Naked Scientists Special Editions

Does Nicolas Cage cause people to drown in swimming pools? Does margarine consumption lead to divorce? Tyler Vigen looked at relations between seemingly unrelated statistics to highlight how correlation can be misleading.

In this episode of the eLife podcast we hear about neuropathic pain, gene therapy, insulin production, ageing in worms, and how flatworms grow new body parts.

In this episode of the eLife podcast we hear about the mating habits of flies, radiation resistance in bacteria, how insects learned to smell, and the Hawaiian bobtail squid...

The course of true love never did run smooth and this can be seen across the animal kingdom too. The Malacological Society of London held their annual meeting and this year it was all about sexual selection.

With as much as 30% of all species potentially at risk of extinction, there is a 'Noah's ark' problem of selecting which species to save. This week the Royal Society held a meeting to discuss extinction risks and the best strategies to prioritise conservation.

In this episode of the eLife podcast we learn more about sleep, super Spy chaperones, swimming bacteria, orphan genes and the neuroscience of birdsong.

The peculiarities of the naked mole-rat: what can we learn from them? Cambridge University pharmacologist Ewan St John Smith hosts this meeting of Cafe Scientifique, Cambridge, kicking off with an interview about the naked mole rat with Chris Berrow...

UK Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts, becomes his own radio presenter; here, on a tour organised by the UK's Science and Innovation Network, he charts his meetings with scientists and entrepreneurs in Chicago, including discovering how researchers are trying to develop new batteries, he meets MIRA the Argonne supercomputer, attends a synthetic biology convention, talks to technology start-up CEOs, addresses the AAAS fellows forum and talks in depth to his travelling companions, Nottingham chemist Martyn Poliakoff and Edinburgh Vice Prinicipal Mary Bownes...

Addressing the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2014 meeting in Chicago, David Willetts, UK Minister for Universities and Science, outlines how the special relationship between Britain and the US, coupled with competition and collaboration, is driving discovery and the next generation of technology...

Moving house is one of life's most stressful events; so imagine packing up 4 million artifacts of a museum collection. That's exactly what they are doing at Cambridge University's museum of Zoology. Harriet Johnson went to find out how they're getting ready for the 3 year project to update and improve the museum, and also sneaked a look at some of the best bits of the collection before it all gets packed away...

In this episode of the eLife podcast we discuss ants, rats, sharks and rays, and the pathogen that causes corn smut in maize.

Polio might not have been seen in Britain since the 1980's, but despite worldwide efforts the potentially fatal disease is still endemic in three countries. Kate Lamble caught up with the Director of Immunisation at the Department of Health, Professor David Sailsbury as he visited St Johns college in Cambridge to speak about the global effort to eradicate the disease.

In this episode of the eLife Podcast, the growing problem of drug resistance, severe brain damage, sugar versus sweetener, public dilemmas, and the evolution of translation...

In The Naked Scientists Guide to Genetics, Simon Bishop explores some common genetics terms, meets a creature from the depths of the sea floor, and befriends a family of fancy rats! The terms DNA, genes, chromosomes and inheritance are explored PLUS are humans really 50% banana? Music featured: Adventure, Darling by Gillicuddy http://freemusicarchive.org/music/gillicuddy/; Dan-O, at http://danosongs.com.

In this episode of the eLife podcast we discuss doing protein crystallography with electrons, the discovery of a receptor for carbon dioxide, new insights into arthritis, how the brain responds to a missing hand, and the best shape for whiskers.