Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the wonders of the natural world. In 1875 in the western Pacific, the crew of HMS Challenger discovered the Mariana Trench which turned out to be deeper than Everest is high, by two kilometres. Trenches like Mariana form when one tectonic pl ...Show more
The Evolution of Lungs
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the evolution of lungs and of the first breaths, which can be traced back 400 million years to when animal life spread from rock pools and swamps onto land, as some fish found an evolutionary advantage in getting their oxygen from air rather than w ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the strange mathematics of probability where heads or tails is a simple question with a far from simple answer. Gambling may be as old as the hills but probability as a mathematical discipline is a relative youngster. Probability is the field of ma ...Show more
Physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince are joined by the Australian comedian and musician Tim Minchin and mathematician Alex Bellos to discuss randomness, probability and chance. They look at whether coincidences are far more common than one might think and how a mathematica ...Show more