’Connor, who co-authored the study.

This week Adam Rutherford marks the birthday of one of the greatest of all physicists: Richard Feynman. Professor Jonathan Butterworth talks about Feynman’s legacy as a scientist and science communicator but also about his highly problematic views on women.

Elephants don’t only communicate using their trunks but also their feet. A new study taps into this underground communication using seismic equipment to detect the vibrations. Dr Beth Mortimer explains how the technology may help to react in real-time to elephant distress such as panic running – for example – when being hunted by poachers.

We all know how dinosaurs became extinct but how did they rise to prominence? Author of the new book “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs” Steve Brusatte talks about how the beloved creatures came to dominate the Earth and the new technologies being used to discover even more about them.

How does science help us understand snooker? From the importance of chalking cues to how physics explains extraordinary snooker shots. Adam Rutherford tries to find out how he can up his game with the help of physicist Dr Phil Sutton.

And while the work of the new Antarctic team-up is studying the impact of the rise of sea levels, here in the UK, researchers are similarly concerned about the warming of the oceans, but on the specific effect it could have on sea birds. Inside Science's Jack Meegan reports from the Yorkshire coast.

The Temperate House at Kew has undergone a 5 year restoration and now is about to open to the public, Adam goes along to get a preview.

Who owns ancient DNA? A recent article in the journal Science argues that we need to think harder about the living relatives of indigenous people and not simply treat their human remains as "artifacts".

Wind, changing water temperatures and salt are all factors known to control ocean currents. But new research suggests there's another element in the mix. When sea monkeys amass, the thousands of swimming legs can create powerful currents that mix hundreds of meters of water.

Whenever a baby is born, we ask whether it's a girl or a boy. But when it comes to puppies, the question is often about the breed, especially with mongrels. And when we think we know what it is, we make assumptions about how that dog will behave. For instance, if you think there's some golden retriever parentage, you may expect it to be good at playing fetch. But do our perceptions of dog breeds change the way it behaves? That's the question of a new citizen science project called MuttMix, which asks you to guess the ancestry of various mongrels.

Finally, Charles Dickens is known as one of the best novelists of the Victorian era but a new exhibition is questioning whether he should be also known as a man of science. Dickens campaigned for paediatrics and his powers of description lead to a new conditions being medically recognised. The exhibition will be at the Charles Dickens Museum and it opens in May.

If you can't recycle plastic, you can re-use. Sheffield University chemist Tony Ryan is working to convert old polyurethane foam mattresses into hydroponic allotment beds so that people at a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan can grow their own crops. Roland Pease reports.

How southeast Asian sea nomads evolved the life aquatic.

The Double Helix, fifty years after its 1968 publication. Biologist and historian Matthew Cobb and science writer Angela Saini discuss the place of James Watson's compelling and controversial memoir in the annals of popular science writing. His account of the discovery of the DNA's structure was unlike any science book that had come before. Does it stand the test of time and what of its blantantly sexist treatment of the gifted X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin? Her work was crucial to Crick and Watson's 1953 model of the DNA molecule.

Next week sees the launch of a NASA mission called TESS. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is surveying the brightest stars near Earth and looking for habitable planets. Roland Pease reports.

Traditionally, the move from Bronze Age to the Iron Age is estimated to be around 1200 BCE. But recent excavations of smelting sites in Uttar Pradesh in India suggest that this date might be a few centuries late and that it might even originate in Asia. Adam visits The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire to see how a particle accelerator is revealing the details of the Indian Iron Age.

Our ancestors bore a very prominent brow ridge, which scientists think was a symbol of dominance. Modern humans, however, have lost this ridge in favour of a flatter forehead. Why? Dr Penny Spikins and her colleagues think the answer lies in social interaction and in particular, the ability to raise your eyebrows.

John Goodenough invented the lithium ion battery, the power pack that makes our smart phones, tablets and laptops possible. At the age of 95, in his lab at the University of Texas, he's now working with colleagues such as Portuguese physicist Helena Braga on an even better next generation battery technology: one that could transform the prospects for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Roland Pease meets the jovial battery pioneer and his team.

Hunting regulations in Sweden are having a profound effect on the behaviour of brown bears in the country. Since the 1980s, hunters are not allowed to shoot female bears with cubs. Historically, mother bears stayed with their cubs for 1.5 years but as hunting rates increased, mothers began to keep their offspring with them for an additional year. Now more than a third of mothers look after their cubs for 2.5 years. According to Andreas Zebrosser of the University of Southeastern Norway and Joanie van der Walle of the Universitie de Sherbrooke, hunting appears to be acting as a powerful evolutionary force on the species' reproductive behaviour.

