Scientists stripped a cell down to its most essential genes in order to find out what makes life...alive. What they found was more bizarre than they could have imagined. This is the first episode of our new three-part series, Life from Scratch. Guests: Kate Adamala, associate pro ...Show more
The idea of a song
A few hundred milliseconds are often all you need to recognize a song, but a lot of recent hits have moved away from intros. Our friends at Switched on Pop (along with the National's Aaron Dessner) break down how song intros can shape our perception and what we lose when they d ...Show more
Every living creature can trace its origins to a single cell 4 billion years ago. But the long march of evolution took many twists and turns. Whether fish or amphibian or reptile, one creature would rise to the top…only to be wiped out in one of five mass extinctions. And each ti ...Show more
We are creatures of the epigean world: the world of light on Earth’s surface. But there is another world – a world beneath the surface. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe venture into the world of cave biology or biospeleology. (part 3 of 4)See omnystudio. ...Show more
In this Back To School episode we consider the "List of Life": the criteria that define what it is to be a living thing. Some are easy calls: A kitten is alive. A grain of salt is not. But what about the tricky cases, like a virus? Or, more importantly, what about futuristic andr ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the great unanswered questions in science: how and where did life on Earth begin, what did it need to thrive and could it be found elsewhere? Charles Darwin speculated that we might look for the cradle of life here in 'some warm little pond ...Show more