Naked Scientists Special Editions Podcast

Earth's largest animals, whales, need a lot of food... that goes without saying. But, new research from a team at Stanford University have found that whales need 10-20 tonnes of food on a feeding day, which is up to three times more than initially thought. Of course that means three times more poop... and as whale poop drives nutrient recycling in the oceans, this could have a big impact on marine ecosystems. Katie King found out more from the lead author Matthew Savoca... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Now this might have flown under your radar, but last Wednesday NASA launched the DART mission, a spacecraft on a one-way collision course with an asteroid, in the world's first full-scale planetary defence test. Tricia Smith asked Space Author Colin Stuart, if life as we know it is in danger... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Covid cases in many European countries are suddenly substantially up. But in a dramatic role reversal, the UK has gone from the standout Covid-19 bad boy of Europe to one of the better performers in terms of daily cases and hospitalisations. According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's Lloyd Chapman, vaccination is the linchpin, and that's where the UK stands out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Covid is surging across Europe, but what's causing it, and will the UK follow suit, or are Europe hot on our heels? Should vaccines be mandatory, and would vaccine passports work? Why does Covid-19 vaccine protection wane with time, and are we looking at a relentless cycle of boosters indefinitely, or will one be sufficient? Dr Chris Smith joins RNZ's Kim Hill for a catch-up all about the current state of Covid-19... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

When two atoms join together, the laws of physics tell us that a large amount of energy will be released, but the experiments performed so far by scientists to achieve nuclear fusion have always yielded a lot less energy than the inputs. This week, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses an approach called 'inertial confinement fusion', announced that they achieved a huge improvement in the record energy yield from a fusion experiment. Iacopo Russo heard from Debbie Callahan, a lead researcher on the project. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The first part of understanding a new language is working out where one word stops and the next word starts out of a string of syllables. Researchers at ELTE University in Hungary have been looking at how dogs' brains respond to language to figure out if they can recognise words, as Sally Le Page found out from author Marianna Boros... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Recently Facebook announced a name change for the company to Meta, which comes during the midst of a marketing plug by Mark Zuckerberg for his new take on an augmented reality universe. Facebook's metaverse. Harry Lewis finds out what the metaverse is from BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman, but first here she is with what this rebrand means for us everyday users... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

We talk a lot about proteins on this programme - what they do, how they work - but have you ever wondered what they sound like? A group of scientists at the National University of Singapore have been turning proteins into pieces of music, as Sally Le Page heard from author, Peng Zhang. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Antibiotics are such an important part of modern medicine but their effectiveness has been waning in the last few decades as certain bacteria, so called superbugs, have become resistant to multiple common antibiotics, leading to the UN declaring that antimicrobial resistance is one of the top 10 global public health threats facing humanity. To tackle this issue, new approaches are needed and as new strains of antibiotics are hard to come by, one option is to modify existing antibiotics to make them more effective. Verner Viisainen spoke to Jennifer Payne from Monash University to find out... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Have you ever noticed that you take one particular walking route to the shops, only to take a completely different route on the way back? If so, you might not be alone...based on recent paper published in Nature Computational Science, this is more common than you might think and could be because our brains try to always take the pointiest, not necessarily the fastest, route to their destination. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Earthshot Prize is an ambitious environmental program created by His Royal Highness Prince William to find and develop solutions for the climate emergency. This year's prizes were awarded last month at a ceremony in London. The prize for the Fix Our Climate category went to company Enapter, which developed a technology called "AEM hydrogen electrolyser". Iacopo Russo heard from Enapter's co-founder Jan-Justus Schmidt, and from Cambridge University engineering professor David Cebon, to find out firstly what an electrolyser is and more importantly what hydrogen can do for us in a sustainable... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

"Test! Test! Test!" was the instruction from the World Health Organisation when the Covid-19 pandemic began to take hold around the world. Now scientists at MIT think they might have a solution, both for this pandemic and future ones: they've developed a sensor system comprising a fibre optic to which a special coating is applied that can recognise specific viruses. When it does so, it emits light of a specific colour, signalling a detection. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

New research published this week has turned what we know about Alzheimer's disease progression on its head. Instead of the disease gradually spreading through the brain causing symptoms to get worse, the study found progression relied more on how quickly the number of disease-associated proteins increased in individual brain regions. Julia Ravey heard from Cambridge University's Georg Meisl, the study's author, on how this may impact future treatments. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Wild water swimming is becoming ever more popular and, according to a new study published recently in Cell Reports Medicine, combining dips in cold water with time in a hot sauna could have potential health benefits. Verner Viisainen spoke with senior author Camilla Scheele to find out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Who doesn't like to pick up a cold drink from the fridge and sit down to watch a show on their laptop or TV? Electrical appliances have made our lives easier and richer and yet, as much as we love them, we don't seem to be as good at properly maintaining or disposing of them. Thursday 14th October this year was International E-Waste Day, an event to raise awareness about the problem of waste electronics. Iacopo Russo heard from Pascal Leroy, the General Director of the WEEE Forum, the non-profit expert group which promotes the event... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

A form of cultured cell, known as a HeLa cell, is at the centre of a lawsuit that is being brought against a large scientific company that uses these cells. HeLa cells are named after the person they were collected from originally, Henrietta Lacks. They are an "immortal" cell line that grows continuously in the culture dish. This means that the cells that exist today stem directly from Henrietta Lacks' original cell sample, which was taken back in 1951. The use of these cells today raises ethical questions, because Henrietta Lacks did not give consent for them to be collected or used. The case... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Pain relief after surgery is a major headache as we don't have a lot of effective, and safe, options. Opioids in particular, like morphine, are very addictive and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths globally each year, and so doctors are desperate for alternatives. Now, scientists at the University of Buffalo have developed a long-lasting, local painkiller that can be injected into the site of injury to specifically prevent pain-transmitting nerve cells, or neurons, from passing on their painful messages to the brain. It works by stopping a process called endocytosis; this is where cells... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

He said he'd introduce them, now Boris Johnson has stepped back from mandating vaccine passports across England for venues like nightclubs. But what's provoked this viral volte-face? Also, saliva tests for Covid-19, few fatal coronavirus cases among the unvaccinated, what's the role of hand sanitisers, and are Covid booster jabs the way forward? Dr Chris Smith joins RNZ's Kim Hill to discuss the latest Covid-19 news... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Fluoride is the stuff in toothpaste that helps strengthen teeth. But if there's too much fluoride in the water it softens bones, and children become susceptible to bone deformities. It's very difficult and expensive to remove dissolved fluoride ions from water. But, inspired by nature, scientists have used polymers to produce a membrane that can filter out fluoride, as Sally Le Page heard from Ayse Asatekin... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Twitter has been the subject of another study, looking at how people's tendency to post tweets in moral outrage is affected by other people on the site. Increasingly in recent years, celebrities and other well-known individuals have found themselves being "cancelled". This usually happens when they do or say something that other users disagree with. The outpourings of outrage reverberate across the social network with many piling in publicly to scorn and humiliate the perpetrator. But why do people resort to this Twitter equivalent of lobbing rotten tomatoes at someone in the stocks?... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists