The Life Scientific

As a girl, Caroline Dean would watch the cherry trees in her childhood garden unfurl their pink and white blossom and wonder how it was that they all flowered at exactly the same time. She tells Jim Al-Khalili that the flowering synchronicity she observed was to spark a life-long fascination with the timing mechanisms of plant reproduction, in particular with a process called vernalisation - how plants respond to extreme cold. Professor Dame Caroline Dean of the John Innes Centre in Norwich has focussed right down to the molecular level, homing in on the individual cells and genes that flip the flowering switch. For thirty years running her own lab Caroline has been asking (and answering) questions like why some plants need a period of cold before they can flower the following Spring, how plants know that the cold winter is really over and it's safe to flower and, when winter is so different around the globe, how do plants adapt? Her team focused in on one gene - with the snappy title of Flowering Locus C or

Carlo Rovelli first became interested in the nature of time when he took LSD as a young man. Later he became curious about the world of the almost absurdly small, where time has no meaning and space is grainy. He took seven years to complete his undergraduate degree, having spent a lot of time protesting against the political establishment, falling in love and travelling. An extended hippy trip across north America was, he says, perhaps the most useful time of his life. All this rebelling taught him the value of seeing the world in a different way and the benefits of challenging the status quo. In the end he concluded it was easier, and more meaningful, to challenge Einstein's understanding of time, than it was to overthrow the government. He's a theoretical physicist who became a household name when his book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics became an unexpected international bestseller. His concise, and poetic, introduction to the laws and beauty of physics has sold more than a million copies. He's also a pi

Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Biology at the University of York, learnt to dive in a leaky wet suit in the North Sea when he was a boy. As a student, he was introduced to the extraordinary diversity of marine life on a coral reef in the Red Sea. His job was to count different species of fish but he also noticed several different species of fish working together to defend a common resource, lurid green algal lawns. Life on coral reef is notoriously competitive and collaboration on this scale was unexpected. In 1991 he wrote a ground-breaking paper about marine reserves showing how it is possible to have our fish and eat them. It was a radical suggestion at the time. Now many countries are committed to protecting 10% of the ocean in this way by 2020. Aiming to maintain fish stocks in their current state is, Callum says, ridiculously unambitious. On sabbatical at Harvard University, he started reading historical accounts by pirates, travellers and fishermen and his eyes were opened wider still to just how

Stephen Reicher is a social psychologist at St Andrews University who has spent decades understanding how people behave when in a group. To do so, he's often had to immerse himself among the subjects of his studies, from the Bristol riots in 1980 to the millions of Hindu pilgrims who go to the Magh Mela. Stephen Reicher talks to Jim al-Khalili about the positive and the negative sides to a crowd and the role of a leader of a crowd. He explains how he gave up a place to read medicine, to the annoyance of his parents, to study psychology. Now, he says, his mother would be proud of him as he's publishing research on the health benefits of attending mass gatherings.

Next time you swear at the battery in your mobile phone, spare a thought for the chemist, Clare Grey. Having developed a new way of looking inside solids (using nuclear magnetic resonance), her interest in batteries was sparked by a man from Duracell who asked her a question at an academic conference, and charged up by some electrochemists she met playing squash. For the last twenty years she has sought to understand the precise chemistry of the rechargeable lithium ion battery. And her insights have led to some significant improvements. In 2015 she built a working prototype of a new kind of battery for electric cars, the lithium air battery. If this laboratory model can be made to run on air not oxygen, it could transform the future, by making electric cars more energy efficient and considerably cheaper. Clare talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the years she has spent studying rechargeable batteries, seeking to understand, very precisely, the chemical reactions that take place inside them; and how this kind of fu

Professor Sir John Burn, has made Newcastle on Tyne a centre for research on genetics and disease. He was one of the first British doctors to champion the study of genes in medicine back in the 1980s. More recently his research with families with a propensity to develop certain cancers has shown the benefits of taking aspirin as a prevention against the disease. John Burn was part of the team that set up the Centre for Life on derelict industrial land near the River Tyne, where the public can watch research in action. It now attracts a quarter of a million visitors each year to its public science centre. John Burn was knighted for services to medicine in 2010 and was one of first 20 'local heroes' to have a brass plaque on Newcastle Quayside in 2014, alongside Cardinal Hume, Alan Shearer and Ant and Dec.

