The Life Scientific

By BBC Radio 4

Personal Journals Society & Culture

What's The Life Scientific about?

Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to leading scientists about their life and work, finding out what inspires and motivates them and asking what their discoveries might do for mankind

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Tamsin Edwards on the uncer...

06.01.2021

Certainty is comforting. Certainty is quick. But science is uncertain. And this is particularly true for people who are trying to understand climate change. Climate scientist, Tamsin Edwards tackles this uncertainty head on. She quantifies the uncertainty inherent in all ...

The Life Scientific episodes:

06.01.2021 Tamsin Edwards on the uncertainty in climate science Certainty is comforting. Certainty is quick. But science is uncertain. And this is particularly true for people who are trying to understand climate change. Climate scientist, Tamsin Edwards tackles this uncertainty head on. She quantifies the uncertainty inherent in all ...
05.25.2021 Mike Tipton on how our bodies respond to extreme conditions As the craze for cold water swimming continues, Jim Al Khalili talks to triathlete and Professor of Extreme Physiology, Mike Tipton. Is it as good for our mental and physical health as many enthusiasts claim? And do the benefits go ...
05.18.2021 Nira Chamberlain on how mathematics can solve real-world problems When does a crowd of people become unsafe? How well will Aston Villa do next season? When is it cost-effective to replace a kitchen? The answers may seem arbitrary but, to Nira Chamberlain, they lie in mathematics. You can use ...
05.11.2021 Helen Scales on marine conservation Luminescent bone-eating worms, giant squid and a sea cucumber commonly known as the headless chicken monster: some extraordinary creatures live at the bottom of the sea. For a long time almost everyone agreed the pressure was too intense for any ...
05.04.2021 Peter Goadsby on migraine Throbbing head, nausea, dizziness, disturbed vision – just some of the disabling symptoms that can strike during a migraine attack. This neurological condition is far more common than you might think, affecting more people than diabetes, epilepsy and asthma combined. ...
04.27.2021 Jane Clarke on Protein Folding Professor Jane Clarke has had a fascinating double career. Having been a science teacher for many years, she didn’t start her research career until she was 40. Today she is a world-leading expert in molecular biophysics and, in particular, in ...
04.20.2021 Professor Martin Sweeting, inventor of microsatellites When Martin Sweeting was a student, he thought it would be fun to try to build a satellite using electronic components found in some of the earliest personal computers. An amateur radio ham and space enthusiast, he wanted to create ...
04.13.2021 Theresa Marteau on how to change behaviour We all know how to be more healthy. And yet we are also remarkably good at NOT doing what we know is good for us. We keep meaning to get fit, but the sofa seems so much more appealing than ...
03.09.2021 Mark Spencer on how plants solve crimes Inside the mind of a forensic botanist, Mark Spencer tells Jim Al-Khalili how he uses plant evidence to help solve crimes. By studying the vegetation at crime scenes, Mark can tell how long a dead body has been laying in ...
03.02.2021 Sarah Bridle on the carbon footprint of food What would happen to our carbon emissions if we all went vegan? Astrophysicist, Sarah Bridle tells Jim Al-Khalili why she switched her attention from galaxies to food. A rising star in the study of extra-galactic astronomy, Sarah was a driving ...
02.23.2021 Richard Bentall on the causes of mental ill health For a long time people who heard voices or suffered paranoid delusions were thought to be too crazy to benefit from talking therapies. As a young man working on a prison psychiatric ward, Richard Bentall thought otherwise. Together with a ...
02.16.2021 Jane Hurst on the secret life of mice Mice, like humans, prefer to be treated with a little dignity, and that extends to how they are handled. Pick a mouse up by its tail, as was the norm in laboratories for decades, and it gets anxious. Make a ...
02.02.2021 Anne Johnson on the importance of public health Public health has been on all of our minds during the pandemic and Prof Dame Anne Johnson has spent more time thinking about it than most of us. She studies the human behaviours that enable viruses to spread and is ...
01.26.2021 Giles Yeo on how our genes can make us fat Many of us think we’re in control of what we eat and that, coupled with what we do, dictates our shape and size. It’s physics after all - if you eat too much and move too little, you put on ...
01.19.2021 Cath Noakes on making buildings Covid-safe Professor Cath Noakes studies how air moves and the infection risk associated with different ventilation systems. Early in the pandemic, she was invited to join the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE and asked to study the transmission routes ...
