This month the connections that human inhabitants have to the coast, why we're still in the middle of a worsening extinction crisis despite international laws and treaties designed to protect nature, the promise of pharmacogenomics and personalised medicine, the plastic pollution problem and how to tackle it, and why water management in the face of a changing climate needs more than just a single solution. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In the eLife Podcast this month, signs that bees are oblivious to pesticides in nectar, sea anemone stinging strategies, a new means of cell-cell communication to share growth factors and other signals, how plants make a comeback when ice sheets retreat, and how the world's biggest bird uses wind and waves to good effect to minimise the costs of takeoff... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Better awareness of the precious resource that is water, getting a grip on coastal ecosystems and the impact of pollution, why recycled plastics are a threat for food packaging and kitchen utensils, how we can help humans to step up in extreme environments, and the opportunity offered by "lived experience" when it comes to mental health all go under the microscope in this episode of the Cambridge Prisms Podcast. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This time we hear how many species are being driven to extinction by human trade, why clinical psychology needs an update for the 21st Century, how non-specialists can help to plug the gap in mental health services, what art can do for science and conservation of coastal habitats, and the role of epigenetics in medicine... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Ken Mcginley was there during some of the first tests of hydrogen bombs in the 1950s. We were lucky enough to hear his story... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There are many factors that might affect the way we make decisions: our age, our past experiences, even our mood that day. But now, a new study has suggested that the language we speak also plays a part in our willingness to wait for a reward. Researchers gave the choice of having an amount of money now, or a slightly greater amount later. But they put this choice to bilingual speakers, once in each language. So did the language in which the decision was put to these people affect their decision? Speaking to Will Tingle from Tel-Aviv University was Tali Regev and, kicking us off, Tamar... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Comparatively, we know an awful lot about life on the surface of planet earth. We know a lot less about the extent of life in our oceans, and we know even less about the life festering deep beneath us, in the rocks underground. Scientists estimate that 20% of the earth's biomass (that's the combined weight of all living things) are beneath our feet - microbes adapted to the extreme temperature and pressure down there. Geologists, like Andy Mitchell from the University of Aberystwyth, are determined to understand more about these microorganisms, and not just for scientific interest. If we are... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Babies born during the Covid-19 lockdowns are behind on their language development. That's the finding of a recent study comparing infants born during the pandemic with similar children born in previous years. The reason, as the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland's Susan Byrne explains to Risa Bagwandin, is that social isolation and face masks made it harder for developing youngsters to explore, socialise and interact in the key ways that help foster their communication skills... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A new non invasive technique to pick up breast cancer has been unveiled by UK scientists. Breast cancer is the most diagnosed form cancer in the UK. Dense breast tissue, particularly common in young women, is difficult to image using existing techniques. Now scientists at the National Physical Laboratory have developed a new technique , using ultrasound. Risa Bagwandin spoke to senior research scientist, Daniel Sarno... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Apopo is a charity that trains African giant pouched rats for humanitarian purposes, with a view to combating some of the challenges faced by countries in the developing world. Originally, they trained these much shunned rodents to sniff out unexploded landmines left over from wars in countries like Mozambique. More recently, their keen sense of smell has also enabled trainers to develop them into excellent detectors of Tuberculosis carriers, so that patients can get diagnosed more quickly than before and receive treatment. Now, these Hero rats as they've been dubbed, are being prepared for a... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Did you end up in your dream job? Or did you end up pursuing a career quite intensely for some reason that eludes you? Perhaps the media representation of your profession had a part to play. Shrikanth Narayanan and colleagues from the University of Southern California created a dataset to analyse 4000 professions in the subtitles of over 136,000 movies and TV shows and found that their representation may have influenced some of us to take up a career we loved watching on screen... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There's news of a huge rift in the world of video games... EA Sports, who made the first ever FIFA football game in 1993, have announced that they will no longer be licensing the FIFA name. Chris Berrow, from the Naked Gaming Podcast, has been finding out why and what the consequences might be... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Now, I want you to cast your mind back to that first lockdown (if you can bear it) and to think about the ways you chose to fill all that new found free time. Perhaps, like the participants of a survey conducted by the Paris Brain Institute to learn more about the effects of the pandemic on creativity, you decided to sharpen your culinary skills, or spent more time pottering in the garden. But what can this uptick in artistic endeavours in such strange circumstances tell us about the way we react to new situations? This and more was the topic of conversation between James Tytko and... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Dingoes are native Australian dogs, although how and when they got to Australia isn't known. They were certainly already there by the time the first western explorers visited the continent, but fossil dingo remains go back only a few thousand years. So what is the relationship between dogs and dingoes, and the wolves they're both related to? Speaking with Chris Smith, Latrobe University's Bill Ballard got into this debate under slightly unusual circumstances... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Coffee prices are on the rise and the plant is said to decline by 60% before 2050, meaning new coffee alternatives are being considered in order to give us that caffeine hit. Harry Lewis speaks to Charlie Shaw from Atomo coffee to find out how they've been making our favourite beverage, without the use of coffee beans... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If I asked you to give up one of your five senses, which one would you choose? Chances are, instead of giving up your ability to see or hear, your sense of smell would be in pole position for the chop. Scientists in Germany think we're under appreciative of smell in our evolution as a species, with new research from the Max Planck Institute exploring biomolecular methods to bring smells from the past back to life. James Tytko spoke with Barbara Huber... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The world has a huge problem with plastics. While they are a materials scientist's dream in terms of their properties, they are an environmentalist's worst nightmare, because they don't break down naturally and are very hard to recycle. But Athina Anastasaki, from ETH Zurich, has set herself the goal of making plastics that can be recycled more easily and now she thinks getting close. Chris Smith found out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers have been studying DNA as a method to store binary data. As data generation continues to increase in the information age, we need new methods to store it. DNA is extremely robust and can store data 100 times more densely compared to a computer hard drive. In order to capitalise on DNA as a data storage platform, modifications to the molecules that make up DNA are currently being studied. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Playing games may be something you do in your spare time or in the queue at the supermarket, but striving for that elusive high score can also now contribute to science! Julia Ravey grabbed her mobile and caught up with Marc Marti-Renom; he's part of a team at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, where they've built a game for your phone that will help contribute to cancer research... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There are over 7,000 documented languages in the world to date, and now we might have another to add to the list: the one spoken by pigs. No, this is not an April Fool come early. Elodie Mandel-Briefer, from the University of Copenhagen, has assembled a vast dataset of pig noises. And by correlating the noises the animals produced in response to positive or negative experiences, she can pin emotions on sounds. Julia Ravey got in touch to find out if the research team responsible are completely off their trotters... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers from Indiana University studied the reactions of volatile compounds released when cleaning with ozone in the air. They found the reactions led to formation of nanoparticles classified as indoor pollutants. Evelyna Wang speaks to Phillip Stevens about this discovery... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Nuclear weapons are at the forefront of news but what are they and how do they work? Anoushka Handa reports... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As NASA aims to send humans back to the moon in the upcoming years, research on how to supply oxygen to future settlements on the moon are underway. Oxygen can be genearted from lunar resources such as ice. A team of researchers including Mark Symes, from the University of Glasgow and the European Space Agency, have been studying the effects of low gravity environments on oxygen production... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Washing our hands has become paramount during the pandemic, but the Romans didn't seem to bestow any importance to this, leading to parasites and infections. Anoushka Handa spoke to Sophie Rabinow, to tell us more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Blood clotting is important in preventing excessive bleeding, but for millions of people, it can also mean increased risk of mortality due to certain medical conditions. Blood thinning medication is required for those suffering theses conditions as well as constant blood clot monitoring. A team from the University of Washington, including Justin Chan, has developed a method to take blood clot tests at home, using only a smartphone and a small drop of blood... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Have you ever got a horrible mosquito bite whilst on holiday and wondered 'why me again?' And was your travel buddy someone who never got one? It could very well be to do with their fashion sense. Anoushka Handa spoke to Jeff Riffell to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There's a growing body of evidence that birds can detect magnetic fields like the one around the Earth, possibly by "seeing" them. And this, researchers think, accounts for how migrating birds, like reed warblers, manage to find their way, seemingly unerringly, half way around the planet. But it's more subtle than just using the magnetic field like a compass. What Oxford University's Joe Wynn thinks is happening is that the birds are pre-programmed by their upbringing to fly in a certain direction, but they use the angle - or inclination - of the Earth's field, to work out how far north or... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Greenfield housing developments are residential communities built upon land which was not previously occupied by anything else. These modern homes are often very energy efficient, but a new report by Transport for New Homes has found that these developments are offsetting their positive contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions because of a lack of planning around sustainable modes of transport. James Tytko went to see for himself... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Krzysztof wrote in to ask 'Why don't plants freeze to death during Winter?' and James Tytko tracked down Professor Howard Griffiths, from the University of Cambridge, to break the ice on this question. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Black holes are known for their awesome destructive powers, ripping stars apart piece by piece. But now, scientists have seen evidence of a black hole helping to form stars. Using the Hubble Telescope, researchers at Montana State University have seen a massive black hole at the centre of a small galaxy called Henize 2-10 triggering star formation around it. Robert Spencer spoke to Zachary Schutte to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Planting trees has a great impact on creating a greener environment. The Queen's Green Canopy is an initiative to encourage people to plant a tree in honour of the Her Majesty's Platinum Jubilee. Robert Spencer and Anoushka Handa take a dive into the science of trees to find out more about these fantastic plants and to discover what they can do around Cambridge to help... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Mathematicians Ville Salo and Ilkke Toermae from Finland have solved a long-standing problem in the field of cellular automata (The Game of Life). Despite being quite simple systems to describe, these automata often show quite complex behaviour. Now, though, we are starting to find out more about situations when these systems aren't quite so dynamic. Robert Spencer has more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Memories form a large part of human interaction. Scents, tastes and touch all can invoke us to remember particular events. But how do we know the order of these events? How do you remember that this time last week you were listening to our show... or at least we hope so! New research has shown that the human brain contains time cells to understand when an event has occurred. Anoushka spoke with Dr. Leila Reddy from the French National Center for Scientific Research... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Blood smear analysis is a repetitive, laborious, and time consuming job. Research at the University of Cambridge has led to developing a 3D printed device which both speeds up the smearing process and the quality of the blood smears. Julia Ravey talks to Samuel McDermott... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's the new year, and with that comes a tradition to commit to new year's resolutions. But the typical goals of giving up drinking, or losing weight, can be hard to achieve, especially without support from friends and family. Tricia Smith asked sport psychologist Helen Davis whether there was a smarter way to go about achieving her goal to "get fit" in 2022... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The astonishing discovery of this jurassic era creature has been covered on our show before, but this recording features special insight into the dig itself. Mark Evans from the British Antarctic Survey and Emily Swaby from The Open University describe the significance of finding the skeletal remains of this marine reptile to Harry Lewis... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Tropical rainforests are deforested at an alarming rate to make way for cultivating crops and rearing livestock. But what happens when these forest areas are abandoned and left to recover in their natural way? Research published in the journal Science gives a message of hope, explaining how forests are able to recover to their original state on a much faster time-scale than first thought. Katie King spoke to lead author, Loorens Poorter, to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Changing the way the brain controls how we sleep, as a new study suggests, might be a way to cut the risk of Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer's is the commonest form of a group of conditions known as senile dementia. They occur when brain cells are lost, progressively robbing us of our mental faculties. In Alzheimer's Disease it's caused by a buildup of a toxic chemical called a-beta; also known as beta amyloid. This naturally accumulates during the day and gets flushed out during a restful night's sleep. But, by studying mice that have been genetically programmed to develop a form of... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Katie King interviews Huw James, from the Royal Astronomical Society, about the reality of the chances planet-killing asteroids could collide with Earth. What these objects are, how they are found, and what methods are being trialled to prevent any potential collisions... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Hearing and listening... is there a difference? I am sure that we have all been guilty of letting our minds drift out of a conversation before realising and immediately trying to tune back in. New research published in Cell Reports describes how brain activity varies during listening and hearing and how this work sheds light on neural pathways linked to attention. Katie King spoke with author Tania Barkat to find out the difference between hearing and listening... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Understanding the human brain and how it completes complex tasks, like processing other people's speech as well as producing its own, is a complex task in and of itself. As it stands, neuroscience isn't able to tell us the underlying computations that lead to human language. New research from the US has taken an interesting approach to working this out: instead of just studying how real, human intelligence deals with language, these researchers have been looking at how artificial intelligence does it too. Cameron Voisey spoke to Ev Fedorenko from MIT to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Astronomers believe that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre, this being true for our very own Milky Way. These objects exert such strong gravitational forces on the matter contained within them that it cannot escape the black hole's pull. Scientists using the LOFAR telescope in the Netherlands have been studying the impact that such black holes have on the Universe on a mind-bogglingly large scale. One of the scientists working on the project, Marisa Brienza from the University of Bologna, told Cameron Voisey what they found. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

During IVF or in-vitro fertilisation, sperm and eggs are mixed together in a dish to produce fertilised embryos, one or two of which are placed in the uterus where the hope is they will trigger a successful pregnancy. Previously, embryologists would pick out and use only what they judged to be the most promising looking embryos. But now new research from the reproductive genetics company, Igenomix, has found that a large proportion of embryos that were previously being overlooked can in fact lead to successful pregnancies. Katie King spoke to lead author Antonio Capalbo about these findings... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

While the coronavirus pandemic is at the forefront of our minds, it's not the only health crisis looming on the horizon. Antimicrobial resistance has been called the "hidden pandemic". One of the ways to counteract resistance is by developing drugs that make current antibiotics more effective, and new research published by the University of Oxford reveals some promising candidates. Tricia Smith spoke with John Tregoning, a researcher in infectious diseases, but not affiliated with this particular study, to talk about the past, present, and future for these critical, and often "last-resort"... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Dr Chris Smith joins Indira Naidoo on the ABC's Nightlife programme to discuss the latest developments in science and answer questions from listeners. This time they look at the difficult decisions confronting politicians and policymakers internationally and how they should react to the omicron new variant, which appears super transmissible but potentially a lot less lethal than other existing forms of SARS-CoV-2... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Us humans are thought to have appeared on Earth around 300,000 years ago. But how much have we changed since then? New research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University has found many of our most complex traits have continued to be tweaked, even in the past two to three thousand years. Julia Ravey spoke to Guan Ning Lin about our ancestors and how alike we really are. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

2021 marks 100 years since insulin was first discovered. The World Health Organisation estimates that 422 million people around the world have diabetes, a disease where the body either can't produce enough insulin or doesn't respond properly to insulin. In the UK, 1 in 15 people are affected, and that's only set to rise as more and more of us are overweight or obese. So what is insulin, how was it discovered, and how have we reached a place where millions of people can safely inject themselves with it every day? Sally Le Page explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

More than 50% of the world's population now lives in urban areas and, in recent years, many major cities have been hit with extreme weather events due to the effects of climate change, like the flooding that hit the London underground - and Queen guitarist Brian May's basement - in the summer of 2021. A key reason for this might be that the urban environments themselves are exacerbating the heating effect, as Verner Viisainen heard from Iain Campbell, from the organisation RMI and the lead author of a new United Nations guide on cooling down cities... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Cities have been found to be warming at faster rates than the rest of the planet due to the materials used such as concrete absorbing heat more readily than organic materials. This is known as the "urban heat island" effect. One antidote, scientists have found, is to plant trees. But flipping the issue around for a moment, what do the trees make of these urban jungles? According to Lin Meng, at the University of California, Berkeley, tree growth in urban locations is different, as she explained to Verner Viisainen, based on research published in PNAS... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As we near Christmas, we will be subjected to a fair few more hugs than usual! Some of them can be great, and others... just downright awkward. But what makes a bad hug? What makes a good hug? New research has been published investigating the most pleasant hugging style. Katie King spoke to Anna-Lena Duren to find out why hugs are an important area to study. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We know that sleep is critical for our physical and mental wellbeing, but as it turns out, the answer doesn't simply lie in the number of hours we spend unconscious each night. New research from digital healthcare company, Huma, suggests that a goldilocks bedtime between 10-11PM is linked with a lower risk of heart disease. Katie King spoke to Dr David Plans, Head of Research from Huma to find out why we all need a bedtime... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Virologist Chris Smith talks with Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill on Saturday 27th November as the world contemplates the discovery of the Covid-19 variant that the WHO has dubbed "Omicron" and labelled as a "variant of concern". How will scientists investigate this agent, and how are policymakers responding? Will the vaccines rolled out internationally continue to work, or do they need to be updated? Is the apparent benign nature of Omicron actually a blessing in disguise? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Earth's largest animals, whales, need a lot of food... that goes without saying. But, new research from a team at Stanford University have found that whales need 10-20 tonnes of food on a feeding day, which is up to three times more than initially thought. Of course that means three times more poop... and as whale poop drives nutrient recycling in the oceans, this could have a big impact on marine ecosystems. Katie King found out more from the lead author Matthew Savoca... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Now this might have flown under your radar, but last Wednesday NASA launched the DART mission, a spacecraft on a one-way collision course with an asteroid, in the world's first full-scale planetary defence test. Tricia Smith asked Space Author Colin Stuart, if life as we know it is in danger... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Covid cases in many European countries are suddenly substantially up. But in a dramatic role reversal, the UK has gone from the standout Covid-19 bad boy of Europe to one of the better performers in terms of daily cases and hospitalisations. According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's Lloyd Chapman, vaccination is the linchpin, and that's where the UK stands out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Covid is surging across Europe, but what's causing it, and will the UK follow suit, or are Europe hot on our heels? Should vaccines be mandatory, and would vaccine passports work? Why does Covid-19 vaccine protection wane with time, and are we looking at a relentless cycle of boosters indefinitely, or will one be sufficient? Dr Chris Smith joins RNZ's Kim Hill for a catch-up all about the current state of Covid-19... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When two atoms join together, the laws of physics tell us that a large amount of energy will be released, but the experiments performed so far by scientists to achieve nuclear fusion have always yielded a lot less energy than the inputs. This week, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses an approach called 'inertial confinement fusion', announced that they achieved a huge improvement in the record energy yield from a fusion experiment. Iacopo Russo heard from Debbie Callahan, a lead researcher on the project. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The first part of understanding a new language is working out where one word stops and the next word starts out of a string of syllables. Researchers at ELTE University in Hungary have been looking at how dogs' brains respond to language to figure out if they can recognise words, as Sally Le Page found out from author Marianna Boros... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Recently Facebook announced a name change for the company to Meta, which comes during the midst of a marketing plug by Mark Zuckerberg for his new take on an augmented reality universe. Facebook's metaverse. Harry Lewis finds out what the metaverse is from BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman, but first here she is with what this rebrand means for us everyday users... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We talk a lot about proteins on this programme - what they do, how they work - but have you ever wondered what they sound like? A group of scientists at the National University of Singapore have been turning proteins into pieces of music, as Sally Le Page heard from author, Peng Zhang. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Antibiotics are such an important part of modern medicine but their effectiveness has been waning in the last few decades as certain bacteria, so called superbugs, have become resistant to multiple common antibiotics, leading to the UN declaring that antimicrobial resistance is one of the top 10 global public health threats facing humanity. To tackle this issue, new approaches are needed and as new strains of antibiotics are hard to come by, one option is to modify existing antibiotics to make them more effective. Verner Viisainen spoke to Jennifer Payne from Monash University to find out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Have you ever noticed that you take one particular walking route to the shops, only to take a completely different route on the way back? If so, you might not be alone...based on recent paper published in Nature Computational Science, this is more common than you might think and could be because our brains try to always take the pointiest, not necessarily the fastest, route to their destination. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Have you ever noticed that you take one particular walking route to the shops, only to take a completely different route on the way back? If so, you might not be alone...based on recent paper published in Nature Computational Science, this is more common than you might think and could be because our brains try to always take the pointiest, not necessarily the fastest, route to their destination. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Earthshot Prize is an ambitious environmental program created by His Royal Highness Prince William to find and develop solutions for the climate emergency. This year's prizes were awarded last month at a ceremony in London. The prize for the Fix Our Climate category went to company Enapter, which developed a technology called "AEM hydrogen electrolyser". Iacopo Russo heard from Enapter's co-founder Jan-Justus Schmidt, and from Cambridge University engineering professor David Cebon, to find out firstly what an electrolyser is and more importantly what hydrogen can do for us in a sustainable... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

"Test! Test! Test!" was the instruction from the World Health Organisation when the Covid-19 pandemic began to take hold around the world. Now scientists at MIT think they might have a solution, both for this pandemic and future ones: they've developed a sensor system comprising a fibre optic to which a special coating is applied that can recognise specific viruses. When it does so, it emits light of a specific colour, signalling a detection. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

New research published this week has turned what we know about Alzheimer's disease progression on its head. Instead of the disease gradually spreading through the brain causing symptoms to get worse, the study found progression relied more on how quickly the number of disease-associated proteins increased in individual brain regions. Julia Ravey heard from Cambridge University's Georg Meisl, the study's author, on how this may impact future treatments. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Wild water swimming is becoming ever more popular and, according to a new study published recently in Cell Reports Medicine, combining dips in cold water with time in a hot sauna could have potential health benefits. Verner Viisainen spoke with senior author Camilla Scheele to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Who doesn't like to pick up a cold drink from the fridge and sit down to watch a show on their laptop or TV? Electrical appliances have made our lives easier and richer and yet, as much as we love them, we don't seem to be as good at properly maintaining or disposing of them. Thursday 14th October this year was International E-Waste Day, an event to raise awareness about the problem of waste electronics. Iacopo Russo heard from Pascal Leroy, the General Director of the WEEE Forum, the non-profit expert group which promotes the event... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A form of cultured cell, known as a HeLa cell, is at the centre of a lawsuit that is being brought against a large scientific company that uses these cells. HeLa cells are named after the person they were collected from originally, Henrietta Lacks. They are an "immortal" cell line that grows continuously in the culture dish. This means that the cells that exist today stem directly from Henrietta Lacks' original cell sample, which was taken back in 1951. The use of these cells today raises ethical questions, because Henrietta Lacks did not give consent for them to be collected or used. The case... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Pain relief after surgery is a major headache as we don't have a lot of effective, and safe, options. Opioids in particular, like morphine, are very addictive and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths globally each year, and so doctors are desperate for alternatives. Now, scientists at the University of Buffalo have developed a long-lasting, local painkiller that can be injected into the site of injury to specifically prevent pain-transmitting nerve cells, or neurons, from passing on their painful messages to the brain. It works by stopping a process called endocytosis; this is where cells... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

He said he'd introduce them, now Boris Johnson has stepped back from mandating vaccine passports across England for venues like nightclubs. But what's provoked this viral volte-face? Also, saliva tests for Covid-19, few fatal coronavirus cases among the unvaccinated, what's the role of hand sanitisers, and are Covid booster jabs the way forward? Dr Chris Smith joins RNZ's Kim Hill to discuss the latest Covid-19 news... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Fluoride is the stuff in toothpaste that helps strengthen teeth. But if there's too much fluoride in the water it softens bones, and children become susceptible to bone deformities. It's very difficult and expensive to remove dissolved fluoride ions from water. But, inspired by nature, scientists have used polymers to produce a membrane that can filter out fluoride, as Sally Le Page heard from Ayse Asatekin... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Twitter has been the subject of another study, looking at how people's tendency to post tweets in moral outrage is affected by other people on the site. Increasingly in recent years, celebrities and other well-known individuals have found themselves being "cancelled". This usually happens when they do or say something that other users disagree with. The outpourings of outrage reverberate across the social network with many piling in publicly to scorn and humiliate the perpetrator. But why do people resort to this Twitter equivalent of lobbing rotten tomatoes at someone in the stocks?... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists and doctors are always after good quality human cells for research and therapeutic purposes, but these can be hard to come by in sufficient quantities. Now, synthetic biology company bit.bio has opened up new headquarters in Cambridge to start supplying multiple different cell types by reprogramming stem cells. Eva Higginbotham heard more from founder and CEO Mark Kotter... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Many of us love putting out bird seed and watching birds feast away, and feel we're doing a good deed too, but a new paper out of Manchester Metropolitan University suggests we may actually be doing more harm than good. Eva Higginbotham spoke to BBC science correspondent Victoria Gill, who spoke with lead author Alex Lees previously... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Most schools across the UK are open and children are heading back to their classrooms. But to what extent will this affect the Covid case rates across the country and what can we do to avoid disrupting a third academic year? In Scotland, children returned to school sooner than their English counterparts: what can we learn from their experience? Chris Smith spoke with Linda Bauld, who specialises in public health at the University of Edinburgh... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Quite soon after the pandemic first struck a significant number of people began to complain of persistent symptoms in the aftermath of being infected with the new coronavirus. These manifestations have been dubbed "long covid". What's less clear is the extent to which this is happening not just to adults but also to children, and particularly teenagers. Terence Stephenson is at the UCL Gt Ormond St Institute of Child Health and spoke with Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We often look for water on remote planets and moons because, as far as we know, it's a requirement for life. Now a team of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope to scrutinise Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, think they've found water in its atmosphere. Sally Le Page spoke with team member Kurt Retherford. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Is Delta more deadly, or just transmitting more rapidly? And are the vaccines we're using likely to defend against future coronavirus variants? Also, does it matter that levels of antibody dimish post-vaccination, or will immune memory make up for the shortfall? Meanwhile, are vaccinated people who still catch Delta equally infectious? Does Delta incubate at the same rate as classical coronavirus strains? And do tests work equally well against Delta? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers have reported a case of antibiotic-resistant bacteria passing between dogs and their owners. And these bacteria aren't just resistant to any antibiotic - they're resistant to colistin, an antibiotic of last resort that we use when all other treatments fail. Mark Holmes is a vet and a microbial scientist from the University of Cambridge - he wasn't involved in the research, but he took a look for us and spoke to Eva Higginbotham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill to talk Covid-19, including the impact of the July 19th UK Freedom Day on Covid case rates. They also touch on vaccine performance, variants, past pandemics and whether we'll all be getting boosters in future years... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Although Covid-19 is dominating the headlines perpetually at the moment, it's very important not to lose sight of other significant diseases that don't yet have vaccines and do have a higher cumulative death toll. Malaria is one of them and kills half a million people, mostly children, every year. One serious problem is that the parasite that causes the disease is rapidly becoming resistant to the remaining antimalarial drugs we're using, so scientists have been searching for new ways to treat the disease. So far, more than 7 million chemical compounds have been screened to try to discover new... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Earlier this year a devastating heatwave in the pacific northwest of the United States killed almost 200 people with record-shattering temperatures; and, in 2019, the UK recorded its highest ever temperature of 38.7 degrees here in Cambridge. Alarmingly, new research from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology suggests that there's more of this to come. Eva Higginbotham heard why from Erich Fischer... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A question we're being asked quite a lot is whether the extra lengths we're going to in terms of hygiene to protect us from COVID-19 might cause us immune problems later because we're living lives that are too clean. This is the basis of what's dubbed the "hygiene hypothesis". But a report out this week says that, actually, it's the environment we've created - rather than the way we clean it - that matters, because modern living conditions and building materials select for the wrong sorts of microbes. Microbiologist and author of the report, Graham Rook, spoke to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The general view is that waterways, such as rivers and underground water sources, will dry up during severe drought - but eventually recover and resume their normal flow when the rains return. But new findings from Australia pour cold water on that idea. When researchers analysed 30 years of rainfall and flow data from 161 water catchments in southeast Australia, they discovered that one-third of these water catchments had not recovered almost eight years later. Charlotte Birkmanis heard more from Monash University's Tim Peterson... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