The Government Office for Science published a massive report this week, entitled the 'Future of the Sea' which sets out the UK's stall with regard to our future relationship with the seas, and to put science front and centre in that plan. Professor Ed Hill, Executive Director at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, is one of the authors and tells Adam Rutherford about future exploitation of the sea.

Debris in space is a huge issue - it's estimated that there are more than 170 million fragments of satellites, rockets and other stuff that we've sent up, all orbiting the Earth at ballistic speeds. All of these have the potential to lethally strike a working satellite or worse, a crewed space station. Graihagh Jackson met Professor Guglielmo Aglietti at Surrey University who's researching the best technology to safely remove space junk.

Dinosaurs were incredibly successful and lived on earth for over 150 million years. Francois Therrien from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada, and colleagues explored how living crocodiles and birds, the descendants of dinosaurs, rear their eggs. Dr Therrien told Adam how their findings have suggested that dinosaurs used a variety of ways to hatch their eggs in the many environments on earth.

Fly tipping is a problem faced by most authorities. But conservationists at the Creekside Discovery Centre in Deptford are embracing the carpets and shopping trolleys that have washed up in their creek in south-east London. They even argue that the rubbish provides a safe haven for wildlife. Graihagh Jackson investigates.

Graphene is often touted as a wonder material but now this carbon sheet could be making an unexpected appearance in your bathroom cabinet as hair dye.

The world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. The British scientist was famed for his work with black holes and a general relativity. Inside Science examines his scientific legacy.

Today marks International Women’s Day. Its aim is to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. But there’s also a strong call for change, especially in the tech industry where women are vastly underrepresented. Discussions on how we could achieve gender equality have been ongoing for years, so why has there been so little change? And how can this bias affect the technology we all use?

Scientists are warning of an infertility 'crisis' among men. Sperm counts have been falling for over 40 years and now, 1 in 20 men have low sperm counts. The cause is unknown and this week, doctors are calling for more funding to better understand the issue.

The red squirrel has found an unlikely ally: the pine marten. Grey squirrels were introduced to the UK in the late 1800s from America and have since caused the native red population to diminish. However, with the reintroduction of a predator, the mal-adapted greys are being hunted and as a result, red squirrels are bouncing back.

Dutch Elm Disease laid waste to millions of British Elm trees back in the 1970's, Now a new tree bacteria which mimics the effects of drought has spread from the Americas to Europe. It has already been detected in some tree imports to the UK. Unlike Dutch Elm Disease it affects a huge variety of trees and shrubs, from mighty oaks to fruit trees and Lavender bushes. New directives have just been introduced to try and halt its spread.

Can we beat dementia? Research from the US amongst people in their 80's and 90's provides grounds for optimism, showing that elderly people with good memories have brain structures which can be more developed than those of people 30 years younger. And yet at the same time they may carry factors usually associated with dementia.

And how violent are we? Compared with our past that is. Research from collections of gruesome medieval remains paint a picture of a violent society, where men and women commonly carried weapons and inflicting or receiving severe wounds may have been a part of daily life. And yet other studies suggest this level of violence is actually lower than that experienced in some societies today.

Marnie Chesterton presents.

Around 4,500 years ago, 90% of the British population was replaced by incomers known as the Beaker people. Across Europe archaeologists have uncovered elements of the Beaker culture - bell-shaped pots, copper daggers, arrowheads, stone wrist guards and distinctive perforated buttons -it's always been a mystery as to whether these finds represent a wave of mass migration or the sharing of ideas between peoples. Now ancient DNA studies show it was both, and for Britain reveal a huge population change which still resonates today.

A new collaboration between an artist and a cyclone physicist commences this week.They joined forces to model Hurricane Katrina and cast its shape into six brass bells. Each bell represents a key moment from the category 5 storm, as it progressed across the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall in the United States in 2005. The finished collection will feature in a BBC Radio 4 documentary later this year.

And how does the moon affect life on earth? specifically worms - we unearth a species of worm that times its mating ritual by the waxing and waning Moon.

The nearly complete skeleton of Cheddar Man was found in a cave in Somerset in 1903. He'e been in the news because experts in human face reconstruction have created an image of what he probably looked like based on new DNA evidence. Chris Stringer, Ian Barnes and Selina Brace of the Natural History Museum have all worked with Cheddar Man and they talk to Gareth about how the study of this 10 000 year old skeleton is part of a bigger project to understand how Britain became populated with waves of peoples from Europe in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems have invented a magnetically controlled soft robot only four millimetres in size that can walk, crawl or roll through uneven terrain, carry cargo, climb onto the water surface, and even swim in it. Professor Metin Sitti, Director of the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute, explains how it works and how he sees the future use of millirobots in medicine - in delivering drugs and targeting cancerous cells.

