In 2025, Russian-born scientist Kseniia Petrova picked up some spliced frog embryos from a laboratory in France and brought them back to the USA to aid her research into ageing and cancer. She was detained by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), charged wi ...Show more
Is everyone accounted for?
This month, India began the immense undertaking of surveying its population of 1.4 billion people in the world’s largest ever census. Inspired by this huge task, the Unexpected Elements team explores some population science. First, counting – or miscounting – populations. The glo ...Show more
CrowdScience is uncovering the super-powers of spiders, flies and the most irritating mosquitos. Anand Jagatia meets spider specialist Jamie Mitchells at London Zoo to find out how spiders create such vast webs and speaks to researchers in Sweden about how they are trying and suc ...Show more
One year ago, the World Health Organisation declared that COVID-19 would no longer be categorised as a global health emergency. But the pandemic has left us with a new normal in all areas of our lives. From vaccine rollout to wastewater monitoring, we’re asking: how has COVID alt ...Show more
The last great "out of Arica" movement of our ancestors swept out of the northeast of the continent 74,000 years ago. Archaeologist John Kappelman of the University of Texas brings us an update to this complex tale in the form of animal carcasses. We take a trip to Oxford to meet ...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