Discovery

By BBC World Service

Technology

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Explorations in the world of science.

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David Eagleman

09.26.2022

Literature student turned neuroscientist, Prof David Eagleman, tells Jim Al-Khalili about his research on human perception and the wristband he created that enables deaf people to hear through their skin. Everything we see, taste, smell, touch and hear is created ...

Discovery episodes:

09.26.2022 David Eagleman Literature student turned neuroscientist, Prof David Eagleman, tells Jim Al-Khalili about his research on human perception and the wristband he created that enables deaf people to hear through their skin. Everything we see, taste, smell, touch and hear is created ...
09.20.2022 Frances Arnold Nobel Prize winning chemist Frances Arnold left home at 15 and went to school ‘only when she felt like it’. She disagreed with her parents about the Vietnam war and drove big yellow taxis in Pittsburgh to pay the rent. ...
09.12.2022 Sir Martin Landray Who could forget the beginning of 2020, when a ‘mysterious viral pneumonia’ emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Soon, other countries were affected and deaths around the world began to climb. Perhaps most alarmingly of all, there were no ...
09.05.2022 How Covid Changed Science, part 3 In the third and final part of our series How Covid Changed Science, Devi Sridhar Professor of Global Health at Edinburgh University looks at the legacy and lessons of the pandemic for scientific research. Tackling the virus became a global ...
08.29.2022 How Covid changed science, part 2 In the second of our series How Covid Changed Science, Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Health at Edinburgh University looks at the scientific messaging. Just how do you explain to both politicians and the public that a growing global pandemic ...
08.22.2022 How Covid changed science, part 1 Until 2020 developing a new drug took at least 15 years. Scientists by and large competed with each other, were somewhat secretive about their research and only shared their data once publication was secured. And the public and the press ...
08.15.2022 Satellites versus the stars If you look up into the night sky, there are around 7,000 active satellites orbiting the Earth. They’re part of our daily life – essential for things like the internet, the GPS in our cars and giving us weather reports. ...
08.08.2022 Plant based promises, diet and health Giles Yeo learns how to make a Thai green curry with Meera Sodha. This is a recipe without meat or prawns but with tofu and lots of vegetables. If we need to eat less meat and dairy to help prevent ...
08.01.2022 Plant based promises and sustainability In Plant Based Promises, Giles Yeo a foodie and academic at Cambridge University, asks how sustainable are commercial plant based products? This is a fast growing sector with a potential value of $162 billion by 2030. Giles travels to the ...
07.25.2022 Plant based promises, rise of the plant based burger In Plant Based Promises, foodie, researcher and broadcaster Giles Yeo looks at the science behind plant based diets and the increasing number of plant based products appearing in supermarkets and restaurants. The market for plant based products could be worth ...
07.18.2022 The mysterious particles of physics, part 3 The smaller the thing you look at, the bigger the microscope you need to use. That’s why the circular Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they discovered the Higgs boson is 27 kilometres long, and its detectors tens of metres ...
07.11.2022 The mysterious particles of physics, part 2 Episode 2: Lost in the Dark Physics is getting a good understanding of atoms, but embarrassingly they’re only a minor part of the Universe. Far more of it is made of something heavy and dark, so-called dark matter. The scientists ...
07.04.2022 The mysterious particles of physics, part 1 The machine that discovered the Higgs Boson 10 years ago is about to restart after a massive upgrade, to dig deeper into the heart of matter and the nature of the Universe. Roland Pease returns to CERN’s 27-kilometre Large Hadron ...
06.27.2022 The Life Scientific: Adam Hart Ant-loving professor, Adam Hart, shares his passion for leaf cutting ants with Jim Al Khalili. Why do they put leaves in piles for other ants to pick up? Talking at the Hay Festival, Adam describes the experiments he designed to ...
06.20.2022 The Life Scientific: Jacinta Tan When a person with severe anorexia nervosa refuses food, the very treatment they need to survive, is that refusal carefully considered and rational, as it can appear to those around them? Or is it really the illness that’s causing them ...
06.13.2022 The Life Scientific: Pete Smith Pete Smith is very down to earth. Not least because he’s interested in soil and the vital role it plays in helping us to feed the world, mitigate climate change and maintain a rich diversity of species on planet earth. ...
06.06.2022 The colour conundrum The world is full of colour! But, listener Maya Crocombe wonders ‘how do we see colour and why are some people colour blind?’ Dr Rutherford and professor Fry set out to understand how special light-sensitive cells in our eyes start ...
05.30.2022 The Turn of the Tide Mathematician Hannah Fry and geneticist Adam Rutherford investigate your everyday science queries. Today, they get stuck into two questions about tides. Lynn Godson wants to know why isn’t high tide at the same time at all points around the coast? ...
05.28.2022 The Evidence: The nature of mental health Today The Evidence goes green as Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts discuss plant power, how nature and the natural environment affect our mental health. Produced in collaboration with Wellcome Collection and recorded in front of a live audience ...
05.23.2022 The Shocking White Hair Why does human hair go grey and is it ever possible for it to go white overnight from shock? Hannah and Adam explore why hair goes grey, how much stressful life events and a lack of sleep can speed up ...
05.16.2022 Surprising symmetries Two eyes, two arms, two legs - we are roughly symmetrical on the outside, but inside we are all over the place! We just have one heart, which is usually on the left, one liver on the right, one spleen ...
05.09.2022 The weird waves of wi-fi We use wi-fi every day, but do you know how it works? “Is it waves and science or just some mystical magical force?” wonders listener Abby. Well, our science sleuths are on the case. To help them navigate the strange ...
05.02.2022 The Mystery of the Teenage Brain ‘Why are teens prone to risky behaviour?’ asks Dr Mark Gallaway, ‘especially when with their friends?’ 13 year old Emma wonders why she’s chatty at school but antisocial when she gets home. And exasperated mum Michelle wants to know why ...
04.25.2022 Wild Inside: The Ocean Sunfish Ben Garrod and Jess French get under the skin of Mola mola the world's largest bony fish to unravel this bizarrely shaped predator's ability to swim to a huge range of depths. Producer Adrian Washbourne
04.18.2022 Wild Inside: The Burmese Python Ben Garrod and Jess French delve deep inside the predatory Burmese Python to examine its extraordinary body plan that enables it to catch, constrict and consume huge prey whole. Producer Adrian Washbourne
04.11.2022 Wild Inside: Jungle royalty - the Jaguar Wild Inside embarks on something we hardly ever witness – a look inside some of nature’s most wondrous animals. Its a rare chance to delve deep into some enigmatic and very different wild animals – from a reptile, to a ...
04.02.2022 The Evidence: War trauma and mental health War and conflict turns lives upside down and millions of adults and children witness atrocities, lose loved ones and often lose their homes and even their countries. The psychological and emotional suffering can continue long after the immediate threat to ...
03.28.2022 The Life Scientific: Steve Brusatte on the fall of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals Steve Brusatte analyses the pace of evolutionary change and tries to answer big questions. Why did the dinosaurs die out and the mammals survive? How did dinosaurs evolve into birds? If you met a Velociraptor today you’d probably mistake it ...
03.21.2022 The Life Scientific: Shankar Balasubramanian on decoding DNA Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is responsible for a revolution in medicine. The method he invented for reading, at speed, the unique genetic code that makes each one of us who we are, is ten million times faster than the technology that ...
03.14.2022 Tooth and Claw: Wolves We look at wolves and the programme is a little different, because the predator we’re talking about is very much a predator of our imaginations. Wolves are the spirit of the wilderness, but they also symbolize the darker side of ...
03.08.2022 Tooth and Claw: Army ant The army ant might be small enough to squash under foot but, make no mistake, it’s a formidable predator. When they club together in their thousands they are a force to be reckoned with. Picture a tiger, comprised of hundreds ...
02.28.2022 Tooth and Claw: Venomous snakes Adam Hart discovers why rattlesnakes make good mothers and how deadly their venom is. There are over 600 different species of venomous snakes around the world with fearsome fangs delivering deadly venoms. Up to a third of the world’s population ...
02.26.2022 The Evidence: Drug-resistant superbugs Today, Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts focus on what’s been called “the silent pandemic”, the threat to modern medicine of anti-microbial resistance or AMR. Infections are increasingly resistant to live-saving drugs like antibiotics and many believe the very ...
02.21.2022 Tooth and claw: Spotted hyena Cursed as a worthless scavenger and cast as villainous cowardly sidekicks in Disney’s The Lion King, the spotted hyena is one of the world’s most misunderstood of all predators. It may scavenge at night on a giant rubbish tip on ...
02.14.2022 Deep sea 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 ...
02.07.2022 A new space age? In 2021, Captain James Kirk, aka William Shatner, popped into space for real for a couple of minutes, transported by space company Blue Origin's tourist rocket New Shepard. Elon Musk's Space X ferried more astronauts and supplies between Earth and ...
01.31.2022 African science, African future Professor Tom Kariuki has spent his career battling for science in Africa, both as a leading immunologist and as the former director of the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa. Now, as the world comes to grips with ...
01.29.2022 The Evidence: Africa, the pandemic and healthcare independence In a special edition of The Evidence, Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts focus on Africa, on how the more than fifty countries on the continent, home to 1.3 billion people and the most youthful population in the world, ...
01.24.2022 The venomous vendetta Whilst watching a documentary about some poisonous frogs, Curio Janni in Amsterdam, started to wonder what would happen if a frog licked itself or another frog of the same species. She asks Dr Adam Rutherford and Professor Hannah Fry to ...
01.17.2022 The slippery situation 'What is the slipperiest thing in the world?' asks 8 year old Evelyn? 'Why do my feet slip on a wet floor but when my feet are even slightly moist it's nearly impossible to put on a pair of socks ...
01.10.2022 The painless heart Dr Mitch Lomax is a sports scientist at the University of Portsmouth. She helps actual Olympic swimmers get faster. She explains how most of the muscles attached to our skeletons work: Tiny fibres use small-scale cellular energy, which, when all ...
01.03.2022 The weirdness of water, Part 2 of 2 “I don’t really understand why water has so many properties on different scales ranging from very large and cosmic to very small quantum and quarky - Could you help by zooming in and out on water to explain what is ...
12.27.2021 The weirdness of water, Part 1 of 2 “I don’t really understand why water has so many properties on different scales ranging from very large and cosmic to very small quantum and quarky - Could you help by zooming in and out on water to explain what is ...
12.25.2021 The Evidence: When will the pandemic end? Everybody hopes that the new super-charged Omicron variant of coronavirus will be less severe, but even if it is, it’s spreading so fast and infecting so many people, health services around the world could still buckle under the strain. Two ...
12.20.2021 The guiding hound Dogs and humans have gone paw in hand for thousands of years. Historic and genetic evidence shows we’ve shaped each other's existence over millennia. But dogs were only first trained as guides for blind people in the UK 90 years ...
12.13.2021 The James Webb Space Telescope The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is only days away. Scheduled for lift off on 22 December, the largest and most complex space observatory ever built will be sent to an orbit beyond the moon. James Webb is ...
12.06.2021 Genetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares CRISPR is the latest and most powerful technique for changing the genetic code of living things. This method of gene editing is already showing great promise in treating people with gene-based diseases, from sickle cell disease to cancer. However, in ...
11.29.2021 Genetic dreams, genetic nightmares Professor Matthew Cobb looks at how genetic engineering became big business - from the first biotech company that produced human insulin in modified bacteria in the late 1970s to the companies like Monsanto which developed and then commercialised the first ...
11.27.2021 The Evidence: Healthcare pushed out by the pandemic As all eyes have been on the virus, other serious killer diseases took a backseat. Resources and staff were diverted, lockdowns were common all over the world and a very real fear of Covid-19 kept people away from clinics and ...
11.22.2021 Genetic dreams, genetic nightmares Biologist Matthew Cobb presents the first episode in a series which looks at the 50-year history of genetic engineering, from the concerns around the first attempts at combining the DNA of one organism with the genes of another in 1971 ...

Older episodes

Discovery

What's Discovery about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Discovery episodes:

David Eagleman

Frances Arnold

Sir Martin Landray

How Covid Changed Science, part 3

How Covid changed science, part 2

How Covid changed science, part 1

Satellites versus the stars

Plant based promises, diet and health

Plant based promises and sustainability

Plant based promises, rise of the plant based burger

The mysterious particles of physics, part 3

The mysterious particles of physics, part 2

The mysterious particles of physics, part 1

The Life Scientific: Adam Hart

The Life Scientific: Jacinta Tan

The Life Scientific: Pete Smith

The colour conundrum

The Turn of the Tide

The Evidence: The nature of mental health

The Shocking White Hair

Surprising symmetries

The weird waves of wi-fi

The Mystery of the Teenage Brain

Wild Inside: The Ocean Sunfish

Wild Inside: The Burmese Python

Wild Inside: Jungle royalty - the Jaguar

The Evidence: War trauma and mental health

The Life Scientific: Steve Brusatte on the fall of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals

The Life Scientific: Shankar Balasubramanian on decoding DNA

Tooth and Claw: Wolves

Tooth and Claw: Army ant

Tooth and Claw: Venomous snakes

The Evidence: Drug-resistant superbugs

Tooth and claw: Spotted hyena

Deep sea exploration

A new space age?

African science, African future

The Evidence: Africa, the pandemic and healthcare independence

The venomous vendetta

The slippery situation

The painless heart

The weirdness of water, Part 2 of 2

The weirdness of water, Part 1 of 2

The Evidence: When will the pandemic end?

The guiding hound

The James Webb Space Telescope

Genetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares

Genetic dreams, genetic nightmares

The Evidence: Healthcare pushed out by the pandemic

Genetic dreams, genetic nightmares