Marnie Chesterton talks to Dr Lisa Wallis from ELTE University in Hungary about her work to improve the cognitive abilities of older dogs... using touchscreens.

As more and more of our everyday lives are conducted online we ask what are the cyber-security threats of today, and how can science be used to counter them. Do we now need new kinds of science to locate, understand and stop new kinds of threat?

Can bat science help human ageing research? New findings have show that some long lived bat species do not age in the same way as other mammals. They don't even seem to posses the DNA repair enzyme most commonly found in the animal kingdom. We look at the mystery of why bats seem to have evolved in this way.

And have you lost a satellite? Don't worry: a computer geek will find it for you. That's exactly what's happened - an amateur space sleuth has detected signals from a NASA satellite thought to have been 'lost' for years.

It's the 60 years since the launch of Explorer 1 and the discovery of the Van Allen Belts. This was the satellite the US launched in response to Sputnik. However unlike Sputnik it did undertake scientific exploration, its findings have been significant for every space mission that followed.

Using DNA sequencing scientists have found that the 'Two Brothers' mummies at the Manchester Museum have different fathers so are, in fact, half-brothers. Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ankh - date to around 1800 BC. Ever since their discovery in 1907 there has been some debate amongst Egyptologists on whether the two were actually related at all. DNA was extracted from their teeth to solve the mystery.

And the science of the Archers, a current storyline involves leaks of industrial chemicals illegally buried on a farm many years ago. We'll be looking behind the scenes to see where the story came from and how the world's longest running soap opera ensures scientific accuracy.

This week's programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell as Adam is away.

In 2015, Nick Goldman issued a challenge. If anyone could decode the information he had stored on some DNA by 21st January 2018, they could win a bitcoin. When Nick bought the bitcoin it cost about £200. To claim the bitcoin, the winner would have to sequence the DNA and then decrypt a code. In late 2017, Nick thought he would be keeping his bitcoin, now worth thousands of pounds. But PhD student Sander Wuyts got in touch with Nick to claim his prize. Marnie Chesterton follows the story.

Adam talks to MIT scientist, Michael Strano about his new techniques to make plants glow in the dark. Could these plants be used as street lighting in the future?

And how can sound be used to levitate humans? Professor of Ultrasonics at the University of Bristol, Bruce Drinkwater explains how his team have managed to overcome a size limit on the use of acoustic beams to trap and move objects in space. With no theoretical upper limit on the size of object which can be levitated, he explains how the technology could be used in medicine to deliver powerful drugs to a very specific place. This would leave the rest of the body unharmed or could help in the dispersal of kidney stones.

Simon Boxall from Southampton Oceanography Centre gives an update on the sinking of the oil tanker Sanchi and its environmental impact.

CRISPR is a revolutionary gene editing technique which can modify DNA and has the potential to correct genetic errors in a range of human diseases - even cancer. The technique has only been around for a few years but is already being talked about as a Nobel prize winning candidate. The market for the technology has been predicted to be worth US$ 10 billion by 2025. But stocks took a wobble last week on news that our immune system may render CRISPR useless. Is there really a big problem? Adam talks to Matt Porteus from Stanford University who did the research.

18 months ago, New Zealand announced a conservation project to exterminate all vermin that are decimating the indigenous bird population. For millions of years, the flora and fauna evolved in isolation, without predatory mammals. When humans arrived, they brought with them a host of bird-eating animals like rats, stoats and possums which now kill 25 million native birds every year. Marnie Chesterton travelled to New Zealand to report on a campaign of mass poisoning to save the kiwis and the kakapos and asks whether it’s ethical to kill one species to save another.

And Cat Hobaiter from St Andrews University responds to listener questions about how chimpanzees might recognise family members.

A long-held belief that babies look more like their fathers is being put to the test by scientists at St Andrews University. They are launching an on-line citizen science experiment asking members of the public to see if they can tell from a group of chimps which are the close relations. Geoff Marsh takes the test and talks to researcher Cat Hobaiter about why it might be advantageous for a baby primate to look like its father more than its mother and what they hope to learn from humans' ability to recognise chimp family trees.

