Episodes
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The climate's in a fix, but can we really fix it with geoengineering - large-scale tinkering with carbon emissions, weather, and the sky?
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The hovercraft was an iconic British invention from the 1950s; now we barely hear about it at all. How exactly did it work... and why did it fall out of favour?
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Missing episodes?
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From Blaise Pascal and Charles Babbage to Konrad Zuse, Alan Turing, and Steve Jobs... join us on a 2,500-year journey through mechanical calculators (cogs), relay-driven early computers (clicks), and modern microprocessors (chips) as we explore the fascinating history of computers!
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You've probably heard the hype about memory foam, widely used in mattresses and cushions, but what's the science behind it and how does it really work?
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You've probably heard of graphene, but what is it... exactly? What's so good about it... and will this simple new kind of carbon power out future?
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Pagers have been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Can you remember what they were and exactly how they worked?
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Will fracking save our skins by helping wean us off coal... or push us ever closer to a climate catastrophe? In this episode, we find out how it works and take a balanced look at the arguments for and against.
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With crafty building design, you can heat your home with plentiful, free energy from the Sun. It's called passive solar energy - and here's how it works!
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If water's the stuff of life, why do we still live in a world of littered rivers and oil spills? Today, a look at water pollution - and what we can do about it.
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How do self-driving cars see where they're going? One way is by using a kind of light-scanning laser called LIDAR - and here's a quick look at how it works.
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The ideas we have about ourselves and other people are often well wide of the mark - as 10 amazing experiments from the history of psychology impressively demonstrate!
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Are you feeling lost? GPS "satnav" will soon put you right. Today we take a simple look at GPS, Glonass, Galileo, and the other space satellite navigation systems spinning around over our heads!
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No, the Wright Brothers didn't invent flying - the idea actually dates back through thousands of years of history. Today, we glide through the story of human flight!
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Today we discover how atoms vibrating 9,192,631,770 times a second can help us tell time. Welcome to the wonderful world of radio-controlled, atomic clocks!
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From HAL and "Speak & Spell" to Siri, and Alexa, we look at how speech synthesizers work... and why they still don't work perfectly!
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Is there still a place for the lone genius inventor - the Edison, Ford, Tesla, or Marconi? Or is invention now solely the province of giant corporations like Apple, IBM, and DuPont?
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Hurrah, the Olympics is nearly here! From springy pole vaulters and leaping long jumpers to spinning ice skaters and slippery swimmers, we're going to take a quick tour through the surprising science behind sport!
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Let's zip back over two and half thousand years to understand the sparky story of electricity, from Thales and Aristotle to Edison, Marconi, and James Clerk Maxwell!
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How goes a gecko stick to the ceiling... why doesn't glue stick to the tube? Today, I'm exploring adhesive and cohesive forces and trying not to come unstuck as I explore the sticky science of glues.
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Can you feel the force? Maybe it's gravity - the tingling attraction between everything in the Universe and everything else. Where does it come from? What causes it? How near are we to understanding it?
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