BBC Inside Science

By BBC Radio 4

Science & Medicine

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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Net-Zero carbon target, Sci...

06.13.2019

Net-Zero Carbon Target The UK is set to become the first member of the G7 industrialised nations group to legislate for net-zero emissions after Theresa May’s announcement this week. The proposed legislation would commit the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to ...

BBC Inside Science episodes:

06.13.2019 Net-Zero carbon target, Science Policy Under Thatcher, Screen time measures Net-Zero Carbon Target The UK is set to become the first member of the G7 industrialised nations group to legislate for net-zero emissions after Theresa May’s announcement this week. The proposed legislation would commit the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to ...
06.06.2019 CCR5 Mutation Effects, The Surrey Earthquake Swarm, Animal Emotions Some people have a genetic mutation in a gene called CCR5 that seems to bestow immunity to a form of HIV. This is the mutation which controversial Chinese scientist Jianqui He tried to bestow upon two baby girls last year ...
05.30.2019 How maths underpins science Adam Rutherford and guests at the Hay Festival discuss how maths underwrites all branches of science, and is at the foundation of the modern world. His guests are the following. Professor Steve Strogatz, of Cornell University, the author of a ...
05.23.2019 New CFC emissions, Cannabis and the Environment, The Noisy Cocktail Party, Automated Face Recognition New CFC emissions Researchers say that they have pinpointed the major sources of a mysterious recent rise in a dangerous, ozone-destroying chemical. CFC-11 was primarily used for home insulation but global production was due to be phased out in 2010. ...
05.16.2019 Hubble Not-So Constant, Synthetic E. Coli, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt The Hubble Constant The Hubble constant is the current expansion rate of the universe but it seems to have changed over time. Hiranya Peiris, Professor of Astrophysics from University College London and Adam Riess, Professor of Physics and Astronomy from ...
05.09.2019 Forensic science provision, optimal garden watering strategy, and a mystery knee bone A damning House of Lords' report into the provision of forensic science in England and Wales makes for uncomfortable reading for some but is broadly welcomed by those in the field. Prof. Niamh Nic Daeid, one of many who gave ...
05.02.2019 Sex, gender and sport - the Caster Semenya case and the latest Denisovan discovery In 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) introduced new eligibility regulations for female athletes with differences in sex development (DSDs). These regulations are based on the contention that women with high levels of endogenous testosterone and androgen sensitivity ...
04.25.2019 Thought-to-speech machine, City Nature Challenge, Science of Storytelling Patients who suffer neurological impairments preventing them from speaking potentially face a severely limited existence. Being able to express yourself in real time is a large part of our identity. In the journal Nature this week, scientists from the University ...
04.18.2019 Notre-Dame fire, Reviving pig brains, ExoMars, Evolution of faces The horror of the blazing Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris has been slightly quenched by the fact that so much of the French landmark has been saved. But what was it about the structure of the roof, with some the beams ...
04.11.2019 Visualising a black hole, Homo luzonensis, Two ways to overcome antimicrobial resistance "We have now seen the unseeable" according to scientists who are part of the Event Horizon Telescope group. The international team has released a picture of the first black hole. Data gathered from an array of over 8 radio telescopes ...
04.04.2019 Cretaceous catastrophe fossilised, LIGO and Virgo, Corals, Forensic shoeprint database About 66 million years ago an asteroid at least 6 miles wide crashed into the Earth, in the shallow sea that is now the Yucatan Peninsular in Mexico. It gouged the Chicxulub crater 18 miles deep; threw 25 trillion tonnes ...
03.28.2019 UK pollinating insect numbers, Tracking whales using barnacles, Sleep signals One of the longest running insect pollinator surveys in the world, shows that a few generalist pollinators are on the increase, whereas specialist insects are declining. Using data collected by volunteers across Great Britain to map the spatial loss of ...
03.21.2019 Where next World Wide Web? Space rocks and worms 30 years ago Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as a way to let physicists share their papers and data on a distributed network. It's changed a lot since then and not all for the better. Dominant technology companies ...
03.14.2019 Rules and ethics of genome editing, Gender, sex and sport, Hog roasts at Stonehenge When the news broke last December that Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui had successfully edited the genomes of twin girls using the technique known as CRISPR-Cas9, scientists and the public were rightly outraged that such a procedure had taken place. Jiankui ...
03.07.2019 A cure for HIV? Sleepy flies, Secrets of the Fukushima disaster, Science fact checking An HIV-1 sufferer, who had developed aggressive cancer, and underwent a revolutionary stem cell transplant, has been declared HIV resistant. It's been 18 months since the 'London patient' underwent a stem cell transplant of donated HIV resistant cells. This has ...
02.28.2019 Falling carbon and rising methane; Unsung heroes at the Crick Efforts to cut emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and tackle climate change in many developed economies are beginning to pay off, according to research led by Corinne Le Quere at the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia. The ...
02.21.2019 Mars - rovers v humans? Forests and carbon, Ethiopian bush crow Nasa have called time on the 14 year mission with the Mars Opportunity rover. Curiosity is still there. But what's next for our exploration of the Red planet? Adam asks Senior Strategist in Space Systems at Airbus, Liz Seward and ...
02.14.2019 Insect decline, Gut microbiome, Geomagnetic switching A very strongly worded, meta-review paper (looking at 73 historical reports from around the world published over the past 13 years) has just been published looking at the fate of insects around the world. The researchers have collated other people’s ...
02.07.2019 Sea Level Rise, Equine Flu, Generator Bricks, Iberian Genes In 2016 some scientists suggested that with climate change so much ice in Antarctica could melt that the global sea level could rise up to a metre. There would be an "ice apocalypse". Now another group has refined the models ...
01.31.2019 Sprinting Neanderthals, Geodynamo, Spreading Sneezes and Dying Hares Many physical features of Neanderthals might not be for cold climate adaptation as previously thought. They may be for types of locomotion. Which, according to paleo-ecologist, John Stewart at Bournemouth University, makes the long thigh to calf ratios more likely ...
01.04.2019 Ultima Thule, Dry January, Periodic Table 2019 means the opportunity to explore the most distant object yet encountered in our solar system – the brilliantly named Ultima Thule as Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft hit the headlines this week when it flew past an object 4 billion ...
11.29.2018 Gene-edited twins, Placenta organoids in a dish, When the last leaves drop Claims by a Chinese scientist that he has gene-edited human embryos, transplanted them producing genetically edited twins, who will pass on these changes to their offspring, has the scientific community outraged. The work, which was carried out in secret, has ...
11.22.2018 Mars InSight mission, Detecting dark matter, Redefining the kilogram, Bovine TB The Government's strategy to eradicate TB in cattle is a contentious topic. The disease is extremely complicated and lots of people have different ideas on how to manage it. Professor of Zoonotic and Emerging Disease at the University of Nottingham, ...
11.15.2018 Bovine TB and badger culling, Shrimp hoover CSI, Shark-skin and Turing The Bovine TB Strategy Review has just been released. It contains a review of the science and offers advice and guidance to Government ministers on how to eradicate this costly and hard to manage disease in cattle. Controversially it does ...
11.08.2018 Oldest cave picture; the Anthropocene under London; a new scientist for the £50 note What could be the oldest figurative cave paintings in the world have been found in a cave complex in remote Borneo. A reddish orange depiction of an animal that could be a Banteng (wild cattle found in the region) is ...
11.01.2018 Repairing potholes, Ozone hole, Internet of hives, Drugs from fingerprints Potholes are one of the biggest frustrations to any road-user, but why do they keep occurring? Following Philip Hammond’s announcement of £420 million for councils to tackle potholes, Malcolm Simms, Director of the Mineral Products Association’s Asphalt & Pavement group, ...
10.25.2018 Science and Brexit, Antibiotic livestock growth promoters, Bepicolombo goes to Mercury How might Brexit affect UK Science? Why is feeding a 'last resort' antibiotic to farm animals not a good idea? Why is space probe Bepicolombo going to Mercury? Adam Rutherford is your host. This week, leading British and European scientists ...
10.18.2018 Old Dogs and Physics in Space How far back can we trace the ancestry of dogs? For just how long have they been following us around? The answer is for a very long time - long before humans settled down and developed societies. Scientists in France ...
10.11.2018 IPCC report, Cairngorms Connect project, grass pea, the Sun exhibition at Science Museum Adam Rutherford speaks to Dr Tamsin Edwards, a lecturer in Physical Geography at Kings College London and a lead author for the latest IPCC report. Dr Edwards describes what happens in the making of the report, including the summarising of ...
10.04.2018 Nobel Prizes - Hayabusa 2 latest - IPCC meeting - North Pole science Adam Rutherford reviews this year's Nobel science prizes, and talks to Professor Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a 2009 laureate and president of the Royal Society, about the experience of being tipped as a Nobel winner. This can included a stressful condition known ...
09.27.2018 Hyabusa 2 at Ryugu, deadly 1918 flu pandemic; WW2 bombing and ionosphere, teenage brain Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has arrived after more than a three year journey at the Ryugu asteroid which is just over half a mile long. It has successfully sent probes onto the surface and is sending pictures back to Earth. Gareth ...
09.20.2018 Science of Addiction The Science Gallery London at Kings College London, right under the Shard, is a brand new venue for the collision of art, science and culture, and its opening exhibition is called Hooked, a series of installations and works by people ...
09.13.2018 First human drawing, Cycling genes, Oden Arctic expedition, Hello World A new discovery of abstract symbolic drawings on a rock has been found in the Blombos Cave, about 300 km east of Cape Town in South Africa. The fragment - which some say looks a bit like a hashtag - ...