A new swallow-able, electronic pill that sniffs out the gas produced in your gut could be the answer to accurately diagnosing and distinguishing between ailments of the gut. The gastrointestinal tract is hard to access so when something goes wrong, conditions like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, lactose intolerance and over production of bacteria. can be hard to distinguish from one another and so accurately diagnosed. Professor Kourosh Kalantar Zadeh from RMIT in Melbourne explains why his device, which senses gases in the gut and transmits its findings back to a smartphone in real time,, is more accurate and less invasive than current breath tests or endoscopies and colonoscopies.

And Janet Kelso answers listener questions on human evolution and why modern Europeans still carry Neanderthal DNA.

BBC News science correspondent Jonathan Amos joins Adam to share some highlights in space exploration for the coming 12 months.

Zoologists and engineers at the University of Oxford are developing an app that identifies one species of mosquito from another by analysing the sounds their rapid wing beats make. Graihagh Jackson visits Marianne Sinka at the Zoology Department to listen to her collection of mosquito songs.

Did the widespread introduction of the food additive trehalose fuel the emergence of epidemics of virulent Clostridium difficile in hospitals from the early 2000s? Microbiologist Robert Britton tells Adam about the evidence his team has gathered and published this week in the journal 'Nature'.

Adam Rutherford talks to Svante Paabo, the scientist has led these remarkable achievements. Professor Paabo and his colleague Janet Kelso at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Anthropology in Leipzig discuss the genes in many European people alive today that originated in Neanderthals and were passed to modern humans when the two species interbred.

Adam also speaks to Johannes Krause who worked on the Neanderthal genome project in Leipzig but is now director of the Max Planck Institute of the Science of Human History. His latest research adds a new layer of intrigue and complexity to the relationship between our species and Neanderthals in deep time.

David Reich at Harvard University focuses on using ancient DNA to uncover the ancestry and movements of modern human hunter-gatherers in Eurasia from about 50,000 years to the Bronze Age, a few thousand years ago. Population movements occur on a cinematic scale, he says. (Podcast only).

The revelations of ancient genetics would not be possible and meaningful without the traditional disciplines of palaeoanthropology and archaeology. Adam goes to Gibraltar to seek the perspective of Clive Finlayson who leads excavations there as director of the Gibraltar Museum. Gibraltar is the most concentrated site of Neanderthal occupation in the world. As well as remains of a young Neanderthal child last year, the Rock's caves have also recently yielded the first example of Neanderthal cave art.

At the beginning of the month, Donald Trump decreed that two national monument landscapes be drastically down-sized. Strict protections against exploitation were removed from vast tracts of land bearing some of the world's most important fossil bearing strata. President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists, Professor David Polly explains why his organisation is now suing Trump.

At Harvard University, bioengineers are growing parts of functioning kidneys in small chips using a form of 3D printing. Jennifer Lewis' lab is doing this to learn how kidneys function and explore the possible therapeutic applications of the mini-kidneys-in-a-chip. Roland Pease visits the team at work.

The electric eel can deliver a 600 volt shock, from a stack of electrically charged cells along the length of its body. Inspired by the eel's biology, Michael Mayer and his colleagues at the Universities of Fribourg and Michigan have now created their own version of its electric organ with the help of jelly babies and clever origami. In the future, it could power devices in the human body.

After twenty years of excavation and preparation, the most complete fossil skeleton of an Australopithecine has been unveiled to the public in South Africa. Its discoverer Ron Clarke explains its significance for understanding human evolution.

December 16th is the 100th anniversary of Arthur C Clarke. Science writer Marcus Chown and cultural journalist Samira Ahmed join Adam to discuss Clarke's visions and works of science fiction.

Gene drive is a new genetic technology that could be used to eradicate populations of species of 'pest' animals. The Roslin Institute in Edinburgh has just announced it is to begin research on gene drives to control rat and mouse populations. The Institute's Bruce Whitelaw and Simon Lillico explain how the approach would work and argue that it would be humane compared to traditional methods of vermin control. However there are concerns about its potential ecological consequences - namely the risk of female infertility in the targeted species spreading without no geographical limits. Kevin Esvelt of MIT voices his reservations. Bruce Whitelaw outlines how future research aims to bring gene drives under more control.

Researchers in the USA and Japan talk about their discovery of nuclear reactions in lightning strikes, and Caroline Brighton and Graham Taylor of the University of Oxford explain why they have been attaching small cameras and GPS units to peregrine falcons and recording the birds chasing drones.

A laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute have created a semi-synthetic bacterium with two new man-made genetic letters in its DNA, in addition to the natural four A, G, T and C. What's more, the engineered microbe can use its enhanced genetic alphabet to build synthetic amino acids into the proteins it makes. Chemist Floyd Romesberg talks to Adam Rutherford about what we can learn from his team's extraordinary feat of synthetic biotechnology, what we might gain from it and why, in his opinion, we've no need to be worried.

Adam deals with some of your correspondence on axolotls by talking to laboratory salamander breeder Randal Voss at the University of Kentucky. He also notes listeners' comparisons of the recent visit by interstellar asteroid Oumuamua with the alien vessel in Arthur C Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama'.

Cosmologist and AI researcher Max Tegmark visits BBC Inside Science to discuss the possibility of artificial intelligence machines with super-intelligence and how humanity should be preparing for their advent.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Twenty years ago, geneticist Svante Paabo began a revolution in human evolution science when he extracted fragments of DNA from the 40,000 year old bone of a Neanderthal. Among other first, he went onto sequence the entire genome sequence of Homo Neanderthalenisis. Professor Paabo was in the UK this week at a conference on DNA and human evolution at the Wellcome Genome Campus to mark the anniversary. He tells Adam about one of the new directions of research for him now.

What does the future hold for synthetic biology? Who will be the practitioners of this fast-growing branch of bioengineering and what will be its impact on the world - for good and possibly ill? Experts in the field have just published a horizon-scanning report in the journal eLife. One of its authors, Jenny Molloy of the University of Cambridge, talks to Adam about the nascent democratisation of the discipline and where this might lead the field and society.

The paradoxical plight of the axolotl: popular aquarium pet, laboratory animal and critically endangered species in the wild. This species of salamander is a wonder of nature. It's the amphibian that never grows out of its larval stage yet it's able to reproduce. Most remarkable is its ability to regrow limbs, which is of great potential interest to researchers developing regenerative medicine. There are many thousands of axolotls in labs and homes around the world. But in the wild, in their native Mexico, they are on the very edge of extinction. Inside Science talks to conservation biologist Richard Griffiths of the University of Kent and axolotl researcher Tatiana Sandoval Guzman of the Technical University in Dresden, Germany.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

In the year that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit, the UK launched its own rocket into the Space Race. 1957 saw the launch of the first Skylark space rocket. Inside Science talks to two veterans of the Skylark programme - Professors John Zarnecki and Ken Pounds - who cut their space research teeth with some of the 440 launches. The Science Museum in London is staging a Skylark exhibition in celebration.

Francis Galton was one of the UK's most influential 19th century scientists and laid important methodological foundations for genetics and other fields of science today. But he was also a racist and leading proponent of eugenics. Adam discusses Galton's legacy with historian Subhadra Das of University College London and clinical geneticist Han Brunner of the Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Both guests attended a meeting of the Galton Institute in London which brought together researchers of many disciplines to discuss the bad and the good in Francis Galton's legacy.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Scientists at the University of York are investigating medieval livestock farming through the study of the 1,000 year old York Gospels manuscript: not by reading it but by extracting proteins and DNA from its animal skin parchment pages.

Inside Science listener and Middle Eastern archaeologist Melissa Sharp takes the programme to task for suggesting that anyone can now use publically available sonar and satellite data to search for shipwrecks and other archaeological sites. It opens up the world's ancient and not so ancient heritage to looters, she says.

Since the University of Cambridge made Stephen Hawkings 1966 PhD thesis free to view and download last month, more than a million people have at least looked at it. Adam Rutherford talks to cosmologist Andrew Pontzen, biologist Matthew Cobb and neuroscientist Sophie Scott about the record-breaking thesis and asks whose first research project they'd like to download.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

We hear anecdotes and concerns from listeners following our item last week on the catastrophic decline in flying insects in the last quarter century and the disappearance of moth snow storms.

What can the social lives and brains of whales and dolphins tell us about the evolution of our species cognitive capacities and white matter? Adam talks to Susanne Shultz of the University of Manchester.

Everyone's favourite indoor firework, the Pharoah's Serpent, is under scientific scrutiny from chemists Tom Miller and Andrea Sella at University College London.

The speed and ease of precise infection diagnosis could be transformed by synthetic biologists at Imperial College, London. Paul Freemont tells Adam about a simple DNA biosensor that turns green in the presence of a pneumonia-causing bacterium that is a particular problem for people with Cystic Fibrosis. He adds that the technology is adaptable to any kind of bacteria and may also aid efforts to curb the spread of antibiotic resistance.

