Naked Scientists Special Editions ENHANCED

Dec 20 2018 250 ep. 541

Naked Scientists Special Editions ENHANCED Podcast artwork

Probing the weird, wacky and spectacular, the Naked Scientists Special Editions are special one-off scientific reports, investigations and interviews on cutting-edge topics by the Naked Scientists team.

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Cheers to the Liver! - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.21

Dec 20 2018 6 mins

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 li

Bio-inspired robot swarms - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.21

Dec 20 2018 5 mins

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 rob

New test for cervical cancer - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.20

Dec 19 2018 5 mins

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 test

eLife Episode 52: Fossil Flowers, and Fur Seal Parasites - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.19

Dec 18 2018 32 mins

In this episode of the eLife Podcast, the nerves with a taste for salt, why fur seal pups succumb to hookworms, the oldest fossilised flowers ever found, the monkey business of chimp personalities, and the 11 million year old flying squirrel foung in a rubbish tip...

How to cut down on carbon this Christmas - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.19

Dec 18 2018 3 mins

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...

Solar-powered device cleans water - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.17

Dec 16 2018 4 mins

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 sunlig

'Nano-tweezers' for single cell biopsy - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.13

Dec 12 2018 5 mins

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

Language development through childhood - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.12.07

Dec 06 2018 4 mins

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

Cuddly Robots Feel Hugs - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.11.30

Nov 29 2018 4 mins

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 s

Using gallium as an antibiotic - Naked Scientists Special Editions 18.11.26

Nov 25 2018 4 mins

Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats facing mankind today. A new group in the University of Washington in Seattle, have been working to fight this threat. In their study published September 2018, they looked to poison bacteria using the heavy metal gallium, to improve the lives of those with cystic fibrosis. In October 2018, Adam Murphy spoke to two authors of the s