01.12.2021 Chris Jackson on sustainable geology Chris Jackson is the kind of scientist who just loves to get out into the landscape he loves. He’s often introduced as ‘geologist and adventurer’. For the past five years he’s been Professor of Basin Analysis in the Department of ...
12.15.2020 Scientists in the Spotlight during the Pandemic More of us have been exposed to so more science than ever before during 2020. And our insatiable appetite for science shows no sign of diminishing. Back in 2019, most scientists struggled to get any media attention. Now scientists involved ...
09.22.2020 Neil Ferguson on modelling Covid-19 Neil Ferguson is known to many as Professor Lockdown. The mathematical models he created to predict the spread of Covid-19 were influential but, he says, it took him quite a long time to be persuaded that full lockdown was a ...
09.15.2020 Sarah Gilbert on developing a vaccine for Covid-19 Sarah Gilbert started working on a vaccine for Covid-19 just as soon as the virus genome was sequenced. Within weeks, she had a proof of principle. By early April, her team at the Jenner Institute in Oxford had manufactured hundreds ...
09.08.2020 Steve Haake on technology, sport and health Steve Haake,has spent much of his career using technology to help elite sports people get better, faster and break records. He has turned his hand to the engineering behind most sports, from studying how golf balls land, to designing new ...
09.01.2020 Francesca Happé on autism When Francesca Happé started out as a research psychologist thirty years ago, she thought she could easily find out all there was to know about autism – and perhaps that wouldn’t have been impossible as there were so few papers ...
08.25.2020 Heather Koldewey on marine conservation Professor Heather Koldewey wants to protect our oceans from over-fishing and plastic pollution. An academic who is not content to sit back and let the science speak for itself, she wants to turn science into action and has found conservation ...
08.18.2020 Dale Sanders on feeding the world Professor Dale Sanders has spent much of his life studying plants, seeking to understand why some thrive in a particular environment while others struggle. His ground breaking research on their molecular machinery showed how plants extract nutrients from the soil ...
08.11.2020 Andy Fabian on black holes Professor Andrew Fabian from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy has spent his career trying to unravel the mystery of how some of the most dramatic events in the universe can profoundly influence its evolution. For over 50 years he’s been examining ...
08.04.2020 Alice Roberts on bones It’s amazing what we can learn from a pile of old bones. Having worked as a paediatric surgeon for several years (often doing the ward round on roller blades), Alice Roberts spent a decade teaching anatomy to medical students and ...
06.16.2020 Clifford Stott on riot prevention Why does violence break out in some crowds and not in others and what can the police do to reduce the risk of this happening? Professor Clifford Stott tells Jim Al-Khalili about his journey from trouble maker to police advisor ...
06.09.2020 Emma Bunce on the gas giants Emma Bunce, Professor of Planetary Plasma Physics at the University of Leicester, was inspired to study the solar system as a child by a TV programme that featured Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune. She has spent the last 20 years ...
06.02.2020 Jane Goodall on living with wild chimpanzees Jane Goodall, aged 86, reflects on the years she spent living with the wild chimpanzees in Gombe in eastern Tanzania and tells Jim Al Khalili why she believes the best way to bring about change is to ‘creep into people’s ...
05.26.2020 Liz Seward and the dream of spaceflight Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to Liz Seward, Senior Space Strategist for Airbus Defence and Space. Liz's young interest in Science Fiction led to a career designing spacecraft and robots for exploring our own earth, other planets, and the stars. From ...
05.19.2020 Frank Kelly on air pollution Long before most of us gave air pollution a second thought, Frank Kelly was studying the impact of toxic particles on our lungs. In a pioneering set of experiments on human volunteers in northern Sweden, he proved that pollutants, such ...
05.12.2020 Debbie Pain on conserving globally threatened bird species Professor Debbie Pain has spent the last 30 years solving some of the most devastating threats to birdlife, saving many species from the brink of extinction. Her childhood passion for bird spotting drove her into conservation research with the RSPB ...
05.05.2020 Jim McDonald on power networks Jim McDonald grew up in Glasgow. He was the son of a rope-maker and the first in his family to go to university. Now he’s the Principal of Strathclyde University, a non-executive director of Scottish Power and President of the ...
04.28.2020 Brian Greene on how the universe is made of string Jim talks a man who studies the universe at the largest and smallest scales imaginable. When Brian Greene was just twelve years old, he wandered round Columbia University in New York looking for someone to teach him mathematics, with a ...