An ancient skull, uncovered decades ago in China, has recently been revealed to be possibly the closest ever relative to humankind. It's called "Dragon Man", and based on trace uranium inside the skull, it's been dated to at least 146,000 years old - but could well be much older! This puts it at a critical time period in human evolution, when our ancestors were first emerging within Africa. But there's some disagreement about whether the fossil is from an entirely new species, or is linked to other sets of fossils found in East Asia. Palaeoanthropologist John Hawks, who wasn't involved in the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Few animals inspire the imagination like Tyrannosaurus rex. And the mighty tyrannosaurs did dominate the lands that eventually became central Asia and western North America for millions of years. But during that time, fossils show that medium-sized predators all but disappeared. Why? Thomas Holtz from the University of Maryland dug deep into the records, and - as he tells Charlotte Birkmanis - thinks teen T-rexes are the answer... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Previously, researchers knew that sharks can travel back and forth across entire oceans, accurately returning to specific locations. But what we didn't know was whether they memorise these routes, or if they have some sort of inbuilt GPS. To find out how sharks navigate, Charlotte Birkmanis mapped the course with Florida State University's Bryan Keller... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

New technology may help save bees by providing an antidote for deadly pesticides. The new solution allows beekeepers to feed their bees 'pollen patties', a pollen-sized microparticle filled with enzymes to prevent the bees from ingesting certain pesticides. Carlotte Birkmanis chatted with Cornell University's James Webb to get the latest buzz on their sweet technology. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Covid viruses, vaccines and variants: Chris Smith talks to Radio New Zealand National to bring Kim Hill up to speed with the latest developments on the pandemic front, including the recent case in NZ's Wellington... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Eastern Australia is currently in the grips of a mouse plague. Mice live everywhere people do, often undetected. Right now though, highly favourable conditions have caused mice populations to explode in the eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales. A year of abundant rainfall after several years of drought has led to bumper crops, providing lots of food for mice, allowing them to not only thrive but also reproduce at an astonishing rate. Farmers are using zinc phosphide-coated wheat bait to combat the pests, the only registered in-crop rodent killer for the management of mice in... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have reported on some unusual things flying in space recently. In one paper, sperm, stored aboard the International Space Station for the last 5 years, has been brought back to Earth and used to fertilise eggs. Also, a group of glow-in-the-dark bobtailed squid headed spacewards to look at how microgravity affects their microbiome. Westminster University astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell talked Chris Smith through the different projects... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The world is always on the lookout for new drugs - but they're not easy to make. Synthesising them is often an expensive and prolonged process. But what if we could employ a miniature assistant to do it for us? That's what a team from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology have come up with. They're managed to genetically reprogramme living cells to build complex molecules - molecules that no living thing would ever normally produce. Phil Sansom learned how from researcher Jason Chin... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month: how hummingbirds hum, how elephants evolved anti-cancer genes so they can sustain big bodies, gorillas that grow up without their mothers, and why deforestation causes peaks and then troughs in malaria cases... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

For thousands of years, humans have used traditional mining techniques involving sinking tunnels or large pits to recover relatively small amounts of useful metals like gold and copper. What remains is usually, at best, a scar on the landscape, large amounts of waste material, and habitat destruction. At worst, the practices have led to environmental catastrophes. Now an international team, including researchers from the University of Western Australia, have found a way to harness the power of electricity to achieve the same mineral recovery but without the environmental costs. By placing... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you live in the UK, you should soon be able to drink vodka... from Chernobyl! Which might sound like a radioactive nightmare, but the stuff is - supposedly - completely safe to drink. Not only do radioactive particles get removed during the distillation process, there were few originally there at all - thanks to how well much of the environment around Chernobyl has recovered since the 1986 disaster. The project is the brainchild of researchers in Ukraine alongside environmental scientist Jim Smith from Portsmouth University. They've just distilled the first batch of their vodka, but... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's often hardest to think when you've been working all day - especially if your job involves making lots of decisions. Psychologists call this decision fatigue. And evidence has shown that the phenomenon has serious, real-world consequences... beyond making you collapse on the sofa. Now, a study from the University of Cambridge seems to demonstrate that it could make the difference between your bank loan getting approved - or rejected. Lead author Tobias Baer spoke to Eva Higginbotham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The mantis shrimp is a sea creature with a particular party piece. While our eyes are sensitive to three colours, red, green and blue, which our brain uses to make the full rainbow of colours we see, the mantis shrimp is sensitive to 12 to 16 different colours, giving them a much wider spectrum of colours. Scientists in the University of Illinois figured this might be useful, and have created a camera that can see colours we can't. The idea is that if you tag a cancerous tumour with a fluorescent chemical that we can't see, but the camera can, it will give surgeons a quick and easy way to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Alexandra Elbakyan is the founder of the website SciHub, and it came out this week that she is being investigated by the FBI. You see, SciHub is an illegal venture: it makes research papers available for free to people who want them, bypassing the fees and subscriptions that journals would normally charge for that access. In this respect they can claim the moral high ground: people who couldn't otherwise afford to access the material can read it. But the way SciHub obtains the journal articles it makes available is not legal; they are said to have obtained access codes from people at... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Noise pollution can be difficult to live with, and it turns out that plants are also impacted by too much noise, although not in the way you might expect. Jenny Phillips from Texas A&M in San Antonio has been studying the seedlings of native trees around gas wells in New Mexico. She's found that noise pollution can drive away the animals that some plants rely on to spread their seeds, as she explained to Katie Haylor... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Anorexia nervosa is a cruel, complex and serious mental health condition. It involves deliberately losing weight in order to keep body weight as low as possible. And through investigating brain circuits involved in regulating body weight and which can go awry in obesity, Roger Cone from the University of Michigan and colleagues, along with scientists from Vanderbilt University, have now shown that activating a particular receptor called MC3 in the brains of mice encourages them to eat more, whilst at the same time also suppressing fear and anxiety. And Roger thinks this has interesting... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When they're trying to piece together our understanding of ancient Humans and Neanderthals, scientists often have to rely on artifacts found in caves. What scientists wish they had more of was ancient DNA, which would allow them to study how the populations of these groups changed and expanded over time. Now that's about to change thanks to Benjamin Vernot at the Max Planck Institute, as he explained to Eva Higginbotham.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Each year 80,000 patients are hospitalised in the US for paracetamol overdose, the leading cause of liver damage in the US and Europe. The current treatment is effective at treating the liver damage, but because its efficacy is limited to being given within 8 hours since the overdose, scientists have been looking for alternative treatments. Melanie Jans-Singh spoke with clinical scientist Christof Gaunt, about the discovery of a new molecule that can treat the damage done by the paracetamol overdose to the liver... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Face masks have their place, but what's really needed right now is a breath of fresh air and a dose of common sense to control Covid-19, as Chris Smith explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

New research has found a gene that looks to be the reason why rabbits, and perhaps all bouncing mammals hop. Using an unusual type of rabbit, called a sauteur d'Alfort, which doesn't hop, but runs on its front paws like a handstand, scientists have found a specific gene called RORB, that's missing in these rabbits. Defects in this gene may have damaging effects in all mammals though, not just rabbits. Adam Murphy spoke to Leif Andersson from Uppsala University about these bizarre bunnies... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Spinosaurus was a dinosaur that was around 13 metres long, and looked a little like a T-Rex with the addition of a massive sail on its back. There's been much debate around how it lived; while it seems to be tied to the water, it's unclear how close those ties were. One theory suggests it was actually like a crocodile, living a pretty aquatic life. But new research points to features of its anatomy that suggest that it was a lot more like a giant, very toothy heron, waiting at the water's edge. Adam Murphy spoke to David Hone from Queen Mary University of London about the dino debate... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We share our planet with microbes. Some do us harm, others do us good and are known as our microbiome. Plants also have a microbiome, and in a paper out recently, scientists working in a seed bank report how they got curious about what microbes could be stored away inside banked seeds. And by surveying seeds from just 1 type of plant, they found about 200 species of fungi. Katie Haylor spoke to study author Rowena Hill... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In 1994, at DeGray Lake in the state of Arkansas in the USA, 29 bald eagles were found dead from a mysterious disease. Many more across the area have been found suffering from "Avian Vacuolar Myelinopathy", which causes holes in the brain and spinal cord, and erratic behaviour. Researchers now think they've cracked the mystery, as Eva Higginbotham heard from Timo Niedermeyer at Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Crohn's Disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease (or IBD), where the immune system attacks and inflames bits of the intestines. It can cause diarrhea, pain, fatigue, and consequent disruptions to daily activities like school and work. There are treatments, but currently no cure. Now, scientists in the US have found that a fungus used industrially in foods like wine, cheese and cured meats - called Debaryomyces Hansenii - seems to be thriving in gut wounds in mice, and getting in the way of the wounds healing. And they think a similar thing is happening in the inflamed intestines of the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Fires of any scale tend to produce a certain amount of smoke - a variety of different particles including small bits of unburnt fuel, which eventually disperse into the atmosphere. And looking at data from satellites out in space, scientists in Israel have shown that smoke from the late 2019 / early 2020 Australian wildfires actually travelled up beyond the lower atmosphere (known as the troposphere) and into the stratosphere - that's above where clouds gather and planes tend to fly. Up here, these smoke particles stick around for longer, where they can absorb or scatter incoming energy from... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Cone snails are a group of highly venomous marine snails. Their shells are beautiful, but they pack a powerful neurotoxic punch: some members of this family are so poisonous that they can easily kill a person. But one species of cone snail, called Conus imperialis, produces a very different reaction in the worms they hunt. This snail has a venom cocktail that includes pheromones: it uses similar chemicals to the ones the worms give off when mating. Why make a worm aphrodisiac? Phil Sansom spoke to Joshua Torres from the University of Copenhagen about these strange creatures... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In recent years we've realised quite how bad a knock on the head can be for us, because the brain bobs about suspended in fluid inside our skulls. And if you move, or stop, the head suddenly, the brain cannons into the inside of the skull and can be injured. It's especially important in sports, but it's hard to study - and to develop effective safety equipment - for obvious reasons. But scientists have now discovered that something you commonly find in fridge door behaves in an uncannily similar way to your brain. Adam Murphy found out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In the UK, about 1 in 4 adults are affected by obesity, which is linked to diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. But recently a new study has documented the effect of giving a drug called semaglutide to 2000 people over a 1 year period. The drug mimics a gut hormone called GLP-1 to boost insulin levels and it's already used to treat diabetes. The study subjects lost an average of 15kg on the drug, suggesting that it might be an effective way to support weight loss. Katie Haylor asked Cambridge University geneticist and obesity specialist Giles Yeo to take her through the results of the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A new way to repair diseased livers has been unveiled by researchers at the University of Cambridge. They've found a way to grow the cells that line the branching system of pathways inside the liver - the bile ducts. It's a big step forward. Chris Smith heard from Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, who is part of the team behind the work... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One thing we're all hoping for is that the new coronavirus vaccines will give us 'herd immunity' - this would mean that so many people are immune to the virus that it would start to die away as it can't find new hosts to infect. But how does herd immunity work in practice, and are the vaccines we have likely to put us in this fortunate position? Eva Higginbotham spoke with Peter English, a consultant in communicable disease control, to find out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Virologist Dr Chris Smith catches up with RNZ's Kim Hill with an update on the Covid-19 latest news including encouraging data on the performance of the vaccines, but discouraging news on the stances of some prominent European leaders towards AstraZeneca's vaccine. Also, new Covid variants in America, and why scientists suspect flu might be waiting in the wings to make a dramatic comeback... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Osteoarthritis is a painful condition caused by wear and tear to the slippery cartilage that normally coats and lubricates the bone surfaces in our joints. This doesn't repair itself very well, so, when it wears out, joint replacement is usually the only option. But recently, scientists out of Penn State University in the US have shown that the antidepressant drug paroxetine has an interesting side-effect: it encourages the cells that make and build cartilage to grow. So, perhaps, in the future we'll be able to pop a pill, rather than have a hip replacement. Fadia Kamal told Katie Haylor what... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

About 70% of our planet is covered in water, and the vast majority of that water is in the salty oceans. But in a paper published recently, scientists from Germany propose that the Arctic Ocean was - at a relatively recent few points in Earth's history - actually entirely freshwater. Rivers and meltwater flushed out the salt, and lower sea levels worldwide at the time meant it couldn't come back, at least for a while. Getting to grips with how and exactly when this was happening is critical to our understanding of how climate change affects the Arctic, as Katie Haylor heard from Walter... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Many of us may love driving, but nature certainly doesn't love us doing it! Alongside the pollution, there's the noise of traffic, which isn't just a nuisance for humans. Lots of research shows man-made noise affects nearby animals, and now another study shows that insects are also being impacted: female crickets get so confused by road noise that they struggle to pick the best potential suitor from the pack. Zoologist Adam Bent explained the situation to Phil Sansom... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In the online world, a battle is brewing between tech giants Google and Facebook and the Australian government. The government are proposing a law to force organisations like Google pay the news outlets that produce the news content they currently run for free on their websites, where it draws huge amounts of traffic. The tech companies have retaliated by threatening to withdraw their services from Australia. To explore this in more detail, Adam Murphy spoke with entrepreneur and tech Investor Peter Cowley... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The things we see inhabiting our planet have evolved fantastic adaptations and habits to overcome issues in their environment that get in the way of an ultimate happy ending. This week an international collaboration led by scientists from Japan, have established the first life cycle in a creature other than the famous cicadas where they erupt from the earth all at the same time to cause havoc and interrupt human lives. Martin Khechara spoke to arthropod researcher Eleanor Drinkwater from the University of York about the research... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Erosion is carrying away millions of tonnes of the soil we depend upon to keep our crops alive, every year. To try to prevent soil losses, farmers have moved away from some traditional techniques, like deep ploughing, and they're also planting short-lived "cover-crops" that protect the soil surface over winter. They then sow seed directly through these cover crops for the next season. The problem is that, without periodic deep ploughing, soils can become highly compacted. Plants don't tend to send their roots through compact soils so well, meaning they miss out on nutrients, and this can dent... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Anyone who's had surgery knows that recovery is often accompanied by discomfort. But scientists in Germany, writing in the British Medical Journal recently, explain how playing music and soothing words to patients while they are "under" during surgery results in less self reported pain and lower use of painkillers - specifically opioids - afterwards. Katie Haylor spoke to Ernil Hansen from Regensburg University Hospital in Bavaria... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Amid accusations of "despicable behaviour", the EU are backpedalling furiously. With fewer than 2% of EU citizens vaccinated compared with 12% of the UK population, Brussels faces a rising tide of disquiet from EU members as the bloc fails to get a vaccine programme on track. They blamed AstraZeneca, then invoked laws to erect a border across Ireland to block movements of vaccines made in Belgium. Many cannot believe the behaviour of the Brussels bureaucrats. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You've probably heard of catnip, which makes cats go crazy. There's also another plant called silver vine, which has a similar effect. Now scientists have been nailing down what in silver vine makes cats so excited, but also a surprising bonus effect of the chemical - it makes an effective mosquito repellent! Eva Higginbotham heard how from lead author on the study Masau Miyazaki from Iwate University, which has just been published in the journal Science Advances...Ref: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/4/eabd9135 Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Although knitting and other handicrafts are having a bit of a moment during the pandemic as we all try to keep ourselves busy at home, the art and practice of knitting goes back a long way through history. Eva Higginbotham spoke with Loretta Napoleoni, a journalist and author who last year wrote a book about the power, and history, of knitting... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Now in the UK it is dark and dreary, but there's been a recent colourful scientific discovery to brighten up the day, as a new flamboyantly-dressed dinosaur has recently been described by scientists at the University of Portsmouth and the State Museum of Natural History in Germany. Eva Higginbotham heard the story from lead scientist on the project, Dave Martill... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Kim Hill talks to virologist Chris Smith about Covid-19 in 2020, in retrospect and right now. What's the situation with global access to vaccines for the new coronavirus, and will the "new variant" emerging in the UK defeat the present vaccine repertoire? Where did this variant come from, what does it tell us about how viruses evolve, and is the UK looking at another lockdown post Christmas? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Do you have any winter holiday traditions? This month, as we were gearing up for our holidays here at the Naked Scientists, we thought it would be a fun experiment to explore the science behind holiday celebrations around the world with the help of Chunendra Sahu, Cristina Rodriguez, Ljiljana Fruk, and Olgo Loblova - all researchers at the University of Cambridge... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The WHO estimates that up to 650,000 people globally die each year from the flu, and one of the tools in our arsenal against it is the seasonal flu vaccine. Recently there's been a huge breakthrough in the search for a universal flu vaccine, that is one vaccine that would give broad protection from lots of different strains of flu. Just published in the journal Nature Medicine, Eva Higginbotham spoke to one of the scientists behind the work: Lynda Coughlan... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Traditionally, when someone says "vaccine", the image of a syringe and needle usually springs to mind. But injections need trained staff to administer them, and they're unpleasant, even for people who are not scared of needles. So vaccines you can inhale sound altogether more attractive. And that's what researchers at Rutgers University in the US have been working on. They've found a particular clutch of chemical compounds that are very good at passing harmlessly through the lungs and entering the bloodstream where they can interact with the immune system. What's exciting is that these... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When we nod off we often dream, but many people have reported that, over the course of the pandemic, what they dream about has changed dramatically. It seems to be a real claim, and scientists are studying it. Eva Higginbotham spoke with dream scientist Alejandro Ezquerro-Nassar from the University of Cambridge... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The AstraZeneca Oxford University Covid-19 vaccine results were announced recently, but something wasn't quite right: it turned out that some people in the trial had received the wrong vaccine dose, although with surprising results. Chris Smith joins RNZ's Kim Hill to review the AZ and other vaccines... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Recently news was published of an artificial intelligence system which has analysed bits of speech from participants of a long-running study on dementia. These participants were cognitively normal, didn't have signs of dementia, at the time. The system managed to predict the onset of dementia up to 7 years earlier than human doctors. Katie Haylor asked Susan Kohlhass, director of research at Alzheimer's Research UK what she made of the announcement... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Let's dive into the depths and consider the octopus. As well as being famous for its 8 arms, and 3 hearts, octopus vision is also impressive: it helps them spy out dinner, among other things. But light isn't always in great supply when you're hunting around on the seabed, so these creatures have a fascinating ability to taste their surroundings and therefore make decisions about what to eat or not, simply by touching things. Now, a paper from scientists at Harvard explains how this touch-taste system actually works on a molecular level. By studying the cells in the suction cups of the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As part of their obesity strategy the UK government announced plans to restrict the advertising of unhealthy foods on TV. And in a paper out recently, Oliver Mytton, of Cambridge University, and colleagues have modelled the potential impact of the TV ban on rates of obesity and overweight among children in the UK. Katie Haylor spoke to Oliver. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Join Chris Berrow for this extended chat with Carlos "Ocelote" Rodriguez about running one of the biggest eSports teams in the world - G2. From League of Legends to Hearthstone, the team have had a huge amount of success across the board. So what has coronavirus and lockdown meant for the business? Find out how long a typical player's career lasts, and what happens after you retire from competitive play. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When we think of drug discovery we might conjure up images of scientists in white lab coats holding test tubes, but a new study searching for drugs to kill dangerous disease-causing fungi had researchers wearing wetsuits and holding fishing nets, and so far, it's all been worth it. Eva Higginbotham spoke with Tim Bugni and David Andes, two leaders on the project... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you've ever wondered what's going on in your brain when choosing what you want for lunch, look no further. Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis recently published a paper in Nature where they used an experimental trick to show what was happening in the brains of monkeys as they chose which beverage they wanted to drink. Eva Higginbotham spoke with lead scientist on the project, Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, about how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Tired of just seeing and reading about history? Soon you'll be able to experience its smells as well! This is thanks to an ambitious project called ODEUROPA, which has just received a big EU grant that brings together researchers from a range of disciplines including historians, computer scientists and chemists to reconstruct the pongs of the past. Marieke van Erp is one of them; she's from the Dutch Digital Humanities Lab, and spoke to Eva Higginbotham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Pfizer and BioNTech have concluded the Phase 3 trial of their coronavirus vaccine. The results appear to show an efficacy rate of 95%, and the developers hope to win FDA approval as soon as possible. This vaccine - a promising hope for many - works via a new methiod that's never been tried before in humans. Chris Smith asked Cambridge University immunologist Clare Bryant for her reaction... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Could an injection of your own brain cells be a way to halt multiple sclerosis - MS? That's what researchers in the US are finding in mice with the disease. In MS, the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, damaging a material called myelin. An extract of this myelin material, injected into the bloodstream, can permanently deactivate the immune cells that cause MS... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

What do we know about Pfizer and bioNTech's new RNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, preliminary results for which were announced this week? Who was tested in the trial? And what is a genetic vaccine, why were vaccinees innoculated twice, what does 90% effective mean, and what's the reason it needs to be stored at -80º C? Joining RNZ's Kim Hill, virologist Dr Chris Smith explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There's been a lot of discussion about the Swedish approach to the coronavirus pandemic, and back in September, Jonas F Ludvigsson, a paediatrician and clinical epidemiologist at the Karolinka Institute, published a paper describing in detail what happened in Sweden during the first 8 months of the pandemic, so between January and August 2020. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Jonas back in October... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month we hear about an artificial intelligence (AI) breakthrough for infertility, how ketamine can mimic some of the decision-making difficulties seen in schizophrenia, a new device to observe and document mosquito feeding behaviour, the key to scar-free wound healing, and how open is open access publishing at the moment? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Have you ever heard of the condition known as "heart failure with preserved ejection fraction"? If not, then you're not alone; despite it representing hundreds of thousands of heart failure cases every year in the UK alone, a new study shows that many doctors don't really understand it, and many patients don't even know they have it. In order to better understand the condition they call "heff peff", Emma Sowden from the University of Manchester and her colleagues have been speaking to people living with it - like Mancunian Mike Wardle - as well as to Phil Sansom... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Virologist Dr Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill to talk Covid-19. Why is the UK back in a lockdown, and did the measure come too late? How are we testing for the virus and how many cases are we missing? What is the incubation period, and what's the prospect for long term immunity? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There's been lots of talk over the last several months over how best to both protect people from coronavirus and protect the economy, and economist Quentin Grafton from Australian National University has been crunching the numbers. Back in September, he combined epidemiological models of how the virus spreads with models of the Australian economy, and found results that lockdown-sceptics might consider surprising, as he told Eva Higginbotham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Would you like to make more money? Understand your relationships better? Know when to trust someone, or something, or not? Well, David Sumpter's got an equation for you in his new book 'Ten equations that rule the world" as he explained to Eva Higginbotham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Were you waking up too early this week? Across Europe, we recently left summer Daylight Light Saving time and re-entered standard time. But where does this practice of changing the clocks come from, and is it still a good idea? Eva Higginbotham reports... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Plastics are useful but notoriously hard to recycle back into their component chemicals, which limits what else we can do with them. Now, scientists in the US have developed a new catalyst that can break apart common plastics and turn them into chemicals that can be used to make other products. Cambridge University's Taylor Uekert works on ways to deal with plastic waste and she talked Katie Haylor through what the US team have managed to do... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We've heard news that Morrisons, Waitrose and John Lewis' own brand Christmas products will not contain glitter this year. And now, scientists at Anglia Ruskin University have looked at making little ponds in the lab with river water and sediment. Katie Haylor heard from lead author Danielle Green, who explained that all the glitters they tested had an impact on the plants and algae in these ponds... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you've been paying attention to the news in recent times, you'll be very familiar by now with graphs: COVID rates, infection rates, data are being displayed in a plethora of ways. But there are, as the old saying Mark Twain made popular goes "lies; damn lies and statistics", so are there any "gotchas" we should look out for when someone shows us a graph? Adam Murphy caught up with Nira Chamberlain, president of the Institute of Mathematics... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Britain recently began a diplomatic campaign to draw up new rules for responsible behaviour in space; essentially it's a "don't litter" policy intended to reduce the threat posed by decades of irresponsible dumping in orbit. But what's the scale of the problem of space littering, and how might things go wrong? Adam Murphy spoke to John Zarnecki, emeritus professor of Space Sciences at the Open University... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

