Discovery

Dr Julia Ravey and Dr Ella Hubber are both scientists, but it turns out there’s a lot they don’t know about the women that came before them. In Unstoppable, Julia and Ella tell each other the hidden, world-shaping stories of the scientists, engineers and innovators that they wish they’d known about when they were starting out in science. This week, a Chinese malariologist who hunted for clues in ancient medical texts to find a cure for one of the world’s deadliest diseases.

During a time of global political tension, the Chinese government set up a top-secret project to help communist troops in North Vietnam struggling with malaria. And tasked with this mission was young scientist, Tu Youyou. With a drive to help people after falling ill as a teenager and seeing the horrors of malaria firsthand, Tu turned to traditional Chinese medicine to look for potential treatments. And, after finding a hit, decided she should be the one to trial it...

Named as arguably the most important pharmaceutical discovery in the last half-century, winning the 2015 Nobel Prize, discover how one woman used an overlooked herb combined with modern science to ultimately save millions of lives.

Presenters: Ella Hubber and Julia Ravey

(Image: Chief Professor Tu Youyou, laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine acknowledges applause after she received her Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden during the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony at Concert Hall on December 10, 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/WireImage via GettyImages)

Dr Julia Ravey and Dr Ella Hubber are both scientists, but it turns out there’s a lot they don’t know about the women that came before them. In Unstoppable, Julia and Ella tell each other the hidden, world-shaping stories of the scientists, engineers and innovators that they wish they’d known about when they were starting out in science. This week, the story of an Indian conservationist who combines stork preservation with female empowerment.

(Image: Purnima Devi Barman. Credit: Purnima Devi Barman)

As the famous frog once said, it's not easy being green. And when it comes to decarbonising industry, indeed, reducing emissions of all sorts, the task is a complex one.

Fossil fuels are used to manufacture some of mankind’s most ubiquitous products, from plastics to cement to steel; and even in areas where we’re trying to improve our footprint, there are repercussions. Mining lithium for electric car batteries isn’t exactly without impact. Add to the mix stories of corporations prioritising profits, and governments focusing on short-term popular policies – and it would be easy to feel disheartened.

Professor Anna Korre says her role is to be the champion of science in this debate: providing clear evidence to help reduce environmental impacts, while allowing vital production processes to continue.

Anna is an environmental engineer at Imperial College London and Co-Director of the university’s Energy Futures Lab. Her work has led to a risk model that's now used in mining operations around the world – and her current research into underground CO2 storage could hold the key to decarbonising British industry. But as she tells Jim Al-Khalili, social and family expectations when she was growing up in her native Greece meant her successful career in engineering very nearly didn't happen...

Rosalie David is a pioneer in the study of ancient Egypt. In the early 1970s, she launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using the techniques of modern medicine. Back then, the vast majority of Egyptologists regarded mummies as unimportant sources of information about life in ancient Egypt. Instead they focussed on interpreting hieroglyphic inscriptions, the written record in papyrus documents and archaeological remains and artefacts. Rosalie David proved that the traditionalists were quite wrong.

Professor David’s mummy research started at the Manchester Museum when she began to collaborate with radiologists at in Manchester, taking the museum’s mummies for x-rays at the hospital. Her multi-disciplinary team later moved to a dedicated institute at the University of Manchester, the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology. Over the decades, the team there has made remarkable discoveries about disease and medicine in ancient Egyptian society, providing a new perspective on the history of medicine and giving extraordinary insights into the lives of individuals all those years ago.

Rosalie tells Jim Al-Khalili about her journey from classics and ancient history to biomedicine, including some of her adventures in Egypt in the 1960s. She talks about some of her most significant research projects, and the 21st Century forensic detective work on the mummy of a young woman which revealed a gruesome murder 3,000 years ago...

In the summer of 2003, Europe experienced its most intense heatwave on record - one that saw more than 70,000 people lose their lives.

That’s exactly what he went on to do - and, through this work and more, Peter has helped to shine a light on the causes and effects of climate change.

But the biggest challenge remains: Peter talks to Jim Al-Khalili about whether humanity can adapt quickly enough to deal with the increasingly dangerous effects of our warming world...

Imagine a nanoparticle, less that a thousandth of the width of a human hair, that is so precise that it can carry a medicine to just where it’s needed in the body, improving the drug’s impact and reducing side effects.

Ijeoma Uchegbu, Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at University College London, has spent her career with this goal in mind. She creates nanoparticles to carry medicines to regions of the body that are notoriously hard to reach, such as the back of the eye and the brain. With clinical trials in the pipeline, she hopes to treat blindness with eyedrops, transform pain relief and tackle the opioid crisis.

Ijeoma took an unconventional route into science. Growing up in the UK and in Nigeria, she tells Professor Jim Al-Khalili her remarkable life story, from being fostered by a white family in rural Kent, while her Nigerian parents finished their studies, to struggling to pay the bills through her PhD as a single mum with young children.

So passionate is Ijeoma to spread her love of science, she’s even turned to stand-up comedy to help get her message across!

Darren Croft studies one of the ocean’s most charismatic and spectacular animals – the killer whale. Orca are probably best known for their predatory behaviour: ganging up to catch hapless seals or attack other whales. But for the last fifteen years, Darren Croft’s focus has been on a gentler aspect of killer whale existence: their family and reproductive lives .

Bill Gates is one of the world's best-known billionaires - but after years at the corporate coalface building a software empire and a vast fortune, his priority now is giving that wealth away. And his ethos for doing it has been shaped by science.

Famed for co-founding Microsoft, in recent decades Bill’s attention has turned to philanthropy via The Gates Foundation: one of the largest charities in the world. Since its inception in 2000, the organisation has helped tackle issues around health, education, inequality and climate change in some of the world’s poorest countries, with an undeniable impact, from contributing to the eradication of wild poliovirus in Africa, to helping halve global child mortality rates within 25 years.

But, as Jim al-Khalili discovers, for a man with lofty ambitions and an even loftier bank balance Bill has surprisingly humble tastes.

A small, informal survey leads to shocking revelations about the US justice system, with its truths only uncovered decades later. Meanwhile, an ambitious portfolio manager discovers a perfect graph outlining eye-watering profits. But something does not seem right. Could the graph be accurate, or is it hiding a far more sinister truth? This story delves into the power of data, the hidden forces behind it, and the unexpected revelations that can change everything

At a conference in Mexico, one scientist’s outburst sparks a global quest to find a ‘golden spike’ - the boundary marking the shift into a new geological period dominated by humans, not volcanoes or asteroids. From plastics and concrete to nuclear fallout, the data they uncover reveals a planet profoundly altered. But can they convince their colleagues and the world of the extent of this transformation? Meanwhile, in a small Italian city nestled in the Apennine mountains, a series of low-level tremors raise the question: Is this just a passing phase, or a warning of something much more devastating?