RNZ: This Way Up

Tom Smulders of Newcastle University is trying to discover the secrets of why the skin on your fingers and toes puckers up when you spend too long in the bath.

Peter Griffin beams in with tech news. This week, the Pentagon boosts recruitment to build an army of cyber terrorism experts. Plus The US Postal Service struggles to cope with new technology.

Joshua Lewis wants to change the traditional scoring system for Scrabble by giving some tiles new values to reflect modern word usage.

Can music be a performance enhancer for football teams? Kate Connolly reports on the German Football Federation's annual science congress in Frankfurt.

Dr Chris Smith beams in with the latest science news; a device for migraine sufferers, the magnetic maps salmon make to navigate home, and why kids eating dirt is essential for their immune systems.

Drones- unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV's- are being used by the military and by law enforcement agencies around the world, but there are other applications for the technology. With Ben Forman, Stephen David Howard and Ryan Cadwallader of Sycamore. And the law around using drones in private and public spaces with John Edwards.

Vodka's gone from a humble drink from Eastern Europe to the world's most popular spirit. Patricia Herlihy's written a book charting its global reach and history.

Looking for the spurwinged plover with birdman Hugh Robertson.

In India a Hindu religious festival called the Kumbh Mela is underway. Up to 100 milllion people are expected to attend, making it the largest human gathering in history. Anu Anand reports.

According to a new study by Henning Holle and his colleagues at Hull University, itching and scratching can be pretty contagious behaviour.

Dr. Jeff Moore of the US Pharmacopeial Convention keeps a huge database of thousands of cases of food fraud dating back to 1980.

A new citizen science project needs your home videos to study how people play with their dogs! With Julie Hecht of the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Columbia University.

Audio forensics specialist Philip Harrison of JP French Associates can use the background hum coming from the mains electricity network to work out if audio recordings are fake or not.

John Eastwood is a clinical psychologist who's interested in boredom and its relationship to other health problems.

Naked scientist Dr Chris Smith beams in with the latest science news from around the planet.