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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Dealing with drought

09.29.2022

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 ...

BBC Inside Science episodes:

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 ...
06.16.2022 Buried Mars Landers, Freezing Species, and Low-Tide Archaeology Since 2018, Nasa's InSight Mars lander has been sitting on the surface listening to the seismic rumbles of the red planet's deep interior. But this week, plans were announced to finally phase down its activity, as martian dust obscures too ...
06.09.2022 Running Rings Around Matter Astronomers have captured the first image of Sagittarius A*, the gargantuan black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Dr Ziri Younsi, University College London, shares what it took to capture a picture of a supermassive black hole that is ...
06.02.2022 Precious Metals, Earlier Eggs, and Meaningful Meteorites With the cost of living spiralling, many are probably thinking more about the price of food than lithium, titanium, copper or platinum. But the volatility in the global market for these materials - partly because of the pandemic and geopolitical ...
05.26.2022 The Ebb and Flow of the Tidal Power Revolution This week, we begin with a disturbing medical mystery. Since the start of the year, almost 200 children worldwide have fallen ill with hepatitis—or liver inflammation—without any apparent cause. Most of the children are under five, and nearly half of ...
05.19.2022 Building Better Engagement Victoria Gill and guests ask why does scientific communication matters in society and how it might be done better, with Sam Illingworth, Berry Billingsley and Ozmala Ismail. The climate crisis and Covid-19 have shown over the recent years the importance ...
05.12.2022 A Trip-Switch for Depression? Could magic mushrooms be the key to a revolution in treating depression? Professor David Nutt, director of the Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research, thinks so. He tells Vic Gill about recent research suggesting that psilocybin - the psychedelic compound found ...
05.05.2022 Declining Data, Climate Deadlines and the Day the Dinosaurs Died Covid-19 infections in the UK are at an all-time high. But most people in England can no longer access free Covid-19 tests, and the REACT-1 study, which has been testing more than 100,000 individuals since the pandemic began, ended last ...
04.28.2022 How can the UK get to zero carbon? Energy is essential: every living thing needs energy to survive, and today’s industrialised societies consume enormous quantities of it. At the moment, the vast majority of this comes from burning fossil fuels that emit carbon. But the government is committed ...
04.21.2022 Racial inequality in UK science This month the Royal Society of Chemistry released a shocking report on racial inequality at all stages of academia, from research funding to career progression. Black scientists in particular are unfairly disadvantaged when it comes to funding allocation. This is ...
04.14.2022 Global food security during Ukraine conflict The Russian conflict in Ukraine is already causing hunger there, and as Ukraine and Russia are huge grain exporters, the crisis will be far reaching. Food prices everywhere are expected to rise, and there’s fear that the war could affect ...
04.07.2022 High Seas treaty talks and discoveries from the deep The High Seas make up most of our oceans but belong to no-one and are largely unregulated, leaving them at risk of plunder. UN talks start afresh this week with the aim of protecting the marine biodiversity of these vast ...
03.31.2022 Cyber frontlines in Ukraine As conflict continues in Ukraine, there are invisible ‘cyber frontlines’ running in parallel to the physical fighting. We hear how the country’s tech scene is responding to the Russian invasion, as Mike Sapiton, Tech Editor at Forbes Ukraine gives us ...
03.04.2022 Inside Science is now first on BBC Sounds Looking for the latest episode? New episodes of Inside Science will now be available first on BBC Sounds for four weeks before other podcast apps. If you haven’t already, you can download the BBC Sounds app to listen to the ...
02.24.2022 World’s largest Jurassic pterosaur found on Skye In a week of exciting fossils finds we get up close to a 170 million year old pterosaur, found on the Isle of Skye. And over in the States, some fossilised fish hold the clue to what time of year ...
02.17.2022 COVID-19: Beginnings... and endings? With the prime minister proposing an end to self-isolation requirements as early as the end of the month, we thought we would check in with all things pandemic-related this week. We hear from mathematical biologist Dr Kit Yates from the ...
02.10.2022 Fusion energy smashes world record This week the UK-based JET Laboratory broke its 25-year-old record for energy extracted by nuclear fusion - the process that powers the stars. Using temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun, nuclear fusion has the potential to provide vast amounts ...
02.03.2022 The Continuing Story of the Nuclear Waste Bill Whilst energy prices are shooting up due to gas demand, in the UK the plans for the next generation nuclear reactors are moving ahead. The costs of eventually decommissioning these, and the spent fuel products they will create is all ...
01.27.2022 Predicting Long Covid, and the Global Toll of Antimicrobial Resistance Prof Onur Boyman, Director of department of Immunology at University Hospital, Zurich, this week published a paper in the journal Nature Communications that presents a way of quantifying the risk of a Covid patient going on to develop Long Covid ...
01.20.2022 The 'perfect' depth for a destructive eruption Why was the blast from the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano so explosive? Where are we on the global climatic thermostat? And how you can get involved in the Big Repair Project. Gaia Vince speaks with Auckland University volcanologist Prof Shane Cronin, one ...
01.13.2022 The Rutland ‘Sea Dragon’, An Astronomer's Christmas and some Animal Magic After 20 years of planning, preparation and a nail-biting build up fraught by delays The James Webb Space telescope finally launched on Christmas day 2021. Anxious astronomers across the globe looked on as the JWST then completed even riskier manoeuvres ...
01.06.2022 Deep ocean exploration UCL oceanographer Helen Czerski explores life in the ocean depths with a panel of deep sea biologists. They take us to deep ocean coral gardens on sea mounts, to extraordinary hydrothermal vent ecosystems teeming with weird lifeforms fed by chemosynthetic ...
12.30.2021 A new space age? Dr Kevin Fong convenes a panel of astronautical minds to discuss the next decade or two of space exploration. 2021 was an eventful year in space. Captain James Kirk a.k.a William Shatner popped into space for real for a couple ...
12.23.2021 The Origin of Celtic Culture in Britain? Victoria Gill hears of ancient DNA evidence for an unrecognised mass migration from continental Europe 3,000 years ago that may even have brought the Celtic languages with it. In a paper in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers ...
12.16.2021 The James Webb Space Telescope The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is only days away. Scheduled for lift off on 24 December, the largest and most complex space observatory ever built will be sent to an orbit beyond the moon. James Webb is ...
12.09.2021 Initial Omicron Lab Data, Creative Naps, and Fishy Sounds. T-Cells in vaccinated people may be holding the fort, or at least fighting serious illness, against the latest SARS CoV2 variant. Also, how the briefest of sleeps aids creativity. Prof Penny Moore, of South Africa’s National Centre for Infectious Disease ...
12.02.2021 When Pandemics Collide As virologists around the world race to investigate the latest SARS CoV2 variant of concern, the UN’s World AIDS Day this week reminds us of the other global pandemic raging for some 40 years. Much of the work achieved over ...
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 ...

