BBC Inside Science

By BBC Radio 4

Technology

What's BBC Inside Science about?

Dr Adam Rutherford and guests illuminate the mysteries and challenge the controversies behind the science that's changing our world.

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Malaria: what's in it for t...

11.25.2021

Malaria, a disease that infects hundreds of millions of people and kills hundreds of thousands each year. It is caused after a plasmodium parasite is passed from a blood-feeding mosquito into a human host. Subject to much research over hundreds ...

BBC Inside Science episodes:

11.25.2021 Malaria: what's in it for the mosquito? Malaria, a disease that infects hundreds of millions of people and kills hundreds of thousands each year. It is caused after a plasmodium parasite is passed from a blood-feeding mosquito into a human host. Subject to much research over hundreds ...
11.18.2021 Yet More Space Junk; COP-up or COP-out; The End of Bias. Earlier in the week the current ISS crew had to prepare to evacuate after Russia tested an anti-satellite weapon, spreading thousands of high velocity shards of ex-satellite into a reasonably low-earth orbit and potentially endangering many other earth observation and ...
11.11.2021 Propane: Keeping Your Cool as the World Warms Around You How propane might prevent air conditioning and refrigeration becoming an even bigger burden as our planet warms. Also, covid antiviral pills, and how we forgot to breathe properly. The Montreal Protocol is famous for reducing CFC emissions to help protect ...
11.04.2021 How Whales Farmed For Food, COP progress, and The Last Stargazers Gaia Vince hears how blue whales' huge appetites and energetic eating behaviours helped generate more food for themselves. Also, an update from COP26, and Emily Levesque on The Last Stargazers. New research published this week in the journal Nature reveals ...
10.28.2021 Atmospheric Pollutants and Where to Find Them This week London's Ultra Low Emission Zone was extended to 18 times its previous size. In an effort to cut levels of various nitrogen oxides and other gases dangerous to humans from urban air, cities encouraging lower emission vehicles is ...
10.21.2021 The Possible Impact of false-negative PCR Tests As many as 43,000 PCR tests for people living in and around the South West of England could have been wrongly returned as negative recently, thanks to a seemingly unknown error, or errors, at a laboratory near Wolverhampton. For an ...
10.14.2021 Early Alzheimer's Alert Marnie Chesterton hears of a simple test for the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease. She finds out about UK scientists using robots to map radiation at Chernobyl, and talks to Merlin Sheldrake about fungi. Roland Pease travels to Bath University ...
10.07.2021 Surprising choice for Nobel prizes in a pandemic? This week saw the announcement of the Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine, chemistry and physics. None of them reward research connected with Covid. Roland Pease, science journalist and Nobel watcher, and Gaia Vince discuss the decisions, which some have ...
09.30.2021 Covid vaccine boosters; why we don't have a tail; cassowary domestication; Royal Society Science book prize shortlist Booster vaccines are now being offered to people in England most at risk of Covid, who had their second jab at least 6 months ago. Most people are getting an mRNA vaccine as a booster, mainly the Pfizer one. Dr ...
09.23.2021 La Palma volcano; wind energy in the UK; origins of SARS-Cov2; Formula 1 safety Thousands of people have been forced to flee the path of the lava that has been spewing from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma since Sunday 18th September. Dr Rebecca Williams of Hull University is an expert on the ...
09.16.2021 Perseverance drills on Mars; space tourism; Australian fire debris and algal blooms; DNA vaccines against Covid NASA's Perseverance rover has been trundling around the Jezero crater since it landed successfully in February 2021. A few weeks ago it made its first attempt at collecting a sample of rock. Unfortunately the rock turned out to be so ...
09.09.2021 Climate change and oil and gas exploration; cutting methane emissions; African wild dog populations; freezing eggs and sperm We’re just weeks away from the big international climate talks in Glasgow, where governments will be trying to figure out a workable plan for how to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees. Gaia Vince explores a couple of strategies ...
09.02.2021 Rugby and the brain Victoria Gill talks to Professor Damian Bailey who's leading research at the University of South Wales into the potential risks to brain health in contact sports players, from impacts to the head and body sustained during play. His latest study ...
08.26.2021 Window to solve pandemic origins closing Virologist Marion Koopmans is one of the independent researchers appointed by the World Health Organisation to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The team visited China in January this year as a first step to answer how, when and ...
08.19.2021 Mammoth Journey A 17,000 year old tusk contains a remarkable story of the lifetime travels of a woolly mammoth which roamed the grasslands of Ice Age Alaska. The animal travelled 70,000 kilometres over the course of three decades before his premature death ...
08.12.2021 IPCC report - extreme weather events Victoria Gill talks to climate scientist Friedericke Otto about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new landmark report. The report this week states that the evidence for humanity's role in changing global change is now unequivocal. Dr Otto was a ...
08.05.2021 Bees and multiple pesticide exposure Victoria Gill looks at the latest stories from the world of science. In this week's episode: the threat to bees from multiple pesticide exposure, how bee colonies can evolve defences against the varroa parasite, more problems for the Starliner space ...
07.29.2021 Covid 19 – reaching the unvaccinated In the UK we have seen a recent fall in Covid 19 cases. Good news, but we don’t know yet if this will be sustained. The virus is now thought to be spreading predominantly amongst the under 30s, most of ...
07.22.2021 A life-changing database Proteomes, the sequences of protein within the DNA of every living thing, are notoriously difficult to model. The usual chemical methods can take months, but a new computational model using the ability of artificial intelligence to learn the complex sequences ...
07.15.2021 Covid19 - should we test everybody ? Epidemiologist Julian Peto is advocating mass testing as the key part of a plan to stop the virus spreading. Studies where everyone has been tested have picked up asymptomatic cases. With the addition of isolation and contact tracing this method ...
07.08.2021 Covid and our ancient ancestors A global project looking at the genomes of over 2 million people has found a number of distinct genetic markers which seem to either make Covid infection more likely or the symptoms more severe. Some of these markers are known ...
07.01.2021 Gene editing gets real For the first time the gene editing technique CRISPR has been used by injecting the CRISPR instructions into the bloodstream rather than directly into the affected organ. In a trial, six adult patients showed improvements after the treatment was used ...
06.24.2021 UK science policy shake-up; Ivermectin & Covid; black fungus in Indian Covid patients; many hominins in Siberian cave The Prime Minister has announced his desire for the UK to become a 'science superpower'. A new office within the cabinet to look at science will work alongside existing science strategy and funding structures. So far it's unclear where the ...
06.17.2021 Cov-Boost trial; SARS-Cov 2 infection in action; sapling guards; why tadpoles are dying Scientists are now looking at the question of third doses of vaccines against SARS-Cov2, and this week the Cov-Boost trial was launched. It’s being run from University of Southampton and is going to be using seven different vaccines, some at ...
06.10.2021 Covid vaccines in children; preventing dengue; algal blooms; supersonic flight Should we be vaccinating children in the UK against SARS-Cov 2? Children are rarely seriously ill if they catch Covid but infections mean missed school, and they can pass it onto older vulnerable people. The US, Canada, Israel and Dubai ...
06.03.2021 Lab origin theory of SARS-Cov2; gene for obesity; dark matter map; rock art in Scotland Sars Cov2, as the Covid19 coronavirus is called, probably began as the vast majority of new diseases do, when an animal virus infected a person – perhaps in a market or farm. There’s a large animal market in the city ...
05.27.2021 Human use of plants beyond the limits of history. Human impact on planet earth’s plant life might be detectable several thousand years back in fossil pollen cores taken from mud columns around the world. As Suzette Flantua and Ondrej Mottl describe in a paper published in the journal Science, ...
05.20.2021 Blood Clot Cure, Synthetic Fuels and Coal Mine Heat Pumps Vic Gill talks to scientists who have cured a vaccine-induced blood clot patient, and meets a former top F1 chief engineer who wants to transform the fuel industry. Scientists in Vienna have been continuing to look at the rare blood ...
05.13.2021 Microplastics in UK river beds Untreated wastewater "routinely released into UK rivers" is creating microplastic hotspots on riverbeds. That is the conclusion of a study in Greater Manchester, which revealed high concentrations of plastic immediately downstream of treatment works. The team behind the research concluded: ...
05.06.2021 Early burials, diversity in Tudor England, a malaria vaccine, and rogue brain waves Despite being home to our early ancestors, attempts to find evidence of early burials in Africa have proved unsuccessful. That is until now. Professor María Martinón-Torres explains how findings from a 78,000-year-old Kenyan grave shed light on how our ancestors ...
04.29.2021 Dragonfly on Titan, Retreating Glaciers, Surge Testing, Acoustic lighthouses Now that NASA engineers have successfully flown a helicopter remotely on Mars planetary scientists are exploring how to use the technology elsewhere. Marnie Chesterton talks to Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle, from Johns Hopkins University who is working on a mission to ...
04.22.2021 Coronavirus variants and vaccines, climate change resistant coffee, dare to repair and how to get rid of moths This week has seen a huge surge in Covid- 19 in India leading to concern of a "double mutant" variant, but what do we know about this B.1.617 as it is otherwise known. It was first described in October and ...
04.15.2021 Blood clots, grieving and the emotion of screams The story of what we understand about the rare cases of blood clots associated with certain Covid-19 vaccines is constantly evolving. In today’s programme Professor Beverley Hunt looks at the emerging evidence. How have the restrictions due to Covid 19 ...
04.08.2021 Disobedient particles, noisy gorillas, sharks and fictional languages In 2016, an accelerator physics centre called Fermilab acquired a massive circular 50 foot magnet from a lab in New York. Too big for the roads, the magnet had to take a 2000km detour via New Orleans to get to ...
04.01.2021 Science funding cuts; Mice get Covid-19; Native oyster reintroductions Scientists were delighted earlier this year to find they would still have access to the EU Horizon 2020 funding and collaborations. Now, it has been revealed that membership of this group, which was previously paid for through fees to the ...
03.25.2021 Halfway to net zero; hydrogen as a fuel; Fagradalsfjall, Iceland’s active volcano The UK is reportedly halfway towards meeting its 2050 target of "net zero" carbon emissions. How did we get there and how will we achieve the next stage? ‘UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 were 51% below 1990 levels, according ...
03.18.2021 Human embryo research and ethics; sperm whale social learning; Antikythera mechanism We still know very little about exactly how the embryo forms out of a mass of dividing cells in those crucial first weeks after conception. This is also the time when many miscarriages occur, and scientists want to understand why. ...
03.11.2021 China's green growth plan On Friday 5th March China published a draft for its 14th five-year plan in Beijing. The document acts as a national economic blueprint and was expected to provide an outline as to how the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gas ...
03.04.2021 Blue carbon; inside Little Foot's skull; reading locked letters With global warming continuing to increase at an alarming rate, we need all the help we can get to lock up the carbon that we’ve released into the atmosphere. Fortunately, plants have evolved to do just this, but there’s a ...
02.25.2021 Good COP Bad COP, Shotgun Lead Persistence, and Featherdown Adaptation On Thursday, The UN Environmental Programme published a report called Making Peace With Nature. It attempts to synthesise vast amounts of scientific knowledge and communicate “how climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of ...
02.18.2021 Nasa's Perseverance - will it pay off? And spotting likely hosts for future pandemics. On Thursday 18th Feb 2020 Nasa’s Perseverance Rover is due to touch down – gently and accurately – in the Jezero crater on Mars. Using similar nail-biting Sky Crane technology as its predecessor Curiosity, if successful it will amongst many ...
02.11.2021 Meeting Mars, Melting Ice, Ozone on the Mend Again, and A Sea Cacophany Victoria Gill and guests discuss the signs and symptoms of melting ice and anthropogenic climate warming, illicit CFC production and the racket we make in the seas. As two robotic missions from UAE and China arrive at Mars , and ...
02.04.2021 Putting a number on biodiversity Ahead of the COP summit in Glasgow at the end of the year, this week an important study was published that attempts to enumerate the value of biodiversity in the economics of humankind. Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta's review makes it ...
01.28.2021 Next Gen Covid Vaccines; Man's Oldest Bestest Friend; Bilingual Brain Development A year after the first SARS-Cov2 sequences were received in the vaccine labs, Dr Alex Lathbridge and guests look into ongoing development and what next year's booster shots might be like. Prof Robin Shattock's team at Imperial College are still ...
01.21.2021 Vaccine Hesitancy and Ethnicity; The Joy of catnip; Lake Heatwaves Reports this week talk of some BAME ethnic minorities being significantly less likely to take a covid vaccine if offered. Vittal Katikireddi and Tolullah Oni both sit on the SAGE ethnicity subgroup, and they discuss with Alex Lathbridge where the ...
01.14.2021 UK Science post Brexit; GMOs vs Gene Editing regulation; Identical Twins That Aren't Indentical In the new EU-UK deal, the UK is to be an associate member of the latest EU research funding round, known as Horizon Europe. Costing around £2bn to take part, what can UK scientists now do and what has changed? ...
01.07.2021 Vaccine Dosing and Biodiversity Soundscape Monitoring After the decision by the UK government last week to change the spacing between dosings of vaccine from the recommended 3 weeks to 12 weeks, immunologists around the world have been discussing with some urgency the wisdom of such a ...
12.31.2020 Brian Cox and Alice Roberts on a decade of extraordinary science As a new decade ticks over, Dr Adam Rutherford, Professor Alice Roberts and Professor Brian Cox look back on a decade of science that has transformed perceptions of our medicine, our history and our universe. From advances in genetics that ...
12.24.2020 Space Rocks, Aquatic Dinosaurs and Global Temperatures; 2020 science reviewed Nobody could have failed to notice the one story dominating the science news this year - but what about the discoveries that have been overshadowed in 2020? This week, Dr Adam Rutherford eschews all mentions of the pandemic as he ...
12.17.2020 Covid mutation; On the facial expression of emotions; A mystery object Dr Alex Lathbridge with your peek at the week in science. This week in the House of Commons Matt Hancock announced a new variant in the Covid virus, discovered to be spreading through the south east of the UK. As ...

