Naked Scientists Special Editions Podcast

A vaccine that can teach the immune system to attack any type of cancer is being developed and tested by scientists in Germany. Cancer affects one person in every three. It's caused by genetic damage to our cells, which leads them to grow in an uncontrolled and invasive way. But because the cancer cells are part of our own body, the immune system normally ignores them because they're regarded as non-hostile. What Ugur Sahin and his colleagues are doing is to identify a series of chemical markers that are unique to a patient's cancer cells and then turn these into a genetic message that is... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

As a nation, the UK are above the intake guidelines for salt, which, for an adult, is 6g per day. To put that into perspective, there's about half a gram in a small packet of crisps, or one ham and cheese sandwich. But what does salt do to our insides? Viknesh Selvarajah from Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge, researches the impacts of salt and has a very unique perspective on the effects of high blood pressure, as he explained to Chris Smith. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Botox is a popular cosmetic treatment where Botulin toxin-A injections paralyse your facial muscles, which relaxes smile lines and makes your skin appear younger. In comedies, it is often joked about for giving patients frozen expressions. But now, researchers say that having Botox not only makes your face difficult to read, but also impairs your ability to read the emotion of others. This stems from the theory of embodiment. For a person to process an emotion that they see, they are required to mimicking that emotion. When we see our friend smile, our face automatically smiles a little as... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week we're tackling a myth sent in by listener Tim who says, "For many years I heard management gurus talking about the boiling frog syndrome.If you throw a frog into a pot of hot water it will immediately jump out. But If you put it in cold water and slowly heat it, it will boil to death " He also adds "Please don't harm any frogs disproving it!" Fortunately for Tim - and the frogs - someone has already done this experiment, or at least got as close to it as they feel ethically able to, without actually boiling any frogs alive. Kat Arney gets into hot water finding out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Robots are everywhere, from the machines that work in factories to pop culture icons like the Star Wars droids BB8, R2D2 and C3PO. but this is nothing new. Humans have been creating robots for centuries, and a new exhibition at the Science Museum in London will be showcasing our love of these Metal Mickeys, although sadly we'll have to wait until next year for it to open. Kat Arney went along to get a sneak preview of one of the shining metal stars of the show, and also to the exhibition's human curator, Ben Russell. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

On February 1, 2016, the World Health Organization declared Zika virus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern with the virus' continued spread through the Americas. Zika, which was previously considered to be fairly harmless, has been linked to birth defects and miscarriages in a dramatic shift that scientists are unable to explain. However, we are now one step closer to understanding this virus as the development of a new mouse model may have solved one piece of the puzzle. Connie Orbach spoke to lead researcher Michael Diamond from Washington University in St Louis. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

From maths hacks to poker playing bots, could there be a science to help you win big at the casino? Georgia Mills has been practising her poker face with help from Adam Kucharski... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The origins of life on earth has been a mystery since, well since life began. Researchers from Germany this week have found a crucial link in explaining how we got from the soup of chemicals on early earth to the very first cell, lending support to the so called RNA world theory. Lead researcher Professor Thomas Carell spoke to Emma Sackville about what RNA theory is and how their research supports it... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Could limbs have evolved from fish gills? While it might sound fishy, scientists from the University of Cambridge have discovered that the same genetic programme, triggered by a gene called Sonic Hedgehog, is involved in the development of limbs, fins and gills. The idea that the formation of gills and legs might be linked is actually not a new one and was first proposed more than a century ago based on the similarities in appearances of the two structures, but scientists abandoned the notion as fanciful thinking. Connie Orbach went to see researcher Andrew Gillis, who has discovered that the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In Archaeology is it better to keep an object in the ground or dig it up? Connie Orbach spoke to curators of the Fitzwilliam Museum's Death On The Nile exhibition Helen Strudwick and Julie Dawson and physicist Nishad Karim to find out how techniques from physics are allowing us to visualise objects without damaging them... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Humans are awesomely clever, right? We've colonised the world, manipulated our environment, developed incredible technology and can even make brilliant science radio shows like this one. And it's all thanks to the squishy grey stuff in our skulls - our brains. It's often said that humans have unusually big brains, which explains our exceptional intelligence, but it turns out that may not strictly be true. Kat Arney looks at the popular myth that a bigger brain means a higher level of intelligence... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We might have sexually transmitted infections to thank for our modern-day monogamous society, according to a new study from Canada this week. Between ten and fifteen thousand years ago, as agriculture was established and humans swapped a hunter gatherer lifestyle for life in larger group settlements, our ancestors also appear to have embraced monogamy - having a single partner, rather than multiple wives. Mathematician Chris Bauch has designed a computer simulation that suggests that, as populations increase in size, the threat of sexual disease drives the switch to monogamy, and the desire to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The drug LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, was first made in the 1930s in Switzerland by chemist Albert Hoffman, who also tried the agent on himself and described his psychedelic experience. LSD was widely used until the 1960s when it was made illegal, so very little research has actually been done using modern neuroscience techniques to look at how LSD affects the brain and how it might be useful therapeutically. Until now, that is. Imperial College's Robin Carhart-Harris has been administering the drug to volunteers, as he explained to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Without satellites operating above us, we would be in considerable trouble; even ATM machines don't work without them! So this week, Graihagh Jackson has been at the Royal Academy of Engineering, where leaders in satellite and space technology have been meeting to discuss what's up there Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This week, we've had a first glimpse at the wealth of data sent back by the New Horizons probe, which reached Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, last summer. Open University space scientist David Rothery has been taking a look at the papers charting some of the discoveries, which were unveiled this week in the journal Science, and he went through the findings with Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Strokes are a major cause of permanent disability and they affect millions of people every year. The cause is usually a lack of blood flow to one part of the brain, which destroys the affected brain area and robs the victim of the ability to perform whatever tasks that brain area used to process. But an electrical current applied to the head for a short time, even years after a stroke, appears to open up new circuits in the brain, restoring some of the lost abilities, as Oxford University's Heidi Johansen-Berg explained to Chris Smith... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

ExoMars 2016 launched successfully last week, but why are we going back to the red planet? This mission aims to seek out methane, which could be a crucial clue to whether there is life on Mars. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

It is that time of year again when we should start to see bees buzzing around gardens but populations of bees have been declining recently as disease and lack of food stores are hitting them hard. With a third of global food supply coming from crop species that are to some extent dependent on bees it's important that we halt this decline. Felicity Bedford went to Cambridge University's King's College to meet Kristen Treen, who looks after the honeybees there, and see how their beehives have been getting on this winter Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Back in the 1960s, US researcher Stanley Milgram stunned the world with a study showing that members of the public were prepared to inflict potentially lethal electric shocks on supposedly innocent volunteers, if a lab-coated scientist ordered them to do so. In fact the recipients of the shocks were actually actors, who escaped unharmed. Milgram's experiments raised many ethical questions - not least about whether it was right to do them at all - and Patrick Haggard from UCL is now trying to find out to what extent people feel a sense of responsibility or control when they're ordered to do... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Results that scientists are describing as "unprecedented" in the treatment of cancer have been announced at a conference this week. A team led by Stanley Riddell, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the US, have developed a method to reprogramme the immune system to selectively target cancer cells. This means that, unlike traditional chemotherapy, which can't tell healthy and tumour tissue apart - and this is what causes unpleasant side effects - the immune system acts with surgical precision, selectively weeding out rogue cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists