A Complicated Woman: Leona Zacharias

The only woman in a laboratory filled with men, Katharine Burr Blodgett soon becomes indispensable as an assistant to The General Electric Company’s most famous scientist, Irving Langmuir. Their working relationship is an elegant symbiosis: her forte is experimentation, his is sc ...  Show more

Katharine Burr Blodgett arrives at The General Electric Company’s legendary research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, known as the “House of Magic.” She was just 20 years old when she entered a world built almost entirely for men. She joins as assistant to the brilliant and e ...  Show more

The energy required to grow, birth and raise young is intense, so it's only fair that the female body has some tricks to make sure reproducing is worth it.

From cryptic choice to immune system sperm blockers, the female reproductive system can be a literal maze for those ...

In this episode, Matthew talks to Dr Lexi Stadlen. Lexi is a writer, anthropologist and ethnographer. With a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics, Lexi spent two and a half years living in India, conducting research on the intimate lives of women. In 201 ...  Show more

What does it take to earn the nickname, ‘The Leonardo da Vinci of heart surgery’?That's the moniker given to today's guest - a man who pioneered high-profile and often controversial procedures, but also helped drive huge medical progress; carrying out around 2,000 heart transplan ...  Show more

Many of us have heard of seismology, the study of earthquakes; but what about asteroseismology, focusing on vibrations in stars?Conny Aerts is a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Leuven in Belgium - and a champion of this information-rich field of celestial research. ...  Show more