How The Victorians Took Us To The Moon
If a Victorian met Elon Musk they would completely get him. The world’s richest man, determined to use technology that doesn’t yet exist to colonise Mars. Classic Victorian thinking.The Victorians did...
19 Okt 202225min
Eco Farming
George Washington Carver is well known to Americans as the Peanut Man. It’s been written of him that ‘peanuts were like paintbrushes: They were tools to express his imagination’.If that sounds a bit r...
16 Okt 202239min
FORENSICS: DNA
The birth of DNA fingerprinting will forever be tied to Leicester, England. It was invented in a lab in the city’s university by Alec Jeffreys in 1984. And it was in the outskirts of the city that it ...
12 Okt 202247min
Punk & the Sex Pistols
Have you ever heard the story of how punk began?“They are Dickensian-like urchins who with ragged clothes and pockmarked faces roam the streets of foggy gaslit London…Some of these ragamuffin gangs ju...
9 Okt 202229min
Recorded Sound
From talking sponges to voices frozen in ice, the history of recorded sound is not what you expect.People fantasised about being able to record sound long before it was possible. We begin by hearing a...
5 Okt 202236min
FORENSICS: Lie Detectors
What does Wonder Woman have to do with the invention of the lie detector? Does refusing to yank a donkey’s tail make you a liar? Is it folly to believe that a machine can ever peer inside the human mi...
2 Okt 202230min
Space Food
If humans travel to Mars then by the time they come home all the food they eat will be five years old. Want a bite?Food often gets overlooked in stories about space flight. Yet space food has a fascin...
28 Sep 202240min
FORENSICS: Fingerprinting
We hear from London’s most inaccessible museum, the Met police’s Crime Museum, and take you back to India in the time of the British Raj. We hear about the first murder case ever to hinge on fingerpri...
25 Sep 202241min
