Recent episodes

Flying high with the fruit fly

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 ...

Read more
Journey to the centre of the Earth – the core of our planet

by Lidunka Vocadlo

Connecting rainforest hunter-gatherers with wildlife conservation? There’s an app for that!

by Simon Hoyte

Medicines in Chains: Reducing side effects with polymers

by Christina Picken

Engineering
How to photograph an atom and save the world

by Oscar Williams

How can the behaviour of a single atom provide insights into our energy demands? How do we know that atoms actually exist? And what on ...

Communicating with Mother Nature

by Dina Ibrahim

Do you ever wonder just how many things go to waste in our society of consumption? Are you worried how little care we take of ...

The room temperature MASER

by Neil Alford

Noise is the bane of electronic engineers. The microwave technologies that underpin today’s communications infrastructure – from satellite networks to Bluetooth to 4G – are ...

Printable electronics – A flexible future

by Matthew Dyson

What do all the electronic gadgets you own have in common? Aside from using electricity, they are always solid, box-like objects, regardless of whether they ...

VIDEO EPISODES
Play Created with Sketch.
The woman who unmasked the forger

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, ...

Read more
Play Created with Sketch.
Dude, where's my car? (How philosophy might help you find it!)

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 ...

Play Created with Sketch.
The invisible killer of World War I: Blast injury

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 ...

Play Created with Sketch.
Why Martin Luther King had the US Constitution on his side

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 ...

Philosophy
Dude, where's my car? (How philosophy might help you find it!)

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 ...

A philosopher’s take on Global Basic Income

by Hillel Steiner

One of the more rarely encountered phenomena in this world is agreement between people on opposing sides of the left-right political spectrum. And yet there ...

It's at Tate but is it art?

by Miguel Dos Santos

Once upon a time there was an emperor who was so fond of dressing up that he cared about doing little else. One day, a ...

AUDIO episodes
Walking through Dickensian London

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.

Am I crazy or is it physics

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 ...