Why are seeds such different sizes?

There’s something fishy going on in the Czech Republic, where CrowdScience listener Ian lives. He keeps tropical fish, and he’s noticed that when he adds new ones to his tank, they swim with others of the same breed. He wants to know how they recognise each other. Do they know wh ...  Show more

Is silence blood-curdling or blissful? CrowdScience listener Ziqi finds it intolerable and thinks that there’s a good reason for it – silence is so rare in nature that it could be a signal for danger. Presenter Marnie Chesterton is on a mission to test Ziqi’s theory, starting wit ...  Show more

If plants come from seeds but seeds come from plants then how do you get a seed to start off with? Nij and the kids meet ecologist Professor Angela Moles for a bushwalk to find some answers... 

n December 2020, China's Chang'e-5 mission returned to earth carrying rock samples collected from the moon – the first lunar samples to be collected since the American Apollo and Luna missions to the moon in the 1970s. Laboratory analysis has revealed that these are the youngest ...  Show more

In the last week, teams of astronomers have rushed to report ever deeper views of the universe thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. These are galaxies of stars more than 13.5 billion light years from us and we see them as they were when the universe was in its infancy, less ...  Show more

Marnie Chesterton and guests mull over the saga of an AI engineer who believes his chatbot is sentient. Also, climate scientists propose a major leap in earth system modelling, that might cost £250m a year but would bring our predictive power from 100 km to 1km. And the story of ...  Show more