09.06.2018 Complexity in Biology Adam Rutherford takes the show to Dublin this week, to wrestle with great matters of biological complexity. Trinity College Dublin has organised a mass gathering of some of the world's leading researchers in the life sciences to mark the 75th ...
08.30.2018 Electronic brain probe; Rural stream biodiversity; Arctic weather research trip; Science book prize Scientists have shown how an electronic gadget, implanted in the brain, can detect, treat and even prevent epileptic seizures. Epilepsy is usually treated using anti-epilepsy drugs, but can cause serious side-effects. Researchers at the University of Cambridge, are aiming to ...
08.23.2018 Cavendish banana survival; Guillemot egg shape; Unexpected Truth About Animals; Tambora's rainstorm The last banana you probably ate was a type called Cavendish. But this, our last commercially viable variety is under severe threat, as the fungus, called Tropical Race 4, is laying waste to swathes of Cavendish banana plants across China, ...
08.16.2018 Capturing greenhouse gas, Beating heart failure with beetroot, Why elephants don't get cancer, Exactly - a history of precision Researchers have found a way to produce a naturally occurring mineral, magnesite, in a lab, that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, offering a potential strategy for tackling climate change. They've accelerated a process that normally takes thousands of years ...
08.09.2018 New Horizons' next mission, Helium at 150, The Beautiful Cure, Oden arctic expedition Astronomers this week have been warming up for an encounter as far from the Sun as ever attempted. It's the finale of the New Horizons mission which successfully passed Pluto in 2015 and is now on its way to Ultima ...
08.02.2018 Parker solar probe, Diversity in the lab, Royal Society book prize, Arctic circle weather The sun still has many mysterious properties. The Parker Solar Probe, launched next week will be the closest a spacecraft has ever flown to our star. It's a mission that's been on the drawing board for decades which space scientists ...
07.26.2018 Liquid water on Mars, Early embryo development, Earth Biogenome Project, Marine wilderness The European Space Agency's satellite Mars Express has identified what we think is a subterranean lake of liquid near the south pole of the red planet. The question of water on Mars has been around for years, and we've known ...
07.19.2018 Peatbog wildfires, Coral acoustics, Magdalena Skipper, Fuelling long-term space travel The wildfires on Saddleworth Moor may well be the most widespread in modern British history. Thanks to herculean efforts by Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service and the military, they are now extinguished, though the peat continues to smoulder. Now ...
07.12.2018 Out of Africa, Predicting future heatwaves, Virtual reality molecules, Life in the dark Scientists have found the earliest known evidence of a human presence outside Africa. A set of 96 stone tools has been found in the mountains of south-east China, which is the furthest afield this type of tool has been located. ...
07.05.2018 Northern white rhino preservation, Deep sea earthquake detection, Twitter's rare Heuchera discovery, Human roars The northern white rhinoceros is the world's most endangered mammal. The death earlier this year of the last male of this rhino subspecies leaves just two females as its only living members. New research out this week has adopted new ...
06.28.2018 Hyabusa mission; ProtoDUNE neutrino detector; Caledonian crow skills; Koala microbiome Yesterday a small Japanese ion-thruster spaceship arrived at its destination after a three year and half year, 2 billion mile journey. Hyabusa2 is currently floating alongside the asteroid known as 162173 Ryugu. BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos dissects the aims ...
06.21.2018 The Large Hadron Collider Upgrade, Voltaglue, Cambridge Zoology Museum, Francis Willughby It's been 8 years since the Large Hadron Collider went online and started smashing protons together at just below the speed of light. CERN announced this week that they're ready for a massive upgrade, and on Friday last week, there ...
06.18.2018 Antarctic melt speeds up, Antarctica's future, Cryo-acoustics, Narwhals Adam Rutherford goes totally polar this week with news of accelerating ice melt in Antarctica, two visions of the continent's future, and the sounds of collapsing icebergs and the songs of narwhals. Two hundred billion tonnes of Antarctic ice are ...
06.14.2018 Dinosaur auction, Who owns the genes of the ocean life, Cancer immunotherapy A spectacular predatory dinosaur fossil was auctioned this week in Paris. It was bought by a private collector at the cost of about 2 million Euros. Academic palaeontologists are not happy about the sale. Anjali Goswami of the Natural History ...
05.31.2018 Hay Festival Adam Rutherford and his guests at the Hay Festival, neurologist Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan, acoustic engineer Professor Trevor Cox and science writer Dr Philip Ball discuss what scientists learn when things go wrong. Suzanne O'Sullivan, author of Brainstorm, talks about how ...
05.24.2018 CO2 and rice, Underground farming, Ancient interstellar asteroid, Microplastics air pollution New research suggests that rice will be depleted in important B vitamins and minerals by rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Adam Rutherford to talks to Kristie Ebi of the University of Washington, one of the scientists behind the finding, ...
05.17.2018 Face Recognition, ‘Thug’ plants, Cancer Funding Inequalities, Feynman’s 100th birthday Facial recognition technology is on the rise and in some places used to fight crime. In the UK the police have been heavily criticised for falsely identifying people using the technology. But are their results really that bad? Professor Hassan ...

Older episodes

BBC Inside Science

What's BBC Inside Science about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

BBC Inside Science episodes:

Net-Zero carbon target, Science Policy Under Thatcher, Screen time measures

CCR5 Mutation Effects, The Surrey Earthquake Swarm, Animal Emotions

How maths underpins science

New CFC emissions, Cannabis and the Environment, The Noisy Cocktail Party, Automated Face Recognition

Hubble Not-So Constant, Synthetic E. Coli, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt

Forensic science provision, optimal garden watering strategy, and a mystery knee bone

Sex, gender and sport - the Caster Semenya case and the latest Denisovan discovery

Thought-to-speech machine, City Nature Challenge, Science of Storytelling

Notre-Dame fire, Reviving pig brains, ExoMars, Evolution of faces

Visualising a black hole, Homo luzonensis, Two ways to overcome antimicrobial resistance

Cretaceous catastrophe fossilised, LIGO and Virgo, Corals, Forensic shoeprint database

UK pollinating insect numbers, Tracking whales using barnacles, Sleep signals

Where next World Wide Web? Space rocks and worms

Rules and ethics of genome editing, Gender, sex and sport, Hog roasts at Stonehenge

A cure for HIV? Sleepy flies, Secrets of the Fukushima disaster, Science fact checking

Falling carbon and rising methane; Unsung heroes at the Crick

Mars - rovers v humans? Forests and carbon, Ethiopian bush crow

Insect decline, Gut microbiome, Geomagnetic switching

Sea Level Rise, Equine Flu, Generator Bricks, Iberian Genes

Sprinting Neanderthals, Geodynamo, Spreading Sneezes and Dying Hares

Ultima Thule, Dry January, Periodic Table

Gene-edited twins, Placenta organoids in a dish, When the last leaves drop

Mars InSight mission, Detecting dark matter, Redefining the kilogram, Bovine TB

Bovine TB and badger culling, Shrimp hoover CSI, Shark-skin and Turing

Oldest cave picture; the Anthropocene under London; a new scientist for the £50 note

Repairing potholes, Ozone hole, Internet of hives, Drugs from fingerprints

Science and Brexit, Antibiotic livestock growth promoters, Bepicolombo goes to Mercury

Old Dogs and Physics in Space

IPCC report, Cairngorms Connect project, grass pea, the Sun exhibition at Science Museum

Nobel Prizes - Hayabusa 2 latest - IPCC meeting - North Pole science

Hyabusa 2 at Ryugu, deadly 1918 flu pandemic; WW2 bombing and ionosphere, teenage brain

Science of Addiction

First human drawing, Cycling genes, Oden Arctic expedition, Hello World

Complexity in Biology

Electronic brain probe; Rural stream biodiversity; Arctic weather research trip; Science book prize

Cavendish banana survival; Guillemot egg shape; Unexpected Truth About Animals; Tambora's rainstorm

Capturing greenhouse gas, Beating heart failure with beetroot, Why elephants don't get cancer, Exactly - a history of precision

New Horizons' next mission, Helium at 150, The Beautiful Cure, Oden arctic expedition

Parker solar probe, Diversity in the lab, Royal Society book prize, Arctic circle weather

Liquid water on Mars, Early embryo development, Earth Biogenome Project, Marine wilderness

Peatbog wildfires, Coral acoustics, Magdalena Skipper, Fuelling long-term space travel

Out of Africa, Predicting future heatwaves, Virtual reality molecules, Life in the dark

Northern white rhino preservation, Deep sea earthquake detection, Twitter's rare Heuchera discovery, Human roars

Hyabusa mission; ProtoDUNE neutrino detector; Caledonian crow skills; Koala microbiome

The Large Hadron Collider Upgrade, Voltaglue, Cambridge Zoology Museum, Francis Willughby

Antarctic melt speeds up, Antarctica's future, Cryo-acoustics, Narwhals

Dinosaur auction, Who owns the genes of the ocean life, Cancer immunotherapy

Hay Festival

CO2 and rice, Underground farming, Ancient interstellar asteroid, Microplastics air pollution

Face Recognition, ‘Thug’ plants, Cancer Funding Inequalities, Feynman’s 100th birthday

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