Babbage: All about that base

As temperatures climb, mosquitoes will migrate to places where natural resistance to malaria is lower. More and more severe natural disasters will make for more breeding grounds. How to stop a deadly disease getting deadlier? In China’s cut-throat food-delivery war, absolutely no ... Show More

Less than nine months after Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad was toppled, the honeymoon is over. How is the new regime responding to rising dissent? Introducing Britain’s revolutionary retirees: why pensioners increasingly dominate political protest. And celebrating the life of o ... Show More

Intel was once synonymous with chip-making, but in recent years it has fallen behind. Now the Trump administration may become its biggest shareholder. A political assassination in Colombia raises fears about a return to violence. And what an annual snail race tells us about rural ... Show More

In this episode Benny and Mal think about why knowing more about our DNA might be a good thing. Knowing which health issues we might suffer from would mean we could be prepared. But what if we learned we would face many horrible diseases – do we really want to know what the futur ... Show More

The case against the tech giant has been brewing since 2019 and while the smartphone maker is usually well-equipped to bat away regulators, this fight could bruise. Why Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, Haiti’s most prominent warlord, could play a key role in the country’s future (09:4 ... Show More

Twenty years ago, the Human Genome Project was completed. It unveiled a mostly complete sequence of the 3 billion pairs of building blocks that make up the code within every set of human chromosomes. These are the instructions that create humans. Almost all of human biology resea ... Show More

Professor Aoife Mclysaght is a geneticist. We chat about all things genetics and evolution  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 

This is our second installment of happiness week on the Plain English podcast. On Tuesday, I spoke with the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development about what makes a good life, based on their 80-year longitudinal study.Today’s episode is about the phenomenon of risin ... Show More

When you look around the world, and at a wider set of measures, Generation Z are far better off than the popular narrative would have you believe. We examine what India’s push to soup up its nukes means for the global arms race (09:30). And even as global fertility rates fall, su ... Show More

There are a lot of causes of the declining global birth rate – education, freedom, and even the decline of subsistence agriculture. But what if one of the biggest factors was … plastic? Epidemiologist and author Dr. Shanna Swan joins Adam this week to break down why phthalates af ... Show More

The dengue-fever case counts now break regional records every year—and the structural reasons behind the spike suggest this sometimes-deadly virus will soon threaten more of the world. Breaches and security holes keep revealing how much of the internet’s innards are maintained by ... Show More

We can only understand our present when we understand our past, right? But how can we do that when the evidence of that past is gone? When the stories aren't passed down or recorded? This week we explore this question with bioarchaeologist Dr. Sian Halcrow of the University of Ot ... Show More