Episodes

• 2021

• Tamsin Edwards on the uncertainty in climate science

  Certainty is comforting. Certainty is quick. But science is uncertain. And this is particularly true for people who are trying to understand climate change. Climate scientist, Tamsin Edwards tackles this uncertainty head on. She quantifies the uncertainty inherent in all climate change predictions to try and understand which of many possible storylines about the future of our planet are most likely to come true. How likely is it that the ice cliffs in Antarctica will collapse into the sea causing a terrifying amount of sea level rise? Even the best supercomputers in the world aren’t fast enough to do all the calculations we need to understand what might be going on, so Tamsin uses statistical tools to fill in the gaps. She joined the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 and is currently working on the 6th Assessment Report which will inform the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26. She tells Jim Al-Khalili about her life and work and why she wishes more people would have the humility (and confidence) to consider the possibility that they might be wrong. Producer: Anna Buckley
  June 1, 2021

  32 min

• Mike Tipton on how our bodies respond to extreme conditions

  As the craze for cold water swimming continues, Jim Al Khalili talks to triathlete and Professor of Extreme Physiology, Mike Tipton. Is it as good for our mental and physical health as many enthusiasts claim? And do the benefits go beyond a rush of adrenaline causing feel good endorphins to be released in our brains? Mike studies why people drown. He wants to understand the precise physiological changes that occur when we expose ourselves to extreme environments and to use that information to help save lives. (Shivering and sweating will only get you so far when it comes to temperature control). Most deaths at sea are caused by the initial cold water shock response, not hypothermia. People gasp for air and swallow lethal quantities of water. So is it a case of kill or cure for cold water swimmers? What does the scientific evidence say about the idea that repeated cold water immersion can boost our immunity and have an anti-inflammatory effect? Mike tells Jim how he came to specialise in this area of science and why he believes we should all be challenging our bodies more. Producer: Anna Buckley
  May 25, 2021

  33 min

• Nira Chamberlain on how mathematics can solve real-world problems

  When does a crowd of people become unsafe? How well will Aston Villa do next season? When is it cost-effective to replace a kitchen? The answers may seem arbitrary but, to Nira Chamberlain, they lie in mathematics. You can use maths to model virtually anything. Dr Nira Chamberlain is President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and Principal Mathematical Modeller for the multinational engineering company SNC-Lavalin Atkins. He specialises in complex engineering and industrial problems, creating mathematical models to describe a particular feature or process, and then running simulations to better understand it, and predict its behaviour. Nira is one of just a handful of esteemed mathematicians, and the first black mathematician. to be featured in ‘Who’s Who’, Britain’s book of prominent people. Since 2018, he’s made the Black Power List, which celebrates the UK’s top 100 most influential people of African or African-Caribbean heritage, ranking higher than Stormzy and Lewis Hamilton when he was first listed. Proof, he says, that maths really is for everyone. PRODUCER: Beth Eastwood
  May 18, 2021

  29 min

• Helen Scales on marine conservation

  Luminescent bone-eating worms, giant squid and a sea cucumber commonly known as the headless chicken monster: some extraordinary creatures live at the bottom of the sea. For a long time almost everyone agreed the pressure was too intense for any life to exist. Now, it seems, the more we look the more new species we find. But, many fear, marine life would be threatened if plans to extract precious metals from the potato-sized metallic nodules that grow on the seabed are allowed to go ahead. Metals such as copper, manganese and cobalt are in high demand in the manufacture of mobile phones and renewable energy technologies, such as batteries for electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels. Deep sea mining companies argue that we will need these metals to create a carbon Net Zero economy. Meantime, the World Wildlife Fund is pushing for a moratorium on deep sea mining. And several companies agree: including Google, BMW, Volvo and Samsung. Do we need to choose between green and blue? Or is there a third way that protects both the planet and all the riches in our oceans? Marine biologist, Helen Scales talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her life and work: fish watching off an atoll in the South China Sea to assess the extinction risks to the Humphead Wrasse and a research expedition to explore the brilliant abyss. And she warns of the environmental devastation that could be caused if plans to mine the metals on the bottom of the ocean were to be allowed to go ahead. Producer: Anna Buckley
  May 11, 2021

