Latest Podcasts

In this episode, the team round up some of the best and weirdest science from the last month. We investigate some innovative methods being used to control invasive squirrels, a new technology that could partially restore sight and an innovative memory technique beloved by ancient greeks, memory maestros and TV detectives.

In this episode, the TN team rounds up some of the best and weirdest science from the last month. Hear how elephants and naked mole rats fight cancer, how immunotherapy is getting a microbial boost from poop transplants and why researchers think our sleep patterns might be affected by the phases of the moon.

In this episode, the team discuss the omnipresent technology of next-generation sequencing (NGS), which has seen the cost of sequencing a human genome go from $100 million to under $1000 in just two decades. We hear from the European Bioinformatics Institute’s Dr Alex Almeida, who uses NGS techniques to examine the human microbiome. We also investigate the future of NGS and ask, what will happen when we have sequenced absolutely everything?

2020 has been a memorable year in science for many reasons, most of them bad. As we finally begin to see some chinks of light at the end of this incredibly long year, the Opinionated Science team look back at some of the biggest stories of the year that were nothing to do with COVID-19, including brain implants, inherited trauma and millions of tons of microplastics.

This episode is a COVID-19 podcast with a first-hand focus. Podcast host Ruairi Mackenzie discusses his experience with symptomatic COVID-19. And we also look at the data around COVID-19 risk and age and discuss the emerging problems posed by long COVID.

In this episode, the team discusses the growing movement for sustainable science. Research has a yeti-sized ecological footprint, and here we follow the tracks from ozone-destroying CFCs and energy-guzzling freezers through to a new future for science that promises to make labs eco-friendly at last.

In this episode, the team take a deep dive into the world of biohacking. Practitioners of this DIY biology have big goals: making genetic technologies available to all, bypassing government regulation of drugs and (on the fringes of the movement) achieving immortality.

In this episode, the TN team discusses three promising vaccine candidates being developed for COVID-19. We take a deep dive into the data from these vaccine trials to try and work out what successes can be celebrated and what unanswered questions still remain.

Advances in genetic testing have come with a lot of ethical baggage. In this podcast we discuss how clinical testing can throw up surprise results for doctor and patient, the test data that is helping fight COVID-19 and how one of our own editors responded to receiving her genetic risk scores.

In this episode, we discuss the potential of personalized, precision approaches to change healthcare. We hear how cancer care has been one of the first areas to take advantage of patient-specific data, the risks and rewards of increased access to genomic data and how neuroscience is beginning to explore diseases of the brain at a personal level.