Over the past year, we've seen our energy bills reach unimaginable heights. The war in Ukraine is having devastating effects for Ukrainians and creating ripples for international fuel costs. We're now in the midst of a 'perfect storm' when it comes to energy supply - but where are we in the story? Is the energy crisis going to get worse, and what are the potential solutions to bringing those prices down? We chat to Phil Grünewald who considers the current situation a wake-up call to improve our housing stock, diversify how we heat our homes and to use new and sustainable fuels that could change the geopolitics of energy for good.

In this episode of the Big Questions podcast, we're talking about one of our favourite guilty pleasures - ordering a pizza! From the machinery required to harvest the wheat for the dough, to the cardboard packaging your finished pizza is delivered in, we're considering all aspects of a pizza's journey and asking: is ordering a pizza bad for the climate? Environmental scientists Eleanor Hammond and Dr Mike Clark are here to provide some answers, and tell us about '4 steps 4 the Earth'. (Don't worry, they're not banning pizza!)

What do you think of when someone says “the most dangerous animal in the world”? A lion perhaps? Or a poisonous frog? Well, one species of mosquito – Anopheles gambiae – is often referred to as such, owing to its enhanced ability to transmit malaria, a deadly disease which led to 627,000 deaths in 2020 alone. A. gambiae isn’t the only species of mosquito that is able to effectively transmit malaria, and each species exhibits different behaviours and requires a different management strategy. But how do you tell them apart? In this episode, we chat to Dr Marianne Sinka, Senior Researcher on the Humbug Project (https://humbug.ox.ac.uk/) which uses smartphones to identify mosquito species using their unique ‘hums’.

Did you know there are different types of pain? In this episode of the Big Questions Podcast, we chat to Dr Lydia Coxon, a researcher in the Nuffield Department of Women's and Reproductive Health at Oxford. Lydia is looking at the mechanisms that cause pain in patients with endometriosis - a common gynaecological condition where tissue that normally grows inside the womb is found outside the womb. Through her research she hopes to better understand the type of pain that endometriosis causes, so that it can be treated more effectively.

One way to delve deep into the ancient history of the Earth - or other planetary bodies for that matter - is to examine the magnetism recorded by rocks. Kind of like a fossilised magnetic fingerprint. But trying to do this in an environment where another magnetic field exists (i.e. everywhere on Earth!) is pretty challenging. Enter the 'magnetically shielded room'! Join us as we catch up with Prof James Bryson from Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences, and find out all about this very special DIY project. 

"Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, had a very shiny nose..." Many of us will be very familiar with Santa's famous antlered friend. But did you know that many reindeer actually do have red noses? But why? In this festive episode of the Big Questions Podcast, we ask Oxford polar biologist Ignacio (Nacho) Juarez Martinez to share some of the reasons we find red pigments in animals, and to explain why he thinks Rudolph's nose is so red!

Online communication channels are popular, to say the least. For instance, there are 187 million active Twitter users per day alone. Sadly, these open channels of communication also open up the potential for harm, through online hate speech. The problem is so large that we require AI to help detect it. But what about when it comes to emoji? According to some reports, ten billion emoji are sent in messages around the world every day. When the same emoji can have vastly different meanings depending on the context, how can we use AI to detect their use as hate speech? We speak to Oxford AI researcher Hannah Rose Kirk to find out.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic there was a lot of confusion, as we all tried to figure out what we should and shouldn't do to best protect ourselves and others. Fortunately, we now have more definitive answers to some of our most pressing questions - which are backed-up by data - including "umm...should I be wearing a mask?". As COVID cases are again on the rise across Europe, this is the question we're putting to demographer and behavioural scientist Prof Melinda Mills.

Satellites have been orbiting our planet for the past few decades. We might be familiar with how they can be used to track weather, or beam television and phone signals around the world. But did you know, that by capturing images of the Earth outside the visible spectrum, they're able to offer a unique perspective of the ground beneath our feet? They could even - as Earth observations specialist Maral Bayaraa tells us - provide a remote early warning system for an environmental catastrophe, dam collapse.