  35 min

• Peter Goadsby on migraine

  Throbbing head, nausea, dizziness, disturbed vision – just some of the disabling symptoms that can strike during a migraine attack. This neurological condition is far more common than you might think, affecting more people than diabetes, epilepsy and asthma combined. While medications, to help relieve the symptoms of migraine, have been around for some time, they haven’t worked for everyone. And what happens in the brain during a migraine attack was, until recently, poorly understood. Peter Goadsby is Professor of Neurology at King's College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience and is a true pioneer in the field of migraine. Over the course of his career, he has unravelled what happens in the brain during a migraine attack and his insights are already benefiting patients - in the form of new medications that can not only treat a migraine, but also prevent it from occurring. Peter shares this year’s Brain Prize, the world's largest prize for brain research, with three other internationally renowned scientists in the field. Producer: Beth Eastwood
  May 4, 2021

  29 min

• Jane Clarke on Protein Folding

  Professor Jane Clarke has had a fascinating double career. Having been a science teacher for many years, she didn’t start her research career until she was 40. Today she is a world-leading expert in molecular biophysics and, in particular, in how protein molecules in the body fold up into elaborate 3D structures, that only then enables them to carry out their roles. How they do this has been one of the fundamental questions in biology and the key to combating some of our most challenging diseases, caused by the misfolding of proteins. Jane talks about her journey, from Tottenham schoolteacher to Cambridge Professor and fFllow of the Royal Society, and how, despite the obstacles she’s encountered along the way, she’s always been driven by her passion to understand the mystery of the machinery of life. Producer: Adrian Washbourne
  April 27, 2021

  29 min

• Professor Martin Sweeting, inventor of microsatellites

  When Martin Sweeting was a student, he thought it would be fun to try to build a satellite using electronic components found in some of the earliest personal computers. An amateur radio ham and space enthusiast, he wanted to create a communications satellite that could be used to talk to people on the other side of the world. It was a team effort, he insists, with friends and family pitching in and a lot of the work being done on his kitchen table. Somehow he managed to persuade Nasa to let his microsatellite hitch a ride into space and, after the first message was received, spent more than a decade trying to get a good picture of planet earth. The technology that Martin pioneered underpins modern life with thousands of reprogrammable microsatellites now in orbit around the earth and thousands more due to launch in the next few years to bring internet connections to remote parts of the world. The university spin-off company, Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited (SSTL) that Martin set up in the 1980s with an initial investment of £100 sold for £50 million a quarter of a century later. If his company had been bought by venture capitalists, he says he would probably have ended up making TVs. Instead he developed the satellite technology on which so much of modern life depends. Producer: Anna Buckley Photo Credit: SSTL
  April 20, 2021

  30 min

• Theresa Marteau on how to change behaviour

  We all know how to be more healthy. And yet we are also remarkably good at NOT doing what we know is good for us. We keep meaning to get fit, but the sofa seems so much more appealing than a run. We know we shouldn’t have another slice of cake, but we do. Behavioural psychologist, Professor Dame Theresa Marteau wants to understand why, despite the best of intentions, so many of us fail to adopt healthier lifestyles. She talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her life and work and why, after studying the evidence she changed her mind about how to change our behaviour. Back in the 90s, it seemed reasonable to assume that telling people they were at high risk of dying would jolt them into eating more healthily and taking more exercise. Now we know better. Thanks in large part to research pioneered by Theresa, we have a much more sophisticated understanding of what drives our behaviour. It turns out that small scale interventions to redesign our environment can exert a big influence on our behaviour by nudging us all into make better decisions, in ways that are beyond our awareness. Spoiler alert - smaller wine glasses really do make you drink less! Responses to Covid-19 show that nations can act rapidly and radically in response to immediate threats to health, even at huge cost. Can we do the same to tackle other threats to global health? Producer: Anna Buckley
  April 13, 2021

  28 min

• Mark Spencer on how plants solve crimes

  Inside the mind of a forensic botanist, Mark Spencer tells Jim Al-Khalili how he uses plant evidence to help solve crimes. By studying the vegetation at crime scenes, Mark can tell how long a dead body has been laying in the ground. Brambles can be particularly informative, he says. And by looking at tiny traces of plants under the microscope, he can link suspects to victims, or particular locations. Mark tells Jim Al-Khalili how he came to be a forensic botanist. After working in bars and clubs in Soho for many years, he decided to study for a degree in botany and developed a special interest in water moulds. As a curator of the botanical collections at the Natural History Museum in London, he became intimately acquainted with British flora past and present. And, more recently, has spent a lot of time monitoring urban wildlife – recording how the composition of native species and non-native species in the capital is changing, as the global climate changes and the global trade in plants continues. Producer: Anna Buckley
  March 9, 2021

  29 min

• Sarah Bridle on the carbon footprint of food

  What would happen to our carbon emissions if we all went vegan? Astrophysicist, Sarah Bridle tells Jim Al-Khalili why she switched her attention from galaxies to food. A rising star in the study of extra-galactic astronomy, Sarah was a driving force behind one of the most ambitious astronomy projects of recent times, the Dark Energy Survey of the universe. A few years ago, concerned about climate change, she started trying to calculate the carbon emissions from different foods so that she could make more informed choices about what she was eating. Before long, she was adapting the statistical tools and techniques she had developed to study dark matter and dark energy, to quantify the carbon cost of different foods and lobby government to make food labels indicating carbon cost of foods compulsory. Producer: Anna Buckley
  March 2, 2021

  28 min

• Richard Bentall on the causes of mental ill health

  For a long time people who heard voices or suffered paranoid delusions were thought to be too crazy to benefit from talking therapies. As a young man working on a prison psychiatric ward, Richard Bentall thought otherwise. Together with a small group of clinical psychologists, he pioneered the use of the talking therapy CBT for psychosis and conducted rigorous randomized controlled trials to find out if and why it worked. Turns out, having a good relationship with your the therapist is at the heart of why therapy succeeds, regardless of the type of therapy practised. Richard talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his quest to understand psychosis and how his own mental health has suffered at times. He's interested in how adverse life events affect our mental health and has shown that people who suffer abuse, bullying and victimization as children are three times more likely to have a psychotic episode later in life. If someone has a genetic vulnerability too, they are 20 or 30 times more at risk. A large survey of our mental health, launched by Richard and colleagues on day one of the first lockdown has revealed that lockdown and Covid-19 has not led to a tsunami of mental illness that many feared. 10% of the population has seen their mental health improve. Producer: Anna Buckley
  February 23, 2021

  42 min

• Jane Hurst on the secret life of mice

  Mice, like humans, prefer to be treated with a little dignity, and that extends to how they are handled. Pick a mouse up by its tail, as was the norm in laboratories for decades, and it gets anxious. Make a mouse anxious and it can skew the results of the research it’s being used for. What mice like, and how they behave, is the focus of Professor Jane Hurst’s research. Much of that behaviour, she’s discovered, can be revealed by following what they do with their noses - where they take them and what’s contained in the scent marks they sniff. Now William Prescott Professor of Animal Science at the University of Liverpool, Jane has unravelled a complex array of scent signals that underpin the way mice communicate, and how each selects a mate. Within this heady mix of male scent, she’s identified one particular pheromone that is so alluring to females that she named it Darcin, after Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Producer: Beth Eastwood
  February 16, 2021