On the 28th September, Boris Johnson committed to increasing the area of protected land in the UK to 30% by 2030. This announcement was made at a virtual UN event, where the prime minister, alongside upwards of 60 other world leaders, signed up to a pledge to tackle the world's chronic loss of biodiversity. Sir David Attenborough addressed the event too, imploring world leaders to do more to protect our natural environment. But what does this 30% actually mean for us here in the UK? Katie Haylor spoke to the RSPB's global conservation director Martin Harper... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How do bees recognise who's a bona fide member of the nest and who is an impostor? It turns out that it's down to the bacteria they carry inside them... Eva Higginbotham heard how Cassondra Vernier at Washington University in St Louis has figured it out with her colleague Yehuda Ben-Shahar... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Covid-19 is forcing educators to re-think centuries of teaching traditions and develop new ways to provide a rich but safe student experience. Jim Gazzard leads Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education (ICE). He joined palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger and Theo Bloom to speak with Chris Smith about how adult education and training are evolving rapidly... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Listen in to a special interview all about the Naked Gaming Podcast.Gene "Bean" Baxter from Podcast Radio (and Radio Hall of Famer!) chats to Leigh Milner and Chris Berrow about what its like being married to each other, and recording our gaming podcast.Topics include: how coronavirus has affected the gaming industry, what the best simulator of all time is, and whether Google Stadia is really worth buying. And Bean had to start off asking if Chris and Leigh were naked. Luckily they are used to fielding that question. And if you're wondering the answer was... no. They were wearing dressing... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As UK cases spike again, Dr Chris Smith joins RNZ's Kim Hill to discuss why some geographies are particularly hard-hit, what constitutes a "super-spreader" and who are the asymptomatic cases, what sentinel screening is telling us about the features and spread of Covid-19. Also on the table, low-cost rapid testing technology, the prospect of using testing to return the airline industry to viability, the timelines for vaccines, and why the Neanderthal in you might affect your coronavirus risk... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month on the eLife podcast, artificial intelligence reveals a better test for prostate cancer, is the brain stuffed with neuronal stem cells, bonobos with cultural preferences, and why some insects play "follow my leader"... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

On October 8th, about 15,000 students will return for the new academic year at Cambridge University. Other UK institutions have seen outbreaks and quarantine measures en-masse as Covid has ripped though university campuses. Cambridge Vice Chancellor Stephen Toope spoke with Chris Smith to discuss whether the student experience can be preserved at Cambridge in the face of measures required to control coronavirus... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Welcome to the end of the universe. Which one will we get? Will the life drain slowly from thousands of cold, dead galaxies; or will the stars get ripped apart by a wave of strange new matter? That's the subject of a new book by astrophysicist Katie Mack, "The End of Everything". And be warned, some of the catastrophes she described to Phil Sansom make the coronavirus look like a walk in the park... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Everyone loves magic. But does that extend to animals? You might have seen videos online of people performing tricks to animals, and the animals being hugely entertained by it, but do they understand what's going on. That's the idea put forth by researchers from the University of Cambridge. Adam Murphy spoke to Elias Garcia-Pelegrin about what magic tricks might be teach us about the animals around us... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 is a debilitating genetic disease that causes muscle weakness and wasting, amongst other problems, and there's currently no cure. It causes a toxic form of the chemical RNA - a genetic messenger molecule similar to DNA - to build up and clog up other important processes inside cells. Now, scientists at the University of California San Diego have used gene editing to reverse the disease in mice, as Eva Higginbotham heard from Gene Yeo... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

People everywhere are clinging to the hope that there'll soon be a coronavirus vaccine. That aspiration suffered a setback last week when AstraZeneca announced the suspension of its trial of the Covid-19 vaccine it's developing. So how are decisions to start and stop clinical trials made, and what's the present trajectory for a coronavirus vaccine? Chris Smith asked Gordon Dougan, who's overseen the development of many vaccines during his career, to explain... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Virologist Dr Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill for a Covid-19 update covering why AstraZeneca and Oxford University's coronavirus vaccine trial was halted and how vaccine side effects are investigated, why Boris Johnson has launched his Covid moonshot, signs that vapers are at higher risk of Covid-19, long term immunity to coronavirus infection or vaccination, and the bradykinin storm hypothesis to explain severe Covid-19 infection... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

From the Babylonians to psychologist Sigmund Freud, as humans we've been fascinated by what our dreams might mean for thousands of years. Now, computer scientists have turned their hands to the art of dream divination with the development of automatic dream analysis software, as lead researcher Luca Aiello from the Nokia Bell Labs told Eva Higginbotham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There have been some record breaking temperatures lately, and Adam Murphy is hot on the trail of why one place in particular stands out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Drink driving is one of the biggest killers on our roads. Brian Suffoletto is an A&E doctor in the US where he's spent the past 15 years developing digital interventions to stop people drinking and driving. Lately he's been working on a system that uses a smartphone to analyse the way a person walks to pick up on subtle giveaways that they're over the limit. Katie Haylor heard how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

PTSD is a disease that may occur after experiencing trauma, often characterised by the involuntary reliving of particularly painful memories. About 1 in 3 people who experience trauma will develop PTSD, but it's unclear why some people develop it and others don't. New research out of the University of Basel has shown that a genetic component may help explain why some people are more susceptible, as researcher Dominique de Quervain told Eva Higginbotham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Dr Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill to talk about the latest news and breakthroughs around the Covid-19 coronavirus. How the virus spreads, the prospect of long-term immunity following natural infection or vaccination, how herd immunity works, what drugs do and do not look promising for Covid-19 patients, and how to stay safe on the bus... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Getting cold won't just make your hair stand up, it may also make it grow. Yulia Shwartz at Harvard University and her colleagues have found that the nerves that give us goose pimples also send a message to the cells in the follicles that produce hairs, making them grow. It explains the prolific winter coat that some animals grow in the cold. Cambridge dermatologist Jane Sterling took Chris Smith through the findings... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Giant pandas, which for decades were endangered, finally shed the status in 2016 thanks to huge conservation efforts. But scientists have been warning that their reserves aren't well designed for the ecosystem as a whole - and now a group of zoologists have found that even though panda numbers have gone up since the 60s, big carnivores like leopards have almost disappeared. Bill McShea from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute is one of the authors of the study, and he told Phil Sansom what's been going on inside the panda parks... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

New research means we're going to have to think again about how human sperm swim. You might have seen movies of them looking a bit like tadpoles in a pond - the head carries the male's DNA and the long tail, or flagellum, propels the sperm forward. That motion was first described over 300 years ago, but now a joint team from Britain and Mexico think we might need to re-write the textbooks, as Eva Higginbotham heard from Hermes Gadelha... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The world took a step towards our goal of harnessing nuclear fusion as an energy source last week when the construction officially began of ITER, the new International Thermonuclear Experimental fusion Reactor. Michel Claessens is the author of the book ITER: The Giant Fusion Reactor. He spoke to Adam Murphy about the project... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In early August, the UK stepped back from some of the proposed lockdown easing measures. So how are public health officials managing these situations, are we in good shape to cope with the approaching winter, and is this the pattern of coronavirus cases we should expect going forward? Chris Smith hears from Maggie Rae, president of the faculty of Public Health.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The millions of rods and cones in the retina at the back of each of your eyes, which turn light into nerve signals to send to the brain, use a lot of energy. So the retina tends to burn out faster than the rest of the body. But now scientists have found that short bursts of a red light shone into your eyes could help reduce or even reverse this ageing process. Katie Haylor spoke to Glenn Jeffery, who's been looking at a group of 24 people with no eye disease for the study... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The liver is an incredible organ that does a number of different jobs - including cleaning our blood and breaking down chemicals and drugs - to keep us healthy. And liver problems can have serious consequences, resulting in potentially needing a new one in the case of liver failure. And there aren't exactly loads of spare healthy livers around, and some people just aren't suited for transplant. But this week, scientists have published news of an artificial liver system that cleans the blood, and returns it again to the body within a matter of hours, whilst also encouraging the liver tissue to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Colourful still life paintings of bowls of fruit have been a favourite of artists for generations, and there are thousands of examples in art galleries across the world. Now, two friends from Belgium - one an art historian, and the other a plant biologist - are asking for your help to find paintings that reveal clues about how some of our modern foods came into being. This unusual project came about when the two of them were on holiday in St Petersburg, and visited a museum - as Ive de Smet told Katie Haylor... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

After 22 years of searching, researchers at the Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands have successfully identified the genetic cause behind a certain type of inherited adult hearing loss - a defect in the so-called RIPOR2 gene. Eva Higginbotham spoke to geneticist Hannie Kremer and ear nose and throat surgeon Ronald Pennings about how they did it. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Kim Hill catches up with virologist Chris Smith to review the Covid-19 current state of play, from Leicester's lockdown, the WHO stance on masks and aerosol spread, to long-term immunity and long-haul symptoms of Covid-19, the link between ethnicity and more severe Covid-19 disease, and whether the world's over-reacted to the coronavirus threat... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How has the pandemic affected the global food supply? That's the subject of a recent report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation. Their message is that while there have been a few industry issues so far - overripe fruit left unpicked, spoiled batches of milk left undelivered - that's only a taste of what's to come if there's a huge global recession around the corner. Chris Smith and spoke to Maximo Torero - the organisation's chief economist - as well as University of Cambridge land economist Shailaja Fennell... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Do you consider yourself something of a Dr Doolittle? According to new research from the University of Amsterdam, we're all actually pretty good at understanding what animals are trying to express - at least, animals that we are closely related to like chimpanzees. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Roza Kamiloglu, the lead author on the study, about her research... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month on the eLife Podcast we look at how sugar takes away the pleasure of consuming and makes you eat more, we find out what loneliness does to the brain, uncover new insights into how HIV infects females, and explore sex bias in biomedical research... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Astronomers have taken what might be the first ever picture of a baby planet being formed. It looks like a beautiful tornado-shaped spiral of light, and there's a tiny twist visible inside one of the arms of the spiral. Why is this an achievement? And how can you actually tell whether there's a planet inside that tiny point of light? Phil Sansom asked Anthony Boccaletti, who led the team from the European Southern Observatory in taking this picture - as well as University of Cambridge astronomer Carolin Crawford... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You might think that when you're choosing a partner to have children with that your decision is entirely yours. However it turns out that biology has an interesting trick up its sleeve, which may surprise you. It turns out that there are guidance mechanisms that, like homing beacons, can help swimming sperm get to the eggs. It's because cells in women's bodies release special attracting chemicals into the fluid surrounding the eggs, and, according to a recent paper, these chemicals seem to prefer some sperm over others, taking the decision making completely out of your hands! In reproductive... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Everyday in the UK over 40 people die from liver disease, some of whom could be saved by having a liver transplant - but there aren't enough donor livers to go around. But what if we could grow livers in a laboratory, and use those instead? A team in Pittsburgh has now done just that in rats. The livers were transplanted into animals genetically modified to prevent them from rejecting the transplant. Eva Higginbotham heard from Alejandro Soto-Gutierrez how they did it... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Where are we now, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic? The official global death toll is over 380,000 with well over 6 million confirmed cases according to the World Health Organisation. Are we deceiving ourselves that we really understand it? Jonathan Ball is a virologist at the University of Nottingham who's met some exotic viruses in his time - so for an update, Chris Smith asked his thoughts on the coronavirus and its weird symptoms... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A few weeks ago some stork babies made the news as the first white stork chicks to hatch in the UK for over 600 years. Despite the very long gap, here in the UK a legacy of these large, white, migratory birds has persisted. I'm Eva Higginbotham, and I spoke to Dr Alexander Lees, senior lecturer in Conservation Biology at Manchester Metropolitan University, about the new arrivals, monogamous dating for storks, and the history of white storks in Europe. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Phase 2 of the hydroxychloroquine debacle, how the race to publish is leading to rapid retractions, whether Sweden's having second thoughts, did Covid come out of a lab, innate immunity and antibody responses, and how many tests prove I'm negative? Virologist Dr Chris Smith talks to Radio new Zealand National's Kim Hill... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Donald Trump got a lot of stick when he talked about using disinfectant and light to kill off COVID-19 - seemingly implying people should drink bleach or shine a torch down their throats. Now a team at Columbia University has indeed discovered a narrow wavelength within UV light that they call 'far-UVC', that as well as killing viruses on surfaces, is also safe for humans because it can't get through our skin. Eva Higginbotham heard more from David Brenner... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In this week's coronavirus update, the impact of blood groups on Covid risk, progress towards a vaccine, and the UK still has 8000 cases a day: what does this mean for herd immunity? Also, is Sweden's approach the wrong one, has hydroxychloroquine died a death, what actually is the Covid syndrome, what role may genes play, and how do we calculate Covid excess mortality? Dr Chris Smith talks to Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A herd of fluffy wild Kashmiri goats made the news back in March at the onset of the lockdown when they descended on the Welsh town of Llandudno to explore where all the people had got to. Now, after an investigation by a scientist in London, it turns out that goats are not only curious creatures, but, as the first domesticated livestock species some eleven thousand years ago, they are also able to understand human gestures like pointing. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Alan McElligott from the University of Roehampton about his research... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The UK government has come under fire for failing to protect care homes from the spread of the coronavirus. The facilities have seen more than 14,000 coronavirus-related deaths so far - that's over a quarter of the UK's total mortality, in just a tiny fraction of the population. And these figures echo a similar situation across European countries. Chris Smith spoke to Julienne Meyer - a nurse, an emeritus professor at City University of London, and an adviser to the National Care Forum... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Progress in vaccine trials, the longevity of immune responses to Covid-19 and coronavirus vaccines, animal models of Covid-19, genetic stability of SARS-CoV-2, is hydroxychloroquine a good gamble, coronaviruses on clothes, why do death rates vary, and how is Sweden faring? Kim Hill talks to Chris Smith to find out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A special Covid-19 news update: Have you had a test for COVID-19? Some results from the symptom tracker app. Also, how blood plasma from Covid-recoverees is being used to treat patients acutely ill with the virus. Do hospital and office aircon systems need a rethink to prevent disease spread in future? What happens if you catch coronavirus during pregnancy? And what are the future impacts of Covid-19 on transport? Chris Smith, Katie Haylor, Phil Sansom and Eva Higginbotham report... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Will SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19, continue to circulate for years to come? What's the story with infection in children, and how is Kawasaki Disease involved? Are separate strains of the virus spreading in different countries and accounting for differences in severity? And will the virus mutate to sidestep a vaccine? Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill talks to Chris Smith to find out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If, before a date, you like to spritz yourself to smell great for that special someone, you could be in good company, as this week, scientists in Japan have published a paper looking at ring-tailed lemurs who might be doing a similar thing. There's much debate about whether sex pheramones actually exist in humans - that is, whether we exude chemicals to stimulate some sort of sexual behavioural response in someone else. But could this be what's happening in our distant primate cousins? And what could this mean for us? Primate expert Jacob Dunn, who wasn't involved in the study and is from... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Sometimes scientists try to study one thing and end up accidentally discovering something else. Cancer researcher Cathy Wilson from the University of Cambridge recently experienced such good fortune. While trying to understand the function of cancer gene 'myc' in mice, a gene that goes haywire in almost all human cancers, she accidentally ended up achieving the holy grail of heart disease research - making heart cells start dividing to make more cells. Eva Higginbotham spoke to her about the happy accident... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists discover why Covid-19 causes some people to lose their sense of smell and taste, that patients probably don't catch coronavirus for a second time soon after their first encounter, why children probably are equally infectious, and remdesivir - does it make a difference? Dr Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill for another coronavirus conversation... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Across the world, universities have been closed, researchers sent home and many classes are either not taking place or they've shifted online; so how does that impact the way universities are operating, and what's been the financial and scientific impact. Chris Smith spoke with Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers have discovered a link between certain chemicals found in plastics and the premature births. The chemicals are from a class called phthalates, and they're used in a wide variety of household products as well as in food processing lines. However, when they get into people's bodies, there's evidence that they can disrupt human hormone systems. And now American scientists have found that women whose bodies had high levels of a particular phthalate just before they conceived ended up significantly more likely to give birth too soon. Carmen Messerlian, an epidemiologist at the T.H. Chan... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We're all spending more time at home right now, and being cooped up indoors can feel rather challenging. And with spring very much sprung here in the UK, what better time than to get those fingers green with growing stuff! So, a few weeks ago, novice gardener Katie Haylor spoke horticultural learning coordinator Sandie Cain from Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As human trials of Covid-19 vaccines kick off in the UK, what kind of protection might we expect, and when will we know. Also, the thorny issue of facemasks - do they help contain the contagion, or not? Also, children as active 'super spreaders' of the disease, strange blood clotting effects, and a distinctive form of pneumonia caused by Covid. Dr Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill for an update on what this week has revealed about SARS-CoV-2... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Recorded back in early March for our Cambridge Science Festival event, before the current lockdown measures were put in place, Cambridge University physicist and science stand up comedian Fran Chadha-Day treated us to one of her sets. So, grab a cuppa and take a seat. Becuase, without further ado, here's Fran Chadha-Day! Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Will a vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus be forthcoming, and what other measures are effective at fighting Covid-19? We're setting great store by social distancing, but is 2 metres going far enough? Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill to discuss the latest developments in the evolving coronavirus situation, including the UK lockdown extension, and other therapeutic strategies to aid people stricken by the virus... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's close-call with Covid-19, reversing the lockdown, how contact tracing can control outbreaks, changing public practices around face masks, and can the exhalations of a passing jogger infect me? Chris Smith joins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill for another coronavirus update... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The risk of bringing home coronavirus on your groceries is very low, but what's the best way to minimise the threat? Chris Smith explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As our high streets are becoming increasingly deserted by humans, it's becoming apparent that we aren't the only creatures roaming our cities. Birds are still chirping away out there. A city is not a natural place for a bird, but some species manage to thrive. Intelligence was once thought to be the deciding factor, but maybe that's not the whole story, as put forward by new research in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Melanie Jans-Singh found out more from UCL's Alexander Pigot... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As the lockdown tightens and a quarter of the world's population are forced to stay at home, Chris Smith and RNZ's Kim Hill link up to talk about the latest coronavirus facts. They explore whether facemasks protect you or just lead to a false sense of security, herd immunity and our lockdown exit strategy, why some people suffer more severe infections than others, and if antibodies from recovered Covid-19 victims can help those dying from the disease... Also, the brilliant Coronavirus Rhapsody sung by Adrian Grimes with lyrics by Dana Jay Bein and music by Queen. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Space-grown lettuce may sound like something from science-fiction, but astronauts on the International Space Station, or ISS, have been enjoying their leafy greens since mid 2015, thanks to NASA's Veggie plant growth system. Megan McGregor spoke to Gioia Massa, project scientist at Kennedy Space Centre, and Howard Griffiths from the University of Cambridge... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As the UK goes into lock-down and the government announces unprecedented spending to support businesses and workers, Chris Smith rejoins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill to discuss the scientific basis for these tactics, and how the story will end... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Last year scientists from the University of Exeter discovered that staring at seagulls can discourage them from stealing your food. Not content with saving the chips of many a seaside tourist, they have now discovered that herring gulls are more likely to interact with food after it has been touched by humans. But how exactly do you test a seagull's preferred snack? Megan McGregor spoke to the study's lead author, Madeleine Goumas, to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Every household across the world produces wastewater. While usually we think of it as waste that has to be treated, a new study by the UN Institute for Water, in the National Resources Forum, conceives of wastewater as a largely untapped resource. The scientists, led by Manzoor Qadir, have estimated the total amount of wastewater in the world. This is the first comprehensive study that includes places with little recorded data. According to its result, the total amount of wastewater produced per year globally could cover the entire land in the world (minus Antarctica) by 1 metre. Melanie... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As the focus shifts to Europe, now regarded as the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, Chris Smith rejoins Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill to debate whether the UK stance, currently at odds with the reaction seen across the rest of Europe, is the right one. They ask, how effective are travel bans, why Italy has been so hard hit, why children don't seem to be getting sick, and the influence of the weather on the spread of SARS-Cov-2... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month, new hearing tests to spot those likely to struggle with speech in noisy environments, how your DNA is at risk from hacking on a public database, plants with three parents, researchers recreate endometriosis in mice and show that cannabis might be an effective treatment, and the nerve fibres that make us like a cuddle. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Chris Smith rejoined Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill on Saturday 29th February as New Zealand declares its first case of Covid-19. So far the novel coronavirus has infected more than 80,000 people and caused over 2,800 deaths. They review the on-going situation and how the world is reacting... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Cannabis has all sorts of effects on the body, including - it seems - on memory. A new study has shown that questioning people who are acutely high on cannabis makes them more vulnerable to forming false memories makes them more vulnerable to forming false memories; like remembering something differently to how it happened, or remembering something that never happened at all. Here, scientists from the Maastricht University in the Netherlands put high participants in a virtual reality simulation where they either witnessed or committed a crime, and then interrogated them shortly after. Phil... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Zoos are big players in conservation, investing 750 million dollars in conserving species in the wild. Researchers from Trinity College Dublin discovered, maybe unsurprisingly, that zoos with more visitors are able to contribute more to conservation projects. But what exactly gets people to visit a zoo? Megan McGregor spoke to the study's lead author, Andrew Mooney... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Listener Paul got in touch wondering, given that diamonds are made of carbon, how big a diamond you could make if you turned all the carbon atoms in a lump of coal into a sparkler. Would it make a worthwhile engagement ring? Getting her hands dirty to find out the answer, here's Cambridge University materials scientist Megan McGregor... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Ancient wasp nests have enabled scientists to, for the first time, accurately pinpoint the ages of rock paintings dating back thousands of years in a remote part of Australia. And the picture that emerges is one of the continent's earliest human inhabitants getting to grips with climate change. Speaking with Chris Smith, Damien Finch is based at the University of Melbourne but works in what's arguably one of the most beautiful places on Earth... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Chris Smith joined Radio New Zealand National's Kim Hill on Saturday 1st February in the wake of the World Health Organisation's decision to declare the Chinese coronavirus outbreak a global health emergency. They review the on-going situation and consider the likely trajectory the disease will follow around the world... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Chris Smith appeared on Radio New Zealand National to speak with Kim Hill 0n 25th January 2020 to discuss the emerging coronavirus situation in Wuhan City, China. Here they discuss the origins of this virus, the risks posed by the outbreak, and the reaction of the World Health Organisation... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Have these paralysed patients helped to reveal the brain basis of why we gesticulate when we talk? Also, new insights into how the body clock keeps track of the seasons, signs that immunity to Zika virus wanes with time, why human body temperature is lower than it was 150 years ago, and diversity in science: how can we better hold on to rare talent? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Daily Mile is a programme for primary school children, that gets them to spend 15 minutes jogging or running at their own pace during the school day. The programme's name comes from the fact that for most children, fifteen minutes of running will see them covering about one mile. The initiative, which is over and above timetabled breaks and PE classes, has been adopted by 10,500 schools and nurseries world-wide. But until recently there have been no large scale studies looking at the impact of the programme. Researchers from the University of Birmingham, with the help of 40 Birmingham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers at McMaster University in Canada have developed a new cling-film-like wrap that can be used to coat objects to make them bacteria-, water- and dust-repellent. Inventor Tohid Didar explains to Amalia Thomas how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

An update on the emerging viral infection from Wuhan City, in China: the disease was first picked up by the Chinese in early December and notified to the World Health Organisation at the start of January. The source appears to be a food market in Wuhan City, and the virus itself is a newly-identified member of a viral family called coronaviruses. Speaking with Chris Smith, Neil Ferguson... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Around the world, millions of people are infected with the AIDS virus, HIV. And although drug treatments can successfully suppress the virus to undetectable levels, rather like taking your foot off the brake in a car parked on a hill, if you stop taking the medication, the virus rapidly returns with a flourish and regains its momentum. And that's because it has the ability to insert the genetic code of the virus into our DNA and then hide in an inactive state in various cells around the body. So if we want to rid the body of HIV we have to discover a way to flush out the virus from these... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Naked Gaming Podcast presenters Chris Berrow and Leigh Milner catch up with voice of "The Witcher" video game series, Doug Cockle to find out what he thinks of the latest Netflix TV show... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Motor neuron disease, in its many different forms, affects about one in every 2,500 people in the UK - it's incurable, and can be debilitating, as over time you lose control of parts of your body. But now scientists from the University of Exeter have a new theory about how seemingly different forms of the disease have the same underlying cause. Based on decades of their own research, they've found something in common between thirteen motor neuron disease genes: and the link is, surprisingly, cholesterol. It's a kind of Eureka moment for researching this condition, and might open the door to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One other lifestyle change people tend to embrace at this time of year is to quit smoking. And the good news is that, according to a study from University College London, you're in very good company and, on the whole, cigarette consumption is dropping. Phil Sansom spoke to the study's author Claire Garnett... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have found a way to make organisms not need food at all. Bacteria usually rely on some sort of sugar to survive, but a group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel made a population of a common bacteria able to feed on carbon dioxide, very much like plants do. They did this by genetically modifying how the bacteria digests its food, and then putting them in a tank with very little food - sugar - and a lot of carbon dioxide. In only a few hundred generations, these bacteria evolved to feed on the carbon dioxide in the air instead. Amalia Thomas reports... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

And now onto something out of this World. For the first time, scientists have found evidence of a giant, Neptune-size planet orbiting a white dwarf star. This was previously not thought to be possible due to the destructive energy low-mass stars, such as our Sun, emit to the surrounding solar system as they age and expand. The findings, published in Nature by a team from Warwick University, are particularly interesting because they indicate what might happen to our solar system billions of years from now. Nadeem Gabbani speaks with Ingo Waldmann of University College London for comments on the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Join the Naked Gaming Podcast team for a special bonus episode, with an in-depth interview with the voice of Ash Ketchum from the pokemon TV series. What was it like getting the job, where did the voice come from, and which other characters did she play? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Taking a leaf from the holly and the ivy's book, Katie Haylor explores the virtue of being evergreen...? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How did the popular concept of Christmas trees get started? Extolling the virtues of a real tree, including a superior short-term carbon footprint and a nicer smell, Adam Murphy explains how the tree tradition began... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The lung disease tuberculosis is still one of the world's top ten causes of death. And while it's completely treatable, patients need constant monitoring to make sure the treatment is working. The monitoring is fairly labour-intensive: it requires taking a sample of phlegm and counting the bacteria inside by eye under a microscope. It's a treatment bottleneck. But now, some engineers from Cambridge Consultants have been developing a technology to get rid of that bottleneck using AI - as Phil Sansom found out from developer Matthew Murchie... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Measles was thought to have been eradicated from the UK in 2017, but following an outbreak the very next wear, we lost this elimination status. Measles is a highly infectious disease that can quickly spread through the unvaccinated population with a high complication rate involving pneumonia, gastroenteritis and even encephalitis. And having recovered from that, there's a further sting in the tail: measles virus suppresses the immune system for years after the infection clears. Amalia Thomas hears why from Velislava Petrova, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, who has discovered the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Mental health awareness has been improving in the past few years, but there still isn't universal, accessible support for vulnerable people. A recent study carried out by members of the University of Cambridge might help develop targeted support: it showed that the environment in which people live is correlated to risk of depression in men, but not in women. In contrast to men, women that live in deprived areas are more likely to develop anxiety issues. Amalia Thomas got the details from the lead author of this study, Olivia Remes... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In 2001 Lawrence Jones set out on a freeskiing trip with his mates. It was not the first adventure trip they had been on, but it was the last one that any of them took lightly again. An avalanche turned Lawrence's holiday from fun to tragedy within the space of half an hour. On the Naked Scientists podcast episode "How to survive an avalanche" we discuss his story, and the science behind it, with two avalanche experts.Now, here's the complete tale of his lucky escape from one of the most terrifying forces of nature - as told by Lawrence Jones himself... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The UN Climate Change Conference - COP 25 - has been taking place in Madrid. The purpose of the conference is to take the next crucial steps in implementing the global carbon-cutting proposals agreed 4 years ago in Paris. But where are we on the road towards a carbon-neutral future, and what's it going to take to get there? Chris Smith talks to two climate change experts, Camrbidge University's Eric Woolf and Eliot Whittington... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This is a response to a story we covered earlier this year about planting trees for climate change. A study in the journal Science claimed that the Earth has space for an extra billion hectares of trees; and if they were planted, it would lock away enough carbon dioxide to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. Since then, Science has published not one - not two - but five comments and rebuttals to the original paper. They criticise various aspects of the method and results; one in particular was authored by almost fifty scientists, and said that the available area for trees was... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

While forests do a great job of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, as soon as the trees decompose, all that carbon goes straight back up again. And a new study has investigated how that decomposition works inside freshwater lakes. Scientists have found that what was traditionally just called "carbon" in a lake is actually a hugely diverse mix of different carbon-based molecules, which supports an equally diverse mix of microbes. And the more diverse everything is, the more greenhouse gases these lakes seem to pump out - which could be bad news if different species of trees react... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you have access to a healthy, balanced diet, hopefully you'll be getting adequate supply of micronutrients. Going without can lead to serious health consequences. Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in kids globally, and is a major public health issue in some parts of the world. Fortifying foods is one solution, but things like heat, UV, and moisture can degrade the vitamins and minerals in the food, leaving little left for absorption by the body. This week, scientists from MIT announced that they've made a dissolvable polymer capsule which can shield... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A vaccine that can protect against infection with the skin bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which causes everything from wound and joint infections to impetigo and pneumonia, has been developed by scientists in the US. Apart from increasing rates of antibiotic resistance, what makes Staph infections hard to treat is that the microbes surround themselves with a slimy layer called a biofilm that protects them from the immune system and antimicrobial drugs. As she explains to Chris Smith, to prevent the bugs being able to do this in the first place, Janette Harro looked at what proteins the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You might think we are special as humans for forming societies with complex structures. But we are not actually so different from other species in this regard. It was believed that complex social structures were a trait of large mammals only - but a recent study has shown that birds can form complex societies too. Amalia Thomas spoke to Danai Papageorgiou, who has been studying the social structure of a specific type of bird in Kenya in Africa... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In recent months the satellite Voyager 2, launched in 1977, became the second man-made object to escape from our Solar System and begin its journey into interstellar space. We know it's done that because it's crossed the heliopause, a bubble made by particles, called a plasma, that stream off the Sun and surround our Solar system. To learn more about this Adam Murphy spoke to Du Toit Strauss from North West University in South Africa... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Oil production has multiple environmentally-devastating consequences - including creating of billions of gallons of salty, chemical-filled wastewater. Typically, companies dispose of this wastewater by pumping it deep underground. But a growing body of evidence shows that this pumping causes 'injection-induced earthquakes', most notably the Jones earthquake swarm: thousands of earthquakes that have occurred in Oklahoma over the last ten years. And a new study demonstrates that the fluid properties of wastewater make earthquakes stronger and more common where disposal is concentrated. Matthew... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We have smartphones, smart watches, even smart fridges. But now, from a paper published in the journal Photonics Research, we could be seeing smart glass. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison created a piece of glass that can mimic machine visual perception, basically how smart phones recognize your face to unlock the device, without needing any camera sensors, computer chips, or even a power supply! All the glass needs is light and tiny imperfections called "bubbles" within the glass to direct that light appropriately. Right now it has the capability to tell, in real time,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month, join Chris Smith to hear how sleep deprivation sends your endocannabinoids skyrocketing and triggers a tendency to binge, how many new genetic mutations you inherit from your parents, the gene for behaviour that turned out to be nothing of the sort, what good and bad learners have in common with youTube influencers, and from online collective whinge to paper in eLife: the careers of newly appointed PIs. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One in five UK children are obese. The biological and social factors behind this are complex, but the long term consequences range from cardiovascular and liver disease to diabetes. Now, according to a new study, it may even affect the development of a child's brain too, with overweight children showing a thinner cortex in the parts of the brain concerned with self-control and decision-making. Speaking with Chris Smith, Cambridge University neuroscientist Lisa Ronan... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Considering people's wellbeing in making policy decisions is becoming more and more important, but it's only in recent years that governments have started to record the subjective satisfaction of the population. A team of researchers is looking to fill in the historical gap for national mood by analysing the text of old books published in the US, UK, Germany and Italy and computing a National Valence Index for each of these countries. Mariana Marasoiu spoke with lead author Thomas Hills about how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Immunotherapy is the term used to describe techniques that provoke the immune system to attack and remove cancer. The argument goes that because the immune system is extremely specific in what it targets, and because it has a memory and can learn and improve its action as it goes along, this is a powerful weapon for fighting malignancies. But we need to show the immune system what to attack, which is where a new development from researchers at Yale Medical School comes in. What they've done is come up with a way to find the genetic differences between cancer cells and healthy cells, and... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You're probably familiar with the 1966 science fiction film "Fantastic Voyage", where a submarine crew are shrunk to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair damage to his brain. They're not quite at the stage of shrinking scientists yet, but engineers in America have invented a flexible robot - thinner than a piece of thread - that can be controlled using a magnetic field and snake its way through blood vessels to track down and remove blockages. Phil Sansom spoke to inventor Xuanhe Zhao... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

What if the next refrigeration technology could be based on twisting and untwisting strands? A new paper published in Science by an international team of researchers explored how twisting and stretching can change the temperature of certain types of fibres, leading them to propose a new method for building fridges that are more efficient and more environmentally friendly than those used at present. Mariana Marasoiu untangled the findings with study lead author Ray Baughman... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Can we help people who've lost a leg to feel it again? Mariana Marasoiu has this report... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month, doctors doing U-turns: the medical practices without much evidence to prop them up, wind-tunnel experiments reveal how geese fly at extreme altitudes, why mating makes bees go blind, stress remodelling the brain's myelin, and what goes on during a stint aboard the International Space Station? Join Chris Smith for a look inside the latest papers in eLife... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Mobile phone companies could be set to erect bigger and taller phone masts as part of government plans to roll out 5G networks and improve coverage in rural areas. How might taller masts help with connectivity - and what is 5G anyway? Tech-xpert and Angel Investor Peter Cowley explains to Chris Smith and Katie Haylor... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to many of the agents we use to deal with them, including antiseptics. The bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii is one example and causes hard to treat skin, chest, and urine infections in hospitals. Now, a team at the University of Newcastle, Australia have discovered a gene that renders Acinetobacter resistant to the chemical chlorhexidine that's used in hand disinfectants. But the gene evolved long before the antiseptic was invented, so what was it doing previously? As well as finding out, Adam Murphy also heard from lead author Karl Hassan how the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A research team from Virginia Tech, led by Ryan Pollyea, has found that earthquakes 8 kilometres below the earth's surface are increasing in intensity. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the team's work has found that a super-dense liquid called oilfield wastewater is seeping deep into the sheets of the earth, causing massive pressure changes that could be increasing earthquake intensity. Matthew Hall got into contact with Ryan Pollyea and Martin Chapman from Virginia Tech to see what all the rumble is about... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A heatwave has been sweeping across Europe recently, causing record temperatures across the continent and creating a lot of consternation in the Naked Scientist office. But where do heatwaves come from. And what's going to happen in the future. Adam Murphy spoke to Manoj Joshi, professor of climate dynamics from the University of East Anglia, starting with what a heatwave even is. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Your genome contains all of your genetic information, and it's pretty long - the Human Genome Project estimated that humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes. But according to synthetic biology, you can survive on only 473 genes! At least a very simple bacterium can. Of this "minimal genome", scientists previously didn't know what nearly a third actually did. Now Mark Wass has been telling Heather Jameson how his team at the University of Kent may have cracked 66 of the mystery genes... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The world's largest patch of seaweed appears every summer in the mid-Atlantic. And since 2011, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt has been growing to even more monstrous sizes - thousands of kilometres long - and it's been clogging up beaches along the Americas with metres of stinking brown goo. Now, scientists in Florida and Georgia have used satellite tracking to figure out what's going on - as Phil Sansom explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The nervous system is a complicated network of specialised cells - neurons - that transfer information from one part of the body to another. To help our understanding of the nervous system in humans, scientists have mapped every neuron and every connection in a type of roundworm called C. elegans. Emma Hildyard asked Scott Emmons how this map was created and what it could mean... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You might remember from a year or so ago stories of an alien fly-by. The unidentified object was famously referred to as Oumuamua, which means "scout" in Hawaiian. Now a paper just out in the journal Nature Astronomy has revisited the story to probe whether Oumuamua really is alien technology, or just a cigar-shaped hunk of rock hurtling through the solar system. Matthew Hall got in touch with co-author Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons from Queens University Belfast... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In June, Izzie Clarke explored the extremely fast science of speed and headed to the race tracks with McLaren in their 600LT Spider supercar. But whilst Formula 1 and petrol racing have a huge fan base, we're also seeing the rise of electric racing, Formula E. In this bonus interview, Izzie spoke with Rodi Basso, Motorsport Director of Mclaren Applied Technologies, about the future of the sport. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

With a rising global population, and the impending impacts of climate change, we need more food, and reliable food sources safeguarded for the future. But varying light levels mean that plant growing conditions aren't always consistent, as Katie Haylor has been finding out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In March 2016 the public voted to name a new polar research vessel "Boaty McBoatface", ultimately though, it was decided that "RRS Sir David Attenborough" was a more fitting choice. But the name "Boaty McBoatface" lived on and was instead given to one of the ship's autonomous submarine vehicles. And this week data from Boaty's first research mission in Antarctica has revealed a worrying new mechanism related to rising sea levels. Boaty has discovered that winds above the southern ocean, which have been strengthening in recent years, due in part to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Robots are increasingly used to take over repetitive tasks in industry and agriculture, but they are still limited in what they can do. This also means that humans still need to work alongside them and often things can go badly wrong. 13000 injuries and 60 deaths were caused by accidents due to contact with machinery between 2014-18 in the UK alone. Engineers are working on ways to make robots safer, cheaper and more efficient. Ankita Anirban speaks to Matthias Althoff from the Technical University of Munich, in Germany, about his recent work on modular robots. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The world is facing a global fish issue - a fissue, if you will. One third of all fish stocks are being overfished, and most of the efforts to prevent this involve exclusive zones in the ocean managed by individual countries. But a study released this week shows how the world's fisheries are all closely connected in a "small-world" network, and how overfishing in one zone can affect all of its neighbours. Izzie Clarke spoke with James Rising from the London School of Economics to find out how. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The chest disease asthma is becoming more common. It can lead to life-threatening breathing difficulties when the airways constrict and the lung tissue overproduces mucus; this is usually an allergic reaction that can be worsened by air pollution. But our understanding of what's going on in an asthmatic lung is still quite limited. But now for the first time, scientists at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge have used a new technique to document and examine every cell in lung samples from both healthy and asthmatic patients, to discover what's changing when a person develops asthma. Chris... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Large holes in Antarctic sea ice remain a mystery to scientists despite their discovery over four decades ago. These vast areas of unfrozen water, often referred to as polynyas which is a russian term for natural ice hole, were first spotted in Antarctica's Weddell Sea during the 1970's. They can grow as large as New Zealand and last anywhere between 3 weeks to 3 years. To better understand the phenomenon, oceanographers from the University of Washington led by Ethan Campbell have analyzed decades of data on polynya development, specifically data from two polynyas that formed in 2016 and 2017.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When it comes to understanding how the brain functions, scientists have done a great deal of work on studying macaque monkeys, our evolutionary relative. We share 93% of our DNA and in a lot of ways, our brains are very similar. Even for high level operations such as learning, memory and decision-making, our brains work in comparable ways.. However, when it comes to sound, scientists have discovered that humans seem to have a unique edge in how we perceive pitch. Ankita Anirban spoke to Bevil Conway, from the National Institute of Health in Maryland, on his recent work comparing how humans and... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

At the end of 2018 Walkers launched their own recycling scheme for crisp packets after more than 300,000 people signed an online petition demanding that they change to a fully recyclable material for their packaging. Crisp packets are made from plastic coated with a thin layer of metal. The metal layer is essential to prolong the shelf life of the food by providing a barrier to oxygen and water, but it makes the packets very difficult to recycle.Aiming to tackle this problem is Dermot O'Hare and his team at the University of Oxford, who have developed a new coating using nano-technology which,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Long name, but easy to picture: the sequence is synonymous to a word processor for a book, the book being DNA, which allows scientists to not only read the book, but to also edit a specific 'passage' of the book. Using CRISPR technology, DNA edits were performed on female twin embryos by Chinese scientist Jiankui He, who has since lost his standing in the scientific community. Xinzhu Wei & Rasmus Nielsen, from the University of California Berkeley, followed up with the birth of the twins in an article published in... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Around 1.4 million people alive in the UK today have survived a heart attack, but survivors can suffer from debilitating heart failure, because the heart is damaged during the attack. Ten years ago The Naked Scientists spoke to Sian Harding from Imperial College London about some promising new "heart patches" that could be grown in the lab. Ten years on, production is more reliable and plentiful, and it's hoped that safety trials on humans could begin within the next couple of years. Heather Jameson spoke to Sian to learn more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria evolve to sidestep the drugs we use to kill them. With resistance rising, we could be facing an "antibiotic apocalypse", where even trivial infections become untreatable. What's worse, almost no new antibiotics are being developed by the major pharmaceutical companies. Now, though, Kirsty Smitten has uncovered a new option based on the heavy metal ruthenium. It can destroy antibiotic resistant bacteria, including those known as gram negatives, traditionally regarded as much harder to treat... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

To better understand how personal exposure to air pollution can impact an individual's health, Katie Haylor met up with Cambridge University chemist Lia Chatzidiakou for a walk around central Cambridge. And to find out how air pollution can be monitored across a whole city, Katie climbed up to the roof of Cambridge University's chemistry department with Cambridge University chemist Lekan Popoola.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers have gained new insights into how bacteria move in complex environments. Bacteria move using a system called "swim-and-tumble": they swim in a straight line for a bit, then tumble in a circle, which gives them a chance to correct their course. They can't see where they're going - they can't see at all - but they can sense and follow gradients of increasing concentration of food, like following a delicious smell into the kitchen. This type of movement is called chemotaxis, and it's been well studied in bacteria moving in a clear area. But in the real world, such as inside the human... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Geologists from the University of California, Berkeley, found something unexpected in sand samples from Japan. Rather than natural particles, from rocks or plants, these tiny blobs of glass seem to have been formed in an atomic blast, and they might mean that the destroyed buildings of Hiroshima have been hiding in plain sight ever since. Ruby Osborn spoke to Mario Wannier about his research, which has been published in the journal Anthropocene. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Harassment in online communities is not a new phenomenon, but it is a growing one, with 40-46% of people reportedly having experienced it. Communities like reddit, one of the world's largest discussion forums, often have moderation teams responsible applying self-imposed rules which govern acceptable behaviour. These rules are not always well presented, or well adhered to. Researchers from Princeton University have collaborated with the moderation team at the reddit science discussion community "r/science", to determine how the clear presentation of the expected standards, or social norms... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Everyone's heard of T-Rexes, the twenty-foot-tall monsters that roamed the Earth back in the Late Cretaceous Period. But you may not have heard of their miniature cousin. It's a six foot tall dinosaur called Suskityrannus hazelae, and it gives us a clue about when and how T-Rexes got as big as they did. Sterling Nesbitt is the paleontologist who found the second and most complete fossil of this new dinosaur, but it took him twenty years to put this paper together. Phil Sansom asked him how. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Our society uses - and then throws away - a vast amount of plastic, which then accumulates in the environment. To combat this, in recent years, new types of plastic bags have become available, labelled as "compostable" or "biodegradable."Both of these terms indicate the bag can break down and so avoid pollution, although biodegradable bags take longer than compostable bags. There's also a third type, oxo-biodegradable, which have an additive that should make them decompose a bit faster than standard biodegradable bags.So when you see a plastic bag labelled "biodegradable," how long do you... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Caster Semenya, a South African athlete with unusually high testosterone for a woman, has lost her appeal against new regulations from the International Association of Athletics Federations. The regulations set an upper limit on how much testosterone a female athlete is allowed to have compete in middle distance running, and require any woman over this limit to artificially lower her testosterone if she wants to continue competing. Ruby Osborn discussed the story. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Before Britain was a nation of shopkeepers we were a nation of farmers; before that, the population were a bunch of hunter gatherers. But farming didn't catch on here until 1000 years after it had in Europe. Why was always a mystery, but now DNA technology is shedding new light on how this could have happened. Ben McAllister has been looking into the story... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Human babies grow inside their mothers for 40 weeks enclosed in a watery bag that expands as they do. And as the clock ticks during pregnancy, various processes kick in to thin the membrane material that surrounds the baby so that the bag ruptures at the right time to promote labour. But in some cases this happens far too early and can trigger a pre-term birth, and now scientists at Queen Mary University of London have discovered why. And if we know how it works, we might be in a position to discover how to stop it, as Tina Chowdhury explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Batteries are in almost everything we use. Our phones, computers, energy storage, even in transport. Typically, to see how well a battery performs, scientists have to charge and discharge them over and over until, ultimately, the battery stops working. This can take years of development and testing, plus it's an expensive process. Now researchers from MIT and Stanford University in America have turned to AI to help. Izzie Clarke spoke to William Chueh who explained how AI has stepped in Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The multinational team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which spans the Earth by linking dishes in 8 different countries, have revealed the first images of the supermassive black hole - that has a mass 6 billion times that of our Sun - sitting at the centre of galaxy Messier 87, fifty-five million light years from Earth. For the first time we can see what a black hole - or rather the space around a black hole - looks like. Speaking with Chris Smith to discuss how this was done and what it means, and to answer questions from the Naked Scientists audience, is Cambridge University... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) has recently issued a series of so-called "energy transition pathways". These are essentially routes that we as a society need to follow, in order to prevent global warming from exceeding the limit at which society cannot continue to function. All of these pathways rely on a technology known as "carbon capture", which would capture carbon dioxide from fossil fuel energy plants to prevent it from impacting the atmosphere. As a result, there has been a massive investment of money and resources in this technology. But, some new research from... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Astronomers have used a new camera called the HiPERCAM to analyse a type of small, dim star that has proved elusive to standard cameras. The camera has allowed them to make detailed measurements of this cool subdwarf star 1500 light years away, and it's the first time they've been able to confirm the predicted model of this type of star. Ruby Osborn spoke to Dr Steven Parsons from the University of Sheffield about what makes this star so interesting, and how the HiPERCAM has helped them to study it. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is widely regarded as one of humanity's greatest scientific achievements. The 17 km long accelerator smashes particles together at high speeds, and looks at the products to search for new physics. So far we've learned a tonne about the smallest things in nature, such as quarks - which are tiny particles that make up the atoms that compose people, planets, stars, and everything else we can see. A few years ago, physicists discovered strange new particles known as pentaquarks. We knew they were made up of five quarks bound together, but their properties and... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Catalytic converters are in car exhausts and convert toxic carbon monoxide into much less harmful carbon dioxide, as well as removing other pollutants. On a petrol car, they are the metal box you see just before the exhaust. Unfortunately, current catalytic converters don't work effectively at lower temperatures, usually only starting to work well when heated to about 200°C, once the vehicle has been running for a few minutes. This is what's known as the cold start problem and why the US Department of Energy have set a target to remove 90% of harmful emissions from exhausts below 150°C. A... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Ever wondered how to get the best wifi reception in your house, given all those floors and walls which can interrupt the signal? Where to position the router and signal boosters, then where people should use their devices to get the best reception? There are so many combinations, making it labour-intensive to move things around and try all the different positions! But complex scenarios like this can be modelled by mathematical equations. Not the six minus what equals four type of equation, really complex ones. Additionally, metamaterials are materials that have a structure that take their... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Having an injection is an experience common to us all, and whether you are unfussed by them or they make you feel faint, the actual needle used is the same for everyone and highly standardised. But given different parts of the body are more difficult to inject than others, this is not ideal. Scientists at Harvard Medical School realised this problem and have set about creating a more adaptive solution that could lead to big changes in healthcare. Jack Tavener spoke to Jeff Karp, who co-authored the study, about the challenges his team faced... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

US scientists have engineered into yeast the genes needed to make the key chemicals in cannabis. To find out why and what's involved, Chris Smith looked at the paper with York University's Ian Graham, who wasn't involved in the project but has expertise in this area. We last spoke with him in 2015 when he uncovered the genes needed to perform a similar feat so yeast could make morphine. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The agriculture sector is responsible for about 25% of global warming according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so rearing livestock for meat is a significant problem. When ruminant animals such as cows and sheep digest food they burp large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that causes climate change. And growing the crops they are fed adds even more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It is now possible to cultivate edible meat in a lab, rather than rearing livestock. And because of this, the new technique is often promoted as more environmentally friendly than having... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, from what should be preventable diseases. Up to date, scientists have been trying to figure out the reasons in each individual case, until now A group from McMaster University in Canada has published a paper which shows for the first time the two common physical characteristics of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Mariana Campos has been talking to Maikel Rheinstadter, who explained what they did and how this could help in the development of new and improved medications. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have discovered that some grass species have information in their genes that's not come from their parents, and instead think they're stealing genetic information from neighbouring plants. By genetically enhancing themselves, they gain a competitive edge, which helps them thrive in more challenging environments. The species Alloteropsis semialata, a type of tropical grass found in Africa, Asia and Australia, has changed the way it produces energy, a process known as photosynthesis. Jenny Gracie spoke with Luke Dunning from the University of Sheffield, to find out how these plants... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

About a quarter of a billion people around the world are affected by asthma, when the lungs' airways constrict, making breathing difficult. For decades we've treated the condition with drugs that relax the muscles in the airways and damp down the immune response that makes the airways tighten in the first place. But, recently, researchers have discovered that asthmatic airways also contain bulkier muscles than they should do. This is caused, they think, by the same inflammatory signals that trigger the airways to constrict. And now they've gone on to show that an experimental drug, called... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have found a spot in the brain that, when stimulated, triggers laughter and is followed by a sense of calm and happiness that lasts 30 minutes.This discovery has direct implication for tens of thousands of people who undergo open brain surgery, and could be used in the future to treat anxiety, depression, and pain. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Archaeologists working in the UK and in Germany have come across rare examples of what look like ancient wooden spears that would have been used by our ancestors 400,000 years ago. But scientists were pointedly stuck on whether these weapons were just for poking, or if they could have been thrown, like javelins. To find out, Annemieke Milks built replicas of the original spears and asked six experienced, sharp-eyed javelin throwers to see if they could throw them. She told Adam Murphy how they got on Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have given a dieting drug made for humans to mosquitoes in order to curb their appetite. Researchers at the Rockefeller University in New York have worked through hundreds of thousands of molecule-receptor combinations to find the right one able to suppress the mosquito's hunger. As a result, mosquitoes were not interested in seeking a human blood meal and so this method could be used to help stop the spread of deadly diseases. Jenny Gracie spoke with Laura Duvall, lead author of a paper recently published in Cell, to find out why mosquitoes bite us in the first place... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you are a night owl, getting up in the morning is something that you absolutely dread. On the other hand, morning people jump out of bed ready and chatty. Is this something hardwired? The answer's probably got a lot to do with the genes that influence your body clock. Chris Smith speaks to Samuel Jones from the University of Exeter to find out what the connection is. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy is a genetic disease which causes the muscle of the heart to thicken. Left untreated, it can lead to heart failure, and it's quite common. But the therapies we have available at the moment treat only the symptoms and don't alter underlying disease course. Now new research from Harvard University, published in Science Translational Medicine, has identified the molecular clockwork that actually causes the condition, and they're testing a new drug that may help to stop it. Adam Murphy spoke to Chris Toepher to hear how... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A new way to capture CO2 from factories or the atmosphere has been developed by researchers in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, located in the United States of America. The new technology uses a different molecule to 'soak up' the CO2 and it is 24% more energy-efficient than the existing technologies. On top of it, the molecules can be reused up to a hundred times, meaning even more savings. This improvement on technology may prove a big step towards large-scale adoption of carbon capture, which could help slow down the effects of climate change. Dr David Fairen-Jimenez from the University... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

There is a mountain located in the middle of a giant crater on Mars, but how it formed is still a bit of a puzzle for scientists. Investigations of the rocks below the surface of the crater have been helping piece together an answer. The Curiosity Rover currently on Mars has an advanced suite of scientific instruments able to carry out experiments on the Martian surface. Kevin Lewis is a planetary scientist from Johns Hopkins University, who along with help from colleagues, has been able to adapt some of the instruments to work in new ways. Jenny Gracie spoke with him to find out the rover's... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Lack of sleep or poor sleep is a problem that affects 1 in 3 people in the UK and America. Insufficient sleep is not only a health issue, contributing to heart disease, diabetes and obesity, but also an economic one. There's the direct costs of treating sleep disorders and their numerous side effects, plus the costs associated with reduced productivity, time off work and injuries resulting from fatigue. With such a big problem at hand, we need to think of a solution outside the box. Mariana Campos spoke with Dr Aurore Perrault, formerly from the University of Geneva, now at the Sleep,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Nearly every cell in the body contains a part called the nucleus which houses the genetic information needed to function. Muscle cells are the largest cells in the body, so they often need multiple nuclei to meet high power demands. New research from the University Massachusetts at Amherst, supports the contradiction of a widely believed theory linking large cells and nuclei numbers. Jenny Gracie spoke with Professor Larry Schwartz to find out why the relationship may no longer be true... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's common knowledge that smoking cigarettes is addictive, and this is because of the nicotine they contain. E-cigarettes are devices that heat up a liquid and produce an aerosol or spray which is then inhaled. If there's nicotine in the e-cigarette liquid then this gives a nicotine hit. In Australia, nicotine is classified as a poison, so it's illegal to sell e-cigarette liquids containing it, they have to instead be "nicotine free". But while studying the potential health impacts of e-cigarettes, scientists have found that, surprisingly, out of 10 "nicotine-free" e-cigarette liquids, or... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Brushing our teeth keeps them clean and free from debris, but back in medieval times, dental hygiene wasn't part of your daily routine. This means that scientists can look at the teeth of skeletons to reconstruct what food they might have munched on back then and find out more about their lifestyle. But recently a team of international scientists, lead from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, found something a little more peculiar fossilised in the teeth of a 1000 year old skeleton. Jenny Gracie spoke with Christina Warinner to unearth the mysterious... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Every day hundreds of people die when they accidentally overdose on opiate drugs, like heroin or morphine. These agents depress breathing, causing respiratory failure. But, if an opioid antidote is administered sufficiently quickly, then the situation can be reversed. And a team at the University of Washington have developed a system that turns a mobile phone into a sonar device that can monitor a person's breathing and then sound the alarm if something goes wrong. Chris Smith spoke with Jacob Sunshine, an anaesthesiologist and assistant professor at the University of Washington, to discuss... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One terrifying prediction is that, by mid-Century, up to 30% of adults will be affected by a form of dementia, chiefly Alzheimer's Disease. This happens when proteins called beta-amyloid, and tau, build up in the brain and damage nerve cells. But scientists think this begins to happen decades before a person develops Alzheimer's symptoms, meaning we might have an opportunity to intervene and change the course of the condition if we can tell who's affected sufficiently early. Now, researchers at Washington University in St Louis have discovered subtle changes in the patterns of brain waves we... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Back in 2001, Dr Chris Smith launched a new show, The Naked Scientists, in the hope of making science accessible. It was one of the first radio programmes to be made into a podcast and is now one of the world's most popular science shows. In the past five years, the programme has been downloaded more than 50 million times. Dr Chris has travelled the world in search of the latest science topics and trends, through which he has won numerous national and international accolades. He joins Lawrence Jones MBE to discuss bringing science to life through podcasts, how the team are engaging more people... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Ancient Greeks understood that the liver was one of the most incredible organs humans possess when they wrote the cautionary tale of Zeus' punishment of Prometheus, in which poor Prometheus was tied to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, but overnight it would regenerate and grow back, allowing his punishment to continue day after day. Now, in real life, the liver doesn't regenerate quite that quickly, but it is true that it has the ability to grow back and heal itself remarkably well. Georgia Mills spoke to liver scientist Auinash Kalsotra from the University of Illinois,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Biological systems are able to create complex shapes and patterns, like the stripes of a zebra, the shape of your hand or the dynamic displays of a flock of birds. These shapes develop in an emergent and self-organised way, relying on just local interactions between individuals. In contrast, human designed technology is usually created by an external builder. But now, a team of roboticists and biologists have come together to design robot swarms that can self-organise into complex shapes. Hannah Laeverenz Schologelhofer spoke with Sabine Hauert from the Bristol Robotics Lab. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers affecting young women, and it's caused by a virus called Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV, which is spread through sexual contact. The virus causes the cells of the cervix to keeping growing excessively, which eventually damages their DNA, causing cancer. Testing for this cancer can be challenging: these days it involves using DNA tests to look for traces of the virus in a sample. But the viruses are very common, and only a small proportion of people carrying them will actually get cancer; so there are lots of false positives. Now researchers at... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Christmas is a wonderful time of year, but all of the additional transport and consumption adds up, and we are left with plenty of seasonal rubbish and greenhouse gases. So how can you cut down this Christmas? Georgia Mills is here to spoil all of the festive fun... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Clean water is something that we often take for granted, but making it can be a major technological and energy-intensive process. Now, thanks to a system developed by scientists at York University, Toronto, and MIT, there might be a way to do this much more cheaply in future. Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer spoke with York researcher Thomas Cooper, about this new way of using sunlight to clean up water and produce superheated steam. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How can seemingly similar cells behave differently? This is a particularly important question when a small change means that a cell does not function properly and several diseases might be the result of these small changes at the single cell level. But a cell is a complex system, and some of the important molecules inside a cell exist in very small quantities that can be difficult to detect. To address this challenge, a new tool has been developed called 'nano-tweezers'. These tiny devices can extract individual molecules from inside cells. Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer spoke with Joshua Edel... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Language is all around us, and good language skills are important for getting on in life. But does being good in one language domain, like spelling, mean you'll be good in another, like grammar? And if your child is doing well with language as a toddler, will they still be doing well as a teenager? Recently, results have come out from a study 15 years in the making and Katie Haylor spoke to one of the authors, Rebecca Pearson from the University of Bristol. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When we think of robots we might think of the Terminator, West World, or even something completely different like Big Hero Six - a story about a young boy and his soft medical robot companion Baymax. Doughy and malleable, a robot like Baymax is kind of the holy grail for scientists who are working on making Soft Robots - robots which aren't made of metal or plastic but instead of stretchable, supple materials like rubber, gels, or fabric. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Ilse Van Meerbeek, a PhD student at Cornell University who recently published a paper in Science Robotics about new progress in... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Every year, hundreds of millions of people contract malaria; this is a parasitic infection spread by mosquitoes. The parasite does two things when it grows in the body: either it clones itself to make millions more malaria parasites in that infected individual, and makes them sicker in the process; or, it produces a different form of the parasite that's sexually active and specialised to infect mosquitoes so it can spread to another human. And this week scientists in Edinburgh have discovered that malaria bases the decision on whether to boost its numbers in an infected person, or to try to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Do you like to lie out on the beach in the summer, or are you more likely to be found hiding in the shade? Well, how you answer might depend on how quickly you seem to get sunburnt. We all know that we should wear sunscreen when out and about in the summer to protect our skin and so reduce our risk of skin cancer, but new research from the Weill Medical College of Cornell might allow us to ditch the sunscreen at some point in the future. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Dr Jonathan Zippin, a dermatologist and skin researcher, about his lab's key discovery in the science of skin. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When we think of our immune system, most of us will be familiar with the white blood cells that circulate around our body to target and kill the bacteria and viruses that make us sick. But, we actually also have a special type of immune cell sitting in some of our body surfaces, like our skin and our gut, and new research suggests that these cells might hold the key to future cancer and allergy treatments. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Professor Adrian Hayday from the Francis Crick Institute and King's College London, about his new paper describing the unique way these cells actually work, and why... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Today marks 100 years since the end of World War 1. This conflict caused the deaths of around 16 million people, and the new developments in artillery meant that new and nasty injuries were defying our ability to treat them. Ironically, this meant WW1 actually lead to huge advances in medicine, and neuroscience. But, thanks to a charity, Headway, it's also helping people with brain injuries today. Georgia Mills has been finding out how Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We get so many good questions sent to us here at The Naked Scientists, that sadly we can't fit them all into our monthly question and answer shows. So here's an extra slice of science for you from our November 2018 QnA. Roger got in touch to ask whether artificial intelligence will be making medicines in the future, and we also heard from Sean about some rather intelligent ravens... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Glioblastoma is an aggressive and often deadly cancer of the brain. Understanding it is vital to improving patient outcomes. In a new study published in Nature Genetics, a group in Cornell University has been sequencing genes to understand which ones are switched on by the tumours. To learn more, Adam Murphy spoke to Charles Danko, of the Baker Institute for Animal Health and the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Good dental hygiene is crucial in the fight against gum disease, which can lead to a common condition called periodontitis. It comes about when changes to the bacteria in the mouth cause a reaction called inflammation in areas around the teeth, potentially destroying tissue and bone and causing tooth loss. But quite why an altered microbiome causes this inflammation isn't known, so there are no targeted treatments, and surgery is the main option for severe cases. But now scientists have spotted that periodontitis patients have higher numbers of immune cells called TH17 cells in their mouths,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire have come up with an explanation for the wobble seen in jets of matter being blasted from regions surrounding some supermassive black holes: Another nearby supermassive black hole! Dr Martin Krause tells us how we can see them at all... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Nowadays, tuberculosis takes more lives than any other infectious disease. Cases are on the decline but emerging antibiotic resistance threatens to interrupt that pattern. Tamsin Bell spoke with Professor Francois Balloux from University College London to learn about how this infectious disease evolved... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We all know that drinking alcohol is bad for us but in the UK we still pay a huge 3.5 billion annually for the National Health Service (NHS) to treat over 60 alcohol induced medical conditions including liver disease, pancreatitis, diabetes, heart disease and numerous forms of cancer. Fortunately, it seems that the message to put down the booze has trickled down to the younger generation as a recent study of 16 to 24 year olds shows that over the past ten years, they are drinking less. Tamsin Bell spoke to Linda Ng Fat from University College London to find out why more teens are laying off... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

From right here on earth to the furthest visible parts of the universe, NASA has its eye on pretty much everything in between. Professor Andrew Coates from University College London was lead co-investigator in the joint ESA-NASA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, and is involved in several further NASA missions of space exploration. With NASA turning 60 this month, Sam Brown spoke to Professor Coates about the fascinating missions that NASA is involved with, and what they have planned for the future... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Mosquitoes spread diseases like malaria, and they are rapidly becoming resistant to the insecticides used to control them. So scientists are looking at the potential of using a genetic technique, called a gene drive, to solve the problem. This involves engineering a gene-editing system into the insects that targets and inactivates a gene called dbx - or doublesex - that is needed for the insects to develop normally. Critically though, only female mosquitoes, which are also the ones that bite, are affected by the change. This means that males are left unaffected and can spread the genetic... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats facing mankind today. A new group in the University of Washington in Seattle, have been working to fight this threat. In a new study, they've been looking to poison bacteria using the heavy metal gallium, to improve the lives of those with cystic fibrosis. Adam Murphy spoke to two authors of the study. First, Christopher Goss and then colleague, Pradeep Singh... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Imagine going into space. You've got your kit, you're blasted into darkness, you're ready to discover the unknown but then your equipment doesn't quite fit the task required. How can you prepare for that? This is a reality that space engineers and robotic experts are trying to facing every day. Now, researchers from Yale think they've got an answer. They've developed something called "Omniskin" - a sheet of material that can animate everyday objects and turn them into robots. Izzie Clarke spoke to study author Joran Booth. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You may have heard of graphene, the so called wonder material set to revolutionise electronics but the difficulty to consistently add extra properties and scale up cheaply limits industrial use! Scientists have been looking for easy to make alternatives, such as a new class of materials called metal organic frameworks or MOFs. As the name suggests, they're made by combining two components: a metal and something called an "organic chain" which contains carbon with some other elements. These can be used to create new materials with exciting properties.The big problem is that scientists have not... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Do you share food or do you bite the hand off anyone who tries? Chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives are in the latter category: they'll gladly share tools, but food's a no no. New research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B has been looking into our other close relatives: bonobo apes. Bizarrely, while they'll gladly share food, woe betide anyone who touches someone else's tools or toys! So what does this say about us? Adam Murphy spoke to Christopher Krupenye, from the University of St. Andrews to learn more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We've all been there at some point - you raise your hand in class, answer the question, and get it utterly, utterly wrong. These school-day humiliations may stay with us many years later, in fact - I'd love to hear yours, but as our kids are all headed back to school this week, we're trying to find out if perhaps these mistakes are good for us! Georgia Mills is on the case, but only after finding out some of our listeners biggest dunce moments! Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

These days, many of us are heavily dependent on our trusty sat navs to get where we want to go, but looking at these devices whilst driving is incredibly dangerous and can lead to car accidents. Psychologists from Anglia Ruskin University are hoping to minimise the dangers of using this technology by incorporating audio cues with in-car GPS to forewarn the driver of the lay of the land. Tamsin Bell met with Helen Keyes to hear what's driving their work... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Goats can tell apart human facial expressions and - what's more - prefer to interact with happy people, according to a new study from scientists at Queen Mary University of London. We knew work animals like dogs and horses could do this, but no-one knew if animals domesticated for food products would be able to. Georgia Mills spoke to lead researcher Alan McElligott to find out how they did it Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Most of the people who develop cancer are adults, although a significant number of children succumb too. The signs are though that childhood cancers could have a different origin than the adult disease, which might also mean they can be treated in a different way. Cambridge University's Sam Behjati suspects that tumours in children form from foetal tissue that has failed to mature properly. And by comparing the genetic instructions operating in normal and cancerous kidney cells from children and adults, he's tracked down evidence to support his theory and found a host of new avenues to explore... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

From artificial photosynthesis to the art of statistics, the Naked Scientists take Jenny Zhang and Richard Samworth, two of St John's College's leading scientists, for a trip down the river to hear all about their work. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Doctors think that one third of the world's population have been exposed to the bacterial infection TB, or tuberculosis. It can damage any tissue in the body, infect the skeleton and joints, and even cause meningitis, but most people develop chest disease and a cough, which is how it chiefly spreads. A major problem with controlling the infection is that the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria can be very hard to culture in a laboratory, and they grow extremely slowly, which holds up diagnosis and also makes it tricky to tell quickly whether someone is actually responding to the treatment... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We often hear about the search for life on Mars, but could life begin outside our solar system? Izzie Clarke discussed the chemistry involved with astrophysicist Paul Rimmer... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Since Darwin's time scientists have been studying the skeleton of a type of fish that lived 400 million years ago called Heterostracans. These fish were covered in a tough exoskeleton, but scientists couldn't decide exactly where it came from. Was it a precursor to bone? To teeth? New research is suggesting all those old theories may be as dead and buried as the fish fossils, and this exoskeleton is just another way of making bone. Adam Murphy spoke to Joseph Keating of the University of Manchester to learn more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

HIV is a global pandemic. Worldwide, about 37 million people are living with the virus, and there are between 3 and 5 thousand AIDS deaths every day. More worrying is that, despite intensive public health and safe sex campaigns, there are a further 3 to 5 thousand new HIV infections occurring every day, and despite decades of effort, scientists still have not yet managed to develop an effective vaccine. But one very powerful way to prevent infection is for men to be circumcised, which reduces their risk of picking up the virus by up to 80%. So is this a cost effective strategy to halt HIV... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Mixing chemicals together causes reactions and produces new molecules. With so many different chemicals in existence, there are infinite combinations that can be made, and millions of chemical reactions yet to be tried. But doing these tests is very time consuming, laborious and has a low success rate; it's also very susceptible to human failings, like bias and fatigue. To surmount this, University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin has invented a robot to test his chemical combinations for him. What's more impressive is that this robot can actually learn. By testing random chemical combinations... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Vitiligo is an autoimmune condition, in which the immune system attacks the pigment-producing cells of the skin, leaving behind pale white patches. Although not dangerous in itself, vitiligo can be disfiguring, causing a great deal of distress to people suffering from it. There are treatments available for vitiligo - these include topical creams that suppress the immune attack on skin cells, and phototherapy, which uses UV light. However, these treatments are time- and effort-consuming, particularly if large areas of the skin are affected. Another problem is that they only work temporarily -... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Heart attacks come about when blood vessels in the heart are blocked, and without a supply of oxygen-rich blood, the heart muscle can die. This is called ischemic injury, and can also occur in other places in the body, potentially leading to tissue death and even limb amputation. But what if it was possible to re-build the blood vessels in the heart or in other areas of the body, to kick-start the circulation and prevent tissues from being starved of oxygen, and dying? This is what Jo Mountford is trying to do at the Scottish National Blood Transfusion service, as she explains to Katie... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

People all around the world are living the high life. That's to say, living their whole lives at high altitude. This lifestyle has an impact on their bodies, including upon how their bones grow. And one adaptation, Cambridge University's Stephanie Payne has found, is to alter the relative lengths of the arms. Katie Haylor and Chris Smith found out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists want to raise awareness to protect the Earth from dangerous asteroids. June 30th has now become Asteroid Day where people from around the world come together to learn about asteroids, the impact hazard they may pose, and what we can do to protect our planet, families, communities, and future generations from future asteroid impacts. Izzie Clarke spoke to Matt Bothwell and Adrian Currie at the University of Cambridge to learn more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

4 billion years ago, life on earth looked nothing like it does today. In fact, the oceans contained only single-celled microbes. At some point, these single-celled organisms began to work together, forming complex, multi-celled creatures, which then suddenly became much larger. The question is, why? Emily Mitchell studies one of the earliest animals believed to exist, and explained to Marika Ottman why she thinks these creatures got bigger when they did Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In recent years, we've woken up to the massive problem that is dementia. This is where people progressively lose their cognitive faculties and Alzheimer's Disease is one well-known example. But scientists are increasingly realising that injury done to the brain by damaged blood vessels is probably the leading cause of dementia, but it's also the one that we know much less about. It happens when the very small blood vessels deep within the brain become narrowed, stiffened and leaky, which leads to progressive damage to the adjacent brain tissue, although we don't understand how this happens, or... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Osteoarthritis, a condition which damages the cartilage in joints, is a painful, debilitating condition. Millions suffer every year, and with an ageing population, that number will only increase. Therefore, improving diagnosis is an important goal. Adam Murphy spoke with Tom Turmezei from Cambridge University, to learn more about osteoarthritis and his Wellcome Trust funded project which aims to improve diagnosis... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If robots really are the future, then said future is certainly one step closer as of this week. For the first time ever, a robot has been used in surgery on the human eye. To find out more about this incredible feat of engineering, Isabelle Cochrane spoke to Dr Tom Edwards, the lead author of the study... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

CRISPR makes it possible to snip out undesired bits of DNA from our cells. This process holds the potential to cure genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis. However, it seems that doing this isn't without risk. Marika Ottman went to the University of Cambridge and spoke with biochemist Jussi Taipale to learn more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers have found a way to regenerate the enamel - or apatite - that's damaged by tooth decay. Katie Haylor spoke to Alvaro Mata from Queen Mary University of London...Sound effects from www.zapsplat.com Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We know more about the surface of mars than we do about the depths of our own ocean, but scientists from the California Academy of Science created an invention that allows researchers to bring never-before seen species from coral reefs in the deep sea to the ocean's surface. In the spirit of World Ocean's day tomorrow, Marika Ottman spoke with lead author Bart Shepherd to learn more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Millions suffer from osteoarthritis, a condition that causes joints, especially knee and hip joints, to become stiff and painful. Luckily these joints can be replaced by an implant with usually good results. However, scientists are going one step further, bringing robots into the operating theatre to improve precision, and patient outcomes. The Nuffield Hospital in Cambridge recently brought in one of these robot helpers, and Chris Smith spoke with the director of the hospital, Adrian Connolly... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Any activity on your daily commute, like walking to the bus instead of just hopping in the car, might reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, says a new study from the University of Cambridge, published in the journal Heart... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We all love a good hug, whatever our age! Babies are no different. There's growing evidence that skin-to-skin contact is beneficial for babies, so Katie Haylor spoke with Laura Baird and Kelly Spike from Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge to find out what it's all about... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Hawaii's Big Island has been experiencing a series of volcanic eruptions. What's causing them, and how is it likely to change in the future? To find out, Chris Smith talked to Jessica Johnson, a volcanologist at the University of East Anglia... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Exercise is good for us, it's one of the best things you can do to keep your mind and body healthy for a long age. But perhaps not all exercise is equal. A new analysis out in the British Journal of Sports Medecine reports that exercise at work is associated with an increased risk of early death in men. So what's going on? Georgia Mills spoke to study author Pieter Coenen, of VU University in Amsterdam. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Knowing where Earth's freshwater is accumulating, or perhaps more critically, disappearing is of paramount importance. A new study in Nature has analysed changes in freshwater across the entire planet. To learn more Adam Murphy spoke with Matthew Rodell, from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Neurodegeneration is a process involved in several serious and debilitating diseases, for which there is often no cure. One of the first steps on the journey towards a treatment to stop neurons dying is understanding how and why they do so. Now, scientists from Cambridge University and the University of Toronto have announced a mechanism that explains how neurons die in two diseases, motor neurone disease and a type of dementia called fronto-temporal dementia. Georgia Mills spoke to Cambridge University chemist Michele Vendruscolo. First, Georgia asked, what actually are neurons? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Are you struggling to know what to wear for the weather at the moment? One day in the UK it's freezing, the next rain, the next a veritable heat wave. Apart from playing havoc with BBQ plans, this extreme variation in weather is also affecting local wildlife. Georgia Mills went for a stroll along the river Cam with the RSPB's Richard Bradbury to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Tasmanian devils are black, carnivorous, scavenger marsupials that live - perhaps unsurprisingly, on the island of Tasmania. In recent years an intriguing type of cancer has been decimating their numbers, pushing the animals to the brink of extinction. Known as "Devil Facial Tumour Disease" - or DFTD - the cancer is spread when an affected animal bites - and literally implants - some of the tumour from its own mouth into the face of another devil. The tumours avoid detection by the immune system by switching off key markers that would normally label the tissue as foreign. Now, by studying the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Every year millions of people contract malaria, which is a blood parasite infection spread by mosquitoes. And part of the reason why the infection spreads so successfully, scientists now know, is because the parasite makes an infected human over-produce certain skin odours that are irresistible to a mosquito. Chris Smith spoke to Ailie Robinson, researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the lead author on the new study that's uncovered how this happens Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Motorneurone Disease (MND), which is also known as ALS and Lou Gehrig's Disease, is caused by the death of the motor nerves that convey movement instructions from the nervous system to muscles. We don't understand why this happens, but up to 10% of cases appear to be genetic. Now Babraham Institute researcher Jemeen Sreedharan has genetically engineered into a mouse the same genetic change that causes MND in humans. His animals are now providing us with new insights into the pathological process that underlies MND, as he explains to Chris Smith...Jameen - Motorneurone disease is an... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Motor neurone disease (MND) is a degenerative disease affecting around 5,000 people in the UK. It attacks people's ability to move, speak and breath, and usually is fatal within two years. At the moment there is no cure, but scientists are trying to find out more about what causes MND and how we might one day treat it. This week, a paper out in Nature Neuroscience describes a new model for MND, which has revealed some unexpected clues about how the disease operates, and may even lead to a target for treatments. Chris Smith spoke to one of the authors Jemeen Sreedheren, from Cambridge... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When people take wildlife products over a border that is under the control of CITES. Some of it is illegal, and this is when Border Force step in, confiscating the items in question and when possible, returning them to the wild. But what do people bring through? Georgia Mills was shown the Dead Shed, by senior Border Force officer Grant Miller, a horrific stash of animal and plant products that had been confiscated at Heathrow Airport. This content may be upsetting to some people. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, affects hundreds of thousands of people. It's a condition where the body's own immune system attacks a protective layer around nerve fibres called myelin. This prevents messages being conveyed quickly and faithfully through the brain producing symptoms that can include difficulty with vision, movement, speech, balance and sensation. In recent years scientists have begun to explore the use of stem cells to combat the progression of the disease. As author Stefano Pluchino, from Cambridge University, explained to Chris Smith. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists in the US have uncovered a surprising potential treatment for strokes: short-term sensory deprivation. Strokes occur when the blood supply to the brain is interrupted; this destroys the affected nerve cells, and robs the victim of the function of the affected brain area. But it is possible to achieve some degree of recovery by encouraging other, adjacent healthy parts of the brain to rewire themselves and take over from the damaged area. Working with mice, Washington University neurologist Jin-Moo Lee has found that this can be promoted by temporarily depriving a patch of brain... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Was exercising more one of your new year's resolutions? Has it ended up a broken promise at the bottom of your to-do list? Georgia Mills spoke to Catherine Meads from Anglia Ruskin University, who may be able to help. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Up to a third of women experience debilitatingly heavy periods. This can cause significant disruption. It can also lead to depression; time off work; and, in severe cases, even lead to a low blood count or anaemia. Currently, heavy periods are treated hormonally or surgically, but these options have side effects and can affect fertility. So is there a better treatment? Edinburgh University's Jackie Maybin thinks so. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have shown that a toothpaste ingredient could be used as an anti-malarial drug. Spread by mosquitoes, malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites, and kills over half a million people every year, 70% of them children. In recent years the parasite has also become resistant to most of the existing anti-malarial compounds. This new discovery, by researchers at the University of Cambridge, was aided by Eve, an artificially-intelligent 'robot scientist'. Chris Smith was joined by Steve Oliver who was part of the investigation. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's winter time again in the northern hemisphere and the influenza virus - the 'flu - is making its seasonal rounds. The virus infects millions of people every year, and vulnerable individuals with underlying health complaints including heart disease, kidney problems and diabetes, as well as pregnant women, the very young and the over 65s are at higher risk of developing a severe infection. To find out how flu spreads and causes disease, and how you can protect yourself, Naked Scientists Connie Orbach and Khalil Thirlaway have been investigating this microbial assailant... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Around one in ten people have to live with tinnitus, this is a persistent noise ringing in the head when there's nothing external causing it. The severity of tinnitus can range from irritating to completely life-changing, by making it nearly impossible to work or sleep, and there is no cure. But now, scientists have come up with a way to reduce the severity of symptoms, by stimulating parts of the brain responsible for causing the phantom sounds. Georgia Mills spoke to Susan Shore, from the University of Michigan. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The question of where life began is a difficult one to answer. While many scientists believe that life began on earth, others believe that life, or at least its building blocks, first formed in space. A recent study from the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada, has shown how complex organic molecules could form on icy comets - from nothing more than simple molecules and radiation. And it's possible that this could explain how complex molecules like amino acids - which are the building blocks of proteins - could have originally formed billions of years ago and led to the beginning of life on... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In the run up to Christmas, shops are bursting at the seams with delicious treats, appealing platters and indulgent morsals, which can make sticking to a healthy diet rather unlikely. And food consumption has consequences for our "waist" in more ways than one! According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN, over a third of all the food made globally each year goes un-used, that's around 1.3 billion tonnes. But could adhering to a healthier diet in the food we do eat make a difference to the environment? Paul Behrens and colleagues from Lieden University in the Netherlands have... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

New research shows that peregrine falcons hunt their prey using strategies similar to those used by guided missiles. Could this information be useful in downing drones that are flying where they shouldn't? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Great Barrier Reef is a huge system of over 3,800 individual coral reefs - making it the largest coral reef system on earth. Located off the northeastern coast of Australia, it is home to thousands of species. However, in recent years, the Great Barrier Reef has come under threat. Rising sea temperatures have led to a number of problems, including mass coral bleaching, and a huge increase in the number of crown-of-thorns starfish, which eat corals. Now, a new study has shown that some reefs may be more important than others, in terms of the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef. Lewis Thomson... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

December 1st is World AIDS Day. HIV AIDS affects 35 million people worldwide, and although the number of new infections is slowly decreasing, last year it still caused one million deaths. The virus, HIV, attacks the body's immune system by infecting white blood cells, also called "lymphocytes". Lewis Thomson has been finding out what the future holds for treatment, and what it's like to be diagnosed with the virus, and met with Professor Andrew Lever from the University of Cambridge, who researches the virus. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week the UN Climate Change Conference has been happening in Bonn. This meeting is the next step for governments to implement the Paris Climate Change Agreement, which entered into force last November and sets out strategies to try to limit the rise in global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees C. With these targets in minds researchers the world over have been exploring various ways to reverse global warming. One suggestion is to spray about 5 million tonnes of reflective sulphur particles into the high atmosphere to temporarily reduce the intensity of sunlight and cool things down.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Last year, Diabetes UK reported that almost 4 million people in the UK are living with diabetes. Around 90% of these cases are classed as Type 2, which is often linked with obesity. Interestingly, Type 2 diabetes has been reversed in people undergoing weight loss surgery, who have been able to leave hospital after only a few days no longer needing their diabetes medication. Studies have suggested it's not the surgery itself, but the calorie restricted diet that follows which is responsible. Now, a team at Yale University has investigated the mechanisms by which this reversal is made possible.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Traditionally, researchers have recognised the importance of sleep in modulating the fear learning response when the sleep occurs after fear learning. To understand how sleep, prior to a fear learning task, may be important; researchers looked at the sleep of participants in the lab and at home by measuring brain wave activity. They discovered that a particular stage of sleep called rapid eye movement stage sleep may be protective against fear learning when it occurs prior to fear learning, something which may have implications for protecting against the development of post traumatic stress... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In 2016, the world champion Lee Sedol was beaten at the ancient boardgame of Go - by a machine. It was part of the AlphaGo programme, which is a series of artificially intelligent systems designed by London-based company DeepMind. AlphaGo Zero, the latest iteration of the programme, can learn to excel at the boardgame of Go without any help from humans.So what applications could AI learning independently have for our day-to-day lives? Katie Haylor spoke to computer scientist Satinder Singh from the University of Michigan, who specialises in an area within artificial intelligence called... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Imagine it's a Friday night, you're in the pub it's and really noisy. Your friend though is telling a great story, and you really want to hear it. But how do you separate their voice from the din going on around you? This week scientists at Imperial College have sussed out the answer. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A drug based on a form of cholesterol might be able to reduce the damage done by heart attacks. Working with experimental mice, scientists in Australia have found that so-called good cholesterol, also known as "HDL", if injected into the bloodstream shortly after a heart attack can prevent heart cells from dying. The experiments suggest that the HDL temporarily alters the way heart cells burn glucose, giving them more energy and improving their survival. Chris Smith spoke to Sarah Heywood, who carried out the work at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists in the US have discovered a way to recreate the condition polycystic kidney disease using stem cells in a culture dish. The new culture system means that researchers can now begin to screen thousands of potential drug molecules to find ways to prevent the disease from progressing in humans. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We all use Wi-fi nearly every day. It is short for wireless fidelity, using microwaves frequencies to transmit data to and from your phone. But, visible light can be used to for the same purpose - with a technology being developed at Edinburgh University called Li-Fi, which would be faster and more secure. It works by making the lights in a room flash incredibly quickly to send signals. It's too fast for us to see, but does it nonetheless affect us, or the performance of the lights? Georgia Mills spoke with Wasiu Popoola from Edinburgh University to find out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Astronomers are trying to understand where our solar system came from, how life got started here, and where else in the galaxy life may be lurking. Chemistry is very important in these processes both in terms of providing chemical building blocks from which things can form, but also providing chemical signatures that highlight that something - like life - is happening. We had thought that one compound, called methyl chloride, was a surefire sign of life, but now astronomers in America and Denmark have detected the same chemical around a star without any planets, as well as on a comet in our... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Three quarters of the world's honey is laced with neonicotinoid insecticides, a new study from scientists in Switzerland has shown this week. The findings are based on an analysis of nearly 200 honey samples collected from around the world with the help of citizen scientists on every continent (except Antarctica!). Neonicotinoids are the most widely used pesticides in the world now and scientists suspect that, by getting into pollen and nectar, they're also having off-target effects on pollinators, like bees. This the first comprehensive global study to look at how widespread these effects... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Natural muscle plays an important role in our human ability to control our movements, so could we give this ability to robots? Katie Haylor spoke to Aslan Miriyev from Colombia University in New York, who's developed a soft, synthetic muscle that can substantially expand and contract alongside being strong. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

By 2050, it is estimated that we will need around a 50% increase in crop yield to feed our rapidly growing population. However, it turns out that algae - the slimy green layer often found on the surface of ponds in summer - may provide a solution to this problem. Stevie Bain chatted with Luke Mackinder from The University of York about how a better understanding of algae may allow us to engineer fast-growing crops Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The complex branching patterns seen in the growth of tissues in the lungs, kidneys and pancreas have an elegantly simple mathematical solution... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We never really notice oral hygiene, except when it's bad. The latest research shows that we can't really blame genetics for this, but rather the oral hygiene of everyone else in your household. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

From elaborate peacocks to seagulls by the shore, birds are found in a wide range of habitats on every corner of globe and a recent study suggests that the key to their world domination may all be in their heads. Stevie Bain chatted with Arkhat Abzhanov to find out more Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One major goal of scientists has been to measure the strength of tectonic plates. However, laboratory estimates of plate strength vary widely and in general seem to overestimate strength compared to real world observations. Thus, there has been a fundamental lack of understanding about how plate dynamics work, until now. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

C. diff - or Clostridium difficile - is a superbug that can cause major problems in hospitals. It leads to life-threatening diarrhoea and intestinal inflammation in patients who catch it, it spreads easily, and patients who do recover often relapse many times afterwards because the spectrum of so-called "good bacteria" in the bowel also goes off-kilter when you treat the infection. What's needed are highly-targeted antibiotics that can hit exclusively c. diff and not affect the good bacteria that we need to keep us healthy. Luckily, Sheffield University's Joe Kirk is on the case... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Finding new drugs for our various diseases and ailments is one of the biggest industries in the world. But how does so called big pharma operate - how do they choose what to work on and how does an idea get from the lab to your local chemist? Astra Zeneca, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, have recently moved to Cambridge, so Chris Smith took the opportunity to ask Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice-President of AstraZeneca's Innovative Medicines and Early Development Biotech Unit, about how a company like his invents and markets medicines in the modern era... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Known as the 'forests of the ocean', coral reefs represent an entire underwater ecosystem, teeming with life. But this ecosystem is under threat. Researchers from The University of Queensland and Colby College in the USA have used old 18th century nautical charts and compared them to modern satellite data as a novel way to understand coral loss over a period of 240 years. Michael Wheeler spoke with lead researcher Loren McClenachan, assistant professor at Colby College to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's well known that older mothers have more complicated pregnancies. For a long time scientists thought that old eggs were the reason for this and many women have made the decision to freeze their eggs to circumvent this problem. But new research from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge suggests that the age of the uterus is important too. Alexandra Ashcroft spoke to Laura Woods to find out more Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Bacteria produce a molecule that stimulates sexual reproduction in the closest living relatives of animals, according to researchers at UC Berkeley and Harvard Medical School. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Our hairy insides protect us from the full force of fluids racing through our bodies and may inspire future robotic design Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Osteoarthritis is a common, painful joint condition that affects about 8 million people in the UK, and many others across the world. It stems from a breakdown of the protective cartilage at the ends of bones causing pain, swelling and movement problems, commonly in the knee. Osteoarthritis cases have been on the rise, but not for the reasons you might think. Katie Haylor spoke to palaeoanthropologist Ian Wallace from Harvard University, who has taken a historical perspective on finding out why... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

What kinds of food might you be able to forage in a city green space? Katie Haylor went out to explore what wild food Cambridge in the UK has to offer with lifelong forager Antony Bagott.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

More than half a million people in the UK suffer from Alzheimer's disease. Symptoms of this disease, including memory loss and communication problems, are due to sticky protein build ups within the brain, called amyloid plaques. These plaques cause damage to nerve cells and are a hallmark feature of the disease. Currently, there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease. However, researchers at Yale University School of Medicine have made a striking discovery about the role of cellular garbage disposal units, called lysosomes, in the formation of these plaques. Lead researcher on the study, Shawn... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Short term memory is incredibly important in day to day life, whether you're driving to work, having a conversation, or reading through the Naked Scientists website. However, scientists from Princeton University have found evidence that exposure to violence reduces short term memory, even if the violent incident occured more than a decade ago. Alexandra Ashcroft spoke to Pietro Ortoleva to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Alzheimer's Disease is one - very common - form of senile dementia. It usually affects older people and progressively robs them of their mental faculties. It occurs because a protein called beta amyloid builds up in the brain forming harmful deposits called plaques, which are toxic to nerve cells. What's confusing though is that the brain naturally makes beta amyloid all the time but seems to wash most of it away when we go to sleep. But what aspect of sleep is important for this clean-up process, and what are the implications for people who are chronically poor sleepers? At Washington... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists now think they can explain why the hypervelocity stars - that's stars going at 600 - 1000 km per second are only spotted in one part of the sky, in the constellation of Leo, and it's down to their explosive origins. Douglas Boubert is a second year PhD student in the University of Cambridge, and he and his team used a computer model to try and work out what was going on. Georgia Mills heard what they found. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Millions of people worldwide are affected by Alzheimer's Disease; Terry Pratchett was famously a victim of the condition, which progressively robs sufferers of their mental faculties. At the moment, no therapies are available to halt the disease, but it might be possible to keep patients functioning well, for longer, with a bit of brain-training. Cambridge University neuroscientists have invented a memory-boosting app called GameShow. Katie Haylor went to see the game's co-inventor Barbara Sahakian and lead scientist George Savulich... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Our coasts are constantly changing. And whilst human impact can have a significant impact Mother Nature also plays her part, tides and storms can change a beach overnight. Continuing with Marine Month, Chris Smith spoke to Oceanographer Simon Boxall from the University of Southampton about what's driving these changes and can we prevent them? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you're up for a bit of practical experimentation, give this a go. Hold your finger out in front of your face, fix your gaze on the tip and then shake your head from side to side, or nodding up and down. Without you having to think about it, your eyes stay locked on their target by precisely matching the movements of your head. But for some people, maintaining a steady gaze like that is impossible because their eyes rhythmically drift off. Luckily a British team of doctors and eye surgeons have come up with a solution based on an implantable pair of magnets. Chris Smith spoke to Parashkev... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Many of us enjoy a boiled egg or two for breakfast, but why are hen's eggs round at one end and pointy at the other? Katie Haylor caught up with Mary Stoddard of Princeton University, who's trying to find out why eggs look the way they do. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The third week of June had everyone searching for the suncream as temperatures reached record breaking heights. But while most of us enjoy fun in the sun, prolonged heatwaves can have significant health risks and can even be life-threatening. Izzie Clarke investigated just what is causing the surge in dangerous heatwaves and how we can stay cool as things start to heat up. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In May 2017 hundreds of thousands of computers across the world were hit by a massive ransomware attack called Wannacry. The perpetrators encrypted the contents of users' computers and demanded payment to unscramble their data. What made the threat worse was that it had the ability to literally spread virally across the Internet by exploiting connections between computers on networks. But where did it come from, what can we do to mitigate the threat, and who is at risk of attacks like this? Chris Smith, Kate Feller and Andrew Holding put these questions to cybersecurity expert Paul Harris,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When viruses attack our crops they can wipe them out, and in some parts of the world, this can be a death sentence. So naturally, scientists are keen to find a way to provide protection against these infections. Viruses usually attack by using parts of the victim's own cell machinery against it, so in theory, if you can change this component or protein, the virus won't recognise it, and its attack will have been neutralised. But, if you fiddle about with the stuff inside a cell too much, the cell won't be able to use it and will die anyway. Now, a group from the University of Granada in Spain... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Methane is 20 times worse than C02 as a greenhouse gas, so when it's created as a byproduct in oil rigs it's burned. This is better than releasing the methane into the atmosphere but it's not an ideal solution as it creates more C02. Jeroen Van Bokhoven and his team at ETH Zurich have found a new way to convert the methane into something cleaner, and a bit more useful. Tom Crawford found out what it's being turned it into Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Looking at biochemical markers found in blood samples of those with autism and those without, researchers are looking to develop a blood test that could serve as a diagnosis tool for autism spectrum disorders. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How the plaque found on the teeth of Neanderthals sheds light on their diets and lifestyles. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Promoting social causes online can mobilise millions and raise huge sums of money. But it only leads to long term changes if the campaigns don't fizzle out prematurely. Social psychologist, Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge, thinks he's found the formula for social media campaigns to be effective in the long run, detailing what he calls "viral altruism" in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour. Ricky Nathvani went to go find out exactly what it is... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A tiny sensor capable of transmitting information from inside the body and powered by stomach acid has been unveiled by US scientists. The device was tested in a pig over the course of a week wirelessly transmitting its body temperature every twelve seconds to an external receiver. The MIT and Harvard-based team behind the work, which was published this week in Nature Biomedical Engineering, say this represents a step towards safer, cheaper ingestible sensors that could even be used to dispense drugs inside the body. Dr Giovanni Traverso of the Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Some viral infections are more lethal in men than in women. This is usually linked to differences between male and female immune systems. However, mathematical modelling of the different ways some viruses can spread in men and women suggests it may, in fact, benefit the virus to tailor its aggression based on who it is infecting, as Vincent Jansen from Royal Holloway University explains to Tom O'Hanlon... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

2016 was another record-breaker in terms of global temperatures, and it's part of a longer-term trend which has seen 15 of the hottest years on record occur since 2001. One victim of this warming is the Artic, where sea ice is steadily retreating, which means that the habitats for species that live there are also radically altering. So are these organisms equipped to cope with the change? Thomas Mock, from the University of East Anglia, has been studying one marine species which use a genetic trick to achieve considerable resilience, as he explained to Tom Crawford... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A chemical found in sharks can block the process that leads to Parkinson's Disease, scientists at Cambridge University have found. Know as squalamine, the substance prevents a protein called alpha-synuclein from accumulating on and damaging the membranes of nerve cells in the brain. Dosing with squalamine protected cells cultured in a dish as well as microscopic worms that have been genetically altered to make them develop a Parkinson's-like syndrome. Chris Dobson explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Us humans boast about our big brains but until now, evidence has been scant to suggest that animals also benefit from having larger brains. Cambridge University's Corina Logan measured the skulls of 1314 red deer from the Isle of Rum to see if the brainy stags and does were more successful. She explained her results to Naked Scientist Tom O'Hanlon... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

What's your usual Thursday night out? The cinema maybe, or a gig? Well how about a live cheetah dissection at the Royal Veterinary College in London? Don't worry if that's not quite your cup of tea because we sent Connie Orbach along for you... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As the saying goes, "if you don't learn from the past you're doomed to repeat it," or words to that effect; which is why understanding what has happened to the Earth's climate in the past is critical if we are to make accurate predictions about our the effects of climate change in future. So how might clams help? Well, they are among the oldest living animals on Earth, surviving for 500 years in some cases. Georgia Mills spoke to lead researcher David Reynolds from Cardiff University... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Carbon monoxide poisoning is the common form of poisoning worldwide. Just in the US tens of thousands of people are killed or hospitalised every year by this odourless and colourless gas, which in is boiler, stove and vehicle exhausts and is also produced during house fires. At the moment, the only treatment is oxygen, but it's not very effective and often is administered too late. Now researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed an antidote molecule that can circulate in the bloodstream and pull the carbon monoxide from tissues to make it safe. Mark Gladwin told Chris Smith how... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

An area of rainforest the size of Panama is lost every year to deforestation and we know habitat loss is probably the leading factor driving extinction today. However, another potential problem could be an increase in certain disease-causing organisms which benefit from the changing habitat. Ecosystems are complex and changes to the conditions each species needs to survive can impact on each other and throw it out of balance. Aaron Morris, from Bournemouth University and the IRD in France, has been looking at how changes in the local environment have affected populations of the bacterium... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Dark energy, the mysterious unknown entity which permeates all of space makes up 68% of the universe's total energy. Despite being such a large proportion of existence we still can't directly detect it. An international group of scientists is trying to map dark energy in our night sky. But how do you map something that you can't see and what precisely is dark energy? Liam Messin spoke to Joe Zuntz from the University of Edinburgh who is involved in the project Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

2D materials are objects that are only one or two atoms thick. Graphene is the most well known of these but many incredibly thin substances exist. These exotic materials are strong, flexible, semi-transparent and great conductors of electricity. But before they can be used in novel technologies we need efficient ways of making them. Graphite, as found in pencil leads, is made up of many layers of graphene and to isolate graphene all these layers have to be peeled away one by one until only a single layer is left. Researchers at UCL have found a new method of obtaining single 2D sheets from... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We've just come to the end of anti-bullying week and with 25,000 children using Childline's counselling sessions in 2015 to talk about bulling it clearly is still a problem for the UK. This problem appears to go beyond playground trauma with research published this week showing that bullied children are more likely to be overweight at age 18. The study's lead author, Jessie Baldwin, explained to Liam Messin what they did Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Malaria parasites in Cambodia are showing resistance to the front line drug Piperaquine making current treatment useless and putting lives at risk. Dr Roberto Amato, and his team, uncovered the genetic basis for this resistance; he took Liam Messin through the study starting with how they collected parasite samples Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When you were little did you ever dream of becoming an astronaut? Well Michael Foale did and he actually made it happen. Born in the UK Foale completed both his undergraduate and doctorate degrees in Cambridge before joining NASA and going on to become the most experienced UK-born astronaut. Well he was back in Cambridge to talk about his experiences at a Pint of Science event and Connie Orbach went along to find out how a UK lad got to be a NASA astronaut... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Quantum mechanics describes the properties of light, atoms and the even smaller particles inside atoms, like electrons and protons. On these tiny scales, we observe strange effects that contradict our everyday experience and we are beginning to harness these effects to build technologies that seemed impossible before. Kerstin Gpfrich went to the 2016 National Quantum Technologies Showcase in London to find out about the latest quantum leaps in quantum technology. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Plants can be good for the planet, nice to look at and often pretty tasty. But what if they were also high tech sensors that we could harness to detect harmful chemicals and even explosives in groundwater or the air around them? Michael Strano and his group from MIT have produced just such a "bionic" plant by engineering spinach plants to produce more, or less, infrared light in the presence of certain chemicals. Connie Orbach heard how... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Compared to a lot of the objects in our solar system the Earth's Moon is a bit unusual. A new theory, published in the journal Nature, explains how the Moon got to where it is today. Professor David Rothery, from the Open University, wasn't on the paper but he took Liam through what Matja Cuk, the study's lead author had done. He started by explaining what makes the Moon such a space oddity... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Paris agreement is an international climate change treaty signed earlier this year by 192 countries and it aims to mitigate man-made global warming. It kicks in from this week. But will its targets be sufficient? Over half of the Arctic sea ice area has been lost in the past 40 years and we may yet lose all of it. That's according to a new study from the Max Plank Institute for Metrology in Hamburg. Kerstin Gpfrich spoke to study's author Dirk Notz. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Now is there anybody out there? Or should I say is there anybody out there? Graihagh Jackson phones home to BBC broadcaster Dallas Campbell Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Conditions like Down's Syndrome, which are caused by babies carrying the wrong numbers of chromosomes in their cells, affect about one pregnancy in every 500. There are also many other inherited disorders that run in families but can't be diagnosed without a sample of the developing baby's DNA to test. But obtaining that DNA is risky; pregnant women have to undergo tests like an amniocentesis, where a needle is used to obtain cells from around the baby. When doctors do this, there can be up to a one per cent risk that the woman will have a miscarriage. These tests also cannot be performed... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

White lies are widely accepted as an integral part of our everyday lives. And yet history has taught us how a series of small transgressions can snowball with detrimental outcomes. But can we really get desensitised to lying, and if so, what happens in our brains? Tali Sharot from University College London answered this question in her new study and Kerstin Gpfrich wanted to know more about it... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When most people think of dinosaurs they'll likely conjure up images of the stabbing teeth of the T-rex or the cutting claws of a Velociraptor but what about the squishy bits of dinosaurs? To find out more Liam Messin went to the University of Cambridge's Earth Science Department to speak with Dr Alex Liu. Alex was co-author of a recent study detailing a fossilised dinosaur brain. Liam started by asking Alex precisely what he and his colleagues have described in the paper Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

According to the Office for National Statistics, the ONS, in England and Wales deaths involving heroin and morphine have more than double since 2012. The ONS say this is partially driven by a rise in heroin purity and availability over the last three years. Age, they say, is also a factor because heroin users are getting older and they often have other conditions, such as lung disease and hepatitis that make them particularly vulnerable. But are these the only reasons? John Middleton, president of the UK's faculty of public health, in an editorial in this week's British Medical Journal,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We all know that men aren't really from Mars and women aren't really from Venus, we are both from Earth and there are more similarities between sexes and genders than there are differences. But, even after many decades of campaigning there are still issues with gender equality across many areas of life from equal pay for equal work to shared parental leave or even just differences in ways of working. One topic that's really important to us here at the Naked Scientists is the balance of men and women in STEM research, that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, so to delve into this a... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

On the 13th of October Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge turned 250 years old. As an established teaching hospital, it trains hundreds of medical students with the final three years their time spent on clinical placements. Connie Orbach went to meet up with some of these students to hear how they're getting on. Starting with 4th year Keerthi Senthil who Connie grabbed on his lunch break, only weeks into his first placement on the wards... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

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

Levels in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas methane released accidentally by the oil and gas industry might be up to 60% higher than climate scientists had budgeted for. A new method combining long term atmospheric measurements of methane levels with a way of fingerprinting where the gas has come from has enabled scientists at the University of Colorado to make more accurate predictions of the status quo. Grant Allen is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Manchester and wrote a commentary on the new study for the journal Nature, where it's been published this week. Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

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

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

There is a centuries old debate about violence between people - is it something we're born with, or a product of our environment? Understanding the causes of violence is important if we want to try and reduce it, and so there have been hundreds of social experiments trying to establish this. But this week, some scientists have taken a different approach, and looked across all mammals for answers, and found that throughout human ancestry, we have been becoming progressively more violent. Laura Brooks spoke to Professor Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, who had been looking into the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Since the 1970s scientists have condemned fats - or lipids - as the culprits that cause heart attacks. But while that's certainly true of some fats, it's not the case for all of them. Because one, called palmitoleic acid, can potently protect arteries against becoming clogged. When it's fed to mice it cuts their levels of arterial disease by over 30 per cent. Ebru Erbay, at Bilkent University in Turkey, is sufficiently impressed with the performance of palmitoleic acid on her mice that she now even eats it herself as she told Dr. Chris Smith. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We live in an increasingly mobile society, with many of us owning cars and driving around the place for all kinds of reasons - work, leisure, or visiting family perhaps. And this doesn't change as we get older, especially if we all have to keep working much later in life. But what does change is our ability to drive safely. Yet although there might be the perception that older drivers are less safe on the roads than younger ones, this actually isn't true, as Kat Arney found out when she spoke to Swansea University researcher Charles Musselwhite. She started by asking him why old people need to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

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

How much gold have you got sitting in your desk drawer or up in the attic? Probably more than you think because a surprisingly large amount of the world's gold supply is tied up in old electronics. But getting it back out is chemically very tricky, meaning large amounts of the precious metal is actually ending up in landfill! Maybe not for much longer though, because researchers from the University of Edinburgh have developed a chemical solution to the problem, as Connie Orbach heard from Professor Jason Love Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

NASA's space probe Dawn has been orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres, which sits between Jupiter and Mars, for the past eighteen months. The probe is sending back data on this small body, which we previously knew almost nothing about. Last week, a whole constellation of papers detailing Dawn's discoveries were published in the journal Science. Laura Brooks asked David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University, to take her through the results... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists often study disease by examining thin sections of biological tissue under a microscope - a bit like watching a film in 2D. That's fine for some, but an organ like the brain is really complex, with neurons crisscrossing left, right and centre. Cutting it into thin sections to study diseases like dementia means you lose all that complexity. In an ideal world then, scientists would be able to don 3D glasses and see the intact brain. Fortunately, Ali Ertuerk and his team at LMU Munich's Acute Brain Injury Research Group have found how to make a whole rat see-through, and image its... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Imagine a robot. I'm guessing, after decades of droids and terminators, that the machine you're picturing is something metal, rigid and human-shaped. But this type of robot can only do so much. What we need are soft-skinned robots and this is precisely what a team of Harvard University researchers have built: an autonomous, 3D printed octopus-shaped soft robot nicknamed "octobot." Lucka Bibic spoke with Michael Wehner about their latest invention Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Although empathy is often associated with traits like helpfulness and generosity, not a lot is known about how helpful behaviour and empathy might be linked in the brain. Now, scientists have pinpointed part of the brain thought to drive us to learn how to be more helpful. The findings also suggest that people with higher levels of empathy are quicker to learn what they need to do to help. Patricia Lockwood and her team measured participants' brain activity in an MRI scanner while they tried to win money - either for themselves, or for another person, as she explained to Laura Brooks... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's a well-known fact that, as a woman ages, her chances of falling pregnant drop. And this seems to be driven by a fall in the quality of the eggs that she produces. Why this happens though, in an otherwise healthy individual, is a mystery. Now Francesca Duncan, who studies female fertility at Northwestern University, has discovered that older ovaries contain large amounts of fibrous tissue produced by inflammation, and this appears to be harming the ability of the ovary to nurture healthy eggs Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

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

Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System - a massive 318 times heavier than Earth - and it has been quite the 'hot spot' for news recently. NASA's Juno probe entered into orbit around Jupiter at the beginning of July, while in a new finding, it appears the famous 'Great Red Spot' is kicking up a bigger storm than first imagined. Telescope in hand, Claire Armstrong sought to catch a glimpse of the gas giant in the night sky, as explained by NASA's Jack Connerney and David Rothery from the Open University. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Cases of Zika virus infection in Florida are continuing to rise, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued travel advice urging pregnant women not to travel to certain parts of the country. The good news is that scientists testing three new types of Zika vaccine have found that they all work safely and rapidly in monkeys. One of the vaccines is made from killed virus grown in culture, another is based on a small piece of DNA containing the genetic information coding for the outer coat of Zika, and the third is made by adding part of that same outer coat to a common cold... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Childhood pneumonia is the number one killer of children under the age of five worldwide. The disease is a particular challenge for those living in developing countries, where there is a lack of clinical expertise and appropriate equipment to diagnose the disease. Adopting a technique called machine learning, scientists at Oxford University have taken clinical data from children with pneumonia to 'teach' a machine to identify critical symptoms and diagnose future cases. This machine can be something as easily distributed as a mobile phone, giving those who don't have easy access to doctors... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One in 20 people develop colorectal cancer in their lifetime, making it the second-most common form cancer in Europe. Surgery is an option for treatment, but this can result in incomplete removal of the tumour. Now, researchers from MIT have developed a hydrogen patch with three types of therapy applied directly to the tumour itself. Their anti-cancer patch was tested on lab mice and caused the cancer to go into complete remission. Lucka Bibic attempted to uncover some of the patch's secrets from researcher Dr Natalie Artzi from MIT... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

People who feel well tend to live well. They have a better immunity against infections and lower susceptibility to ill-health. Stress and depression, on the other hand, are linked to poorer functioning of the immune system, weaker responses to vaccination and, overall, higher rates of morbidity. But how a healthy mind makes for a healthy body wasn't known. Now, by artificially stimulating the reward circuitry in the brains of mice, scientists in Israel have shown that one of the nerve pathways in the body - called the sympathetic nervous system - can directly manipulate the immune system.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The most sensitive "electronic nose" ever has been built by scientists in Belgium. The portable "E-nose" uses spongy structures called metal-organic frameworks to pick up minute traces of molecules including harmful nerve gases. Lucka Bibic spoke to inventor Rob Ameloot... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's summertime again and along with ice cream, sunburn and our other favourite British traditions, it's time for the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition, in London. We've been to see what's been going on Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A system for growing heart cells on a microscopic silicon grid that can eavesdrop on their electrical behaviour is giving scientists a much clearer picture of how the heart works and providing a way to test new drugs much more safely. Long term it could lead to the creation of a cardiac repair patch that could be "pasted in" to replace or control damaged heart tissue. The work's taking place in the lab of Harvard's Charles Lieber and he told Chris Smith about what they've been up to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Days of squeezing the last drop from your shampoo bottles are over! Thanks to researchers from the US, we now have a material which allows sticky liquids to flow freely AND this has big implications for recycling, as Philip Brown explained to Lucka Bibic... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Helium is the stuff that goes into party balloons and is also an essential ingredient in hospital MRI scanners. Most people have heard of helium but not many realise that we're in danger of running out of it. Luckily, Jon Gluyas from Durham University, has come up with a new way of finding it. Claire Armstrong spoke to him to hear how... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Today, NASA's Juno spacecraft has plunged into uncharted territory, flying closer to Jupiter than we've ever been before. Graihagh Jackson spoke to co-investigator of the Mission, Professor Stan Cowley from Leceister University... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Back in February the World Health Organisation declared the zika virus epidemic in Brazil to be a public health emergency of international concern. At the top of the list was the link between Zika infection and babies being born with microcephaly or an abnormally small head. Now scientists in the US have taken the first steps towards developing a much-needed vaccine, which they've so far tested successfully on mice. Dan Barouch from Harvard University spoke to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Cells collected from the intestines of patients with the disease cystic fibrosis can be grown in the laboratory dish to produce balls of cells that scientists are calling mini guts. These can be used to test a series of new cystic fibrosis drugs that are now entering the clinic. But because these agents don't work on everyone, finding out who will benefit can mean a laborious trial for the patient. Mini guts on the other hand take just a few weeks to grow and give results in just days or hours. Jeffrey Beekman, from the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital, Utrecht, invented the technique... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When it comes to making musical instruments, there's as much science in today's violins as there is art. While many manufacturers around the world are still creating wooden violins, others are turning to alternative materials such as carbon fibre. But, as Kat Arney discovered, the natural world may provide even more options for making instruments with exciting new sound properties. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Solar Impulse is a unique plane, powered not by jet fuel, but solar energy and it is currently on a record-breaking tour around the world. But how does that plane work and what is it like to fly? What happens when the sun begins to fade and the nigh falls over the ocean? Can a solar plane keep flying? Lucka Bibic caught up with co-pilot Andre Borschberg to ask about his green aviation mission. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Chronic Heart Failure is the inability of your heart to effectively pump blood around your body and affects over half a million people in the UK alone. So what causes it and could treatments lie in something as simple as iron? Doctor Paul Kalra is a cardiologist from Portsmouth Hospital and he gave Chris Smith the lowdown. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Sudden cardiac death in the young, that's an apparently healthy person dying unexpectedly from heart-related issues under the age of 35, is rare but devastating. It is also something of a mystery to many scientists. So how can we try to prevent young people from dying unexpectedly like this? Could genetic screening be the answer? Georgia Mills caught up with Michael Ackerman, from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, at the British Cardiovascular Society Conference 2016. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Carbon dioxide is a problematic greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. Power plants are major emitters of carbon dioxide, but unfortunately, current methods of capturing and storing excess carbon dioxide have not been very effective. Only a small amount of carbon dioxide actually gets stored permanently. But researchers at Columbia University have demonstrated that their unique carbon capture and storage process can actually convert carbon dioxide into environmentally friendly limestone in less than two years. Fanny Yuen spoke with Dr. Juerg Matter to hear more about his pilot study. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

On June the 1st, Switzerland announced the opening of the world's longest tunnel. Called the Gotthard tunnel, it runs under the Alps to link Northern and Southern Europe; and at 57.5 km, it's fair to say, you certainly wouldn't be able to see the light at the end of it! Our resident technology expert Peter Cowley talked Connie Orbach through the project. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Immune cells are essential to the maintenance and repair in our bodies. However, an over-active immune system can lead to diseases such as arthritis, chronically inflamed wounds and atherosclerosis. Therefore, it is imperative to understand and carefully control our immune system activity. Our innate or non-specific immune system, acts as our body's first line of defence, these cells quickly reach the site, form a barrier, remove foreign material, and activate our more sophisticated adaptive immune system. Until now these non-specific immune cells were believed to have no memory and act in a... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Earlier this year, the US banned microparticle beads from personal care products, but Europe has yet to follow suit. Now, researchers from Uppsala University are increasing the urgency as for the first time, they have been able to show that fish actually prefer to eat microplastic particles rather than their own food of zooplankton, causing disastrous effects to their survival. Fanny Yuen and spoke with Dr. Oona Lnnstedt to better understand the issue. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A vaccine that can teach the immune system to attack any type of cancer is being developed and tested by scientists in Germany. Cancer affects one person in every three. It's caused by genetic damage to our cells, which leads them to grow in an uncontrolled and invasive way. But because the cancer cells are part of our own body, the immune system normally ignores them because they're regarded as non-hostile. What Ugur Sahin and his colleagues are doing is to identify a series of chemical markers that are unique to a patient's cancer cells and then turn these into a genetic message that is... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As a nation, the UK are above the intake guidelines for salt, which, for an adult, is 6g per day. To put that into perspective, there's about half a gram in a small packet of crisps, or one ham and cheese sandwich. But what does salt do to our insides? Viknesh Selvarajah from Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge, researches the impacts of salt and has a very unique perspective on the effects of high blood pressure, as he explained to Chris Smith. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Botox is a popular cosmetic treatment where Botulin toxin-A injections paralyse your facial muscles, which relaxes smile lines and makes your skin appear younger. In comedies, it is often joked about for giving patients frozen expressions. But now, researchers say that having Botox not only makes your face difficult to read, but also impairs your ability to read the emotion of others. This stems from the theory of embodiment. For a person to process an emotion that they see, they are required to mimicking that emotion. When we see our friend smile, our face automatically smiles a little as... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week we're tackling a myth sent in by listener Tim who says, "For many years I heard management gurus talking about the boiling frog syndrome.If you throw a frog into a pot of hot water it will immediately jump out. But If you put it in cold water and slowly heat it, it will boil to death " He also adds "Please don't harm any frogs disproving it!" Fortunately for Tim - and the frogs - someone has already done this experiment, or at least got as close to it as they feel ethically able to, without actually boiling any frogs alive. Kat Arney gets into hot water finding out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Robots are everywhere, from the machines that work in factories to pop culture icons like the Star Wars droids BB8, R2D2 and C3PO. but this is nothing new. Humans have been creating robots for centuries, and a new exhibition at the Science Museum in London will be showcasing our love of these Metal Mickeys, although sadly we'll have to wait until next year for it to open. Kat Arney went along to get a sneak preview of one of the shining metal stars of the show, and also to the exhibition's human curator, Ben Russell. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

On February 1, 2016, the World Health Organization declared Zika virus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern with the virus' continued spread through the Americas. Zika, which was previously considered to be fairly harmless, has been linked to birth defects and miscarriages in a dramatic shift that scientists are unable to explain. However, we are now one step closer to understanding this virus as the development of a new mouse model may have solved one piece of the puzzle. Connie Orbach spoke to lead researcher Michael Diamond from Washington University in St Louis. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

From maths hacks to poker playing bots, could there be a science to help you win big at the casino? Georgia Mills has been practising her poker face with help from Adam Kucharski... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The origins of life on earth has been a mystery since, well since life began. Researchers from Germany this week have found a crucial link in explaining how we got from the soup of chemicals on early earth to the very first cell, lending support to the so called RNA world theory. Lead researcher Professor Thomas Carell spoke to Emma Sackville about what RNA theory is and how their research supports it... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Could limbs have evolved from fish gills? While it might sound fishy, scientists from the University of Cambridge have discovered that the same genetic programme, triggered by a gene called Sonic Hedgehog, is involved in the development of limbs, fins and gills. The idea that the formation of gills and legs might be linked is actually not a new one and was first proposed more than a century ago based on the similarities in appearances of the two structures, but scientists abandoned the notion as fanciful thinking. Connie Orbach went to see researcher Andrew Gillis, who has discovered that the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In Archaeology is it better to keep an object in the ground or dig it up? Connie Orbach spoke to curators of the Fitzwilliam Museum's Death On The Nile exhibition Helen Strudwick and Julie Dawson and physicist Nishad Karim to find out how techniques from physics are allowing us to visualise objects without damaging them... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Humans are awesomely clever, right? We've colonised the world, manipulated our environment, developed incredible technology and can even make brilliant science radio shows like this one. And it's all thanks to the squishy grey stuff in our skulls - our brains. It's often said that humans have unusually big brains, which explains our exceptional intelligence, but it turns out that may not strictly be true. Kat Arney looks at the popular myth that a bigger brain means a higher level of intelligence... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The drug LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, was first made in the 1930s in Switzerland by chemist Albert Hoffman, who also tried the agent on himself and described his psychedelic experience. LSD was widely used until the 1960s when it was made illegal, so very little research has actually been done using modern neuroscience techniques to look at how LSD affects the brain and how it might be useful therapeutically. Until now, that is. Imperial College's Robin Carhart-Harris has been administering the drug to volunteers, as he explained to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We might have sexually transmitted infections to thank for our modern-day monogamous society, according to a new study from Canada this week. Between ten and fifteen thousand years ago, as agriculture was established and humans swapped a hunter gatherer lifestyle for life in larger group settlements, our ancestors also appear to have embraced monogamy - having a single partner, rather than multiple wives. Mathematician Chris Bauch has designed a computer simulation that suggests that, as populations increase in size, the threat of sexual disease drives the switch to monogamy, and the desire to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Without satellites operating above us, we would be in considerable trouble; even ATM machines don't work without them! So this week, Graihagh Jackson has been at the Royal Academy of Engineering, where leaders in satellite and space technology have been meeting to discuss what's up there Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week, we've had a first glimpse at the wealth of data sent back by the New Horizons probe, which reached Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, last summer. Open University space scientist David Rothery has been taking a look at the papers charting some of the discoveries, which were unveiled this week in the journal Science, and he went through the findings with Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Strokes are a major cause of permanent disability and they affect millions of people every year. The cause is usually a lack of blood flow to one part of the brain, which destroys the affected brain area and robs the victim of the ability to perform whatever tasks that brain area used to process. But an electrical current applied to the head for a short time, even years after a stroke, appears to open up new circuits in the brain, restoring some of the lost abilities, as Oxford University's Heidi Johansen-Berg explained to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

ExoMars 2016 launched successfully last week, but why are we going back to the red planet? This mission aims to seek out methane, which could be a crucial clue to whether there is life on Mars. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It is that time of year again when we should start to see bees buzzing around gardens but populations of bees have been declining recently as disease and lack of food stores are hitting them hard. With a third of global food supply coming from crop species that are to some extent dependent on bees it's important that we halt this decline. Felicity Bedford went to Cambridge University's King's College to meet Kristen Treen, who looks after the honeybees there, and see how their beehives have been getting on this winter Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Back in the 1960s, US researcher Stanley Milgram stunned the world with a study showing that members of the public were prepared to inflict potentially lethal electric shocks on supposedly innocent volunteers, if a lab-coated scientist ordered them to do so. In fact the recipients of the shocks were actually actors, who escaped unharmed. Milgram's experiments raised many ethical questions - not least about whether it was right to do them at all - and Patrick Haggard from UCL is now trying to find out to what extent people feel a sense of responsibility or control when they're ordered to do... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Results that scientists are describing as "unprecedented" in the treatment of cancer have been announced at a conference this week. A team led by Stanley Riddell, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the US, have developed a method to reprogramme the immune system to selectively target cancer cells. This means that, unlike traditional chemotherapy, which can't tell healthy and tumour tissue apart - and this is what causes unpleasant side effects - the immune system acts with surgical precision, selectively weeding out rogue cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Many people make the assumption that climate change means that places will become warmer; and indeed some will. But more important in some ways is how the climate in a particular geography might become more variable. Because, if the temperatures, cloud cover and rainfall become less predictable and operate over a greater range than they have historically, this could affect how the ecosystems - the web of plant and animal life - in those areas can operate. And this week scientists took the first steps towards studying whether this is a real risk and highlighting those areas we need to worry... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

American band They Might be Giants, famous for charting singles 'Birdhouse in your Soul' and 'Istanbul', have also made an album all about science. It's called 'Here Comes Science', and aims to teach children about things like biology and physics, featuring songs like 'My Brother the Ape' and 'I Am a Paleontologist'. The band dropped by Cambridge as part of a tour promoting their new album 'Glean', so Naked Scientist Georgia Mills took the opportunity to speak to founding member John Linnell about songs, science and controversy... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

100 years after Einstein predicted them, scientists have finally discovered gravitational waves. For 25 years, hundreds of scientists across 16 countries have been trying to detect these elusive ripples and yesterday, the LIGO team announced they had finally detected them. Graihagh Jackson went to the announcement and met with the British scientists on the LIGO team... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Last week, the outbreak of Zika virus in Brazil prompted the World Health Organisation to declare a global health emergency. The virus is spreading fast and has been linked to microcephaly, in which children are born with underdeveloped brains. Consultant virologist Tim Wreghitt spoke to Chris Smith about the situation... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week, a British researcher got the green light to genetically modify human embryos - this is the first time that gene editing has been approved in embryos. However, it hasn't been met with open arms by everyone, with some arguing this is the first step to 'designer babies.' Graihagh Jackson spoke to Geneticist Andrew Wood to find out what exactly gene editing involves... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Sperm whales are renowned for being the biggest toothed whales of our seas, migrating thousands of miles every year. But this week, photos of cetacean carcasses were splashed across the media.16 of these majestic creatures have beached across the UK, the Netherlands and Germany Some arrived alive, some were already dead and there's a lot of speculation as to what caused it to happen Graihagh Jackson's been investigating with the help of marine ecologist Bill Amos Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Science is full of conspiracy theories, the moon landings were faked and climate change is a hoax, but how many of them are likely to be true? Felicity Bedford spoke to Dr. David Robert Grimes from Oxford University who has given conspiracy theorists the benefit of the doubt and built a mathematical model to test whether, if these conspiracies were real, they would still be a secret... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Call the Midwife is one of the UK's best loved TV shows, and the new series has just started on the BBC. But as well as its empathetic characters and gripping story-lines, what makes the show special is its attention to detail when it comes to historical and medical accuracy, such as when it tackled the Thalidomide scandal from the late 1950s. Ginny Smith recently had the opportunity to visit the set of Call the Midwife and talk to those who make the show happen, both on and off the screen. She started by asking Executive Producer Dame Pippa Harris about just what it is that makes the show so... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Hibernating animals put their bodies through huge amounts of stress but seem to remain unharmed. Professor Rob Henning from Groningen University explained to Connie Orbach how mimicking their protective mechanisms might be the key to human health. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The current threat level from terrorism in the UK and many other countries is set to severe, and police and security forces acknowledge that their jobs are being made much harder because today's terrorists have at their disposal a range of communications and social network tools to help them to form alliances, attract new recruits and orchestrate terror campaigns. But, the associations that terrorists make through these channels can also help to identify them, if police are able to screen this sort of data routinely. Most people, though, are justifiably concerned about privacy. Now Michael... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Leukemia is a cancer of the white blood cells that normally fight infection. About one person in every 200 will develop the disease, a common form of which is called AML, or acute myeloid leukemia. At the moment it tends to have a relatively poor prognosis and over the past 40 years there have been relatively few new treatments for the disease. A bone marrow transplant is often the only chance an individual has. But this week an international team of scientists led by researchers in the UK announced the discovery of a new way to control the disease by blocking the signals that drive the growth... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Dogs drink in a very distinctive way, lapping up water and, more often than not, making a huge mess. But, until now, the exact way they did this has been a mystery. Thankfully, scientists at Virginia Tech wouldn't let sleeping dogs lie and they've worked out the physics behind how dogs drink. Georgia Mills caught up with lead researcher Sunny Jung, who explained how they did it. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

"195 Nations Set Path to Keep Temperature Rise Well Below 2 Degrees Celsius" were the headlines issuing from Paris in the wake of the Conference of the Parties - or COP21 - meeting. So how will this be achieved, can it be achieved at all, what has the UK signed up to do? Manchester University climate scientist Alice Bows-Larkin was there to hear the verdict... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

On Tuesday the UK Space Agency's first official astronaut, Tim Peake embarked on the trip of a lifetime to the International Space Station. The launch was broadcast live on the BBC and watched around the world. Connie Orbach went to join the celebrations at the Science Museum in London... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

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

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

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

People with the best social networks, who sing in choirs; play instruments; go to church and take part in team sports, all live longer and tend to be happier, studies have shown. People who feel lonely, or isolated, on the other hand, fare less well and are more prone to ill-health. Now a new study, published this week in the journal PNAS and examining the immune systems of lonely people and monkeys has revealed why this might be. John Capitanio revealed all to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

The choices we make are often down to past experience and the circumstances, including picking partners. However, for a bird called the ruff, the way it picks up ladies is determined genetically. Some ruffs are territorial and impress using dramatic neck feathers. Less common are the 'girlfriend stealers' who display on the edge of territories and attempt to lure females away. Finally, female mimics or 'cross dressers' approach mates in disguise. Jon Slate from the University of Sheffield explains to Felicity Bedford how genetics played a part in the evolution of these complex behavioural... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

