Instant Genius

Wikipedia. It needs almost no introduction. Few websites are more well-known, more commonly used and more foundational to the web as we know it than the online encyclopedia. This week, we’re joined by its founder, Jimmy Wales, to talk about how the platform has evolved over the past two decades, the challenges of maint

Hippies, the Beatles, flower power, magic mushrooms, raves and festivals – that’s what most of us associate with psychedelics. But there is mounting evidence that these drugs could also be used medicinally, particularly to treat mental illnesses such as depression. In this episode, we speak to Prof David Nutt, a psycho

What will we all be eating in 2050? How will it be produced? And how can our diets keep us healthier for longer? If these are questions you'd like answered, why not check out the upcoming Future of Food mini-series. You'll discover how cutting-edge farming technology is helping us to produce food that's kinder to the e

The commonly held story goes that we all begin life as a single cell in our mother’s womb and go on from there to develop into fully formed adult human beings composed of cells of our own creation. However, recent research is showing that this isn’t quite the full picture. Not all of the cells in our bodies come from t

Thanks to hundreds of years of scientific progress we now know, that like every other living thing on Earth, human beings are simply assemblages of atoms and molecules that evolved over eons through a series of complex, iterative processes. But somewhere along this long and meandering journey we developed consciousness

Stars feel like a fundamental feature of the Universe – as essential as planets, galaxies and space itself. But since we know the Universe had a beginning (the Big Bang), there must also have been a first star. Before it, there was only darkness; after it, the cosmos as we know it began to take shape. Exactly what thos