BBC Inside Science

By BBC Radio 4

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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COVID reinfections, Susanna...

10.22.2020

If you contracted COVID will you then be protected from further infections and illness from SARS-CoV-2 in the future? We’re starting to hear about cases of people being infected by the novel coronavirus for a second time. A handful of ...

BBC Inside Science episodes:

10.22.2020 COVID reinfections, Susannah Cahalan questions psychiatry and sense of smell and COVID If you contracted COVID will you then be protected from further infections and illness from SARS-CoV-2 in the future? We’re starting to hear about cases of people being infected by the novel coronavirus for a second time. A handful of ...
10.15.2020 Test and trace - how the UK compares to the rest of the world; Linda Scott's book The Double X Economy From the very start of the COVID pandemic, test and trace has been the mantra. But here in the UK it was started, then abandoned as the number of cases rose too high to manage. It’s now been reintroduced and ...
10.08.2020 08/10/2020 Claudia Hammond looks at the neuroscience behind our sense of touch. Why does a gentle touch from a loved one make us feel good? This is a question that neuroscientists have been exploring since the late 1990's, following the discovery ...
10.01.2020 Brian May's Cosmic Clouds 3-D; How fish move between waterbodies and Jim Al-Khalili's take on physics There are few images as awe-inspiring as those of the deep cosmos. Photos of the stars, galaxies, constellations and cosmic nebulae are difficult to improve on, but a new book might have done just that, by making them stereoscopic. David ...
09.24.2020 Royal Society Science Book Prize - Gaia Vince; Biodiversity loss and Science Museum mystery object The Royal Society’s Insight Investment Science Book Prize’s shortlist has just been announced. Over the next few weeks, Marnie and Adam will be chatting to the six authors in line for the prestigious prize. They’ll be getting a guided tour ...
09.17.2020 COVID-19 in Winter, Acoustics of Stonehenge and Dog years As it starts to get colder and we crank up the central heating in our homes, what will the effect be on the SARs-CoV-2 virus? As a respiratory virus like the common cold and influenza, will the coronavirus have a ...
09.10.2020 Coronavirus: The types of vaccine; How the UK is scaling up vaccine production Vaccination has eradicated smallpox, a disease that decimated populations through the 20th century. Polio is almost gone too, and measles is no longer the pervasive childhood threat it once was. It’s clear that vaccination is our best tool to halt ...
09.03.2020 Bird and dinosaur skull evolution; the wonders of yeast and Science Museum mystery object Skulls give researchers a great deal of insight into how an animal might have evolved, and skulls can be sensibly compared between species and groups of animals. The 10,000 species of bird around the world are what’s left of an ...
08.27.2020 What does the science say about the COVID risks of schools reopening? Dolphin ear autopsy Over the next couple of weeks almost all children in the UK will be back to school. But the pandemic hasn’t ended, and we are far from having a complete understanding of how this virus works, including how it is ...
08.20.2020 Smart bricks, The Royal Academy of Engineering awards for pandemic engineering solutions and detecting SARS-Cov-2 in sewage Red clay bricks are among the most ubiquitous building materials worldwide. Julio D'Arcy, a chemist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, describes to Adam Rutherford how he and his team have turned ordinary house bricks into energy storage units ...
08.13.2020 Land use and zoonoses, California's earthquake risk and the Tuatara genome COVID19 is a chilling reminder of how pathogens from animals can jump into humans. But it’s not the first time. SARS, Ebola, West Nile virus and bubonic plague are all serious infectious diseases that sat in a host species before ...
08.06.2020 How sperm swim, the theory of soil & the Big Compost Experiment update Adam reveals new research which overturns received wisdom about how sperm swim. More than three centuries after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek peered down his early microscope to observe human sperm or ‘animalcules’ swimming with a ‘snakelike movement, like eels in water’, ...
07.30.2020 Science Museum mystery objects; home security camera security and Rosalind Franklin at 100 The Science Museum Group looks after over 7.3 million items. As with most museums, the objects you see on display when you visit are only the tip of the iceberg of the entire collection. Up until now, many of the ...
07.23.2020 Pre-prints over peer review during the COVID pandemic and roads and birds A pre-print is a way for scientists to get their work out quickly for other scientists to comment on and debate. But pre-prints are not peer reviewed; they have not undergone the scrutiny of reviewers and journal editors. They're generally ...
07.16.2020 Science Fraud & Bias, Immunity to COVID-19 Science is all about self-reflection. Scientists constantly check themselves, share their work, and check each other’s data. But how robust is the science upon which civilisation is built, the science which has mapped genomes, cured diseases, split atoms and sent ...
07.09.2020 Satellite navigation in the UK; the science of the World Wide Web and Neolithic genomics Is the UK losing its way when it comes to satellite navigation? There's GPS from the US, but other countries and regions, including Russia, China, India and Japan, either have, or are building, satellite navigation systems of their own. The ...