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

Cambridge has a rich history of making discoveries about DNA - the genetic code inside each and every one of us. In the 50s Watson and Crick announced that they had unravelled the structure of DNA - the famous double helix shape. Now, 60 years later, another Cambridge scientist - Bill Amos - has made a further DNA discovery - this time about the way the genetic code changes or mutates to allow evolution to happen, as he explained to Graihagh Jackson. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Back in August we did a show all about the super material graphene. At the molecular level, a sheet of graphene looks a bit like chicken wire and is only a single atomic layer thick, if you were to pile up lots of these single layers you'd get graphite, just like the led in a pencil. For the first time in the UK more than 40 companies from around the world came together to show the latest in graphene related technologies. Connie Orbach went along to see what she could find and started by talking to Gaute Juliussen from the graphine production company Graphitene. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

At the beginning of November, Kat went up to Liverpool for the annual NCRI Cancer Conference, bringing together scientists, doctors, nurses, patients and more from the UK and around the world to talk about the latest progress, ideas and issues in cancer research. On the first night, the charity Breast Cancer Now hosted a heated debate discussing whether after spending so much money investigating the causes of breast cancer as well as treating it, it's now time to focus efforts on preventing the disease in the first place. Sarah Hazell, Senior Research Manager at Breast Cancer Now, gave Kat a... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

E-cigarettes seem to be everywhere nowadays. Invented by a Chinese pharmacist and patented in 2004, they first went on sale in 2010 and are now the most popular way to quit smoking in the UK. But although there's no smoke, there's certainly a fire of controversy around e-cigs, as Kat Arney found out when she spoke to Linda Bauld, professor of health policy at the University of Stirling, who chaired a panel discussion about e-cigarettes at the NCRI Cancer Conference. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

Cataracts are caused when proteins inside the lens of the eye come together. It's a condition that clouds the vision of approximately one hundred and eighty million people worldwide, with surgery to replace the lens with a plastic one currently the only solution. Twenty million sufferers around the world are blind because they cannot access surgical treatments. But help could be on it's way, as a potential non-surgical treatment method has been described in the journal Science this week. It follows another advancement in cataract science published recently in Nature. Roy Quinlan from the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Despite the hundreds of thousands of babies born every day, we still know relatively little about childbirth and how hormones play their key roles in it. A stress hormone, known as cortisol, is involved in inducing labour in animals, but doesn't seem to work the same way in people. A paper this week published in Science Signalling has suggested a potential way cortisol does have a part to play in human childbirth. Georgia Mills caught up with Professor Joe Herbert, from Cambridge University, to discuss the study. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As Winter approaches in some parts of the world, so does the colder weather and the threat of ice on the roads and on your car windscreen. But help is at hand from Kansas State University's Alexander van Dyke. As he explains to Charis Lestrange, he's created what's known as a "biphilic" material that can stop frost from forming so easily on a surface. It consists of two types of material: one hydrophilic, which attracts water, and the other hydrophobic, or water-repelling. Placed in a certain pattern, these can keep water droplets moving so they don't have time to freeze... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

Steel is used to manufacture a wide range of products from tiny surgical tools to huge ships. However, it can become corroded or contaminated when liquid comes into contact with it. A new method to coat steel with the compound tungsten oxide has been reported by researchers from Harvard University in Nature Communications this week. It enables liquid to slip off the surface while keeping the steel strong. Dr Ben de Laune, a materials chemist from the University of Birmingham, explains to Rosalind Davies why this is so important. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week the UK science minister, Jo Johnson, was in Cambridge where he announced an initiative to pump 21 million into seven key research programmes intended to tackle some of the leading scientific and engineering challenges facing the world. The funding will come from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the EPSRC. Professor Philip Nelson is the EPSRC's chief executive, and he spoke to Kat Arney about how the projects were selected... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Every day millions of people are moving around the world by air, land and sea, but they may be bringing with them more than just their luggage. For example, during last year's ebola outbreak, there were concerns that air travel would spread the disease from west Africa to other countries, sparking a global pandemic. But were these worries justified? By studying the patterns of 187 diseases in 225 countries, Kris Murray and his team at Imperial College have discovered that it's geography, rather than air travel, that's the most important factor, as he explained to Kat Arney. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

You know when after a run you feel great? Well previously scientists thought this runners' high was down to endorphins, but this may not be the case. Johannes Fuss from the University of Heidelberg found that mice that ran around all day felt less pain and less anxiety - key features of a runner's high. However, this feel good sensation wasn't down to endorphins, but endocannabinoids - the same chemicals that come from smoking cannabis! Rosalind Davies jogged on over to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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

This week, with the Rugby World Cup in full swing, the sports chief medical officer, Martin Raftery has called for changes to be made to the rules in order to cut the number of concussions suffered by players. Concussion occurs when the brain is shaken around inside the skull. This damages nerve cells and blood vessels, and the effects of the damage are worse if a person is already suffering from a prior concussion. Finding ways to spot who is concussed, and when it's safe for them to play on, is a priority. Ginny Smith spoke to two scientists studying concussion. First, Michael Grey, from the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Sitting for long periods of time has long been associated with negative health effects and is thought to slow down your metabolism. However new research suggests that the movements linked with fidgeting could offset these negative effects. Charis Lestrange spoke with Professor Janet Cade about how fidgeting could potentially prolong your life. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Solar power is growing in popularity around the world, with huge solar farms springing up all over the place. Obviously, solar panels need as much sunlight as possible, but this also means that they heat up, limiting their efficiency at converting sunlight into electricity. This conundrum may now be solved, thanks to a clever coating designed by Aaswath Raman and his colleagues at Stanford University. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Earmarked for 2024, the European- Extremely Large Telescope will be the biggest telescope in the world. The primary mirror is 39 metres across and capable of collecting as much light at once as all the other telescopes that mankind has ever built put together. The University of Oxford have been awarded the contract to build the telescope's new spectrograph, an instrument called HARMONI. Connie Orbach spoke to HARMONI'S principal investigator Niranjan Thatte to find out what it will do. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have announced a revolution in 3D printing. Rather than building things up layer by layer, which is the traditional approach, University of Florida scientist Tommy Angelini prints things inside a gel material using a hollow needle. The gel contains tiny particles that mean it moves easily when pushed by the needle but otherwise remains as a solid, supporting whatever has been printed inside it. Right now it reproducibly prints tumours for testing anti-cancer drugs; long term, entire human organs look likely. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists in America have helped a paralysed man to take his first steps in over 5 years. They've done it by developing a system that eavesdrops on the patient's brainwaves and can detect when he wants to walk. The computer then activates a stimulator system that can signal the patient's leg muscles to move, enabling him to stand, and then walk unaided. The device, which is the first of its kind, provides a way for patients paralysed by spinal cord injuries to bypass the roadblock preventing the flow of instructions from the brain to motor nerves and muscles and recover their ability to move.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You may never have heard of the disease lymphatic filariasis, but it affects 120 million people in 70 countries around the world, causing dramatic swelling of the limbs and other parts of the body, known as elephantiasis.It's caused by tiny parasitic worms, transmitted between people by mosquito bites, which can lie low in the body for many years, hiding from the immune system.But how do they do that? Kat Arney spoke to Michael Kimber from Iowa State University to find out. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Does being a good parent shorten your lifespan? It turns out the answer is yes, at least if you're a burying beetle. Results from researchers at The University of Cambridge published this week show that beetles can sacrifice their own fitness for the good of their offspring. Rosalind Davies went to speak to Professor Rebecca Kilner to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It has been found that endangered Asian elephants age faster and have fewer offspring if their mothers are stressed when they are born. Researchers at the University of Sheffield measured a hormone associated with stress to determine the time of year that the elephants most feel the pressure. Charis Lestrange spoke with lead author Hannah Mumby to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

People can spend their lives looking for love. We go on awkward dates and let our friends set us up with complete strangers. All in the hope of finding 'the one'.But what's the point of it all? Why do we bother? If all we're supposed to do is continue our species surely we're better off just picking someone half-decent and making do.Now scientists in Germany have found that, for zebra finches at least, there is a point to love... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Early intervention is likely to be critical for preventing many age-related diseases; but detecting these diseases at a sufficiently early stage to make a difference is often problematic. Now this may be about to change, because scientists in the UK have identified a molecular signature present in our cells that corresponds to our biological age - in other words, how well "lived in" our bodies are. Joanna Kerr spoke with researcher James Timmons to hear how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A well known benefit of growing up on a farm is the reduced chance of developing allergies. Evidence shows that children who are exposed to a dusty farm environment from an early age have fewer allergies than those who don't. Now researchers have discovered that it is a special property of the dust found on dairy farms which protects the lungs from allergies. Sam Mahaffey spoke to Professor Bart Lambrecht from Ghent University to find out more Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month, Cambridge based company Innovia Technology have taken charge of the "Mission Zero Corridor Project". This project aims to make a 12 mile stretch of highway in West Georgia completely sustainable, with no carbon footprint! This will be the first road of its kind, and hopefully will encourage others to jump on the carbonneutralbandwagon. The project is inspired by Ray C Anderson, the late CEO of a carpet manufacturing company in the USA. He aimed to reduce the carbon footprint of his company to zero a target they are on track to achieve by 2020. Andy Milton from Innovia Technology,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Getting accurate clocks is really important for all kinds of technologies, especially when monitoring the distant heavens. But even if the clock itself is accurate, how do you know that the right time is being transmitted across to other devices, so for example telescopes? David Gozzard from the University of Western Australia has found a new way to make sure that disturbances in the transmission from a clock are accounted for, meaning that multiple high-precision clocks aren't needed. He was speaking about his work at the Perth Science Festival, and Georgia Mills wasted no time in finding out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's long been known that traumatic memories forged in stressful situations can lie buried in the subconscious, yet they can bubble to the surface unexpectedly, triggering strong reactions, flashbacks and more serious psychological problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Researchers have discovered that memories made under such conditions - or under the effects of drugs or alcohol - tend to only be recalled when a person is back in that state again: something known as state-based learning. By putting mice under the influence of a drug called gaboxadol, a team of scientists... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In the UK we are a nation of dog lovers but how did man's best friend become the speedy, bouncy animal we know today? Well for a long time it has been thought that dogs got faster as their prey did, in a sort of arms race, but new research from Professor Christine Janis and a team at Brown University has shown that actually, long term climate change may have been the key. Connie Orbach finds out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

New research has shown that babies born severely prematurely or underweight are likely to suffer in adulthood with a socially withdrawn personality. Amy Goodfellow met with Professor Dieter Wolke from the University of Warwick to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists at King's College London have discovered that genetics makes an unexpectedly large contribution to children's GCSE grades across a wide range of subjects. Kat Arney met with Professor Robert Plomin to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

About 8000 people in the UK develop a cancer in their oesophagus - the tube that connects the back of the throat to the stomach - every year. The majority of these people have detectable changes in the cells lining the oesophagus for many years before they develop the cancer. These changes are referred to as Barrett's oesophagus. But only a minority of people with Barrett's - which is actually relatively common - will actually go on to develop cancer, which makes screening for the disease an expensive headache. Now Rebecca Fitzgerald, a physician from Cambridge, has developed a sponge - packed... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A decade ago a landmark study was published showing that treating Kenyan children for worm infections could increase their attendance at school, as well as bringing health benefits. Since then, many development agencies across Africa have taken the idea on board, as it seems like a cheap, effective and simple way to boost attendance. However,researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have been taking a closer look at the original data, and found that the benefits of de-worming may have been overstated, as Alex Aiken explained to Kat Arney. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How does the way you think influence the music you choose to listen to? Scientists at Cambridge University have developed a test that marries up a person's personality traits including how empathic they are, and how systematically they think, with the tunes most likely to resonate with them. Tom Crawford went to see the lead researcher David Greenberg to discover what the test revealed about his own musical tastes... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Fizzy drinks are often very high in sugar, and doctors suspect that they're likely to be linked to the growing rates of obesity in many countries. Now, by bringing together data from all of the previously published studies in the world, public health doctor Nita Forouhi has uncovered a strong link between sugary drinks and type 2 diabetes. In fact, as she explained to Amy Goodfellow, regularly consuming one sugar-rich drink boosts your diabetes risk by up to 13 per cent... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Punting is one of the most typically 'Cambridge' of activities, with hundreds of tourists being punted lazily along the river Cam at any one point during summer. Now, though, the Cambridge Science Centre has decided to liven things up a little with a rocket-powered punt, running on Chelsea buns from local cafe Fitzbillies. Yes you read that correctly! James Farr spoke to John London, the world's first 'punt-onaut' Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Growing a human heart from a single cell may seem like science fiction, but scientists at the Gladstone Institute at the University of California San Francisco, have taken a huge step forward, by producing the first three-dimensional, beating, human heart chamber. Previously, it had been possible to produce a two dimensional sheet of beating heart cells, but to really gain an understanding of heart formation in a developing foetus and perhaps more importantly, how drugs given to women during pregnancy may affect this development, a three dimensional structure was needed. By treating stem cells... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Volcanic eruptions can be both beautiful and destructive at the same time, but now scientists have found evidence they may have also been linked to plagues, and even the fall of the Roman Empire. When a volcano erupts, chemicals are released into the atmosphere in huge quantities, which reflect light away from the earth and therefore cause climate change, in the form of summer cooling. These chemicals are also locked away in the ice, providing a snapshot of the time of an eruption. Now scientists have dated the ice cores, and the records of summer cooling, from tree rings and have found they... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Marijuana has a reputation for helping people who are in pain. But achieving the analgesic effect comes at a cost: users of the drug complain of memory loss and mood disturbances. Now, by identifying the pathway in the brain that is responsible for these psychoactive side effects, University of East Anglia researcher Peter McCormick has found that in experimental mice it's possible to isolate just the pain killing actions Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's hard to miss the fact that bees are in trouble, with worrying news of colony collapse disorder devastating bee numbers, and concerns about the effects of pesticides on our most important pollinators. Now there's something else for our buzzing friends to worry about: climate change! Jeremy Kerr and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa have been using museum specimens to track how bee populations have shifted over the past century. What they've discovered is that bees and climate change don't mix... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One of the key factors that makes the brain age has been uncovered by scientists in the US. Young mice infused with the blood of older animals developed a drop in their cognitive abilities. This is down to a chemical made by the immune system called beta2-microglobulin. Why it has this pro-ageing effect, we don't know; but, encouragingly, removing it reverses cognitive decline, and promotes the growth of stem cells throughout the body and brain. Chris Smith spoke to Saul Villeda and the University of California, San Francisco to find out more.... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

More than a quarter of people are affected by anxiety or depression each year. But are some people more at risk than others? By studying groups of rhesus monkeys, Dr Ned Kalin from the University of Wisconsin in Madison found that individuals displaying a trait known as "anxious temperament" may be up to 50% more likely to go on to develop anxiety disorders later in life, and the same seems to be true in humans... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How does being driven around in a robotic taxi grab you? Currently, cars contribute 13% to our greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. However, a new study has found that were we to switch to using a fleet of electrified, autonomous taxis - dubbed "robocabs" - we could reduce our emissions to next to nothing.Graihagh Jackson debated the merits of these self driving vehicles with the author of the study, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Jeffrey Greenblatt... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's an age-old debate, who feels more pain, men or women? Scientists at McGill University have taken us one step closer to answering this question with a study using mice. Jeff Mogil and his team have discovered that the biological pathway that causes chronic pain is completely different in male and female mice. If the same is found to be true in humans it could lead to gender specific, or 'his n' hers', painkillers in the not too distant future. Tom Crawford spoke to Jeff Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

What do fish and aircraft have in common? Well, water and air are both fluids. And when fish move their tails and bodies from side to side, they push against the surrounding water and leave behind a mini whirlpool or vortex, which contains information about the drag forces experienced by the fish as it moved along. And if you can wind back the events that produced the vortex you can work out how it formed in the first place and therefore how much drag the fish felt. This is what Florian Huhn, from the German Aerospace Centre, has managed to do. And because aeroplanes produce very similar... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Rejoice because at midnight tonight, a second will be added to clocks across the world. Seeing as you now have all of this extra time, here's Naked Scientist Tom Crawford with everything you need to know about the leap second... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One of the world's most widely-used classes of drugs could significantly increase your risk of suffering a heart attack; that's according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University, in California and published in PloS One this week. Nick Leeper and Nigam Shah used a computer programme to identify patients who were using so-called proton pump inhibitors or PPIs; these block stomach acid production so they're useful for treating conditions like heartburn. But there might be serious side effects, as Nick Leeper explains to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

While Jurassic World may be wowing the crowds at the cinema, a new study from researchers at Imperial College has been making waves in the world of real-life dinosaurs. Although scientists have previously found evidence for soft tissues, such as blood, in very well-preserved dinosaur fossils, this has been controversial. Now cutting-edge microscopy techniques have revealed what looks like blood cells and even protein fibres in fossilised bones dating back 75 million years. Kat Arney took a trip to the Natural History Museum to meet the fossils - as well as researcher Susannah Maidment - to dig... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Hawkmoths live a shadowy existence; they stick their tongues down the flowers' neck, all the while being tossed about in the wind. And as if that wasn't enough, they do it all in the pitch black. With tiny brains and even tinier eyes - they seem to defy what's physically possible. So how do they do it? Simon Sponberg has uncovered the secret and explained his findings to Graihagh Jackson Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists in the US have developed a new brain implant that can be used to record information from nerve cells, and also to transmit signals into the nervous system, to stimulate parts of the brain. Unlike existing electrode devices, which can trigger a scar to form around the implant that eventually prevents it from working, the new device is made from a polymer-coated nickel mesh resembling miniature chicken wire, which can be rolled up before it is introduced into the brain. Chris Smith spoke to Harvard's Charles Lieber... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Saturn is one of the most well-known planets in the solar system, perhaps owing to its distinctive set of rings. The largest of these rings, the H-ring, was only discovered as recently as 2009 and cannot be seen from Earth. Now, using images taken by NASA's WISE spacecraft, scientists at the University of Maryland have given us the first insights into the structure and formation of Saturn's outermost ring. Thomas Crawford spoke to lead researcher, Doug Hamilton, to try to remove the shroud around Saturn's most mysterious ring... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Earthquakes occur at faults, or fractures, in the Earth's crust - where two big slabs of rock meet. Movement under the surface tries to push the rocks past each other but the rough edges get stuck together until enough stress builds up to jerk them past each other - and this violent jerking can cause devastating quakes. But a new instrument, and an experiment in France, has shown that we might actually be able to relieve this stress using fluid injection, as Jean-Philippe Avouac explains to Heather Douglas Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Coffee is an essential part of life for many of us, but could it help to cut depression? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The specific genes that cause schizophrenic symptoms have been found by researchers at Cardiff University. A huge study of the DNA of over 10,000 schizophrenics and 15,000 controls helped identified the genes involved, and determine that they are in fact the cause rather than an effect. Chris Smith spoke to Professor Michael Owen about the impact these findings could have on our understanding of this mental illness... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How our ears screen out sounds so that we can listen selectively only to those sounds we want to hear - like a friend's voice across a noisy room for instance - has been revealed by scientists in Australia. Gary Housley, from the University of New South Wales, has found that the inner ear, known as the cochlea, contains a population of sound-sensitive "hair cells" that communicate with the brain and work like miniature amplifiers to control the sensitivity of the ears to different sound frequencies... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The incidence of many diseases, including heart attacks and multiple sclerosis, peaks in winter time. Now it looks like this could be an unfortunate throw-back to our prehistoric origins. Cambridge University scientist John Todd has found that the immune system goes through annual cycles of activity, with peak levels of inflammation coinciding with winter time. Historically, this would have protected our ancestors, but in the more luxurious modern era we inhabit, it's boosting our disease risk, as he explained to Georgia Mills... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A campaign to combat "over-treatment" of patients has been announced by doctors' leaders this week. Called "Choosing Wisely", the initiative promotes more open conversations between doctors and patients, rather than an obsessive - and frequently financially incentivised - adherence to targets and guidelines. Consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra authored the report, which was published this week in the British Medical Journal... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Dressing in red around the office might have your colleagues seeing you in a different light! A new study from Durham University's Robert Barton has found that when the same person is shown wearing a red-coloured top, rather than a blue one, they tend to be rated as dominant, aggressive, and even more anger-prone by others Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Humans, like all other primates, are a sociable bunch and we tend to pick friends who are fairly similar to us in terms of education, religion, personality and so on. Now researchers studying a troop of wild Chacma baboons living in Namibia have discovered that these animals pick their buddies in the same way, tending to hang around with animals that share similar personality traits. To find out more about these cliquey monkeys, I took a trip to London Zoo to meet primate expert Guy Cowlishaw, who was part of the study team. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Plants and animals are incredible constructions, built from the fundamental building blocks of cells. But how are we made? By modelling how algae cells literally turn themselves inside out, researchers are hoping to understand how our own bodies are formed. Heather Douglas spoke to Professor Raymond Goldstein, Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge, to find out how Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Content curation and news filtering by Facebook, as well as other social media websites, likely leads to ideological biases in the information individuals see and read, a new study has shown. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you are thinking of raising money for charity, what's the best way to ensure you hit your fundraising target? According to Nichola Raihani from UCL, you need to be an attractive woman so men will compete with each other to donate the most to your online giving page. Kat Arney went to find out why this is the case... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You are not alone! Your body is home to a whole host of bacteria that live in and on you: your microbiome. You might be slightly repulsed by this idea, but these tiny organisms are really important for our health. There is now growing evidence that our microbes at risk from our modern lifestyles? Comparing samples of human bowel bugs from America with remote populations in Papua New Guinea, a research team have identified significant differences between the two microbiomes, and what's more, they think they know why. Georgia Mills spoke to Jens Walter from the University of Alberta Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

While you listen to a noise, nerve cells in your brain are busy processing sound information and helping you make sense it. One big mystery in the world of hearing research has been how we perceive repeated sounds that hit our ears slowly - like the tapping of a woodpecker on a tree - compared to much faster noises that seem to blend into a continuous tone. UCL's Daniel Bendor has been investigating how the cells in our brains manage to distinguish these different types of sound, and hopes his findings could lead to the development of better hearing aids. Kat Arney went to hear what he had to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Salmonella bacteria can be modified to make a safe anti-cancer treatment, scientists have shown. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Druham Universtiy's Richard Massey takes Chris Smith to a galaxy far, far away; or, more accurately, several galaxies over, which also happen to have just collided with each other, providing in the process new insights into one of the Universe's biggest enigmas, dark matter... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How the Earth came by its Moon has always been something of a mystery: Scientists had theorised that a Mars-sized planet, called Theia, crashed into Earth and that the moon formed from the debris. But, analysis of the rock chemistry from the lunar surface reveals that the moon and Earth are practically identical. There appeared to be no chemical trace of Theia. So where did it disappear to? This chemical conundrum has thrown a lot of doubt on the impact theory. But a series of papers in the journal Nature suggests that the theory still holds up. Using simulations and isotope measurements,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Evidence has been revealed that a type of dinosaur fell victim to occasional cannibalism. Daspletosaurus was a member of the tyrannosaurs group, and relative of the famous T. rex. A skull was found to have scratches matching the teeth of a predator around the same size, leading researchers to conclude that they did occasionally have the odd snack on one another. Georgia Mills spoke to Dave Hone, from Queen Mary, University of London, to find out more. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A favourite Easter tradition are hot cross buns, but there's one particular ingredient which no bread can do without: yeast. What is about this strange powdery ingredient that makes it so useful? Philip Garsed took some freshly baked hot cross buns to molecular biologiest Lia Chappell to find out. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you've ever seen huge flocks of birds or a shoal of fish, you might have wondered how they are all able to move together without ever colliding. Now scientists at the University of Bristol believe they have been able to explain how flocks of bats are able to avoid collisions, by using just a few simple traffic rules. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Geologists like to divide up history into epochs, or eras, separated by events that leave an indelible mark in the geological record of the earth - for example, the meteorite strike that finished off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, whose impact is written in rocks across the globe. Similarly we humans have made our own irreversible impact on the planet, ushering in what's become known as the anthropocene era. But when did it actually start? Simon Lewis spoke to Kat Arney about how he's has been figuring it out. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Anyone who has struggled with a lousy WiFi connection in a busy public space knows only too well that there are limits to how much data can be beamed over the airwaves like this. Now scientists have come up with a new technology that uses the room lighting to transmit data: effectively by causing the lights to blink billions of times per second using a form of visual morse code. Mark Peplow spoke to Chris Smith and shed some light on the process... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In a remote area in the Andes mountain there exist perilously high levels of arsenic: one of the most toxic substances known to man. But people have been living there for thousands of years, and it has now been discovered that this population has adapted to this dangerous environment. The group have a DNA mutation associated with a fast metabolism- this means they can flush arsenic out of their system much more quickly than most people. Georgia Mills spoke to researcher Karin Broberg to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Dr Kat Arney meets Sophie the Stegosaurus, and Natural History Museum researcher Charlotte Brassey. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

After a seven and a half year journey, and with a price tag just shy of half a billion Dollars, NASA's Dawn spacecraft finally has the asteroid Ceres in its sights. Ceres is a massive asteroid which sits among a clutch of much smaller boulders, pebbles and dust out beyond the orbit of Mars. This field of debris is the rocky rubble left over from the time when the inner planets, including the Earth, were first forming, about 4 and a half billion years ago. This means asteroids like Ceres can help to uncover the origins of Earth and the minerals and materials, including the water, that we have... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

FameLab is a competition where scientists battle it out to be the best at giving engaging short talks on their favourite areas of research. Six Cambridge-based finalists have been chosen by a panel of judges and we're hearing from a selection of them. In this episode we meet Daphne Ezer and hear about the fascinating (and terrifying) snapping shrimp... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists