Discovery

By BBC World Service

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Explorations in the world of science.

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Whatever happened to…those ...

07.31.2021

Whatever happened to those sniffer dogs who were seeking out any passengers infected with Covid-19 at Helsinki airport? And did plans to sample sewage to spot outbreaks early prove successful? This week on The Evidence, we have listeners’ questions about ...

Discovery episodes:

07.31.2021 Whatever happened to…those Covid-19 stories Whatever happened to those sniffer dogs who were seeking out any passengers infected with Covid-19 at Helsinki airport? And did plans to sample sewage to spot outbreaks early prove successful? This week on The Evidence, we have listeners’ questions about ...
07.26.2021 Dare to repair: Fixing the future Mark Miodownik, explores the environmental consequences of the throwaway society we have become and reveals that recycling electronic waste comes second to repairing broken electronics. He asks what we can learn from repair cultures around the world , he looks ...
07.19.2021 Dare to repair: The fight for the right to repair Many electronics manufacturers are making it harder for us, to fix our broken kit. There are claims that programmed obsolescence is alive and well, with mobile phone batteries designed to wear out after just 400 charges. They claim it's for ...
07.12.2021 Dare to Repair: How we broke the future Materials engineer Professor Mark Miodownik looks back to the start of the electronics revolution to find out why our electronic gadgets and household goods are less durable and harder to repair now. As he attempts to fix his digital clock ...
07.05.2021 Tooth and claw: Tigers “As it charges towards you, you can actually feel the drumbeat of its feet falling to the ground”. Nothing quite says fear more than standing before a charging tiger. Yet so often it’s also the poster-predator for conservation. The tiger ...
06.28.2021 Tooth and claw: Bears Teddy bears might be popular with children but real bears are anything but cuddly. Brown, Black and Grizzly bears are the most well-known and have a well-deserved fearsome reputation. But for most part, bear attacks are not nearly as common ...
06.26.2021 The Evidence: How Covid damages the human body A year and a half in, and in many ways Covid-19 is still an enigma. All over the world, doctors and scientists are still struggling to understand exactly how this new virus undermines our defences and then damages, even destroys, ...
06.21.2021 Tooth and claw: Lions From Aslan to Simba, from the Wizard of Oz to heraldry, children in the West probably recognise this king of beasts before they can name the animals in their own back yards. But what about people who have lions roaming ...
06.14.2021 Tooth and claw: Crocodiles We have a morbid fascination with predators. And we've had it since the very first people carved figures or painted on cave walls thousands of years ago. Predators are still revered as gods in many cultures. Our cultural fascination is ...
06.07.2021 Peter Goadsby on migraine neurological condition is far more common than you might think, affecting more people than diabetes, epilepsy and asthma combined. While medications, to help relieve the symptoms of migraine, have been around for some time, they haven’t worked for everyone. And ...
05.31.2021 Patient zero: First outbreak “Aboriginal people had a name for it... they called it ‘Devil Devil’...” In 1789, a disease tore through Aboriginal communities around Sydney Cove, or Warrane, leaving dead bodies floating in the harbour, and scattered along the shorelines. The evidence points ...
05.29.2021 The Evidence: Sharing Vaccines – what’s gone wrong? The lofty ambition of the global community was that across the globe, those with the highest risk of losing their lives to this virus should be vaccinated first. With 99% of deaths coming in the over fifties, the plan was ...
05.24.2021 Patient zero: Back from the brink A six-year old boy in Papua New Guinea woke up one day in 2018 and was suddenly unable to stand up. Less than a year later, children in three other Asia Pacific nations were experiencing the same alarming symptoms. A ...
05.17.2021 Patient zero Ticking time bomb In 2012 doctors in Tennessee started seeing patients with unusual symptoms. It became a race against time to find a diagnosis. A series of investigations revealed that the patients were infected with a fungus that was causing a form of ...
05.10.2021 Patient zero: Spillover in suburbia A horse mysteriously falls ill in her paddock, and before long dozens of other horses from her stables are sick. As the horses start to die vicious, painful deaths, their trainer falls into a coma and is placed into intensive ...
05.03.2021 The noises that make us cringe Why do some people find noises like a fork scraping a plate so terrible? asks Findlay in Aberdeenshire. Rutherford and Fry endure some horrible noises to find out the answer. Warning - This episode contains some horrible sounds Trevor Cox, ...
04.26.2021 The Hamster Power Hypothesis "How many hamsters on wheels would it take to power London?" asks Judah from Virginia in the USA. Rutherford & Fry return with engineering, ethics and economics to answer this electric query. Smart grid engineer Lynne McDonald helps keep the ...
04.19.2021 The Martian Mission What would it take for humans to live permanently on Mars? asks Martin in Weston-super-Mare, UK. The doctors dig into requirements and possibilities of a long-term Martian outpost. We know that many missions to Mars have failed, for a range ...
04.12.2021 The equal rights stuff In 1976, Nasa launched a campaign to help recruit the next generation of Astronauts. It was fronted by African-American actress Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura, as part of an effort to ensure the astronaut corps represented the diversity of ...
04.05.2021 Lithium: Chile’s white gold The Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2019 was awarded to John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino "for the development of lithium-ion batteries." These rechargeable batteries are in our phones, and in our laptops. And they will be the batteries ...
03.29.2021 Patient zero: Coronavirus and contact tracing Today’s episode is about the history we’re still living. From Melbourne to Munich, Lombardy to Wuhan and all the way back again, this episode is about what happened when we faced those first coronavirus cases. Where things went well, where ...
03.27.2021 The Evidence: Mental health and the pandemic Year two of the pandemic, and in tandem with rising rates of illness, death, acute economic shock and restrictions on everyday life, mental health problems have risen too. Claudia Hammond and her panel of global experts answer listeners’ questions about ...
03.22.2021 Patient zero: The December transplant Three transplant patients died within a week of each other in Melbourne in December 2006 and alarm bells started ringing. One of the patients was Karen. When she got a phone call from the hospital offering her a kidney transplant, ...
03.15.2021 Patient zero: something in the water It was October 2010 when reports first emerged of a mysterious disease spreading through Haiti. In a hospital in Saint Marc, about an hour north of the country's capital Port-au-Prince, 400 cases of adults with watery diarrhoea had been reported ...
03.08.2021 The Life Scientific: Jane Hurst Mice, like humans, prefer to be treated with a little dignity, and that extends to how they are handled. Pick a mouse up by its tail, as was the norm in laboratories for decades, and it gets anxious. Make a ...
03.01.2021 The Life Scientific: Cath Noakes Professor Cath Noakes studies how air moves and the infection risk associated with different ventilation systems. Early in the pandemic, she was invited to join the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE and asked to study the transmission routes ...
02.27.2021 The Evidence: Keeping out Covid-19 From flight bans and entry bans to compulsory quarantine and virus testing, most countries have introduced travel restrictions in an effort to control the spread of the virus. But for a virus that knows no borders, do cross-border health measures ...
02.22.2021 The Life Scientific: Giles Yeo Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to leading scientists about their life and work.
02.15.2021 The power of night Lucy Cooke meets some of the animal kingdom’s nocturnal inhabitants to understand why it pays to stir once the sun goes down. She examines some of the extraordinary nocturnal adaptations from the largest group of mammals, the bats, to the ...
02.08.2021 The power of one We humans are a supremely social species, but the coronavirus pandemic has forced many of us into solitary confinement. It feels like an unnatural, regressive move, that goes against our collective nature. So why do some species embrace the power ...
02.01.2021 The power of celibacy You might think that sex is essential for life, but you'd be wrong! Lucy Cooke travels to the Hawaiian island of Oahu to meet a community of mourning geckos - self-cloning sisters who have done away with males altogether. An ...
01.30.2021 The Evidence: The Shapeshifting Virus News that at least three new variants of SARS-CoV-2 have emerged in three separate continents have sent a chill throughout the scientific community. All viruses mutate but the speed and scale of the changes and the fact they occurred independently, ...
01.25.2021 Science Trumped When US health expert sighed last week that science could now speak again, his sense of relief was shared by many scientists. Since the start of the Trump administration, experts inside the US government's science agencies, and those outside working ...
01.18.2021 Plant scientist Dale Sanders Professor Dale Sanders has spent much of his life studying plants, seeking to understand why some thrive in a particular environment while others struggle. His ground breaking research on their molecular machinery showed how plants extract nutrients from the soil ...
01.11.2021 Astrophysicist Andy Fabian Professor Andrew Fabian from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy has spent his career trying to unravel the mystery of how some of the most dramatic events in the universe can profoundly influence its evolution. For over 50 years he’s been examining ...
01.04.2021 Marine conservationist Heather Koldewey Professor Heather Koldewey wants to protect our oceans from over-fishing and plastic pollution. An academic who is not content to sit back and let the science speak for itself, she wants to turn science into action and has found conservation ...
12.28.2020 Climate meltdown The year 2020 started with wildfires raging across parts of Australia, exceptional floods in East Africa, and a heatwave in the Arctic. Extremes persisted through the year in the north - where wild fires consumed record areas in Siberia, and ...
12.26.2020 Hopes and fears for Covid-19 vaccines Less than a year in, and the first vaccines are already being rolled out, with many more in the pipeline. It is an unprecedented scientific response to the global pandemic and researchers around the world have provided the first hope ...
12.21.2020 Evolutionary biologist Alice Roberts It’s amazing what we can learn from a pile of old bones. Having worked as a paediatric surgeon for several years (often doing the ward round on roller blades), Alice Roberts spent a decade teaching anatomy to medical students and ...
12.14.2020 Steve Haake Steve Haake has spent much of his career using technology to help elite sports people get better, faster and break records. He has turned his hand to the engineering behind most sports, from studying how golf balls land, to designing ...
12.07.2020 The Space Burrito Is there a point in space where the Sun could heat a burrito perfectly? asks Will. The doctors tackle this and a plethora of other conundrums from the Curious Cases inbox. Featuring expert answers from astrophysicist Samaya Nissanke, cosmologist Andrew ...
11.30.2020 The Zedonk Problem Today I learnt that tigons and ligers are what you get when lions and tigers interbreed?!’ surprised listener Jamz G tells the doctors. ‘What determines whether species can interbreed?’ Geneticist Aoife McLysaght studies molecular evolution. She explains the modern definition ...
11.28.2020 The Evidence: Pandemic rules: follower or flouter? Millions of us, across the world, are subject to curfews, stay-at-home orders and lockdowns but what makes us stick to the rules, bend them or ignore them altogether? Claudia Hammond and her expert panel of guests consider the psychology of ...
11.23.2020 The end of everything Everyone knows about the Big Bang being the beginning of the universe and time - but when and how is it going to end? ask brothers Raffie and Xe from Rome. For this series, with lockdown learning in mind, Drs ...
11.16.2020 Broad spectrum Autism is a lifelong condition, often seen as particularly ‘male’. Yet a growing number of women, and those assigned female at birth, are being diagnosed as autistic in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. Writer and performer Helen Keen is ...
11.09.2020 Birds: singing for survival As large areas of the world have locked down this year, many of us have become more aware of the birdsong around us. The relative silence has allowed us to listen in. But scientists have known for several years that ...
11.02.2020 Digital touch Claudia Hammond asks if touch can be replicated digitally? What devices exist already and how likely are we to use them? Michael Banissy, co-creator of the Touch Test, neuroscientist David Eagleman and researcher Carey Jewitt look at the possibilities for ...
10.31.2020 The Evidence: Are national lockdowns evidence of policy failure? As a surge of cases risks overwhelming health services in parts of Europe, Claudia Hammond and experts from around the world examine the evidence behind using lockdowns to supress the virus. Lockdowns describe a huge range of actions that many ...
10.26.2020 Affectionate touch 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 ...
10.19.2020 Unwanted touch Claudia Hammond explores unwanted touch and who we do and don’t mind touching us – and where. She draws on insights from the largest study that’s ever been conducted on the topic of touch – The Touch Test - commissioned ...

Older episodes

Discovery

What's Discovery about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Discovery episodes:

Whatever happened to…those Covid-19 stories

Dare to repair: Fixing the future

Dare to repair: The fight for the right to repair

Dare to Repair: How we broke the future

Tooth and claw: Tigers

Tooth and claw: Bears

The Evidence: How Covid damages the human body

Tooth and claw: Lions

Tooth and claw: Crocodiles

Peter Goadsby on migraine

Patient zero: First outbreak

The Evidence: Sharing Vaccines – what’s gone wrong?

Patient zero: Back from the brink

Patient zero Ticking time bomb

Patient zero: Spillover in suburbia

The noises that make us cringe

The Hamster Power Hypothesis

The Martian Mission

The equal rights stuff

Lithium: Chile’s white gold

Patient zero: Coronavirus and contact tracing

The Evidence: Mental health and the pandemic

Patient zero: The December transplant

Patient zero: something in the water

The Life Scientific: Jane Hurst

The Life Scientific: Cath Noakes

The Evidence: Keeping out Covid-19

The Life Scientific: Giles Yeo

The power of night

The power of one

The power of celibacy

The Evidence: The Shapeshifting Virus

Science Trumped

Plant scientist Dale Sanders

Astrophysicist Andy Fabian

Marine conservationist Heather Koldewey

Climate meltdown

Hopes and fears for Covid-19 vaccines

Evolutionary biologist Alice Roberts

Steve Haake

The Space Burrito

The Zedonk Problem

The Evidence: Pandemic rules: follower or flouter?

The end of everything

Broad spectrum

Birds: singing for survival

Digital touch

The Evidence: Are national lockdowns evidence of policy failure?

Affectionate touch

Unwanted touch

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