Naked Scientists Special Editions Podcast

Nearly every cell in the body contains a part called the nucleus which houses the genetic information needed to function. Muscle cells are the largest cells in the body, so they often need multiple nuclei to meet high power demands. New research from the University Massachusetts at Amherst, supports the contradiction of a widely believed theory linking large cells and nuclei numbers. Jenny Gracie spoke with Professor Larry Schwartz to find out why the relationship may no longer be true... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It's common knowledge that smoking cigarettes is addictive, and this is because of the nicotine they contain. E-cigarettes are devices that heat up a liquid and produce an aerosol or spray which is then inhaled. If there's nicotine in the e-cigarette liquid then this gives a nicotine hit. In Australia, nicotine is classified as a poison, so it's illegal to sell e-cigarette liquids containing it, they have to instead be "nicotine free". But while studying the potential health impacts of e-cigarettes, scientists have found that, surprisingly, out of 10 "nicotine-free" e-cigarette liquids, or... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Brushing our teeth keeps them clean and free from debris, but back in medieval times, dental hygiene wasn't part of your daily routine. This means that scientists can look at the teeth of skeletons to reconstruct what food they might have munched on back then and find out more about their lifestyle. But recently a team of international scientists, lead from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, found something a little more peculiar fossilised in the teeth of a 1000 year old skeleton. Jenny Gracie spoke with Christina Warinner to unearth the mysterious... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Every day hundreds of people die when they accidentally overdose on opiate drugs, like heroin or morphine. These agents depress breathing, causing respiratory failure. But, if an opioid antidote is administered sufficiently quickly, then the situation can be reversed. And a team at the University of Washington have developed a system that turns a mobile phone into a sonar device that can monitor a person's breathing and then sound the alarm if something goes wrong. Chris Smith spoke with Jacob Sunshine, an anaesthesiologist and assistant professor at the University of Washington, to discuss... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One terrifying prediction is that, by mid-Century, up to 30% of adults will be affected by a form of dementia, chiefly Alzheimer's Disease. This happens when proteins called beta-amyloid, and tau, build up in the brain and damage nerve cells. But scientists think this begins to happen decades before a person develops Alzheimer's symptoms, meaning we might have an opportunity to intervene and change the course of the condition if we can tell who's affected sufficiently early. Now, researchers at Washington University in St Louis have discovered subtle changes in the patterns of brain waves we... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Back in 2001, Dr Chris Smith launched a new show, The Naked Scientists, in the hope of making science accessible. It was one of the first radio programmes to be made into a podcast and is now one of the world's most popular science shows. In the past five years, the programme has been downloaded more than 50 million times. Dr Chris has travelled the world in search of the latest science topics and trends, through which he has won numerous national and international accolades. He joins Lawrence Jones MBE to discuss bringing science to life through podcasts, how the team are engaging more people... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Biological systems are able to create complex shapes and patterns, like the stripes of a zebra, the shape of your hand or the dynamic displays of a flock of birds. These shapes develop in an emergent and self-organised way, relying on just local interactions between individuals. In contrast, human designed technology is usually created by an external builder. But now, a team of roboticists and biologists have come together to design robot swarms that can self-organise into complex shapes. Hannah Laeverenz Schologelhofer spoke with Sabine Hauert from the Bristol Robotics Lab. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Ancient Greeks understood that the liver was one of the most incredible organs humans possess when they wrote the cautionary tale of Zeus' punishment of Prometheus, in which poor Prometheus was tied to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, but overnight it would regenerate and grow back, allowing his punishment to continue day after day. Now, in real life, the liver doesn't regenerate quite that quickly, but it is true that it has the ability to grow back and heal itself remarkably well. Georgia Mills spoke to liver scientist Auinash Kalsotra from the University of Illinois,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers affecting young women, and it's caused by a virus called Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV, which is spread through sexual contact. The virus causes the cells of the cervix to keeping growing excessively, which eventually damages their DNA, causing cancer. Testing for this cancer can be challenging: these days it involves using DNA tests to look for traces of the virus in a sample. But the viruses are very common, and only a small proportion of people carrying them will actually get cancer; so there are lots of false positives. Now researchers at... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Christmas is a wonderful time of year, but all of the additional transport and consumption adds up, and we are left with plenty of seasonal rubbish and greenhouse gases. So how can you cut down this Christmas? Georgia Mills is here to spoil all of the festive fun... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Clean water is something that we often take for granted, but making it can be a major technological and energy-intensive process. Now, thanks to a system developed by scientists at York University, Toronto, and MIT, there might be a way to do this much more cheaply in future. Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer spoke with York researcher Thomas Cooper, about this new way of using sunlight to clean up water and produce superheated steam. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How can seemingly similar cells behave differently? This is a particularly important question when a small change means that a cell does not function properly and several diseases might be the result of these small changes at the single cell level. But a cell is a complex system, and some of the important molecules inside a cell exist in very small quantities that can be difficult to detect. To address this challenge, a new tool has been developed called 'nano-tweezers'. These tiny devices can extract individual molecules from inside cells. Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer spoke with Joshua Edel... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Language is all around us, and good language skills are important for getting on in life. But does being good in one language domain, like spelling, mean you'll be good in another, like grammar? And if your child is doing well with language as a toddler, will they still be doing well as a teenager? Recently, results have come out from a study 15 years in the making and Katie Haylor spoke to one of the authors, Rebecca Pearson from the University of Bristol. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When we think of robots we might think of the Terminator, West World, or even something completely different like Big Hero Six - a story about a young boy and his soft medical robot companion Baymax. Doughy and malleable, a robot like Baymax is kind of the holy grail for scientists who are working on making Soft Robots - robots which aren't made of metal or plastic but instead of stretchable, supple materials like rubber, gels, or fabric. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Ilse Van Meerbeek, a PhD student at Cornell University who recently published a paper in Science Robotics about new progress in... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Every year, hundreds of millions of people contract malaria; this is a parasitic infection spread by mosquitoes. The parasite does two things when it grows in the body: either it clones itself to make millions more malaria parasites in that infected individual, and makes them sicker in the process; or, it produces a different form of the parasite that's sexually active and specialised to infect mosquitoes so it can spread to another human. And this week scientists in Edinburgh have discovered that malaria bases the decision on whether to boost its numbers in an infected person, or to try to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When we think of our immune system, most of us will be familiar with the white blood cells that circulate around our body to target and kill the bacteria and viruses that make us sick. But, we actually also have a special type of immune cell sitting in some of our body surfaces, like our skin and our gut, and new research suggests that these cells might hold the key to future cancer and allergy treatments. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Professor Adrian Hayday from the Francis Crick Institute and King's College London, about his new paper describing the unique way these cells actually work, and why... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Do you like to lie out on the beach in the summer, or are you more likely to be found hiding in the shade? Well, how you answer might depend on how quickly you seem to get sunburnt. We all know that we should wear sunscreen when out and about in the summer to protect our skin and so reduce our risk of skin cancer, but new research from the Weill Medical College of Cornell might allow us to ditch the sunscreen at some point in the future. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Dr Jonathan Zippin, a dermatologist and skin researcher, about his lab's key discovery in the science of skin. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Today marks 100 years since the end of World War 1. This conflict caused the deaths of around 16 million people, and the new developments in artillery meant that new and nasty injuries were defying our ability to treat them. Ironically, this meant WW1 actually lead to huge advances in medicine, and neuroscience. But, thanks to a charity, Headway, it's also helping people with brain injuries today. Georgia Mills has been finding out how Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We get so many good questions sent to us here at The Naked Scientists, that sadly we can't fit them all into our monthly question and answer shows. So here's an extra slice of science for you from our November 2018 QnA. Roger got in touch to ask whether artificial intelligence will be making medicines in the future, and we also heard from Sean about some rather intelligent ravens... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Glioblastoma is an aggressive and often deadly cancer of the brain. Understanding it is vital to improving patient outcomes. In a new study published in Nature Genetics, a group in Cornell University has been sequencing genes to understand which ones are switched on by the tumours. To learn more, Adam Murphy spoke to Charles Danko, of the Baker Institute for Animal Health and the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists