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PODCAST

Special Editions

Naked Scientists

Probing the weird, wacky and spectacular, the Naked Scientists Special Editions are special one-off scientific reports, investigations and interviews on cutting-edge topics by the Naked Scientists team.

science

All Episodes

5:23

Aspirin vs Clopidogrel: The blood thinner battle

Special Editions ·

2025/10/03

Clots in our blood vessels can be responsible for very serious health problems such as strokes and heart attacks. To combat this, some people at risk of said health problems turn towards blood thinners to prevent this clotting, with the most common household blood thinner being aspirin. The issue with preventing clotting is, should you start to bleed, that bleeding is a lot tougher to stop. Now however, a new drug - clopidogrel - is being touted as coming with the same benefits of aspirin, but few

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37:30

Public Success, Private Grief: remembering Peter Cowley

Special Editions ·

2025/09/23

Peter Cowley was an entrepreneur, angel investor, and for many years was the Naked Scientists technology commentator, a role he fell into by accident when we met one evening at an investment meeting. He became a good friend. But his life, in many respects, despite being incredibly successful, was also touched by great sadness: he lost two sons and struggled with alcohol for a time. But he came through it all and lived his life with energy, curiosity, and generosity... Like this podcast? Please help

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38:48

Finland's giant virus, and monkeys take care of their...

Special Editions ·

2025/06/19

In the eLife podcast, a university compost heap has turned up Finland's first documented "giant virus". Also, why monkeys de-sand their supper, and how learning more languages actually makes brain tissue thinner. Then, the link between sugar and neonatal sepsis, and how a cancer controls its hydra host by bestowing it with extra tentacles... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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5:08

Storing data with "molecular firecrackers"

Special Editions ·

2025/05/23

Your personal data could soon be stored not on a phone or server but locked inside a molecule so tiny it's invisible to the naked eye. Researchers have cracked the code on storing digital information in synthetic molecules called polymers - long chains of anything from plastic to protein made from building blocks known as monomers. Each monomer sends out a unique electrical signal that a special electrochemical technique can decode, turning these tiny sequences into passwords or secret messages

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31:00

Personalised medicine, droughts, and dryland research

Special Editions ·

2024/12/24

Personalised medicine and gene screens for disease, why dinosaurs disappeared, planning for droughts, and new vistas in the drylands arena... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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30:59

Evolving flu, and the desert decomposition conundrum

Special Editions ·

2024/12/20

Predicting how influenza viruses will evolve, how deserts decompose matter despite the dry, what worms are revealing about a gene linked to autism, and what makes mice fearful of cat smells. Dr Chris Smith talks to the authors of the latest leading research in eLife... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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36:04

Future cancer care, and the cost of large animal...

Special Editions ·

2024/10/25

In this episode, why approaches to cancer care need a pro-active approach in future, the opportunities arising for the cancer vaccine space, competency-based medical training, the environmental costs of losing large animals, and why water resilience needs careful planning now... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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6:03

Does our language affect our decision making?

Special Editions ·

2023/02/23

There are many factors that might affect the way we make decisions: our age, our past experiences, even our mood that day. But now, a new study has suggested that the language we speak also plays a part in our willingness to wait for a reward. Researchers gave the choice of having an amount of money now, or a slightly greater amount later. But they put this choice to bilingual speakers, once in each language. So did the language in which the decision was put to these people affect their decision

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5:51

Microbial life deep underground

Special Editions ·

2023/02/06

Comparatively, we know an awful lot about life on the surface of planet earth. We know a lot less about the extent of life in our oceans, and we know even less about the life festering deep beneath us, in the rocks underground. Scientists estimate that 20% of the earth's biomass (that's the combined weight of all living things) are beneath our feet - microbes adapted to the extreme temperature and pressure down there. Geologists, like Andy Mitchell from the University of Aberystwyth, are determined

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4:51

How the pandemic affected child development

Special Editions ·

2022/10/21

Babies born during the Covid-19 lockdowns are behind on their language development. That's the finding of a recent study comparing infants born during the pandemic with similar children born in previous years. The reason, as the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland's Susan Byrne explains to Risa Bagwandin, is that social isolation and face masks made it harder for developing youngsters to explore, socialise and interact in the key ways that help foster their communication skills... Like this podcast

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3:19

New Ultrasound Technique for Breast Imaging

Special Editions ·

2022/09/30

A new non invasive technique to pick up breast cancer has been unveiled by UK scientists. Breast cancer is the most diagnosed form cancer in the UK. Dense breast tissue, particularly common in young women, is difficult to image using existing techniques. Now scientists at the National Physical Laboratory have developed a new technique , using ultrasound. Risa Bagwandin spoke to senior research scientist, Daniel Sarno... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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5:28

Search and rescue rats

Special Editions ·

2022/06/15

Apopo is a charity that trains African giant pouched rats for humanitarian purposes, with a view to combating some of the challenges faced by countries in the developing world. Originally, they trained these much shunned rodents to sniff out unexploded landmines left over from wars in countries like Mozambique. More recently, their keen sense of smell has also enabled trainers to develop them into excellent detectors of Tuberculosis carriers, so that patients can get diagnosed more quickly than

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5:28

Search and rescue rats

Special Editions ·

2022/06/15

Apopo is a charity that trains African giant pouched rats for humanitarian purposes, with a view to combating some of the challenges faced by countries in the developing world. Originally, they trained these much shunned rodents to sniff out unexploded landmines left over from wars in countries like Mozambique. More recently, their keen sense of smell has also enabled trainers to develop them into excellent detectors of Tuberculosis carriers, so that patients can get diagnosed more quickly than

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5:09

TV is influencing careers

Special Editions ·

2022/06/07

Did you end up in your dream job? Or did you end up pursuing a career quite intensely for some reason that eludes you? Perhaps the media representation of your profession had a part to play. Shrikanth Narayanan and colleagues from the University of Southern California created a dataset to analyse 4000 professions in the subtitles of over 136,000 movies and TV shows and found that their representation may have influenced some of us to take up a career we loved watching on screen... Like this podcast

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3:28

FIFA Fall Out with EA

Special Editions ·

2022/05/17

There's news of a huge rift in the world of video games... EA Sports, who made the first ever FIFA football game in 1993, have announced that they will no longer be licensing the FIFA name. Chris Berrow, from the Naked Gaming Podcast, has been finding out why and what the consequences might be... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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5:11

Did the lockdown make us more creative?

Special Editions ·

2022/05/17

Now, I want you to cast your mind back to that first lockdown (if you can bear it) and to think about the ways you chose to fill all that new found free time. Perhaps, like the participants of a survey conducted by the Paris Brain Institute to learn more about the effects of the pandemic on creativity, you decided to sharpen your culinary skills, or spent more time pottering in the garden. But what can this uptick in artistic endeavours in such strange circumstances tell us about the way we react to

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7:09

Dog and Dingo DNA sequences

Special Editions ·

2022/04/29

Dingoes are native Australian dogs, although how and when they got to Australia isn't known. They were certainly already there by the time the first western explorers visited the continent, but fossil dingo remains go back only a few thousand years. So what is the relationship between dogs and dingoes, and the wolves they're both related to? Speaking with Chris Smith, Latrobe University's Bill Ballard got into this debate under slightly unusual circumstances... Like this podcast? Please help us by

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4:10

Coffee without the coffee beans

Special Editions ·

2022/04/28

Coffee prices are on the rise and the plant is said to decline by 60% before 2050, meaning new coffee alternatives are being considered in order to give us that caffeine hit. Harry Lewis speaks to Charlie Shaw from Atomo coffee to find out how they've been making our favourite beverage, without the use of coffee beans... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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6:07

Recreating smells from the past

Special Editions ·

2022/04/07

If I asked you to give up one of your five senses, which one would you choose? Chances are, instead of giving up your ability to see or hear, your sense of smell would be in pole position for the chop. Scientists in Germany think we're under appreciative of smell in our evolution as a species, with new research from the Max Planck Institute exploring biomolecular methods to bring smells from the past back to life. James Tytko spoke with Barbara Huber... Like this podcast? Please help us by

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5:41

A new method for recycling plastics

Special Editions ·

2022/04/04

The world has a huge problem with plastics. While they are a materials scientist's dream in terms of their properties, they are an environmentalist's worst nightmare, because they don't break down naturally and are very hard to recycle. But Athina Anastasaki, from ETH Zurich, has set herself the goal of making plastics that can be recycled more easily and now she thinks getting close. Chris Smith found out more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

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