Older episodes

BBC Inside Science

What's BBC Inside Science about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

BBC Inside Science episodes:

Malaria: what's in it for the mosquito?

Yet More Space Junk; COP-up or COP-out; The End of Bias.

Propane: Keeping Your Cool as the World Warms Around You

How Whales Farmed For Food, COP progress, and The Last Stargazers

Atmospheric Pollutants and Where to Find Them

The Possible Impact of false-negative PCR Tests

Early Alzheimer's Alert

Surprising choice for Nobel prizes in a pandemic?

Covid vaccine boosters; why we don't have a tail; cassowary domestication; Royal Society Science book prize shortlist

La Palma volcano; wind energy in the UK; origins of SARS-Cov2; Formula 1 safety

Perseverance drills on Mars; space tourism; Australian fire debris and algal blooms; DNA vaccines against Covid

Climate change and oil and gas exploration; cutting methane emissions; African wild dog populations; freezing eggs and sperm

Rugby and the brain

Window to solve pandemic origins closing

Mammoth Journey

IPCC report - extreme weather events

Bees and multiple pesticide exposure

Covid 19 – reaching the unvaccinated

A life-changing database

Covid19 - should we test everybody ?

Covid and our ancient ancestors

Gene editing gets real

UK science policy shake-up; Ivermectin & Covid; black fungus in Indian Covid patients; many hominins in Siberian cave

Cov-Boost trial; SARS-Cov 2 infection in action; sapling guards; why tadpoles are dying

Covid vaccines in children; preventing dengue; algal blooms; supersonic flight

Lab origin theory of SARS-Cov2; gene for obesity; dark matter map; rock art in Scotland

Human use of plants beyond the limits of history.

Blood Clot Cure, Synthetic Fuels and Coal Mine Heat Pumps

Microplastics in UK river beds

Early burials, diversity in Tudor England, a malaria vaccine, and rogue brain waves

Dragonfly on Titan, Retreating Glaciers, Surge Testing, Acoustic lighthouses

Coronavirus variants and vaccines, climate change resistant coffee, dare to repair and how to get rid of moths

Blood clots, grieving and the emotion of screams

Disobedient particles, noisy gorillas, sharks and fictional languages

Science funding cuts; Mice get Covid-19; Native oyster reintroductions

Halfway to net zero; hydrogen as a fuel; Fagradalsfjall, Iceland’s active volcano

Human embryo research and ethics; sperm whale social learning; Antikythera mechanism

China's green growth plan

Blue carbon; inside Little Foot's skull; reading locked letters

Good COP Bad COP, Shotgun Lead Persistence, and Featherdown Adaptation

Nasa's Perseverance - will it pay off? And spotting likely hosts for future pandemics.

Meeting Mars, Melting Ice, Ozone on the Mend Again, and A Sea Cacophany

Putting a number on biodiversity

Next Gen Covid Vaccines; Man's Oldest Bestest Friend; Bilingual Brain Development

Vaccine Hesitancy and Ethnicity; The Joy of catnip; Lake Heatwaves

UK Science post Brexit; GMOs vs Gene Editing regulation; Identical Twins That Aren't Indentical

Vaccine Dosing and Biodiversity Soundscape Monitoring

Brian Cox and Alice Roberts on a decade of extraordinary science

Space Rocks, Aquatic Dinosaurs and Global Temperatures; 2020 science reviewed

Covid mutation; On the facial expression of emotions; A mystery object

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