Older episodes

BBC Inside Science

What's BBC Inside Science about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

BBC Inside Science episodes:

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

Buried Mars Landers, Freezing Species, and Low-Tide Archaeology

Running Rings Around Matter

Precious Metals, Earlier Eggs, and Meaningful Meteorites

The Ebb and Flow of the Tidal Power Revolution

Building Better Engagement

A Trip-Switch for Depression?

Declining Data, Climate Deadlines and the Day the Dinosaurs Died

How can the UK get to zero carbon?

Racial inequality in UK science

Global food security during Ukraine conflict

High Seas treaty talks and discoveries from the deep

Cyber frontlines in Ukraine

Inside Science is now first on BBC Sounds

World’s largest Jurassic pterosaur found on Skye

COVID-19: Beginnings... and endings?

Fusion energy smashes world record

The Continuing Story of the Nuclear Waste Bill

Predicting Long Covid, and the Global Toll of Antimicrobial Resistance

The 'perfect' depth for a destructive eruption

The Rutland ‘Sea Dragon’, An Astronomer's Christmas and some Animal Magic

Deep ocean exploration

A new space age?

The Origin of Celtic Culture in Britain?

The James Webb Space Telescope

Initial Omicron Lab Data, Creative Naps, and Fishy Sounds.

When Pandemics Collide

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