Discovery

By BBC World Service

Science & Medicine

What's Discovery about?

Explorations in the world of science.

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Why people have different p...

05.20.2019

"How fast can a human run and would we be faster as quadrapeds?" This question flew in via Twitter from Greg Jenner. Is there a limit to human sprinting performance? In this episode we investigate the biomechanics of running, statistical ...

Discovery episodes:

05.20.2019 Why people have different pain thresholds "How fast can a human run and would we be faster as quadrapeds?" This question flew in via Twitter from Greg Jenner. Is there a limit to human sprinting performance? In this episode we investigate the biomechanics of running, statistical ...
05.13.2019 How do instruments make music? "We play many musical instruments in our family. Lots of them produce the same pitch of notes, but the instruments all sound different. Why is this?" asks Natasha Cook aged 11, and her Dad Jeremy from Guelph in Ontario, Canada. ...
05.06.2019 A sense of time Our senses create the world we experience. But do animals have a ‘sense’ of time, and does that differ between species, or between us and other animals? We know that animal senses reveal a wealth of information that humans can't ...
04.29.2019 Cat Hobaiter on communication in apes Dr Catherine Hobaiter studies how apes communicate with each other. Although she is based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, she spends a lot of her time in the forests of Uganda, at the Budongo Research Centre. There, ...
04.22.2019 Carlo Rovelli on rethinking the nature of time Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who became a household name when his book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics became an unexpected international bestseller. His concise, and poetic, introduction to the laws and beauty of physics has sold more than ...
04.15.2019 Corinne Le Quéré on carbon and climate Professor Corinne Le Quéré of University of East Anglia talks to Jim Al-Khalili about tracing global carbon. Throughout the history of planet Earth, the element carbon has cycled between the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere. This natural cycle has ...
04.08.2019 Ken Gabriel on why your smartphone is smart Jim Al-Khalili talks to Ken Gabriel, the engineer responsible for popularising many of the micro devices found in smartphones and computers. Ken explains how he was inspired by what he could do with a stick and a piece of string. ...
04.01.2019 Donna Strickland and extremely powerful lasers Donna Strickland tells Jim Al-Khalili why she wanted to work with lasers and what it feels like to be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics in 55 years. When the first laser was built in 1960, ...
03.25.2019 Unbottling the past Imagine finding a notebook containing the secret recipes of some of the world’s most iconic perfumes? Formulas normally kept under lock and key. That’s what happened to medical research scientist and trained chemist Andrew Holding. His grandfather Charles “Rex” Holding ...
03.18.2019 California burning When Paradise burned down last year, it made the Camp Fire the most destructive and deadly in Californian history. A few months earlier the nearby Ranch Fire was the largest. In southern California, a series of chaparral fires have brought ...
03.11.2019 ShakeAlertLA - California’s earthquake early warning system Los Angeles is a city of Angels, and of earthquakes. Deadly earthquakes in 1933, 1971 and 1994 have also made it a pioneer in earthquake protection – for example with tough engineering standards to save buildings. Since 2013, with the ...
03.04.2019 From the Cold War to the present day For more than 100 years chemical weapons have terrorised, maimed and killed soldiers and civilians alike. As a chemist, the part his profession has played in the development of these weapons has long concerned Andrea Sella, professor of chemistry at ...
02.25.2019 From the Crimean War to the end of World War Two In the first of two programmes he looks back to the first attempts to ban the use of chemical weapons at the end of the 19th century. Heavily defeated in the Crimea, Russia succeeded in getting unanimous agreement at the ...
02.18.2019 Tracks across time In a dry creek bed in the middle of the Australian outback is a palaeontological prize like no other: 95-million-year-old footprints stamped in a sandstone slab by three species of dinosaur. One of the beasts was a massive, lumbering sauropod ...
02.11.2019 Trouble in paradise The atoll of Tetiaro is a string of tiny islands in French Polynesia, about 60km away from Tahiti. The islands – known as ‘motus’ to local Polynesians – are unique ecosystems that are crucial nesting sites for native seabirds. But ...
02.04.2019 Back from the Dead The Night Parrot was supposed to be extinct and became a legend among birdwatchers in Australia: a fat, dumpy, green parrot that lived in the desert and came out at night. The last bird seen alive was promptly shot dead ...
01.28.2019 Eye in the Sky On this mission, SOFIA is setting out to study Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, by flying into the faint shadow that it casts as it blocks the light from a faraway star. It’s a phenomenon called an occultation, and if the ...
01.14.2019 Kepler's Snowflake The Six Cornered Snowflake, a booklet written by Johannes Kepler as a New Year's gift, sought to explain the intricate and symmetrical shape of winter's tiny stars of snow. His insightful speculations about minerals and geometry were the beginning of ...
01.07.2019 Lucretius, Sheep and Atoms 2000 years ago Lucretius composed a long poem that theorised about atoms and the natural world. Written in the first century BCE, during a chaotic and frightening time when the Roman Republic was collapsing, Lucretius encouraged people to feel free ...
12.31.2018 Eddington's Eclipse and Einstein's Celebrity Philip Ball's tale is of a solar eclipse 100 years ago observed by Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer who travelled to the remote island of Principe off the coast of West Africa and saw the stars shift in the heavens. ...
12.24.2018 Earthrise On Christmas Eve in 1968 Bill Anders was in orbit around the moon in Apollo 8 when he took one of the most iconic photos of the last fifty years: Earthrise. The image got to be seen everywhere, from a ...
12.17.2018 The Supercalculators Alex Bellos is brilliant at all things mathematical, but even he can't hold a candle to the amazing mathematical feats of the supercalculators. Alex heads to Wolfsburg in Germany to meet the contestants at this year's Mental Calculation World Cup. ...
12.10.2018 The China Syndrome Plastic waste and pollution have become a global problem but is there any sign of a global solution? And how did we allow this to happen in the first place? Materials scientist and broadcaster, Professor Mark Miodownik, explores how we ...
12.03.2018 How Much Plastic Can We Recycle? Plastics are fantastically versatile materials that have changed our lives. It is what we do with them, when we no longer want them, that has resulted in the global plastic crisis. Mark Miodownik explores our love hate relationship with plastics. ...
11.26.2018 Why We Fell In Love with Plastic Plastic waste and pollution have become a global problem but is there any sign of a global solution? And how did we allow this to happen in the first place? Materials scientist and broadcaster, Professor Mark Miodownik, explores how we ...
11.19.2018 Finding the Coelacanths The first Coelacanth was discovered by a woman in South Africa in 1938. The find, by the young museum curator, was the fish equivalent of discovering a T- Rex on the Serengeti, it took the Zoological world by storm. Presenter ...
11.12.2018 The Big Bang and Jet Streams Evidence for the big bang was initially thought to be a mistake in the recording. Jet streams in the upper atmosphere were revealed by the dust emitted by Krakatoa and a collection of interested citizen scientists. In the second three ...
11.05.2018 Viagra and CRISPR Viagra’s effects on men were first discovered as an unexpected side-effect during trials for a medication meant to help patients with a heart condition. CRISPR cas– 9 is now a tool that can be used to modify and replace genes ...
10.29.2018 Tracking the First Animals on Earth What were the earliest animals on Earth? The origin of the animal kingdom is one of the most mysterious chapters in the evolution of life on Earth. Our animal ancestors appeared and began to diversify about half a billion years ...
10.29.2018 Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting Mary Anning lived in Lyme Regis on what is now known as the Jurassic Coast in the first half of the 19th century. Knowing the shore from childhood and with a remarkable eye for detection she was extremely successful in ...
10.22.2018 Cooling the City The summer of 2003 saw the largest number of deaths ever recorded in a UK heatwave - but by 2040 climate models predict the extreme summer temperatures experienced then will be normal. We will also be experiencing colder winters, and ...
10.15.2018 Tourism and Transparency In the second programme exploring the Chinese approach to organ transplantation, Matthew Hill looks at what is happening today. Where are the organs coming from today? Have the Chinese overcome their traditional opposition to donating them? There is still a ...
10.08.2018 Who To Believe? For many years the Chinese sourced organs for transplant from executed prisoners. Around a decade ago the authorities acknowledged that this practice had gone on and announced that it was to be stopped. In the first programme exploring the Chinese ...
10.01.2018 The Long Hot Summer - Part Two This summer the Northern Hemisphere has been sweltering in unusually high temperatures. It has been hot from the Arctic to Africa. This has led to increased deaths, notably in Canada, and more wildfires, even in Lancashire and in Sweden. Can ...
09.24.2018 The Long Hot Summer This summer the Northern Hemisphere has been sweltering in unusually high temperatures. It’s been hot from the Arctic to Africa. This has led to increased deaths, notably in Canada, and more wildfires, even in Lancashire and in Sweden. Can we ...
09.17.2018 Sodium Sophie Scott on why sodium powers everything we do, and why it might be the key to a new generation of pain killers. Putting sodium into water is one of the most memorable experiments from school chemistry lessons. It's this ...
09.10.2018 Iron Beyond war and peace, Dr Andrew Pontzen explores how iron has shaped human biology and culture. From weapons to ploughshares, iron holds a key place as the element for the tools of the rise and destruction of human civilisations. As ...
09.03.2018 Fluorine Chemist Andrea Sella tells the story of how the feared element ended up giving us better teeth, mood and health. Many chemists have lost their lives trying to isolate the periodic table’s most chemically reactive element – hence the nickname ...
08.20.2018 Hypatia: The Murdered Mathematician Naomi Alderman's tale is a murder mystery, the story of Hypatia, the mathematician murdered by a mob in the learned city of Alexandria, around the year 415 CE. Hypatia was a communicator of science, tackling difficult maths and teaching it ...
08.13.2018 Descartes' "Daughter" There's a story told about French philosopher René Descartes and his daughter. He boards a ship for a voyage over the North Sea with a large wooden box which he insists be handled with such great care that the sea ...
08.06.2018 Making Natural Products in the Lab Philip Ball tells the science story of German chemist Friedrich Wöhler’s creation of urea, an organic substance previously thought only to be produced by living creatures. Yet in 1828 Wöhler created urea from decidedly non-living substances. It was exciting because ...
07.30.2018 The Real Cyrano de Bergerac Philip Ball reveals the real Cyrano de Bergerac - forget the big nosed fictional character - and his links to 17th Century space flight. Cyrano was a soldier, gambler and duellist who retired from military exploits on account of his ...
07.23.2018 The Nun’s Salamander A convent of Mexican nuns is helping to save the one of the world's most endangered and most remarkable amphibians: the axolotl, a truly bizarre creature of serious scientific interest worldwide and an animal of deep-rooted cultural significance in Mexico. ...
07.16.2018 The Aztec Salamander Victoria Gill tells the extraordinary story of the Mexican axolotl: an amphibian that is both a cultural icon and a biomedical marvel. In its domesticated form, the aquatic salamander is a valuable laboratory animal and a popular pet around the ...
07.09.2018 Gateway to the Mind The microbiome is the strange invisible world of our non human selves. On and in all of us are hoards of microbes. Their impact on our physical health is becoming clear to science, but a controversial idea is emerging too ...
07.02.2018 Dirt and Development BBC Health and Science correspondent James Gallagher explores the latest research into how our second genome, the vast and diverse array of microbes that live on and in our bodies, is driving our metabolism and our health and how we ...
06.25.2018 Manipulating Our Hidden Half Are we on the cusp of a new approach to healthy living and treating disease? BBC Health and Science correspondent James Gallagher explores the latest research into how our second genome, the vast and diverse array of microbes that live ...
06.18.2018 Do Insects Feel Pain? Insects such as fruit flies provide important insights into human biology and medicine. But should we worry whether insects experience pain and suffering in scientists’ hands? Entomologist Adam Hart visits the Fly Facility at the University of Manchester where researcher ...
06.11.2018 Killing Insects for Conservation Prof Adam Hart stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy by asking the public to kill wasps for science. He explores why scientists kill insects to save them from extinction. The work of the entomologist often involves the killing of insects ...
06.04.2018 What’s the Tiniest Dinosaur? Two small creatures are at the heart of today’s questions, sent in to curiouscases@bbc.co.uk. The Tiniest Dinosaur "What is the tiniest dinosaur?" asks young listener Ellie Cook, aged 11. Our hunt takes us from the discovery of dinosaurs right up ...

