logo
episode-header-image
Jul 2024
28m 2s

Are implanted brain chips the future?

Bbc Radio 4
About this episode

Elon Musk’s implanted brain chip, Neuralink, is coming to the UK for clinical trials. Is controlling computers with our minds a future reality or is it all hype? Neuroscientists Dean Burnett and Christina Maher weigh in.

Zoologist Jules Howard ponders the strange effects drugs in our sewage have on frogs from his garden pond.

How do we measure the distance to distant galaxies? Astrophysicist Edward Gomez answers a listener's burning question.

And a 101 on blood groups from Dr Lise Estcourt.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Gerry Holt, Sophie Ormiston Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Up next
Today
Could we have evidence of life on Mars?
News broke this week that rocks picked up by NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars may have found chemical signatures left by living organisms. With the search for life on the red planet capturing our imaginations for decades, Victoria Gill is joined by science journalist Jonathan Am ... Show More
30m 9s
Oct 2
What does caffeine do to our bodies?
Sweet, caffeinated energy drinks are in the headlines again as the UK Government says it wants to ban under 16s from buying them. Some can contain the equivalent caffeine as 2 to 4 espressos. James Betts, Professor of Metabolic Physiology at the University of Bath, explains the s ... Show More
28m 21s
Sep 25
Does warm weather mean more rats in UK towns and cities?
Summer heatwaves and missed bin collections have created panic in the press that rat numbers in the UK are increasing. We ask Steve Belmain, Professor of Ecology at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich for the science. This summer Wales became the first ... Show More
32m 27s
Recommended Episodes
Jul 16
The LIGO Lab Is Pushing the Boundaries of Gravitational-Wave Research
Come with Science Quickly on a field trip to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Host Rachel Feltman is joined by Matthew Evans, MIT’s MathWorks professor of physics, to talk about the last 10 years of g ... Show More
17m 52s
Apr 2025
Consciousness, Reasoning and the Philosophy of AI with Murray Shanahan
In this episode, Hannah is once again joined by Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, for a philosophical deep dive on AI. They explore everything from consciousness and metacognition in animals, to ... Show More
40m 30s
Feb 2025
Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff
Is nuclear power the key to sustainability? With data centers consuming massive amounts of energy, can we keep up? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gary O’Reilly & Paul Mecurio discuss the physics, safety, and future of nuclear reactors in a world of increasing power demands with nuclear eng ... Show More
51m 59s
Apr 2025
From the Internet’s Beginnings to Our Understanding of Consciousness, This Editor Has Seen It All
Senior mind and brain editor Gary Stix has covered the breadth of science and technology over the past 35 years at Scientific American. He joins host Rachel Feltman to take us through the rise of the Internet and the acceleration of advancement in neuroscience that he’s covered t ... Show More
20m 15s
Sep 12
Unpacking the Brain’s Role in Inventing Your Perception
Human brains don’t just perceive reality—they invent it. In this episode of Science Quickly, cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Yon speaks with host Rachel Feltman about how perception is an active process of prediction in which the brain constructs theories about the world that can ... Show More
15m 37s
Feb 2025
Exploring the Hidden Life in the Air around Us with Carl Zimmer
Scientists now agree that COVID spreads via airborne transmission. But during the early days of the disease, public health officials suggested that it mainly did so via close contact. The subsequent back-and-forth over how COVID spread brought science journalist Carl Zimmer into ... Show More
16m 47s
Feb 2025
The War on Science
U.S. science is in turmoil. Amid agency firings and confusion over federal funding, researchers are freaking out. Many can’t do their work, and they have no idea what the future holds. Plus, we’re hearing that all of this could jeopardize medical treatments for people in the U.S. ... Show More
37m 43s
May 2025
We Need More Embodied Education! A Conversation with Arawana Hayashi, Prof Guy Claxton, Dr Akhil K. Singh, Emily Poel and Caroline Williams
This week we're exploring embodiment science in education with some of the worlds leading embodiment practitioners and cognitive scientists! We believe that this is one of the most important shifts happening in education globally, which is simultaneously so simple, and yet so har ... Show More
1h 13m
Sep 26
The Dead Composer Whose ‘Brain’ Still Makes Music
In a hauntingly innovative exhibit, brain cells grown from the late composer Alvin Lucier’s blood generate sound. Set in a museum in Perth, Australia, the installation blurs the line between art and neuroscience. Host Rachel Feltman and associate editor Allison Parshall explore t ... Show More
25m 25s
Jan 2025
Make science great again
Nasa's OSIRIS-REx mission to collect a sample from an asteroid has been a great success. Asteroid Bennu's sample yields a watery pool of history, thanks to an international team of scientists including the London Natural History Museum's Sarah Russell. Also, in a week of tumultuo ... Show More
40m 41s