What once took decades, now takes days, thanks to an astonishingly powerful new technique invented by Richard Henderson, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Richard grew up in a remote village in the Scottish borders exploring the countryside and reading the weekly bundles of comics sent by his great aunt, as part of a care package for his family. When he started work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, a string of Nobel Prizes had been awarded for x-ray crystallography, a technique that had revealed the double helix structure of DNA, and the atomic structure of haemoglobin, vitamin B12 and insulin. But Richard decided to experiment with a radical new approach, using electrons not x-rays. After an early success in 1975, he spent the next 15 years trying to improve the resolution of electron crystallography and, in 1990, he managed to see in astonishing atomic detail how individual atoms were arranged within a particular biological molecule. Next, however, he decided that the future

2018 is having the worst flu season for seven years. Influenza continues to make a lot of us feel very ill, and it can of course be fatal. Wendy Barclay, Professor Virology at Imperial College London, has spent many years trying to learn everything she can about the way flu viruses behave. These microscopic infectious organisms are formidable foes - they mutate all the time, making it hard to predict which strain is going to be the one to make us sick and therefore to design effective vaccines against it. Jim al-Khalili talks to Wendy Barclay about how she uses genetics to understand how flu viruses mutate. She explains how she began her scientific career studying physical sciences but then became fascinated by viruses. Her first experience of working with viruses was when she found herself doing nasal swabs of snuffling volunteers when she did her PhD looking for a vaccine against the common cold.

Nothing annoys Eugenia Cheng more than the suggestion that there is no creativity in mathematics. Doing mathematics is not about being a human calculator, she says. She doesn't spend her time multiplying big numbers in her head. She sits in hotel bars drawing (mainly arrows) with a fine quill pen, thinking about how ideas from different areas of mathematics relate to one another and hoping to reveal a unifying, underlying logic to the whole of mathematics. Her area of research, Category Theory, makes algebra seem superficial. And if that makes your head hurt a little, don't worry. Feeling confused is an essential part of doing mathematics. 'You can't make progress without it' Eugenia says. Jim asks Eugenia what drove her to such a high level of abstraction and learns more about her mission to rid the world of maths phobia, by baking. Producer: Anna Buckley Photo credit: Paul Crisanti, PhotoGetGo.

When Eben Upton was in his twenties, he wanted to get children thinking about how computers think, to boost the number of people applying to read computer science at university. He dreamt of putting a chip in every classroom. The result was Raspberry Pi, a tiny gadget, little bigger than a credit card, that can be hooked up to any keyboard and monitor, to create a programmable PC. And it's cheap. Raspberry Pi Zero, sticker price just �5, was given away free with a computer magazine in 2015. Eben tells Jim how it all began, in his loft with soldering irons and post it notes, and how, by ruthlessly pursuing a philanthropic goal he became CEO of a highly successful business enterprise. Producer: Anna Buckley.

As a young man Adrian Thomas took to the skies in order to better understand the mechanics of flight. He's a paragliding champion and a Professor of Zoology who specialises in the dynamics of insect flight. On a typical day, he can be found inside a wind tunnel that's been custom-made to study insects instead of jumbo jets. Using lines of smoke and high speed video cameras, he measures exactly how different insects flap their wings. When he's not writing academic papers, he's inventing clever machines based on his insights into how nature achieves certain results. His latest project is a drone that's inspired by a dragonfly. This nimble robot can accelerate rapidly in any direction and, having flexible wings rather than rotary blades, it glides when the battery dies rather than dropping dangerously to the ground. He's also working on a wheelchair modelled on a spider and a boat with a fin rather than a propeller. Producer: Anna Buckley.

When Ellen Stofan was just four years old, she witnessed the worst rocket launch-pad disaster in NASA's history convinced that her father, (who was a rocket engineer) was on board. He wasn't. Nonetheless, for many years NASA was not her favourite place. In 2013, however, she became she became their chief scientist, a post she held for 4 years. Barak Obama dreamt of putting people on the red planet by 2032 and Ellen did everything she could to develop a realistic plan to make this happen. (A 2032 arrival is ambitious but NASA is considerably closer than it was before Ellen took charge of the science.) Her research career began studying radar data from a Soviet mission to Venus, trying to see beyond the thick toxic cloud that surrounds it. She wanted to understand how Venus evolved so very differently from its nearest neighbour, earth. She has also used radar data from satellites to study planet earth. And in 2008, was the lead author on a paper that revealed the extent of the lake on Saturn's moon, Titan. It c

Professor Tim Birkhead talks to Jim Al Khalili about his 40 years of research on promiscuity in birds, his love of Skomer Island and its guillemots, and the extraordinary musical talent of the male bullfinch.Tim Birkhead is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist at the University of Sheffield. The primary focus of his research has been reproduction in birds. He pioneered the study of promiscuity or extra-pair mating in birds, and one of its evolutionary consequences - sperm competition. In the early 1970s Tim questioned and then exploded the assumption that female birds were always sexually monogamous - a zoological dogma originating with Charles Darwin. Tim first explored this in the guillemot colony on Skomer Island in Wales: a population of seabirds which he has studied continuously for more than 40 years in the cause of both evolutionary insights and conservation. Tim talks with passion about an ongoing funding crisis that hit this research programme recently and how the public response to it has bee

Steve Cowley has said that "fusion is arguably the perfect way to power the world". But he's had to add that "it is hard to make fusion work. Indeed, after more than 60 years of fusion research, no device has yet made more energy than it consumes". But Steve Cowley isn't giving up. He's spent over 30 years working towards making nuclear fusion a viable way of generating energy. Steve Cowley has done theoretical research on how to contain the incredibly hot material you need to get fusion going. As the Director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy he guided the British contribution to research. And he has led the UK's participation in ITER, an international experimental reactor being built in France that is planned to be the next step towards making nuclear fusion commercially viable. Jim al-Khalili discusses with Steve Cowley, now President of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, why nuclear fusion, which has such promise as a clean form of energy with no dangerous waste, has proved so hard to achieve.

