Great Moments In Science

Wood has a loads of potential—from it we can make semi-conductors, batteries, steel, concrete, even plastics. It does need a lot of processing but we already do that with materials like steel, glass and concrete.

We're now quite familiar with terms like 'herd immunity' and 'epidemic', and that when separate groups of people—with separate germs—meet for the very first time, things can turn out badly. If you have never been exposed to a specific germ you won't be primed for protection against it.

When digging the compost pile into the garden, Dr Karl noticed a ball of entangled shape-shifting worms. You might think 'yuck'—but there's a 'wow' factor because some animal groupings can generate intelligence, giving the group an advantage over solitary individuals.

The final piece about why the 100 million or so black holes in our Milky Way galaxy are missing.

More on the almost-emptiness that is black holes. Because they're invisible, they're difficult to find—but sometimes get discovered because they give off X-rays.

Even though it sounds totally crazy, astronomers are very confident that black holes exist. Our galazy is really old, it should carry at least 100 million black holes but we’ve found only a couple of dozen of them.

There's really no 'genteel' way to say it, this week we're... passing wind. But even though it's totally natural, it can be embarrassing.

It used to be thought that a pathogen (or germ) and its host develop in a 'mutually benign relationship'—this was called the 'Law of Declining Virulence'. If the common cold killed us there would be less hosts and the virus would decrease. So the common cold virus mutated to become less lethal, and more common. The Law of Declining Virulence was debunked in the 1980s, and the pathogen/host relationship is actually pretty complicated.

Power steering on a car involves various rods of steel moving relative to one another. How the rods connect is why mechanics are dealing with an unexpected problem.

Thanks to some fuzzy-looking photos, bat echolocation just got more amazing.

This program was originally published on 3 September 2019