When dogs know you are looking at them, they ramp up the expressiveness of their faces. Marnie Chesterton visits the Dog Cognition Centre at the University of Portsmouth to talk to the researchers who made this discovery, and to meet Jimmy the Staffy.

Palaeontologists at the University of Bristol have figured out the colour patterning on a dinosaur that lived 120 million years ago. Sinosauropteryx was a small feathered dinosaur. Two spectacular fossils of it were found in northeast China. The specimens are so well preserved that remnants of pigment remain in the feathers. This allows Jakob Vinter and colleagues to see that Sinosauropteryx was reddish brown in colour, with light stripes on its tail, light and dark counter-shading on its body and a dashing bandit-style face mask.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

What made the infamous 1883 eruption of Krakatoa so devastating? Roland Pease meets the earth scientists trying to answer the question by recreating in the lab the conditions under the volcano prior to the eruption.

Following a temperature-related faux pas by Adam in the last episode, Michael de Podesta of the National Physical Laboratory explains the difference between Celsius and Centigrade.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

The theory of plate tectonics is 50 years old. It's as fundamental to understanding the Earth as evolution by natural selection is to understanding life. Roland Pease meets geologists such as Dan McKenzie, John Dewey and Xavier Le Pichon who played key roles in proving the hypothesis in the late 1960s.

The United States has removed more than half of its diplomats from its embassy in Havana, Cuba. A signficant number of staff have complained of ailments such as hearing loss, dizziness, headaches and nausea, and there has been speculation that some kind of sonic or acoustic weapon might be responsible. Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford, discusses the likelihood with Gareth.

Stanford University's Tom Mullaney is the author of 'The Chinese Typewriter: A History'. He talks to Gareth about the great engineering and linguistic challenge in the 19th and 20th centuries of getting the Chinese language onto a table top machine. The survival of the ancient language or China's entry into the modern world depended on the success of numerous inventors. In fact one consequence was the development of predictive text in the Chinese IT world long before it appeared in the West.

Note: In the podcast version of this programme, there is an additional item on new research on the role of the world's botanical gardens in global plant conservation. One of the scientists involved, Dr Paul Smith of Botanical Gardens Conservation International, tells Gareth that there's good news about these institutions' contributions and there are areas where there is room for improvement.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

The World Health organisation reports that there are too few new candidate antibiotics in the development pipelines to replace those becoming obsolete through the rapid spread of antibiotic resistance. Professor Willem van Shaik of the University of Birmingham and pharma-biotech analyst Dr Jack Scannell discuss where the problems and solutions might lie.

Could bacteria recycle all of our waste? Waste disposal is a growing concern as nations run out of space and ecosystems are increasingly polluted. Microorganisms may hold the key for turning household waste into biodegradable plastic and perhaps one day even into food and basic chemical feedstocks. Hans Vesterhoff, Professor of Systems Biology at Amsterdam University is developing microbial networks with the aim of converting all carbon-based waste into useful or edible stuff.

AI and Opera: Prof Luc Steels, an AI and language researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Catalonia is also a composer. He has just had his new opera premiered. With a libretto written by a neuropsychiatrist colleague, the opera 'Fausto' is a re-telling of the Faust story. It explores the dangers and flawed thinking of silicon-based transhumanism. In the opera, the Faust character is a social media-obsessed hipster and Mephistopheles is a malevolent AI in the cloud. In a twist on the original, Fausto trades his body rather than his soul so that he can be uploaded and reunited with his lover in the cloud.

The House of Commons has announced its Science and Technology Select Committee - the body of MPs that holds the Government to account on scientific matters, and offers advice on scientific issues of the day. Some controversy has followed, concerning the scientific credentials and the gender imbalance of the committee make-up so far. Norman Lamb, MP for North Norfolk was elected chair of the committee, and he came into the Inside Science studio to discuss the committee selection and its future ambitions.

This week was the 60th anniversary of one of the greatest conceptual leaps in all biology, made by Crick at a lecture at University College London. Matthew Cobb, biologist and historian from Manchester University, who's written a new account of the lecture, discusses its fundamental significance.

It has long been suggested that there's something about the acoustics of a cave that correlates with the location of motifs and sometimes paintings on the walls.Bruno Fazenda is an acoustic scientist at the University of Salford, and reveals how he went into the caves to conduct the first methodical study of this theory by listening to the past.

With contributions from Michele Dougherty, Professor of space physics at Imperial College Robert Brown, Professor Planetary surface processes Arizona University Carl Murray, Professor of Astronomy, Queen Mary,University of London Ellen Stofan, former chief NASA scientist

Producer Adrian Washbourne.

