Instant Genius

Thanks to their comical waddle-like way of walking, striking tuxedo-patterned plumage or graceful ability to seemingly ‘fly’ beneath the water, penguins are without doubt one of the planet’s most instantly recognisable animals. But the fact is that they are also one of its most endangered species of bird. In this episo

Relatively speaking neuroscience and psychology are young fields of scientific research that only really got going over the last hundred years or so. However, during this time several stubborn myths have arisen that, zombie-like, just don’t seem to go away. In this episode, we speak to neuroscientist, best-selling auth

When it comes to climate change, we often think of tipping points as having a huge negative effect. Be it the loss of ice sheets in the Arctic, the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest or the alteration of ocean currents, scientists have identified several key systems on the Earth that will be impossible to reverse

From Lewis Carrol’s mysterious grinning Cheshire Cat and Jim Davis’s lazy, lasagne-loving comic strip tabby Garfield to the depictions of big cats found in palaeolithic cave art and the ancient Egyptian’s practice of worshipping cat-like deities, it’s clear we humans have had a long-standing fascination with felines. B

Despite being a land-based species, the fact is that we humans live on a planet that is largely covered by oceans. The oceans play a key role in regulating the Earth’s climate and provide us with many of the resources essential for our continued survival – even down to the oxygen we breathe. The sad truth is our oceans

In this episode, we’re joined by Professor Omar Yaghi – a pioneer of materials chemistry whose inventions are shaping the future of clean energy, clean air, and even clean water. He’s best known for creating metal–organic frameworks, or MOFs, and covalent organic frameworks, COFs – ultra-porous materials that can captu