03.04.2020 Myles Allen on understanding climate change Professor Myles Allen has spent thirty years studying global climate change, trying to working out what we can and can't predict. He was one of the first scientists to quantify the extent to which human actions are responsible for global ...
03.03.2020 Matthew Cobb on how we detect smells It’s been estimated that humans are capable of detecting a trillion different smells. How is this possible when we have just 400 types of olfactory receptors located in the bridge of our nose? Matthew Cobb has spent many years studying ...
03.02.2020 Anya Hurlbert on seeing colour As a professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University, Anya Hurlbert is one of our most respected researchers into the way we see colour. In a career as a physicist, physiologist, neuroscientist and physician at some of the great research ...
02.11.2020 Optical communications pioneer Polina Bayvel We’ve come to expect to be connected instantly to anywhere in the world and to have unlimited information at our fingertips. We shop online, stream music, download books and boxsets onto our electronic devices. We share videos of our pets ...
02.04.2020 2019 Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine, Sir Peter Ratcliffe Sir Peter Ratcliffe, Director of Clinical Research at the Francis Crick Institute, as well as Director of Oxford University’s Target Discovery Institute – has dedicated his life to understanding the body’s molecular-level response to low oxygen levels, or ‘hypoxia’. He ...
01.14.2020 Susannah Maidment on stegosaurs Susie was dinosaur-mad as a child. But unlike most children, she never grew out of her obsession. She tells Jim about an exciting new stegosaur find in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and describes the time she spent dinosaur hunting ...
01.07.2020 Patricia Wiltshire on how pollen can solve crimes. Patricia Wiltshire grew up in a mining village in South Wales, left home when she was 17 and worked for many years, first as a medical technician and then as a business secretary (a profession her first husband considered to ...
11.12.2019 Elizabeth Fisher on chromosomes in mice and men Elizabeth Fisher, Professor of Neurogenetics at University College London, spent 13 years getting her idea – finding a new way of studying genetic disorders – to work. She began her research career at a time, in the 1980s, when there ...
11.05.2019 Demis Hassabis on artificial intelligence In the 200th episode of The Life Scientific, Jim Al-Khalili finds out why Demis Hassabis wants to create artificial intelligence and use it to help humanity. Thinking about how to win at chess when he was a boy got Demis ...
10.29.2019 Saiful Islam on materials to power the 21st century Not so long ago, all batteries were single use. And solar power was an emerging and expensive technology. Now, thanks to rechargeable batteries, we have mobile phones, laptops, electronic toys, cordless power tools and other portable electronic devices. And solar ...
10.22.2019 Adrian Owen on scanning for awareness in the injured brain Neuroscientist Adrian Owen has spent much of his career exploring what he calls ‘the grey zone’, a realm of consciousness inhabited by people with severe brain injuries, who are aware yet unable to respond to those around them. It's this ...
10.15.2019 Martha Clokie on the viruses that could improve our health Could viruses improve our health where antibiotics have failed? As a child, Martha Clokie spent a lot of time collecting seaweed on Scottish beaches. She loves plants and studied botany for many years. But mid-career, she learnt about all the ...
10.08.2019 Anne Magurran on how to measure biodiversity Anne Magurran started her career as an ecologist counting moths in an ancient woodland in northern Ireland in the 1970s, when the study of biological diversity was a very young science. Later she studied piranas in a flooded forest in ...
10.01.2019 Richard Wiseman on lying, luck and the paranormal How do you tell if someone is lying? When Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a nationwide experiment to identify the tell-tale signs, the results were surprising. If you want to ...
07.30.2019 Jonathan Ball on his arms race against viruses Ebola, Zika, Sars, Mers - rarely a week goes by without a deadly virus stealing the headlines. For Jonathan Ball, getting to know a virus at its most basic level is crucial to mounting a defence. As the son of ...
07.23.2019 Robin Dunbar on why we have friends Maintaining friendships is one of the most cognitively demanding things we do, according to Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar. So why do we bother? Robin has spent his life trying to answer this deceptively simple question. For most of ...
07.16.2019 Katherine Joy on moon rock Katherine Joy studies moon rock. She has studied lunar samples that were brought to earth by the Apollo missions (382kg in total) and hunted for lunar meteorites in Antarctica, camping on ice for weeks on end and travelling around on ...

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