07.02.2020 Preventing pandemics, invading alien species, blood types & COVID-19. As we’re beginning to understand more about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, we’re hopefully starting to get some clues on how to deal with the next viral pandemics, and even look at ways of stopping them from happening. To ...
06.25.2020 The Human Genome Project's 20th Anniversary Adam Rutherford is back to celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the most ambitious and revolutionary scientific endeavours of all time - the Human Genome Project. Its scope and scale was breath-taking, set up to read every one of ...
06.18.2020 Coronavirus conspiracy, Listeners' mask questions, Solar Orbiter gets close to the Sun Throughout the pandemic, we've seen an explosion in information about the science of the virus, SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it causes, COVID-19. An article online, or a text forwarded, could be true and sounds about right, but how do you ...
06.11.2020 Engineering out of lockdown and should we castrate male dogs? As the UK gradually begins to ease out of lockdown, Marnie explores how engineers are hoping to reduce the spread of Covid-19. We’ve learned how infected people exhale droplets and aerosols, containing the virus, and how we can then either ...
06.04.2020 Back to School and Covid-19 and Ordnance Survey and the pandemic As the lockdown eases and some children, in preschool and primary years, start heading back to school, what impact will this have on the pandemic, how will we know and is there anything we can do about it? Marnie Chesterton ...
05.28.2020 Testing & Tracing the coronavirus, and the traces our movements leave behind Inside Science this week is all about our information - the stuff we volunteer and the traces our everyday movements leave behind. With the launch of NHS Test and Trace across England, if you start to feel unwell with suspected ...
05.21.2020 Coronavirus-free science, the impact of lockdown on climate change and the odds of both life and intelligent life existing. In response to listeners who have expressed coronavirus fatigue in recent weeks, Marnie Chesterton brings us up to date on some of the best and brightest breaking science we might have missed, with BBC’s Non-Covid-19 Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos. Inching ...
05.14.2020 Coronavirus R number, genome study of Covid-19 survivors and using aircraft messages to assess aviation R seems to have found its way into the newspapers and on Radio 4 as if it’s a word, or a letter, that we should all be familiar with and understand. As part of the government’s briefing on Sunday, it ...
05.07.2020 Should the public wear face masks? Did SARS-Cov-2 escape from a laboratory in Wuhan? Advice about whether the public should wear face masks, to protect against infection by the coronavirus, differs around the world. In Europe, policy recommendations are mostly geared towards homemade masks. As this country waits to find out how we’ll venture ...
04.30.2020 Testing for immunity to COVID-19 and Citizen science on BBC Radio past and present This week, the Government’s target to be testing 100,000 a day for COVID-19 looks like it won’t be met. But we’ve heard about many people who experienced the virus mildly, or who’ve tested positive with no symptoms at all. If ...
04.23.2020 Understanding Covid-19 death rates; Contact tracing apps; Whale sharks and atomic bombs Every death is a tragedy for grief-stricken families, but every set of statistics is an opportunity to understand the virus and the disease Covid-19 a bit more. In fact gathering these data, quickly and accurately, is a priority at the ...
04.16.2020 Lockdown lessons for climate change and the carbon neutral Cumbrian coal mine While the world is dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, those who are concerned about the environment are saying that an arguably bigger crisis is being side-lined. Climate change, or climate breakdown, is still happening. Just like the Covid-19 pandemic, it ...
04.09.2020 Testing for asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, Human Cell Atlas, and invasive parakeets You can’t build up a picture of Covid-19’s spread throughout the UK without testing those who might have it and those who might have already had it. Britain currently is only testing people who are hospitalised, some healthcare workers and ...
04.02.2020 Coronavirus: Models & being ‘led by the science’; Mars500 isolation tips; Kids’ science - singing glasses Marnie Chesterton reveals how important the models and graphs are in informing government strategies for the Covid-19 pandemic. Christl Donnelly, Professor of Statistical Epidemiology at Imperial College London and Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford, and Dr ...
03.26.2020 Coronavirus - Lockdown efficacy; viral testing; surface survival; dog walking safety Last week, we promised we’d tackle your coronavirus and associated Covid 19 questions and you came up trumps. So this week we’re be talking about the latest from the lockdown, why there are bottlenecks in the testing system, how long ...
03.19.2020 TB vaccination to replace culling in badgers; Neil Shubin on the wonders of evolution The government have announced that the controversial cull of badgers across England will begin to be phased out in the next few years. It will be replaced by vaccinating badgers for bovine TB. The cull is intended to cut tuberculosis ...
03.12.2020 Biology of the new coronavirus Adam Rutherford explores what makes the new coronavirus so effective at making us ill. Jonathan Ball, Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, explains the structure of the virus and how it gets into our lungs. Evolutionary virologist at Cambridge University, ...