How will marine life respond to warming of the seas around Antarctica this century? Dramatically, according to the results of the most realistic attempt so far to warm the sea bed to temperatures predicted for the coming decades. The British Antarctic Survey installed gently heated panels at 12 metres depth off the West Antarctic coast to mimic rock surfaces and then over 9 months monitored how marine creatures colonised and grew on them. All creatures flourished on panels at 1 degree C above today's chilly waters and in fact grew astonishingly quickly on them. But a 2 degree increase saw some continue to flourish vigorously but many species fail. Experiment mastermind Lloyd Peck tells Adam what the findings may mean, and describes the extraordinary cold water diving skills that made the experiment a success.

'I contain Multitudes' is shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize this year. Its subject is the microbiome - the trillions of benign , friendly and not so friendly bacteria which inhabit our bodies and those of all other animals.

For 30 years, Cambridge University zoologists have studied the evolutionary arms race between the cuckoo and the reed warbler that rears the cheating bird's offspring. They have figured out many of the deceptions and counter-tactics adopted by the two co-evolving species. The latest revelation concerns the strange chuckling call which the female cuckoo makes after laying her egg in the warbler's nest. Jenny York describes the experiments which show that the cuckoo is mimicking a predatory sparrow hawk which distracts the warblers and makes them much more likely to not recognise her egg as something they should reject from the nest.

We know about extinct species from fossils in rocks. But in the future there will be techno-fossils too, evidence of our civilisation. Katie Kropshofer has been finding out from Professors Jan Zalasiewicz and Sarah Gabbot of the University of Leicester what we’re leaving for the hypothetical geologists of the future.

Neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli's book, In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's, is the one of the six titles on the shortlist of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. He explains to Gareth Mitchell that it was his grandfather's development of the condition that made him interested in Alzheimer’s.

The Big Wasp Survey is a citizen project to trap wasps and send them off to teams at the University of Gloucester and University College London, so that scientists can then learn more about the distribution of different species around this land. One of the organisers, entomologist and professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucester Adam Hart, talks to Gareth about why these unpopular insects are ecologically valuable.

When a paper titled "Fantastic Beasts and Why to Conserve Them" is printed in the journal Oryx, we had to take a closer look. Far more than a publicity stunt, this work by George Holmes, an expert in conservation and society at the University of Leeds, covers an important point. It explores the dangers of neglecting local beliefs, myths and superstitions about the natural world, and animals in particular, when trying to come up with conservation strategies.

Cordelia Fine is a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne. She is the third shortlisted author of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Her book "Testosterone Rex" explores the science behind gender. She argues that testosterone isn't necessarily the basis for masculinity and that there is so much more to gender than merely our biological sex.

200 years ago, taxidermy was a crucial part of zoological teaching and research, and in the days before BBC wildlife films, often the only way that many people could see strange and exotic wildlife from other lands. Lots of those early specimens are incredibly valuable, and can still be found in museums around the world, although being so old they are often in need of urgent repair. Usually this happens out of sight behind the scenes, but not so at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London, which has been doing its conservation live in the gallery for all to see, to draw attention to the art and science of taxidermy. Some of the more serious repairs get sent to taxidermy conservator Lucie Mascord in Lancashire.

Produced by Fiona Roberts Presented by Gareth Mitchell.

Journalist Mark O'Connell is the second of our Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2017 nominees. His broad-minded, yet sceptical look at the world of 'transhumanism', "To be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death", questions how and why some of us are looking to use technology to fundamentally change the human condition.

On Monday 21st of August 2017, some of the United States will go dark. This is the first total solar eclipse, visible from coast to coast in the US for 99 years. Gareth gets excited with veteran eclipse watchers, David Baron and Jackie Beucher.

On the 20th of August 1977, NASA's probe Voyager 2 launched. This was quickly followed two weeks later by the launch of Voyager 1 (which was on a faster trajectory). Since then the two spacecraft have been exploring our Solar System, the Heliosphere and interstellar space. Surpassing all expectations, the probes have taught us so much about our planets, their moons and beyond. Gareth looks back at the highlights with the Voyager mission's chief scientist, Professor Ed Stone, in a celebration of the 40 year mission.

Produced by Fiona Roberts Presented by Gareth Mitchell.

Professor of Mathematics, Eugenia Cheng, is one of the shortlisted authors for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2017. She talks Gareth through the inspiration for her book "Beyond Infinity: An expedition to the Outer Limits of the Mathematical Universe".

