The Life Scientific Folgen

Darren Croft studies one of the ocean’s most charismatic and spectacular animals – the killer whale. Orca are probably best known for their predatory behaviour: ganging up to catch hapless seals or attack other whales. But for the last fifteen years, Darren Croft’s focus has been on a gentler aspect of killer whale existence: their family and reproductive lives . Killer whales live in multi-generational family groups. Each family is led by an old matriarch, often well into her 80s. The rest of the group are her daughters and sons, and grand-children. Especially intriguing to Darren is that female orca go through something like the menopause - an extremely rare phenomenon in the animal kingdom, only documented in just five species of toothed whales and of course in humans. Halting female reproduction in midlife is an evolutionary mystery, but it is one which Darren Croft argues can be explained by studying killer whales. Darren is Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter. He talks to Jim Al-Kalili about his research on killer whales, his previous work revealing sophisticated social behaviour in fish, his life on the farm, and the downsides and upsides of being dyslexic.Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker

Bill Gates is one of the world's best-known billionaires - but after years at the corporate coalface building a software empire and a vast fortune, his priority now is giving that wealth away. And his ethos for doing it has been shaped by science.Famed for co-founding Microsoft, in recent decades Bill’s attention has turned to philanthropy via The Gates Foundation: one of the largest charities in the world. Since its inception in 2000, the organisation's helped tackle issues around health, education, inequality and climate change in some of the world’s poorest countries, with an undeniable impact: from contributing to the eradication of wild poliovirus in Africa, to helping halve global child mortality rates within 25 years. But, as Jim Al-Khalili discovers, for a man with lofty ambitions and an even loftier bank balance Bill has surprisingly humble tastes - from cheeseburgers and a bingeable spy series, to a good game of pickleball... Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Lucy Taylor

The final episode in this series of The Life Scientific is a journey through space and time, via black holes and wormholes, taking in Nobel-prize-winning research and Hollywood blockbusters!Kip Thorne is an Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, and someone who’s had a huge impact on our understanding of Einsteinian gravity. Over the course of his career Kip has broken new ground in the study of black holes, and been an integral parts of the team that recorded gravitational waves for the very first time – earning him a share in the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics.He went on to promote physics in films: developing the original idea behind Christopher Nolan’s time-travel epic Interstellar and, since then, advising on scientific elements of various big-screen projects; including, most recently, the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer.In a special edition of The Life Scientific recorded in front of an audience of London’s Royal Institution, Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to Kip about his life and career, from his Mormon upbringing in Utah to Hollywood collaborations – all through the lens of his unwavering passion for science. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Lucy Taylor