Discovery

26:28

The Life Scientific: Ginger Kerrick

Discovery ·

2026/10/05

What do you do when your childhood dream of becoming an astronaut is grounded at the final hurdle?If you’re physicist Ginger Kerrick, you go on to help run the missions instead.After failing the medical of her astronaut application process, Ginger went on to become Nasa’s first non-astronaut CAPCOM and its first Hispanic female Flight Director. Across a remarkable three-decade career, she helped train the International Space Station’s first long-term crew, logged thousands of hours in Mission

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26:30

The Ocean Within Us

Discovery ·

2026/09/28

Here's a little fact you might have heard before: Humans are around 70% water. About the same percentage as a sweet potato, incidentally. But what does that actually mean? Sure, there's blood, that accounts for some of it. And the lymphatic system has a fair amount too, sloshing around. There's water in each of our cells. But that doesn't add up to the full 70% - where is the rest of it? In 2018, a scientific paper was published which gives a tantalising clue. The authors revealed for the first time

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26:30

The art of being a Zombie Ant Fungus

Discovery ·

2026/09/21

An ant becomes infected by a fungus which takes over its nervous system, turning the ant into a vehicle for the fungus’s reproduction and killing the ant in the process. It sounds like science fiction, but it is happening in rainforests around the world.It is a parasitic relationship that has inspired the TV series The Last of Us, but it also reveals a great deal about control, autonomy and the interconnectedness of the natural world.Cultural entomologist Bridget Nicholls investigates this

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26:30

Women Not Included: Consumer Products

Discovery ·

2026/09/14

Design is never neutral and small choices can have a big impact. Dr Ella Hubber and journalist Katie Silver explore how consumer products marketed to women are frequently developed without fully understanding their needs. Along with expert insight, they look at everything from footwear based on male anatomy to menstrual products tested with unrealistic methods, revealing how these decisions can affect comfort, performance and even health.As awareness grows, they also ask what change can look like

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26:31

Women Not Included: Medical Devices

Discovery ·

2026/09/07

CPR mannequins, medical implants and surgical tools. These are life changing and lifesaving medical devices. But when they are built around male bodies, what does that mean for everyone else?Through expert insight, Dr Ella Hubber and journalist Candice Bailey uncover how gaps in research can lead to higher complication rates in women, why the “one-size-fits-all” design method falls short, and how even the operating theatre can fail women. As awareness grows, they also ask what change can look like

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26:31

Women not included: Artificial Intelligence

Discovery ·

2026/08/31

Dr Ella Hubber and journalist Katie Silver unpack how artificial intelligence is far from neutral, and why that matters. They speak to experts who reveal how some AI is trained with bad data and how this means it can often reflect the same inequalities found in society be that in voice assistants, hiring tools, or translation apps.As awareness grows, they also ask what change can look like. Better training, better regulation, and the technologies shaping our future working fairly for

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26:30

Women Not Included: Urban Planning

Discovery ·

2026/08/24

On every street corner, at every bus stop, in every public toilet the message is clear: this city is not built for women. Along with journalist Chhavi Sachdev, Dr Ella Hubber explores how urban design often fails to reflect the realities of women’s lives. They unpack issues like why women spend longer queuing for toilets, how safety concerns shape the way women move through cities, and why transport systems built around linear commutes fail those juggling care, work and home. As awareness grows,

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26:29

Women Not Included: Safety Equipment

Discovery ·

2026/08/17

Safety equipment is often designed around an “average” male body and Dr Ella Hubber wants to understand the consequences this has for women. Alongside journalist Candice Bailey and expert voices, we hear how healthcare workers are forced to adapt to PPE never made for them and how car safety systems fail to reflect the way women’s bodies respond in collisions. As awareness grows, they also ask what change can look like and if, through better data, and more women’s input, safety equipment can protect

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26:30

Women Not Included: Drugs and clinical trials

Discovery ·

2026/08/10

After working exclusively with male mice while looking for a treatment for type 1 diabetes, Dr Ella Hubber begins to uncover a much bigger issue: modern medicine is not built equally for everyone. Along with journalist Chhavi Sachdev, she explores how decades of clinical research have overlooked women with serious consequences.Through expert interviews, they examine how women were historically excluded from clinical trials, why biological differences matter in how drugs work, and how this has led to

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26:28

The friendly virus

Discovery ·

2026/06/22

Our antibiotics are failing us. In 2025, the UK Government said antibiotic resistance (AMR) contributes to more than 35,000 deaths each year in the UK. Emergency doctors say they are losing patients on a regular basis when they run out of ways to treat them. Antibiotics have saved countless lives, but alongside them, there is another unlikely sounding ally in this fight: viruses, so small that they can attack and kill the bacteria causing these devastating infections. They are called bacteriophages,

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26:29

The Life Scientific: Dean Lomax

Discovery ·

2026/06/15

Have you ever been told you aren't good enough to do something, then gone ahead and proved the naysayers wrong by doing it anyway - in glorious, headline-grabbing style? That is the satisfying story of Dr Dean Lomax. Dean grew up in Doncaster with a passion for fossils but after failing various school exams, was told by teachers that he'd never make it as a palaeontologist. Undeterred by leaving school with no qualifications, Dean sold his childhood Star Wars collection to fund a fossil-hunting trip

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26:28

The Life Scientific: Helen Hastie

Discovery ·

2026/06/08

What if robots of the future weren’t just clever machines, performing tasks in isolation, but trusted teammates you could have a chat with? That could respond naturally to conversational cues and even explain their work? Making this relationship a reality is a focus for Helen Hastie, Professor of Human-Robot Interaction and Head of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Helen’s career has taken her from developing early dialogue systems - the ancestors of today’s generative AI -

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26:28

The Life Scientific: Seth Berkley

Discovery ·

2026/06/01

Dr Seth Berkley is an epidemiologist and global health leader whose career has been shaped by one central problem: vaccines save lives, but only if people can actually get them. His 40-year career has spanned the global, from helping to build Uganda’s first HIV surveillance system and founding the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; to leading Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance for more than a decade – overseeing the immunisation of hundreds of millions of children worldwide. And when COVID-19 struck,

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26:30

The Life Scientific: Hiranya Peiris

Discovery ·

2026/05/25

Hiranya Peiris is playing a starring role in a movie that promises to tell perhaps the greatest story of all time. However, it’s a movie with a difference – there’s no director and no script. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time is one of the most ambitious projects in the world of astronomy, with a mission to create a decade-long time-lapse movie of the visible universe, to answer fundamental questions about its origin, evolution and, ultimately, its fate.Hiranya is Professor of Astrophysics 1909,

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26:30

The Life Scientific: Washington Yotto Ochieng

Discovery ·

2026/05/18

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 of Engineering at Imperial College London, and President of the Royal Institute of Navigation. Over a career bridging industry and academia, he has helped shape the movement of urban transport; how satellites guide us and

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26:29

The Life Scientific: Lucy Carpenter

Discovery ·

2026/05/11

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 University of York, whose work has helped to transform understanding of how oceans shape the air above them. She was one of the founding scientists behind the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory, established on São Vicente in

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26:29

The Life Scientific: Jens Juul Holst

Discovery ·

2026/05/04

As recently as a few years ago, the idea of a self-administered injection that would deliver proven weight-loss results might have sounded fantastical. Today, these medications are a reality and a global phenomenon; hailed in many quarters as “miracle drugs" for their success in treating obesity and diabetes. They do this by replicating a gut hormone called GLP‑1, which tells the brain you’ve eaten enough and nudges the pancreas to release insulin; and this hormone was discovered and decoded thanks

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26:29

The Life Scientific: Jim Ashworth-Beaumont

Discovery ·

2026/04/27

It's a rare thing to encounter a medical specialist who has experience of his field from the expert and the patient perspective - but not unheard of...Jim Ashworth-Beaumont is an orthotist and prosthetist who spent years helping people adapt to life with artificial limbs and musculoskeletal supports, before a near-fatal accident left him relying on both.This twist of fate might have derailed many - but Jim drew on reserves of resilience and determination forged long before his accident; initially in

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26:30

Inside Universe 25

Discovery ·

2026/04/20

“I shall largely speak of mice,” the paper begins “but my thoughts are on man.”So begins a truly extraordinary scientific paper, and an equally extraordinary story.“Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population.” was published in 1973 by John Calhoun, and it detailed his increasingly bizarre research into the psychological effects of overcrowding. Over two decades he built a series of ‘rodent utopias’, where he could keep a population of rats or mice, meet all their basic food

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26:28

Dark Breath

Discovery ·

2026/04/13

In July 2024 a startling scientific paper was published.Headlined ‘Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor’, scientists told how they had discovered oxygen being made two and a half miles down, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.Their claim centred on small polymetallic nodules on the seafloor, and the key question - could these lumps of metal somehow be making oxygen in complete darkness?It was an extraordinary finding that, if proven, could overturn hundreds of years of

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