The UK Government announced last week that it was aspiring to remove all petrol and diesel vehicles from roads by 2040. Current battery technology relies on lithium-ion batteries. Are lithium, and the other metals required for batteries, sustainable for a totally electric transport system? And do they have the charge capacity to make them a reliable alternative to fossil fuels? Dr Billy Wu, of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, goes through the alternatives and the next generation of battery technology.

To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of Victorian Britain's most important scientists, Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), Kew Royal Botanic Gardens is holding an exhibition titled Joseph Dalton Hooker: Putting plants in their place. It's a fascinating selection of his photographs, journals and paintings. Gareth is taken on a tour by the curators - historian Professor Jim Endersby of the University of Sussex and Galleries and Exhibitions Leader at RBG Kew, Maria Devaney. They explain how as a tireless traveller and plant collector, Hooker was the founder of modern botanical classification and a close friend of Charles Darwin.

Produced by Fiona Roberts Presented by Gareth Mitchell.

Despite the obvious benefits of being an astronaut... exploring new worlds, seeing Earth from space, and of course the glory and fame, it can take a real toll on the body. Astronauts' skeletons and muscles deteriorate in zero gravity, their immune system weakens, and they experience nasal congestion and sleep disturbance. Many symptoms persists once they're back on Earth. But, there's another to add to the list, space flight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome or SANS. Ophthalmologist at Houston Methodist Hospital, Dr Andrew Lee explains that the build-up of fluid in the brain can squeeze the eye and optic nerve and lead to visual disturbance and even vision loss.

The shortlist for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2017 has just been announced. Adam pesters judge Claudia Hammond for the name of the winner (she doesn't tell!) and discusses the criteria for this £25,000 prestigious award. The top 6 books will be featured over the next 6 weeks on BBC Inside Science.

Sexual selection - who you decide to have babies with - is usually decided at the dating stage. But the choice does not have to stop at copulation. Post-mating sexual selection is a thing. Mechanisms such as sperm competition, and cryptic female choice, can happen after sex, but before the sperm fertilises the egg. It's not just an internal thing either, it happens in 'external fertilizers', where eggs are laid, and then fertilized by the male sperm outside the female's body, like come fish do in water. Professor Neil Gemmell, at the University of Otago in Dunedin in New Zealand, has been studying just such processes in Chinook salmon. His findings are surprising and could inform us about human reproduction and fertility.

Produced by Fiona Roberts.

In a report out this week, the UK Government announced they are funding £246 million for major changes to the way electricity is produced and stored. New rules will make it easier for people to generate their own power with solar panels, and store it in batteries. But do we have the technology to make it work in a cost effective way? Steven Harris, a consultant in sustainable energy, thinks we'll soon have smart domestic appliances in our homes which better manage the fluctuating supply and demand for power. Expert in energy systems, at the University of Newcastle, Professor Phil Taylor, is researching the next generation of smart appliances and domestic storage batteries.

A new study reports that 69% of Brits feel they have lost touch with nature. Dr. Rachel Bragg, at the Green Exercise Research Unit at the University of Essex and Care Farming UK, unpicks the anecdotal evidence from the facts and explores why a connection with the natural world is so important, why the connection is being broken and what we need to do about it.

Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at the University of Bath, Carole Mundell, explains how she and other astronomers captured the most complete picture yet of the most powerful type of explosion in the universe - Gamma Ray Bursts. These short-lived bursts of the most energetic form of light, shine hundreds of times brighter than a supernova and trillions of times brighter than our sun.

Back in the 1950's at the dawn of the new plastic age, its everlasting properties were a major selling point. Now, we're dealing with escalating plastic pollution and bulging landfill. But how much plastic are we dealing with? Dr. Roland Geyer has calculated the production, use and fate of all plastics ever made.

Chimpanzees are very communicative animals: they tend to use gestures foremost with vocalisation just to emphasise the flick of a wrist or a stretch of the hand. In an attempt to get a grasp on why, and how, we humans made the shift from gesture-led communication to talking, we need to see how well we can decipher our ape relatives. A new online study called the 'Great Ape Dictionary' wants you to have a go.

The bottom of our seas remains a mysterious other world. Yet, adventuring into the deep depths of the ocean is a major challenge, which is probably why only 5% of it has ever been explored - even though it covers more than 70% of our planet. So to start learning more about our own planet, the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is awarding a total of $7 million to teams that develop autonomous, unmanned vehicles to map and image the bottom of the seas. Dr Jyotika Virmani tells Adam why ocean exploration is so important, and why it tends to take a backseat to adventuring into space.

Presented by Adam Rutherford Produced by Fiona Roberts.