BBC Inside Science

By BBC Radio 4

Technology

What's BBC Inside Science about?

A weekly programme that illuminates the mysteries and challenges the controversies behind the science that's changing our world.

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Wild Britain

05.31.2023

In 2020, the UK government committed to protecting at least 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. Step seven years into the future with Gaia. The UK has achieved its biodiversity goal, but what does wild Britain look ...

BBC Inside Science episodes:

05.31.2023 Wild Britain In 2020, the UK government committed to protecting at least 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. Step seven years into the future with Gaia. The UK has achieved its biodiversity goal, but what does wild Britain look ...
05.24.2023 70th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure James Watson and Francis Crick, who detailed the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, are perhaps two of the most iconic scientists of the 20th Century. Yet the story of how they made their incredible discovery is perhaps equally famous, ...
05.17.2023 Rocket Launch Pollution Whilst the globe struggles to shift to green sustainable energy sources, one industry has its sights set solely on the stars. Space X just launched the biggest rocket the world’s ever seen, and it won’t be their last even if ...
05.11.2023 Negotiation When was the last time you had to use your negotiating skills? Did you walk away satisfied? This week junior doctors are half way through their 4 day walkout, with senior NHS figures suggesting the cancellation of between 250,000 and ...
05.04.2023 Recycling In this special edition of Inside Science, Vic Gill prepares to rummage through our rubbish, to peek behind the curtain of the UK's recycling habits and see how well prepared we are as a nation to further our efforts of ...
04.27.2023 Net Zero Far away and not enough, those are criticisms of the government’s latest net zero initiative – a plan to reduce emissions . We ask Jim Watson Professor of Energy Policy and Director of the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources for ...
04.20.2023 Covid – missing link found? Data collated from swab samples taken in Wuhan’s market in the early days of the Covid pandemic suggest animals sold in the market were carrying the virus at the time. It’s the strongest evidence yet for an intermediate species – ...
04.13.2023 Sweet Science Researchers from London’s Francis Crick Institute have found a type of artificial sweetener is able to dampen down immune system responses - at least in mice. Karen Vousden and Fabio Zani tell us about the implications. And Ronan McCarthy from ...
04.06.2023 Science superpower? The government has launched a new 10-point plan designed, it said to “cement the UK’s place as a global science and technology superpower”. We speak with Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, for his take on the ...
03.30.2023 Covid leaks and conspiracies Science writer Philip Ball has followed the relationship between government and its scientific advisors throughout the pandemic. He discusses the role of scientific advisors in the light of conflicting information following the leak of a number of former Health Minister ...
03.23.2023 Antarctic Ice Special Sea ice coverage hit a recording-breaking low in the Antarctic this week, but what does this mean for the rest of the world? Why is the region so difficult to predict? And what could further changes in climate mean for ...
03.16.2023 Gene Editing Ethics, Killer Whale Mummy's Boys and Ancient Hippo Butchery Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui caused international outrage when in 2018 when he used the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR Cas-9 to edit the genomes of two human embryos. That experiment, described by the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology described ...
03.09.2023 Abundant energy This week’s programme is a thought experiment: What would the world be like if energy became superabundant and very cheap? Energy is vital for every aspect of our society, and the energy cost of extraction, processing, manufacture and transport is ...
03.02.2023 Exploring the New Environmental Improvement Plan Defra, the department for Environment, food and Rural affairs, released its latest Environmental Improvement plan this week. Many environmental groups have criticised the plan for having vague commitments, and landowners are asking where the money is going to come from ...
02.23.2023 Vegetarian school dinners What if all schools offered only plant-based options for 3 out of 5 lunches a week? Would that be enough to trigger a broader societal shift to eating less meat, and allow us to meet our sustainability commitments? We’re not ...
02.16.2023 Towards Net Zero Former Energy Minister Chris Skidmore’s report into Net Zero calls for ambitious policies to drive energy transition, framing it as a huge economic opportunity to drive national growth. Using and conserving energy in the home is one theme the report ...
02.09.2023 Chatbot plagiarism ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an online conversational chatbot, launched by OpenAI in November 2022. To date it remains an online sensation, allowing users to generate poems, essays, code and images in seconds. But fear bubbles in academic circles that ...
02.02.2023 The UK's first satellite launch The UK's first satellite launch faced several delays in 2022, but Virgin Orbit's Cosmic Girl is prepped for imminent take off. BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos has been following the activity in Newquay and, alongside Melissa Thorpe head of Spaceport ...
01.26.2023 Game changers Nations are racing to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 in an attempt to halt biodiversity loss, but one novel approach may be able to safeguard species under threat of imminent extinction. Vic visited Nature’s Safe in May, a ...
01.19.2023 A Scientifically Superior Christmas Dinner How many Scientists does it take to cook Christmas dinner? Marnie seeks help from a food scientist, a geneticist, a doctor and a botanist to create the perfect festive feast.
01.12.2023 Cancer cure, Strep A research and hopes for biodiversity Base editing is a technique for substituting the building blocks of DNA. It has only been around for a few years, so its use to apparently cure cancer was all the more remarkable, as BBC Health Correspondent James Gallagher tells ...
01.05.2023 Biodiversity The UN Convention on Biological Diversity summit, currently taking place in Montreal Canada, intends to develop ways of reducing the global loss of biological diversity by drawing up a series of international commitments to help humanity to live more harmoniously ...
12.29.2022 Killer smog For a week at the beginning of December 1952, London was under a blanket of deadly smog. As a result, the Clean Air Act came into force a few years later banning smoky sulphurous fuels. However air pollution researchers are ...
12.22.2022 Science funding The UK has the opportunity to access European science funding. However disagreements over the Northern Ireland protocol are preventing the UK from joining the multi billion pound Horizon Europe project which funds scientific partnerships between European institutions. BBC Science correspondent ...
12.15.2022 Climate science and politics As the COP27 environment summit draws to a close we look at some of the issues still to be resolved. BBC Environment correspondents Victoria Gill and Georgina Rannard join us from the meeting. And we head to the houses of ...
12.08.2022 COP27 One key issue on the agenda at the COP27 environment summit in Egypt is how to fund damage from the effects of man made climate change. Often the effects of climate change are felt the strongest in countries least responsible ...
12.01.2022 Monkeypox A new study published in the British Medical Journal suggests monkey pox might be passed from person to person before symptoms show. Esther Freeman, Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School and Director of Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts ...
11.24.2022 Turtle Voices, a Pandemic Retrospective and a Nose-Picking Primate New recordings featuring the voices of 53 species of turtle, caecilian and tuatara previously thought to be silent have illuminated the evolutionary origins of vocal communication. Gabriel Jorgevich-Cohen a PhD student at the University of Zurich has travelled the world ...
11.17.2022 The BBC at 100 Recorded in front of an audience at Bradford’s National Museum of Science and Media, we’re delving into the next 100 years of broadcasting, examining the science and technology behind what we’ll watch and listen to. And what the seismic technological ...
11.10.2022 Avian flu Avian or bird flu is normally seasonal, disappearing as migratory birds leave for winter. However a new strain which seems to spread more easily between wild birds and into poultry has led to the deaths of far more birds than ...
11.03.2022 Coronavirus - new variants The virus which causes Covid 19 is continuing to evolve, but into several different closely related strains rather than more new variants such as Delta and Omicron. Ravi Gupta, Professor of Clinical Microbiology at Cambridge university gives us his assessment ...
10.27.2022 Fracking Science The government has lifted a moratorium on fracking imposed in 2019 following a series of small earthquakes caused by exploratory drilling. The British Geological Survey was asked to investigate, we speak to two of the authors of their new report ...
10.20.2022 Science collaborations – with Russia The sub Arctic boreal forests stretch across the northern hemisphere. They represent a huge carbon sink , but are also vulnerable to climate change. Most of the forest is in Russia and most of what we know about its current ...
10.13.2022 Is the James Webb Space Telescope too good? The James Webb Space Telescope continues to beam exciting data back to earth from exoplanet systems, galaxies and stars further away than we’ve ever seen before. But what happens to that data when it reaches us? We spoke to Julien ...
10.06.2022 Ancient Amputation The discovery of a body missing a foot in a thirty one thousand year old grave suggests our ancient ancestors may have been capable of performing complex surgery. The foot seems to have been cleanly amputated, and the patient survived ...
09.29.2022 Dealing with drought As parts of England enter drought conditions we ask what are the drivers for drought and what can we do about it? With Dr Jess Neumann, Hydrologist at Reading University, Aidan McGivern meteorologist at the Met Office and Professor Richard ...
09.22.2022 Return of the ozone hole Research on recent extreme fire events shows they have a direct effect on the size of the seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica. Climate scientist Jim Haywood is concerned more frequent and extreme fires predicted by climate models could negate all ...
09.15.2022 A Possible Sequel to the Dinosaur Armageddon Did the Chicxulub meteor that did for the dinosaurs have a smaller companion? Dr Uisdean Nicholson and Professor Sean Gulick talk to Vic Gill about the newly discovered Nadir Crater. Located on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s raising ...
09.08.2022 Amplified Arctic Amplification and Microclot Clues to Post-Viral Disease Professor Anna Hogg joins us on today’s programme for some polar explorations, we speak to one team recalculating arctic warming estimates and another who are storm chasing in Svalbard. Antii Lipponen from the Finnish Meterological Institute talks us through how ...
09.01.2022 Shaun The Sheep Jumps Over The Moon, Bronze Age Kissing and PPE Rubbish ESA announce that Shaun The Sheep will fly around the moon this month aboard Artemis-1 mission. Philippe Deloo tells Gaia Vince what's in store for the woolly astronaut this month. Philippe is the team lead on the European Service Module, ...
08.25.2022 Heatwave: the consequences The severity of last week's heatwave is changing the narrative. Gaia Vince talks to Simon Evans, deputy editor of the climate publication Carbon Brief, who has been following the media coverage of this heatwave, and Lorraine Whitmarsh, professor of environmental ...
08.18.2022 Multiverses, melting glaciers and what you can tell from the noise of someone peeing The Multiverse Laura Mersini-Houghton is an internationally renowned cosmologist and theoretical physicist and one of the world's leading experts on the multiverse and the origins of the universe. She talks to Gaia Vince about finding evidence that supports her multiverse ...
08.11.2022 Deep Space and the Deep Sea - 40 years of the International Whaling Moratorium. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in business - what further treasures will it find? Also, the origins of the International Moratorium on Whaling, 40 years old this month. This week NASA invited President Joe Biden to help them ...
08.04.2022 Robotic Thumbs, Mending Bones with Magnets, and the State of Science this Summer Gaia Vince takes you for a mosey around his year's Summer Science Exhibition, held by London's Royal Society. Along the way, PRS Sir Adrian Smith talks of reforming A-Levels and a sorry international science collaboration situation as many european research ...
07.28.2022 10 Years of the Higgs Boson In 1964 a theoretical physicist called Peter Higgs suggested a mechanism via which elementary particles of a new theoretical scheme could obtain mass. It had been a thorny mathematical stinker in the framework that today we now call the standard ...
07.21.2022 Engineering Around Mercury, Science Festivals, and The Rise of The Mammals How hard is it to get to Mercury and why are we going? Also, do science festivals work? And why did mammals survive when dinosaurs died? Marnie Chesterton and guests dissect. As this programme went out, scientists and engineers eagerly ...
07.14.2022 Inside Sentience Marnie Chesterton and guests mull over the saga of an AI engineer who believes his chatbot is sentient. Also, climate scientists propose a major leap in earth system modelling, that might cost £250m a year but would bring our predictive ...
07.07.2022 Miscounting Carbon, EU Funding Stalemate, and How to Make a Royal Hologram This week on inside science Marnie Chesterton is looking at how companies measure and account for their use of renewable energy, how politics is impacting science funding in the UK and the technology behind the Queen’s holographic stand in at ...
06.30.2022 A Reign of Science Society itself and the ways we live have been transformed in 70 years of science. Marnie Chesterton, Andrea Sella, and Gemma Milne take a tour of the archive to evaluate some of the biggest hits on Inside Science's jubilee list. ...
06.23.2022 Monkeypox, Pompeii aDNA, and Elephant Mourning Videos Why are non-African monkeypox cases causing concern? Also, the first complete human genome from a Pompeiian cadaver, and how YouTube is aiding animal behaviourists. As cases of monkeypox appear strangely dispersed around Europe and elsewhere in the world outside of ...

Older episodes

BBC Inside Science

What's BBC Inside Science about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

BBC Inside Science episodes:

Wild Britain

70th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure

Rocket Launch Pollution

Negotiation

Recycling

Net Zero

Covid – missing link found?

Sweet Science

Science superpower?

Covid leaks and conspiracies

Antarctic Ice Special

Gene Editing Ethics, Killer Whale Mummy's Boys and Ancient Hippo Butchery

Abundant energy

Exploring the New Environmental Improvement Plan

Vegetarian school dinners

Towards Net Zero

Chatbot plagiarism

The UK's first satellite launch

Game changers

A Scientifically Superior Christmas Dinner

Cancer cure, Strep A research and hopes for biodiversity

Biodiversity

Killer smog

Science funding

Climate science and politics

COP27

Monkeypox

Turtle Voices, a Pandemic Retrospective and a Nose-Picking Primate

The BBC at 100

Avian flu

Coronavirus - new variants

Fracking Science

Science collaborations – with Russia

Is the James Webb Space Telescope too good?

Ancient Amputation

Dealing with drought

Return of the ozone hole

A Possible Sequel to the Dinosaur Armageddon

Amplified Arctic Amplification and Microclot Clues to Post-Viral Disease

Shaun The Sheep Jumps Over The Moon, Bronze Age Kissing and PPE Rubbish

Heatwave: the consequences

Multiverses, melting glaciers and what you can tell from the noise of someone peeing

Deep Space and the Deep Sea - 40 years of the International Whaling Moratorium.

Robotic Thumbs, Mending Bones with Magnets, and the State of Science this Summer

10 Years of the Higgs Boson

Engineering Around Mercury, Science Festivals, and The Rise of The Mammals

Inside Sentience

Miscounting Carbon, EU Funding Stalemate, and How to Make a Royal Hologram

A Reign of Science

Monkeypox, Pompeii aDNA, and Elephant Mourning Videos