03.05.2020 Banning lead shot for hunting; UK Fireball Network and Extremely thin gold We have known for centuries about the toxic properties of lead, and we have known since at least 1876 that birds die of lead poisoning when they eat lead gunshot (which they do, thinking its grit). To address this, in ...
02.27.2020 The Big Compost Experiment; Using AI to screen for new antibiotics; Science of slapstick Composters - we need you! Or rather materials scientists at UCL, Mark Miodownik and Danielle Purkiss, need you to take part in their Big Compost Experiment. Launched back in November, the team asked members of the public to fill in ...
02.20.2020 Coronavirus questions; HMS Challenger and ocean acidification; Sean Carroll's quantum world Adam Rutherford is joined by Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, Jonathan Ball, to help answer some of your questions on the latest coronavirus outbreak. Will it become endemic, and once infected and recovered how long are we resistant to ...
02.13.2020 Ordnance Survey - Britain's 220-year-old tech company; Launching synthetic voices and personality test For the past 220 years, Ordnance Survey have been mapping Great Britain with extraordinary accuracy. But as Gareth discovers when he visits their HQ in Southampton, GB's master map is not a static printed document. It's a 2 petabyte database ...
02.06.2020 Solar Orbiter launch; Mutational signatures in cancer; paleo-oncology The latest space mission to the Sun is due to launch on Sunday. SolO, the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, will loop around our star in an elliptical orbit, sling-shotting around Venus. Professor Richard Harrison at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory ...
01.30.2020 Coronavirus update, Typhoid Mary and 200th anniversary of the first sighting of Antarctica With the recent coronavirus outbreak spreading around the world, and concerns about people being infectious before they exhibit any symptoms. Professor of Virology at Nottingham University Jonathan Ball explains infection rates, quarantines and why he's worried about it spreading to ...
01.23.2020 Coronavirus outbreak in China; Genetic diseases in Amish communities and getting an Egyptian mummy to speak With news reports moving as quickly as the virus may be spreading, the latest coronavirus outbreak which is thought to have started in Wuhan in central China is fast becoming a global health concern. Adam Rutherford speaks to BBC Inside ...
01.16.2020 Reproducibility crisis in science; Aeolus wind-measuring satellite; electric cars Science is built upon the idea that results can be verified by others. Scientists do their experiments and write up their methods and results and submit them to a journal that sends them to other scientists, who check them and ...
01.09.2020 Australian bush fires; Veganuary and LIGO 2019 was the hottest and driest year on record in Australia. The Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode weather systems, plus existing drought conditions, all primed the continent for the horrific fire season currently raging in the east ...
01.02.2020 The hidden history in our DNA - Part 2 - Travel and Culture Our genomes are more than just an instruction manual for our bodies. They are maps, diaries, history books and medical records of our and our ancestor's lives...if you know how to read them. In the second part of BBC Inside ...
12.26.2019 The hidden history in our DNA - Part 1 - Sex and Disease Our genomes are more than just an instruction manual for our bodies. They are maps, diaries, history books and medical records of our and our ancestors' lives.....if you know how to read them. In this programme and the next Adam ...
12.19.2019 Ten years of Zooniverse; what happened to volcano Anak Krakatau and visualising maths Adam Rutherford talks to Chris Lintott about the citizen science platform he set up ten years ago. Zooniverse is a place where the public can help scientists analyse huge swathes of data. Projects such as spotting distant galaxies, counting penguins ...
12.12.2019 Earliest hunting scene cave painting; animal domestication syndrome A cave painting in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has been dated and is at least 43,900 years old. The mural portrays a group of part-human, part-animal figures (called therianthropes), hunting large mammals with spears and ropes. It is thought to be the ...
12.05.2019 Global Carbon Emissions; Parker Solar Probe and simulating swaying buildings Reports from the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 25) in Madrid are saying that global warming is increasing and that we're not doing enough, fast enough, to change things. The World Meteorological Organisation's provisional State of the Climate 2019 report ...
11.28.2019 What's the problem with palm oil and should we be supporting sustainably grown oil? Virtual reality skin Palm oil is now such a dirty word for household products and processed food, that it often hides behind a list of dozens of pseudonyms (from the ubiquitous sodium laureth sulphate to the slightly more obvious palm kernel oil, to ...
11.21.2019 Noise pollution and wildlife; No till farming; Cornwall's geothermal heat The effects of human-made noise on the natural world has been surprisingly little studied. Hanjoerg Kunc at Queen's University in Belfast has collected all experimental data on the effects of anthropogenic noise on wild animals and found it to be ...
11.14.2019 Soils and floods, Air pollution and ultra-low emission zones, detecting the drug Spice The UK's soils are the first line of defence against flooding, but the condition of the soil is vital to how well it can soak up and slowly release rainwater. Jane Rickson, Professor of soil erosion and conservation at Cranfield ...

