Naked Scientists, In Short Special Editions Podcast

Chris Smith appeared on Radio New Zealand National to speak with Kim Hill 0n 25th January 2020 to discuss the emerging coronavirus situation in Wuhan City, China. Here they discuss the origins of this virus, the risks posed by the outbreak, and the reaction of the World Health Organisation... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Have these paralysed patients helped to reveal the brain basis of why we gesticulate when we talk? Also, new insights into how the body clock keeps track of the seasons, signs that immunity to Zika virus wanes with time, why human body temperature is lower than it was 150 years ago, and diversity in science: how can we better hold on to rare talent? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Daily Mile is a programme for primary school children, that gets them to spend 15 minutes jogging or running at their own pace during the school day. The programme's name comes from the fact that for most children, fifteen minutes of running will see them covering about one mile. The initiative, which is over and above timetabled breaks and PE classes, has been adopted by 10,500 schools and nurseries world-wide. But until recently there have been no large scale studies looking at the impact of the programme. Researchers from the University of Birmingham, with the help of 40 Birmingham... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Researchers at McMaster University in Canada have developed a new cling-film-like wrap that can be used to coat objects to make them bacteria-, water- and dust-repellent. Inventor Tohid Didar explains to Amalia Thomas how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

An update on the emerging viral infection from Wuhan City, in China: the disease was first picked up by the Chinese in early December and notified to the World Health Organisation at the start of January. The source appears to be a food market in Wuhan City, and the virus itself is a newly-identified member of a viral family called coronaviruses. Speaking with Chris Smith, Neil Ferguson... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Around the world, millions of people are infected with the AIDS virus, HIV. And although drug treatments can successfully suppress the virus to undetectable levels, rather like taking your foot off the brake in a car parked on a hill, if you stop taking the medication, the virus rapidly returns with a flourish and regains its momentum. And that's because it has the ability to insert the genetic code of the virus into our DNA and then hide in an inactive state in various cells around the body. So if we want to rid the body of HIV we have to discover a way to flush out the virus from these... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Naked Gaming Podcast presenters Chris Berrow and Leigh Milner catch up with voice of "The Witcher" video game series, Doug Cockle to find out what he thinks of the latest Netflix TV show... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Motor neuron disease, in its many different forms, affects about one in every 2,500 people in the UK - it's incurable, and can be debilitating, as over time you lose control of parts of your body. But now scientists from the University of Exeter have a new theory about how seemingly different forms of the disease have the same underlying cause. Based on decades of their own research, they've found something in common between thirteen motor neuron disease genes: and the link is, surprisingly, cholesterol. It's a kind of Eureka moment for researching this condition, and might open the door to... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One other lifestyle change people tend to embrace at this time of year is to quit smoking. And the good news is that, according to a study from University College London, you're in very good company and, on the whole, cigarette consumption is dropping. Phil Sansom spoke to the study's author Claire Garnett... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Scientists have found a way to make organisms not need food at all. Bacteria usually rely on some sort of sugar to survive, but a group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel made a population of a common bacteria able to feed on carbon dioxide, very much like plants do. They did this by genetically modifying how the bacteria digests its food, and then putting them in a tank with very little food - sugar - and a lot of carbon dioxide. In only a few hundred generations, these bacteria evolved to feed on the carbon dioxide in the air instead. Amalia Thomas reports... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

And now onto something out of this World. For the first time, scientists have found evidence of a giant, Neptune-size planet orbiting a white dwarf star. This was previously not thought to be possible due to the destructive energy low-mass stars, such as our Sun, emit to the surrounding solar system as they age and expand. The findings, published in Nature by a team from Warwick University, are particularly interesting because they indicate what might happen to our solar system billions of years from now. Nadeem Gabbani speaks with Ingo Waldmann of University College London for comments on the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Join the Naked Gaming Podcast team for a special bonus episode, with an in-depth interview with the voice of Ash Ketchum from the pokemon TV series. What was it like getting the job, where did the voice come from, and which other characters did she play? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Taking a leaf from the holly and the ivy's book, Katie Haylor explores the virtue of being evergreen...? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

How did the popular concept of Christmas trees get started? Extolling the virtues of a real tree, including a superior short-term carbon footprint and a nicer smell, Adam Murphy explains how the tree tradition began... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The lung disease tuberculosis is still one of the world's top ten causes of death. And while it's completely treatable, patients need constant monitoring to make sure the treatment is working. The monitoring is fairly labour-intensive: it requires taking a sample of phlegm and counting the bacteria inside by eye under a microscope. It's a treatment bottleneck. But now, some engineers from Cambridge Consultants have been developing a technology to get rid of that bottleneck using AI - as Phil Sansom found out from developer Matthew Murchie... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Measles was thought to have been eradicated from the UK in 2017, but following an outbreak the very next wear, we lost this elimination status. Measles is a highly infectious disease that can quickly spread through the unvaccinated population with a high complication rate involving pneumonia, gastroenteritis and even encephalitis. And having recovered from that, there's a further sting in the tail: measles virus suppresses the immune system for years after the infection clears. Amalia Thomas hears why from Velislava Petrova, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, who has discovered the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Mental health awareness has been improving in the past few years, but there still isn't universal, accessible support for vulnerable people. A recent study carried out by members of the University of Cambridge might help develop targeted support: it showed that the environment in which people live is correlated to risk of depression in men, but not in women. In contrast to men, women that live in deprived areas are more likely to develop anxiety issues. Amalia Thomas got the details from the lead author of this study, Olivia Remes... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In 2001 Lawrence Jones set out on a freeskiing trip with his mates. It was not the first adventure trip they had been on, but it was the last one that any of them took lightly again. An avalanche turned Lawrence's holiday from fun to tragedy within the space of half an hour. On the Naked Scientists podcast episode "How to survive an avalanche" we discuss his story, and the science behind it, with two avalanche experts.Now, here's the complete tale of his lucky escape from one of the most terrifying forces of nature - as told by Lawrence Jones himself... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The UN Climate Change Conference - COP 25 - has been taking place in Madrid. The purpose of the conference is to take the next crucial steps in implementing the global carbon-cutting proposals agreed 4 years ago in Paris. But where are we on the road towards a carbon-neutral future, and what's it going to take to get there? Chris Smith talks to two climate change experts, Camrbidge University's Eric Woolf and Eliot Whittington... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This is a response to a story we covered earlier this year about planting trees for climate change. A study in the journal Science claimed that the Earth has space for an extra billion hectares of trees; and if they were planted, it would lock away enough carbon dioxide to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. Since then, Science has published not one - not two - but five comments and rebuttals to the original paper. They criticise various aspects of the method and results; one in particular was authored by almost fifty scientists, and said that the available area for trees was... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

While forests do a great job of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, as soon as the trees decompose, all that carbon goes straight back up again. And a new study has investigated how that decomposition works inside freshwater lakes. Scientists have found that what was traditionally just called "carbon" in a lake is actually a hugely diverse mix of different carbon-based molecules, which supports an equally diverse mix of microbes. And the more diverse everything is, the more greenhouse gases these lakes seem to pump out - which could be bad news if different species of trees react... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

If you have access to a healthy, balanced diet, hopefully you'll be getting adequate supply of micronutrients. Going without can lead to serious health consequences. Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in kids globally, and is a major public health issue in some parts of the world. Fortifying foods is one solution, but things like heat, UV, and moisture can degrade the vitamins and minerals in the food, leaving little left for absorption by the body. This week, scientists from MIT announced that they've made a dissolvable polymer capsule which can shield... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A vaccine that can protect against infection with the skin bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which causes everything from wound and joint infections to impetigo and pneumonia, has been developed by scientists in the US. Apart from increasing rates of antibiotic resistance, what makes Staph infections hard to treat is that the microbes surround themselves with a slimy layer called a biofilm that protects them from the immune system and antimicrobial drugs. As she explains to Chris Smith, to prevent the bugs being able to do this in the first place, Janette Harro looked at what proteins the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You might think we are special as humans for forming societies with complex structures. But we are not actually so different from other species in this regard. It was believed that complex social structures were a trait of large mammals only - but a recent study has shown that birds can form complex societies too. Amalia Thomas spoke to Danai Papageorgiou, who has been studying the social structure of a specific type of bird in Kenya in Africa... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In recent months the satellite Voyager 2, launched in 1977, became the second man-made object to escape from our Solar System and begin its journey into interstellar space. We know it's done that because it's crossed the heliopause, a bubble made by particles, called a plasma, that stream off the Sun and surround our Solar system. To learn more about this Adam Murphy spoke to Du Toit Strauss from North West University in South Africa... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Oil production has multiple environmentally-devastating consequences - including creating of billions of gallons of salty, chemical-filled wastewater. Typically, companies dispose of this wastewater by pumping it deep underground. But a growing body of evidence shows that this pumping causes 'injection-induced earthquakes', most notably the Jones earthquake swarm: thousands of earthquakes that have occurred in Oklahoma over the last ten years. And a new study demonstrates that the fluid properties of wastewater make earthquakes stronger and more common where disposal is concentrated. Matthew... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We have smartphones, smart watches, even smart fridges. But now, from a paper published in the journal Photonics Research, we could be seeing smart glass. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison created a piece of glass that can mimic machine visual perception, basically how smart phones recognize your face to unlock the device, without needing any camera sensors, computer chips, or even a power supply! All the glass needs is light and tiny imperfections called "bubbles" within the glass to direct that light appropriately. Right now it has the capability to tell, in real time,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month, join Chris Smith to hear how sleep deprivation sends your endocannabinoids skyrocketing and triggers a tendency to binge, how many new genetic mutations you inherit from your parents, the gene for behaviour that turned out to be nothing of the sort, what good and bad learners have in common with youTube influencers, and from online collective whinge to paper in eLife: the careers of newly appointed PIs. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

One in five UK children are obese. The biological and social factors behind this are complex, but the long term consequences range from cardiovascular and liver disease to diabetes. Now, according to a new study, it may even affect the development of a child's brain too, with overweight children showing a thinner cortex in the parts of the brain concerned with self-control and decision-making. Speaking with Chris Smith, Cambridge University neuroscientist Lisa Ronan... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Considering people's wellbeing in making policy decisions is becoming more and more important, but it's only in recent years that governments have started to record the subjective satisfaction of the population. A team of researchers is looking to fill in the historical gap for national mood by analysing the text of old books published in the US, UK, Germany and Italy and computing a National Valence Index for each of these countries. Mariana Marasoiu spoke with lead author Thomas Hills about how it works... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Immunotherapy is the term used to describe techniques that provoke the immune system to attack and remove cancer. The argument goes that because the immune system is extremely specific in what it targets, and because it has a memory and can learn and improve its action as it goes along, this is a powerful weapon for fighting malignancies. But we need to show the immune system what to attack, which is where a new development from researchers at Yale Medical School comes in. What they've done is come up with a way to find the genetic differences between cancer cells and healthy cells, and... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You're probably familiar with the 1966 science fiction film "Fantastic Voyage", where a submarine crew are shrunk to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair damage to his brain. They're not quite at the stage of shrinking scientists yet, but engineers in America have invented a flexible robot - thinner than a piece of thread - that can be controlled using a magnetic field and snake its way through blood vessels to track down and remove blockages. Phil Sansom spoke to inventor Xuanhe Zhao... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

What if the next refrigeration technology could be based on twisting and untwisting strands? A new paper published in Science by an international team of researchers explored how twisting and stretching can change the temperature of certain types of fibres, leading them to propose a new method for building fridges that are more efficient and more environmentally friendly than those used at present. Mariana Marasoiu untangled the findings with study lead author Ray Baughman... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Can we help people who've lost a leg to feel it again? Mariana Marasoiu has this report... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

This month, doctors doing U-turns: the medical practices without much evidence to prop them up, wind-tunnel experiments reveal how geese fly at extreme altitudes, why mating makes bees go blind, stress remodelling the brain's myelin, and what goes on during a stint aboard the International Space Station? Join Chris Smith for a look inside the latest papers in eLife... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Mobile phone companies could be set to erect bigger and taller phone masts as part of government plans to roll out 5G networks and improve coverage in rural areas. How might taller masts help with connectivity - and what is 5G anyway? Tech-xpert and Angel Investor Peter Cowley explains to Chris Smith and Katie Haylor... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to many of the agents we use to deal with them, including antiseptics. The bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii is one example and causes hard to treat skin, chest, and urine infections in hospitals. Now, a team at the University of Newcastle, Australia have discovered a gene that renders Acinetobacter resistant to the chemical chlorhexidine that's used in hand disinfectants. But the gene evolved long before the antiseptic was invented, so what was it doing previously? As well as finding out, Adam Murphy also heard from lead author Karl Hassan how the... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A research team from Virginia Tech, led by Ryan Pollyea, has found that earthquakes 8 kilometres below the earth's surface are increasing in intensity. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the team's work has found that a super-dense liquid called oilfield wastewater is seeping deep into the sheets of the earth, causing massive pressure changes that could be increasing earthquake intensity. Matthew Hall got into contact with Ryan Pollyea and Martin Chapman from Virginia Tech to see what all the rumble is about... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A heatwave has been sweeping across Europe recently, causing record temperatures across the continent and creating a lot of consternation in the Naked Scientist office. But where do heatwaves come from. And what's going to happen in the future. Adam Murphy spoke to Manoj Joshi, professor of climate dynamics from the University of East Anglia, starting with what a heatwave even is. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Your genome contains all of your genetic information, and it's pretty long - the Human Genome Project estimated that humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes. But according to synthetic biology, you can survive on only 473 genes! At least a very simple bacterium can. Of this "minimal genome", scientists previously didn't know what nearly a third actually did. Now Mark Wass has been telling Heather Jameson how his team at the University of Kent may have cracked 66 of the mystery genes... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The world's largest patch of seaweed appears every summer in the mid-Atlantic. And since 2011, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt has been growing to even more monstrous sizes - thousands of kilometres long - and it's been clogging up beaches along the Americas with metres of stinking brown goo. Now, scientists in Florida and Georgia have used satellite tracking to figure out what's going on - as Phil Sansom explains... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The nervous system is a complicated network of specialised cells - neurons - that transfer information from one part of the body to another. To help our understanding of the nervous system in humans, scientists have mapped every neuron and every connection in a type of roundworm called C. elegans. Emma Hildyard asked Scott Emmons how this map was created and what it could mean... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

You might remember from a year or so ago stories of an alien fly-by. The unidentified object was famously referred to as Oumuamua, which means "scout" in Hawaiian. Now a paper just out in the journal Nature Astronomy has revisited the story to probe whether Oumuamua really is alien technology, or just a cigar-shaped hunk of rock hurtling through the solar system. Matthew Hall got in touch with co-author Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons from Queens University Belfast... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In June, Izzie Clarke explored the extremely fast science of speed and headed to the race tracks with McLaren in their 600LT Spider supercar. But whilst Formula 1 and petrol racing have a huge fan base, we're also seeing the rise of electric racing, Formula E. In this bonus interview, Izzie spoke with Rodi Basso, Motorsport Director of Mclaren Applied Technologies, about the future of the sport. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

With a rising global population, and the impending impacts of climate change, we need more food, and reliable food sources safeguarded for the future. But varying light levels mean that plant growing conditions aren't always consistent, as Katie Haylor has been finding out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In March 2016 the public voted to name a new polar research vessel "Boaty McBoatface", ultimately though, it was decided that "RRS Sir David Attenborough" was a more fitting choice. But the name "Boaty McBoatface" lived on and was instead given to one of the ship's autonomous submarine vehicles. And this week data from Boaty's first research mission in Antarctica has revealed a worrying new mechanism related to rising sea levels. Boaty has discovered that winds above the southern ocean, which have been strengthening in recent years, due in part to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Robots are increasingly used to take over repetitive tasks in industry and agriculture, but they are still limited in what they can do. This also means that humans still need to work alongside them and often things can go badly wrong. 13000 injuries and 60 deaths were caused by accidents due to contact with machinery between 2014-18 in the UK alone. Engineers are working on ways to make robots safer, cheaper and more efficient. Ankita Anirban speaks to Matthias Althoff from the Technical University of Munich, in Germany, about his recent work on modular robots. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The world is facing a global fish issue - a fissue, if you will. One third of all fish stocks are being overfished, and most of the efforts to prevent this involve exclusive zones in the ocean managed by individual countries. But a study released this week shows how the world's fisheries are all closely connected in a "small-world" network, and how overfishing in one zone can affect all of its neighbours. Izzie Clarke spoke with James Rising from the London School of Economics to find out how. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The chest disease asthma is becoming more common. It can lead to life-threatening breathing difficulties when the airways constrict and the lung tissue overproduces mucus; this is usually an allergic reaction that can be worsened by air pollution. But our understanding of what's going on in an asthmatic lung is still quite limited. But now for the first time, scientists at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge have used a new technique to document and examine every cell in lung samples from both healthy and asthmatic patients, to discover what's changing when a person develops asthma. Chris... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When it comes to understanding how the brain functions, scientists have done a great deal of work on studying macaque monkeys, our evolutionary relative. We share 93% of our DNA and in a lot of ways, our brains are very similar. Even for high level operations such as learning, memory and decision-making, our brains work in comparable ways.. However, when it comes to sound, scientists have discovered that humans seem to have a unique edge in how we perceive pitch. Ankita Anirban spoke to Bevil Conway, from the National Institute of Health in Maryland, on his recent work comparing how humans and... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists