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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Microplastics in UK river beds

05.13.2021

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: ...

BBC Inside Science episodes:

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 ...
12.10.2020 Future risk planning; Millennium Seed Bank; Urban trees Dr Alex Lathbridge brings you the week in science. As the first COVID vaccines are delivered this week hastening the first glimmers of a return to normal life, is it too soon to be thinking about other future threats to ...
12.03.2020 Protein folding; Hyabusa sample return; Holiday Covid testing Has one of the biggest problems in biology been solved by AI? Dr Alex Lathbridge brings you the week in science. This week google's Deep Mind team presented results of their latest efforts at cracking the 50 year old problem ...
11.26.2020 26/11/2020 Last weekend a joint European-US satellite blasted into space to begin its mission - monitoring the oceans back here on earth. Sentinel 6 Michael Freilich is one of a long line of satellites and has a striking design – appearing ...
11.19.2020 COVID Operation Moonshot; Big Compost Experiment; Gulf of Mexico meteorite and new life Earlier this month, the government rolled out a pilot in Liverpool for ‘Operation Moonshot’, their proposal to spend £100 billion pounds to regularly test the entire UK population for SARS CoV 2. Anand Jagatia speaks to screening expert Dr Angela ...
11.12.2020 mRNA vaccinations; bacterial space miners; Artemis accords Scientists this week announced hopeful results in two of the big COVID-19 vaccination trials. Trudie Lang, Professor of Global Health at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford, describes some of the methodology used, what the efficacy statistic means, and how ...
11.05.2020 COVID in families; earthquake under Aegean Sea; Camilla Pang wins science book prize We know that children can catch the SarsCov2 virus, even though adverse side effects are incredibly rare. But what isn't clear is how likely they are to transmit the virus? If you’re a parent, are you in danger of catching ...
10.29.2020 A new saliva gland, Bill Bryson on the Human Body, and the return of the Dust Bowl Marnie Chesterton presents an update on the week's science. Behind your eyes, above your mouth but below the brain, two 3cm saliva glands have been hiding since anatomy began. So reports a new study by Matthijs Valstar and Wouter Vogel ...
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 ...

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