Older episodes

BBC Inside Science

What's BBC Inside Science about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

BBC Inside Science episodes:

COVID reinfections, Susannah Cahalan questions psychiatry and sense of smell and COVID

Test and trace - how the UK compares to the rest of the world; Linda Scott's book The Double X Economy

08/10/2020

Brian May's Cosmic Clouds 3-D; How fish move between waterbodies and Jim Al-Khalili's take on physics

Royal Society Science Book Prize - Gaia Vince; Biodiversity loss and Science Museum mystery object

COVID-19 in Winter, Acoustics of Stonehenge and Dog years

Coronavirus: The types of vaccine; How the UK is scaling up vaccine production

Bird and dinosaur skull evolution; the wonders of yeast and Science Museum mystery object

What does the science say about the COVID risks of schools reopening? Dolphin ear autopsy

Smart bricks, The Royal Academy of Engineering awards for pandemic engineering solutions and detecting SARS-Cov-2 in sewage

Land use and zoonoses, California's earthquake risk and the Tuatara genome

How sperm swim, the theory of soil & the Big Compost Experiment update

Science Museum mystery objects; home security camera security and Rosalind Franklin at 100

Pre-prints over peer review during the COVID pandemic and roads and birds

Science Fraud & Bias, Immunity to COVID-19

Satellite navigation in the UK; the science of the World Wide Web and Neolithic genomics

Preventing pandemics, invading alien species, blood types & COVID-19.

The Human Genome Project's 20th Anniversary

Coronavirus conspiracy, Listeners' mask questions, Solar Orbiter gets close to the Sun

Engineering out of lockdown and should we castrate male dogs?

Back to School and Covid-19 and Ordnance Survey and the pandemic

Testing & Tracing the coronavirus, and the traces our movements leave behind

Coronavirus-free science, the impact of lockdown on climate change and the odds of both life and intelligent life existing.

Coronavirus R number, genome study of Covid-19 survivors and using aircraft messages to assess aviation

Should the public wear face masks? Did SARS-Cov-2 escape from a laboratory in Wuhan?

Testing for immunity to COVID-19 and Citizen science on BBC Radio past and present

Understanding Covid-19 death rates; Contact tracing apps; Whale sharks and atomic bombs

Lockdown lessons for climate change and the carbon neutral Cumbrian coal mine

Testing for asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, Human Cell Atlas, and invasive parakeets

Coronavirus: Models & being ‘led by the science’; Mars500 isolation tips; Kids’ science - singing glasses

Coronavirus - Lockdown efficacy; viral testing; surface survival; dog walking safety

TB vaccination to replace culling in badgers; Neil Shubin on the wonders of evolution

Biology of the new coronavirus

Banning lead shot for hunting; UK Fireball Network and Extremely thin gold

The Big Compost Experiment; Using AI to screen for new antibiotics; Science of slapstick

Coronavirus questions; HMS Challenger and ocean acidification; Sean Carroll's quantum world

Ordnance Survey - Britain's 220-year-old tech company; Launching synthetic voices and personality test

Solar Orbiter launch; Mutational signatures in cancer; paleo-oncology

Coronavirus update, Typhoid Mary and 200th anniversary of the first sighting of Antarctica

Coronavirus outbreak in China; Genetic diseases in Amish communities and getting an Egyptian mummy to speak

Reproducibility crisis in science; Aeolus wind-measuring satellite; electric cars

Australian bush fires; Veganuary and LIGO

The hidden history in our DNA - Part 2 - Travel and Culture

The hidden history in our DNA - Part 1 - Sex and Disease

Ten years of Zooniverse; what happened to volcano Anak Krakatau and visualising maths

Earliest hunting scene cave painting; animal domestication syndrome

Global Carbon Emissions; Parker Solar Probe and simulating swaying buildings

What's the problem with palm oil and should we be supporting sustainably grown oil? Virtual reality skin

Noise pollution and wildlife; No till farming; Cornwall's geothermal heat

Soils and floods, Air pollution and ultra-low emission zones, detecting the drug Spice

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