Special Editions
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.
Modern lifestyles reduce gut bug diversity
You are not alone! Your body is home to a whole host of bacteria that live in and on you: your microbiome. You might be slightly repulsed by this idea, but these tiny organisms are really important for our health. There is now growing evidence that our microbes at risk…
GM Salmonella shrinks cancers
Salmonella bacteria can be modified to make a safe anti-cancer treatment, scientists have shown.
How do we hear time within sounds?
While you listen to a noise, nerve cells in your brain are busy processing sound information and helping you make sense it. One big mystery in the world of hearing research has been how we perceive repeated sounds that hit our ears slowly - like the tapping of a woodpecker…
Dark matter may not be completely 'dark'
Druham Universtiy's Richard Massey takes Chris Smith to a galaxy far, far away; or, more accurately, several galaxies over, which also happen to have just collided with each other, providing in the process new insights into one of the Universe's biggest enigmas, dark matter…
How the Moon was Made
How the Earth came by its Moon has always been something of a mystery: Scientists had theorised that a Mars-sized planet, called Theia, crashed into Earth and that the moon formed from the debris. But, analysis of the rock chemistry from the lunar surface reveals that the moon and Earth…
Evidence of dinosaur cannibalism
Evidence has been revealed that a type of dinosaur fell victim to occasional cannibalism. Daspletosaurus was a member of the tyrannosaurs group, and relative of the famous T. rex. A skull was found to have scratches matching the teeth of a predator around the same size, leading researchers to conclude…
Yeast: Rising from the bread
A favourite Easter tradition are hot cross buns, but there's one particular ingredient which no bread can do without: yeast. What is about this strange powdery ingredient that makes it so useful? Philip Garsed took some freshly baked hot cross buns to molecular biologiest Lia Chappell to find out.
Listening to the bat highway code
If you've ever seen huge flocks of birds or a shoal of fish, you might have wondered how they are all able to move together without ever colliding. Now scientists at the University of Bristol believe they have been able to explain how flocks of bats are able to avoid…
How light can transmit WiFi
Anyone who has struggled with a lousy WiFi connection in a busy public space knows only too well that there are limits to how much data can be beamed over the airwaves like this. Now scientists have come up with a new technology that uses the room lighting to transmit…
When humans made their mark on the world
Geologists like to divide up history into epochs, or eras, separated by events that leave an indelible mark in the geological record of the earth - for example, the meteorite strike that finished off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, whose impact is written in rocks across the globe. Similarly…
ELife episode 18: TB, and a Handshake
In this episode of the eLife podcast we hear about TB, HIV, social behaviour in ants, genetics in baboons and a surprising twist to the handshake.
Adapting to Arsenic
In a remote area in the Andes mountain there exist perilously high levels of arsenic: one of the most toxic substances known to man. But people have been living there for thousands of years, and it has now been discovered that this population has adapted to this dangerous environment. The…
Sophie the Stegosaurus
Dr Kat Arney meets Sophie the Stegosaurus, and Natural History Museum researcher Charlotte Brassey.
What can we learn from Nasa's Dawn probe?
After a seven and a half year journey, and with a price tag just shy of half a billion Dollars, NASA's Dawn spacecraft finally has the asteroid Ceres in its sights. Ceres is a massive asteroid which sits among a clutch of much smaller boulders, pebbles and dust out beyond…
FameLab: the snapping shrimp
FameLab is a competition where scientists battle it out to be the best at giving engaging short talks on their favourite areas of research. Six Cambridge-based finalists have been chosen by a panel of judges and we're hearing from a selection of them. In this episode we meet Daphne Ezer…
Holes give diamonds their colour
Using a new super powerful electron microscope, scientists have discovered tiny holes are responsible for giving brown diamonds their colour.
Space Worms
Worms are about to help scientists to boldly go where no researcher has been before, by venturing into space to help us to understand how changes in gravity might affect our DNA. Although scientists don't think that the physical genetic letters of DNA can be altered by low-gravity space travel,…
Detecting dark matter
It makes up most of the stuff in our universe, but we can't see it or weigh it - but we know it has to be there. This elusive substance is dark matter, and according to a new paper in the journal Nature Physics this week, it's all around us…
Postitive thinking improves your health
Has anyone ever told you to lose a few pounds? Get a bit more active? Work harder in school? We can sometimes become a bit defensive when given this type of advice even if we know it's probably the right thing to do. Now scientists have revealed how a simple…
From venom to medicine
A novel approach to detecting interactions between scorpion venom and its target molecule could aid in the discovery of new drugs for treatment of a wide range of nerve disorders.