From the Cold War to the present day

As a child growing up on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya, Washington Yotto Ochieng once watched a plane cross the night sky and told his mother he wished he could travel on it. But he remembers her encouraging him to dream bigger... Today, Washington is a Professor o ...  Show more

Working on a remote tropical island in the Atlantic might sound like some sort of romantic idyll - but trying to conduct scientific research on a windy, isolated volanic outcrop is no picnic, as Lucy Carpenter can attest! Lucy is an atmopsheric chemist and a Professor at the Univ ...  Show more

PFAS chemicals, also known as forever chemicals, don’t break down in the environment. They can accumulate in the body and are found to have an array of harmful effects on human health. A major mapping project has revealed worryingly high levels of PFAS across thousands of sites i ...  Show more

White phosphorous is an incendiary material and if it were to be used in any built-up civilian areas, the practice would violate international law. We find out what makes white phosphorus so dangerous, and we ask how easy is it to identify? Andrea Sella, professor of chemistry at ...  Show more

Khartoum’s National Public Health Laboratory has been caught up in the ongoing conflict in Sudan. Dr Maysoon Dahab and Dr Ayman Ahmed explain the situation and why health labs are often targeted in conflicts. Virus hunters have used artificial intelligence to discover more than 1 ...  Show more

Saving lives with thin air - by taking nitrogen from the air to make fertiliser, the Haber-Bosch Process has been called the greatest invention of the 20th Century – and without it almost half the world’s population would not be alive today. Tim Harford tells the story of two Ger ...  Show more