Recent episodes

by Laura Martin-Coll and Siamak Redhai

“With the strange feeling that my ancestors were roaming free in Africa, all of a sudden, I was born in a plastic bottle containing banana paste, closed with ...

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by Laura Martin-Coll

“With the strange feeling that my ancestors were roaming free in Africa, all of a sudden, I was born in a plastic bottle ...

by Simon Hoyte

I’d like you to close your eyes and listen to this.

by Tim Blackburn

We humans are probably the most widespread species on the planet. People live in every ecosystem, from tropical rainforests to the Polar regions, from coastal ...

by Simon Schoeller

I’m an academic who spends a lot of time studying sperm, and sperm’s collective behaviour. The twist? I’m a not a biologist, I’m a mathematician.

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by Mary Wellesley

In 1930, the chief librarian of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, Belle da Costa Greene, was approached about a rare medieval panel painting by the Spanish master Jorge Inglés. The painting was to be offered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees by its purchasing agent, ...

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by Luke Fenton-Glynn

In the cult film Dude, Where’s My Car?, Jesse and Chester wake up in their house, after a night of partying, and are unable to ...

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by Emily Mayhew

Paris, 1917. A neuroscientist, Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke, arrived for work. A wind from the east carried the sound of artillery and gunfire up and down the ...

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by Adam Smith

In December 1955, at the Holt Street Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., made a speech that he intended, he later said, to “be militant ...

by Christina Picken

Have you ever taken an ibuprofen or a paracetamol for something like a headache and wondered how it knows where to get to? To a ...

by Dennis Chung-Yang Huang

Are you wearing blue jeans today? If so, then you’re carrying around one of the most ancient dyes known in human history: indigo.

With its ...

by John Mullan

In this podcast, Dickens expert John Mullan takes us on a journey through this great writer's mind, touching on his relationship to London, dreams, Bedlam, and more.

by Katy Clough

For any theoretical physicist, there is a moment when you know you have “made it”, and that moment is when you receive your first letter from someone who claims to ...