Ockham’s Razor

Are you a fan of pop music? What about rap? Or maybe you like edgy, experimental, electronic stuff?

Well – that’s what you think. But if we covered your head with sensors and played you some music, we might discover differently.

First broadcast 28 August 2021.

We know that giving students choice and ownership over their own learning is best, but has it been lost from the education system?

Think about the stem cells in an embryo – they’re a bit like a teenager on the brink of adulthood, with the potential to be almost anything they want to be.

There are those places in nature that we come back to, again and again. The reason we come is because they’re so beautiful, or peaceful… but it’s the act of returning regularly that helps us notice when things are different. The landscape is telling us in those subtle changes what’s happening to it.

What do boiled bandicoot, smuggled salami and an invisibility cloak have in common?

Dr Deb Bower can tell you. She's a conservation biologist working on reptiles and amphibians ... with no shortage of fieldwork adventures to share.

And the key to understanding the relationship between those seemingly very different items lies among the rough forest tracks of Papua New Guinea.

Originally broadcast 7 March 2021.

520 million years ago, the oceans teemed with some of the most bizarre animals ever to have lived.

Every day we make hundreds of choices, big and small, that build to become the story of our lives – the friends we make, the careers we choose, our partners and our purpose.

What if our entire universe, including you and I, could be boiled down to one object: a vibrating string?

They breathe air but live underwater, and like their land-dwelling counterparts their bites are venomous.

Nathan Brooks-English usually studies the geological processes that make mountains but on one particular field trip, the thing he learned most about was human connection.