Science Stories

Science Stories episodes:

• 09.10.2019

  Alexis Carrel and the immortal chicken heart

  Philip Ball tells the story of Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon who worked to preserve life outside the body and create an immortal chicken heart in a dish. His quest was to renew ageing flesh, repair and rebuild our bodies...

  
• 01.09.2019

  Ibn al-Haytham and How We See

  Philip Ball's story is of Ibn al-Haytham, the first scientist, and his book of optics that defined how we see.

  
• 01.02.2019

  Lady Mary Montagu's Smallpox Experiment

  Naomi Alderman's Science Story reveals how Lady Mary Wortley Montagu experimented on her own child in a quest to prove that smallpox inoculation works. Born in 1689 in a position of some power and influence, Lady Mary travelled to Constantinople...

  
• 12.26.2018

  Kepler's Snowflakes

  Philip Ball reveals the tale of a small booklet 'On The Six-Cornered Snowflake", written by Johannes Kepler as a New Year's gift. The C17th astronomer wished to explain the intricate and symmetrical shape of winter's tiny stars of snow. His...

  
• 12.19.2018

  Lucretius, Sheep and Atoms

  Naomi Alderman's tale is of Lucretius, author of a 2000 year old poem that theorised about atoms and the natural world. Written in the first century BCE, during a chaotic and frightening time when the Roman Republic was collapsing, Lucretius...

  
• 12.12.2018

  Eddington's Eclipse and Einstein's Celebrity

  Eddington's Eclipse and Einstein's Celebrity Philip Ball's tale is of a solar eclipse 100 years ago observed by Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer who travelled to the remote island of Principe off the coast of West Africa and saw...

  
• 07.11.2018

  Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting

  Mary Anning lived in Lyme Regis on what is now known as the Jurassic Coast in the first half of the 19th century. Knowing the shore from childhood and with a remarkable eye for detection she was extremely successful in...

  
• 07.04.2018

  Hypatia: The Murdered Mathematician

  Naomi Alderman's tale is a murder mystery, the story of Hypatia, the mathematician murdered by a mob in the learned city of Alexandria, around the year 415 CE. Hypatia was a communicator of science, tackling difficult maths and teaching it...

  
• 06.27.2018

  Descartes' Daughter

  There's a story told about French philosopher René Descartes and his daughter. He boards a ship for a voyage over the North Sea with a large wooden box which he insists be handled with such great care that the sea...

  
• 06.20.2018

  Urea and the Wohler Myth

  Philip Ball tells the story of German chemist Friedrich Wöhler's creation of urea, an organic substance previously thought only to be produced by living creatures. Yet in 1828 Wöhler created urea from decidedly non-living substances. It was exciting because the...

  
• 06.13.2018

  17th-Century Space Flight: The Real Cyrano de Bergerac

  Philip Ball reveals the real Cyrano de Bergerac - forget the big nosed fictional character - and his links to 17th Century space flight. Cyrano was a soldier, gambler and duellist who retired from military exploits on account of his...

  
• 04.01.2016

  Einstein's Fridge

  What do you do when you've described the nature of the universe? In the late 1920s Einstein was working on a grand unified theory of the universe, having given us E=mc2, space-time and the fourth dimension. He...

  
• 01.27.2016

  The duchess who gatecrashed science

  In the spring of 1667 Samuel Pepys queued repeatedly with crowds of Londoners and waited for hours just to catch a glimpse of aristocrat writer and thinker Margaret Cavendish. Twice he was frustrated and couldn't spot her, but eventually...

  
• 01.20.2016

  The meteorite and the hidden hoax

  In 1864 a strange type of rock fell from the sky above Orgueil in rural France. Shocked and frightened locals collected pieces of the peculiar, peaty blob from the surrounding fields, and passed them on to museums and scientists. ...

  
• 01.13.2016

  How an eel sparked our interest in electricity

  Naomi Alderman presents an alternate history of electricity. This is not a story of power stations, motors and wires. It’s a story of how the electric eel and its cousin the torpedo fish, led to the invention of the first...

  
• 01.06.2016

  Submarine for a Stuart King

  Philip Ball dives into the magical world of Cornelis Drebbel , inventor of the world's first submarine in 1621. How did the crew of this remarkable vessel manage to breathe underwater, completely cut off from the surface, 150 years before...