Lucie Green studies the sun - that giant, turbulent ball of burning gas at the centre of our solar system. Her first ambition was to become an art therapist, but she soon switched from art to astrophysics, and before long had fixed her gaze on our local star. It may be 93 million miles away, but the sun's extensive and ever changing magnetic field determines the 'weather' throughout our solar system. Under a worst-case scenario, bubbles of super-hot plasma and streams of high energy particles - spat out when the surface of the sun erupts - can hurtle towards planet earth, damaging communication and navigation satellites and bringing down electrical power supplies.Thanks to the work that Lucie and others have done to raise awareness of these coronal mass ejections, solar belches as Lucie likes to call them are now a recognised threat to national security, alongside flooding, pandemic flu and terrorist attacks. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Marine ecologist Tracey Rogers talks to Jim Al Khalili about her research on one of Antarctica's top predators. This is the leopard seal - a ten foot long killer which glides among the ice floes in search of prey ranging from other seals to penguins to tiny krill. Tracey's research has encompassed the animal's prolific and eerie underwater singing to radical changes in its diet that appear to be linked to climate change.Now a senior researcher at the University of New South Wales in Australia, Tracey first encountered the species as a less than successful seal trainer at a zoo in Sydney. There she met a giant female leopard seal named Astrid. Astrid's singing one Christmas day in the early 1990s set Tracey on the path to become the world's authority on this Antarctic species.Tracey tells Jim how her first expedition to study leopard seals was met with almost universal scepticism until she dropped an underwater microphone into the water. In the following 25 years, she has worked to decode the meanings and qual

Jennifer Doudna's research has transformed biology. And this is not an understatement. Her work has given us the tools to edit genes more precisely than ever before. Her scientific career began with work to understand the actions of RNA, part of the machinery of every cell. But, after a meeting in 2005 with a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, where Jennifer is currently a professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology, she changed her direction of research. Through collaborations all over the world she's since developed the gene editing system called CRISPR/cas9. She's been awarded multiple prizes for her work. The CRISPR/cas9 system has created opportunities that could be used for both for good and for ill. Unlike many scientists who leave the ethical implications of their research to others, Jennifer Doudna has decided to engage with her critics. She talks to Jim al-Khalili about her decision to do this.

To volcanologist Tamsin Mather, volcanoes are more than a natural hazard. They are 'nature's factories', belching out a rich chemical cocktail of gases. It's these gases or 'plumes' that fascinate her the most. She likes nothing more than crouching on a crater's edge collecting a smouldering mix of ash and gases, a clue to what's brewing deep inside.As Professor of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, her work is helping to not only predict when a volcano may erupt, but to understand how volcanoes shape our planet both now and over geological time.Producer: Beth Eastwood.

Tim O'Brien has earned the nickname 'the awesome astrophysicist dude from Jodrell Bank' He is Professor of Astrophysics at Manchester University, and the associate director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, best known for the giant, iconic radio dish of the world-famous Lovell telescope which sits majestically on the Cheshire plain, where he carries out research on the behaviour of transient binary stars called novae. For twenty-five years Tim O'Brien has been telling the public about astronomy, and recently he's also become an organiser of concerts. Building on some very successful one-day events, the first Blue Dot Festival was held at Jodrell Bank in July 2016 and the second will be this summer. Tim talks to Jim al-Khalil about how he pops up on stage between acts to tell the audience about science - and doesn't get bottled off!

To the untrained eye, a plant's existence may seem rather uneventful. It spends its days rooted to the spot, seemingly at the mercy of its environment. Not so, plant biologist Ottoline Leyser explains to Jim Al-Khalili. Plants are intelligent creatures that possess a unique ability to adapt in ways we animals can only dream of. They can alter their entire body plan of roots and shoots, when required, in response to their surroundings. Now Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory & Professor of Plant Development at Cambridge University, Ottoline has spent her career unearthing the mysterious mechanisms that underpin this process. She's pieced together the finely-tuned network of hormonal signals which regulate how the roots and shoots of a plant develop.These new insights into what plants get up to are so remarkable that Ottoline is determined to change the way we think about them.Producer: Beth Eastwood.