Older episodes

Discovery

What's Discovery about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Discovery episodes:

Why people have different pain thresholds

How do instruments make music?

A sense of time

Cat Hobaiter on communication in apes

Carlo Rovelli on rethinking the nature of time

Corinne Le Quéré on carbon and climate

Ken Gabriel on why your smartphone is smart

Donna Strickland and extremely powerful lasers

Unbottling the past

California burning

ShakeAlertLA - California’s earthquake early warning system

From the Cold War to the present day

From the Crimean War to the end of World War Two

Tracks across time

Trouble in paradise

Back from the Dead

Eye in the Sky

Kepler's Snowflake

Lucretius, Sheep and Atoms

Eddington's Eclipse and Einstein's Celebrity

Earthrise

The Supercalculators

The China Syndrome

How Much Plastic Can We Recycle?

Why We Fell In Love with Plastic

Finding the Coelacanths

The Big Bang and Jet Streams

Viagra and CRISPR

Tracking the First Animals on Earth

Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting

Cooling the City

Tourism and Transparency

Who To Believe?

The Long Hot Summer - Part Two

The Long Hot Summer

Sodium

Iron

Fluorine

Hypatia: The Murdered Mathematician

Descartes' "Daughter"

Making Natural Products in the Lab

The Real Cyrano de Bergerac

The Nun’s Salamander

The Aztec Salamander

Gateway to the Mind

Dirt and Development

Manipulating Our Hidden Half

Do Insects Feel Pain?

Killing Insects for Conservation

What’s the Tiniest Dinosaur?

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