“I shall largely speak of mice,” the paper begins “but my thoughts are on man.”So begins a truly extraordinary scientific paper, and an equally extraordinary story.“Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population.” was published in 1973 by John Calhoun, and i ...Afficher plus
Dark Breath
In July 2024 a startling scientific paper was published.Headlined ‘Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor’, scientists told how they had discovered oxygen being made two and a half miles down, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.Their claim centred on small pol ...Afficher plus
Melvyn Bragg looks at the development of the science of genetics. In the 1850s and 60s, in a monastery garden in Burno in Moravia, a Franciscan monk was cultivating peas. He began separating the wrinkly peas from the shiny peas and studying which characteristics were passed on wh ...Afficher plus
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the theory of Genetic Determinism. In the middle of the last century two men - Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, and Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, established the central theories of modern biology and changed the world forever. Darwin’s On ...Afficher plus
Our genes can tell us so much about us, from why we look the way we look, think the way we think, even what kind of diseases we might be likely to suffer from. But our genes aren't the whole story. There are other, complex and intriguing systems within every cell in our bodies wh ...Afficher plus
Sam Harris speaks with Robert Plomin about the role that DNA plays in determining who we are. They discuss the birth of behavioral genetics, the taboo around studying the influence of genes on human psychology, controversies surrounding the topic of group differences, the first l ...Afficher plus