Recent episodes

Flying high with the fruit fly

by Laura Martin-Coll and Siamak Redhai

“With the strange feeling that my ancestors were roaming free in Africa, all of a sudden, I was born in a plastic bottle containing banana paste, closed with ...

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Journey to the centre of the Earth – the core of our planet

by Lidunka Vocadlo

Connecting rainforest hunter-gatherers with wildlife conservation? There’s an app for that!

by Simon Hoyte

Medicines in Chains: Reducing side effects with polymers

by Christina Picken

Neuroscience
Saving newborns from brain damage

by Ping Yip

A happily pregnant mother arrived at the hospital to give birth to her baby boy. It was supposed to be one of those routine births, ...

Why do we have a brain

by Alejandro Galvez-Pol

Imagine fairly simple tasks, like snapping your fingers, or moving your feet to the rhythm of your favourite song. Even though these are very basic ...

Can we cure neurological disorders by modifying the genome?

by Gabriele Lignani

How many of us know at least one person with a neurological disorder? In one way or another, we all do, since this doesn’t only ...

Neural cartography: Mapping the brain using a very strong magnet

by Gaelle Coullon

Human beings are natural explorers. We like to discover strange new places and make maps of the worlds we find. However, one particular world that ...

VIDEO EPISODES
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The woman who unmasked the forger

by Mary Wellesley

In 1930, the chief librarian of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, Belle da Costa Greene, was approached about a rare medieval panel painting by the Spanish master Jorge Inglés. The painting was to be offered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees by its purchasing agent, ...

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Dude, where's my car? (How philosophy might help you find it!)

by Luke Fenton-Glynn

In the cult film Dude, Where’s My Car?, Jesse and Chester wake up in their house, after a night of partying, and are unable to ...

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The invisible killer of World War I: Blast injury

by Emily Mayhew

Paris, 1917. A neuroscientist, Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke, arrived for work. A wind from the east carried the sound of artillery and gunfire up and down the ...

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Why Martin Luther King had the US Constitution on his side

by Adam Smith

In December 1955, at the Holt Street Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., made a speech that he intended, he later said, to “be militant ...

Philosophy
Dude, where's my car? (How philosophy might help you find it!)

by Luke Fenton-Glynn

In the cult film Dude, Where’s My Car?, Jesse and Chester wake up in their house, after a night of partying, and are unable to ...

A philosopher’s take on Global Basic Income

by Hillel Steiner

One of the more rarely encountered phenomena in this world is agreement between people on opposing sides of the left-right political spectrum. And yet there ...

It's at Tate but is it art?

by Miguel Dos Santos

Once upon a time there was an emperor who was so fond of dressing up that he cared about doing little else. One day, a ...

AUDIO episodes
Walking through Dickensian London

by John Mullan

In this podcast, Dickens expert John Mullan takes us on a journey through this great writer's mind, touching on his relationship to London, dreams, Bedlam, and more.

Am I crazy or is it physics

by Katy Clough

For any theoretical physicist, there is a moment when you know you have “made it”, and that moment is when you receive your first letter from someone who claims to ...