  28 min

• Anne Johnson on the importance of public health

  Public health has been on all of our minds during the pandemic and Prof Dame Anne Johnson has spent more time thinking about it than most of us. She studies the human behaviours that enable viruses to spread and is an architect of a highly influential report on Covid-19 published in July 2020 by the Academy of Medical Sciences, Preparing for a Challenging Winter. For many years Anne was uncertain about a career in medicine. But the time she spent in the slums of Caracas and working as a GP in some deprived areas of Newcastle opened her eyes to the importance of good public health. In the early days of the HIV AIDS epidemic, Anne proved that HIV AIDS was transmitted heterosexually. Her landmark study involved asking people detailed questions about their sex lives and she went on to co-create the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. The survey was banned by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and thought by many to be a scientific enterprise that was doomed to fail. But it continues to this day, informing our sex education policy and public health interventions to control the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. In the noughties, Anne turned her attention to influenza. She was heavily involved in Flu Watch, a community survey that collected a great wealth of data during the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009. It revealed high levels of asymptomatic infections and showed how T cell immunity could offer protection against different strains of influenza. Insights that have proved to be highly relevant to the study of Covid-19 and how it spreads. Anne tells Jim Al-Khalili what gets epidemiologists like her out of bed in the morning and why it’s so important to focus on prevention as well as cure. Producer: Anna Buckley Credit: Academy of Medical Sciences/Big T Images
  February 2, 2021

  31 min

• Giles Yeo on how our genes can make us fat

  Many of us think we’re in control of what we eat and that, coupled with what we do, dictates our shape and size. It’s physics after all - if you eat too much and move too little, you put on weight; do the opposite, and you lose it. Genes, the theory goes, have minimal if any effect on our size. But what if we’re wrong? What if our genes have a powerful influence over how we put on weight, and why many struggle to lose it? Over the past two decades, this once controversial idea has gained acceptance and has inspired the work of Giles Yeo. His research on the genetics of obesity at Cambridge University reveals the powerful ways in which our genes, which function within our brains, influence our eating behaviour. These genes are far better suited to times of food scarcity. Fast forward to the modern diet, packed with sugar and fat, and our genetic makeup quickly becomes a recipe for disaster. Producer: Beth Eastwood
  January 26, 2021

  28 min

• Cath Noakes on making buildings Covid-safe

  Professor Cath Noakes studies how air moves and the infection risk associated with different ventilation systems. Early in the pandemic, she was invited to join the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE and asked to study the transmission routes for Covid-19. In July, together with many other scientists, she urged governments around the world and the World Health Organisation to recognise that Covid-19 could be transmitted in tiny particles in the air, even if the risk of getting infected in this way was much smaller than the risk from larger particles that travel less far. Her research highlights the importance of good ventilation as a way to stop the spread of infection in indoor environments. Being in a well ventilated space can reduce the risk of inhaling tiny airborne pathogens by 70%. Cath talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her journey from studying industrial processes to infection risk, her work on the airborne transmission of diseases and the challenge of designing buildings that are both well ventilated and energy efficient. Producer: Anna Buckley Photo credit: University of Leeds
  January 19, 2021

  30 min

• Chris Jackson on sustainable geology

  Chris Jackson is the kind of scientist who just loves to get out into the landscape he loves. He’s often introduced as ‘geologist and adventurer’. For the past five years he’s been Professor of Basin Analysis in the Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering at Imperial College London and he’s now about to move back to the University of Manchester, where he studied as a student, to become Professor of Sustainable Geoscience. As a child growing up in Derby, Chris learned to love the outdoors on family trips to the Peak District. Recently, you may have seen him abseiling into a crater of an active volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a BBC TV series. He’s also been telling us about the link between our planet’s geology and climate change as part of the recent Royal Institution Christmas lectures. Chris talks to Jim al-Khalili about working in the oil and gas exploration industry at the start of his career, searching for massive deposits of salt deep inside the earth and his experience of being a black geologist.
  January 12, 2021

  28 min
• 2020

• Scientists in the Spotlight during the Pandemic

  More of us have been exposed to so more science than ever before during 2020. And our insatiable appetite for science shows no sign of diminishing. Back in 2019, most scientists struggled to get any media attention. Now scientists involved in fighting the pandemic are generating headlines almost daily. On top of working harder than ever to further our understanding of the virus, many have become public figures. Some have been caught in the headlights. Others have stepped into the footlights. Many have found themselves at the centre of highly politicised conversations - not something a scientific training prepares you for. And the fact that everyone is now an expert on R numbers and immunology has created a new set of challenges. Jim Al-Khalili explores how The Life Scientific has changed during the pandemic and asks if, during these difficult times, a new relationship between scientists and the media has been forged. We look to science for certainty (all the more so during uncertain times) but there is no magic moment when scientists can announce with absolute certainty that ‘this is how it is’. Now that science is being reported in real time, revealing all the ups and downs on the bumpy road to discovery is there a danger that our faith in science will be undermined. Or could one legacy of the pandemic be a much greater appreciation of the true nature of scientific knowledge and how it’s formed? Has good journalism helped science to progress by synthesising scientific findings and interpreting what they mean? And, when the pandemic is over, will scientists continue to be part of the national debate? Producer: Anna Buckley
  December 15, 2020

  39 min

• Neil Ferguson on modelling Covid-19

  Neil Ferguson is known to many as Professor Lockdown. The mathematical models he created to predict the spread of Covid-19 were influential but, he says, it took him quite a long time to be persuaded that full lockdown was a good idea. A physicist by training, Neil switched from studying string theory to the spread of disease and presented scientific advice to government during the BSE crisis, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in livestock in 2001 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. In January 2020, he issued his first report on Covid-19 estimating the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan City in China. In March, he predicted that 510,000 people in the UK could die if nothing was done to mitigate the spread of this pandemic. Does he stand by that prediction? And how worried is he now? Jim Al-Khalili talks to Neil Ferguson about his life and work, the tricky relationship between politics and science and asks if he has any regrets about lockdown. Producer: Anna Buckley for BBC Radio Science
  September 22, 2020

  38 min

• Sarah Gilbert on developing a vaccine for Covid-19

  Sarah Gilbert started working on a vaccine for Covid-19 just as soon as the virus genome was sequenced. Within weeks, she had a proof of principle. By early April, her team at the Jenner Institute in Oxford had manufactured hundreds of doses ready for use in clinical trials. In phase one of these trials, completed in July, this vaccine was shown to be safe for use in a thousand healthy volunteers, aged between 18 and 55. It also provoked exactly the kind of immune response to Covid-19 that Sarah was hoping to achieve. Larger scale clinical trials are currently underway in the UK, South Africa and Brazil. If everything goes according to plan and the vaccine meets all the necessary regulatory standards, it will be manufactured in multiple locations including the Serum Institute in India and made available for use in low to middle income countries. AstraZeneca has already committed to making two billion doses, each costing about $4. The UK has an order in for 100 million. Sarah talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her life and work. As a young woman, she nearly gave up on a career in science. Now she’s in charge of one the most successful vaccine projects in the world. How did Sarah and her Oxford team get so far, so fast in developing a vaccine against Covid-19? Producer: Anna Buckley
  September 15, 2020

  30 min

• Steve Haake on technology, sport and health

  Steve Haake,has spent much of his career using technology to help elite sports people get better, faster and break records. He has turned his hand to the engineering behind most sports, from studying how golf balls land, to designing new tennis racquets and changing the materials in ice skates. He’s now Professor of Sports Engineering at Sheffield Hallam University and was the Founding Director of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre there. Since the 2012 London Olympics, Steve has also been working to improve the health and wellbeing of all of us. As Chair of the Parkrun Research Board he’s heavily involved in this international phenomenon in which thousands of people have sprinted, jogged and stumbled around a 5-kilometre course on Saturday mornings, which he’s shown really does encourage people to be generally more active. Jim al-Khalili talks to Steve Haake about how he got from a physics degree to being one of the leading sports engineers in the world, and how we can all improve our health by moving more.
  September 8, 2020

  29 min