The Life Scientific Folgen

Inside a Victorian sewer, with fat deposits sliding off the ceiling and disappearing down the back of his shirt, Trevor Cox had an epiphany. Listening to the strange sound of his voice reverberating inside the sewer, he wondered where else in the world he could experience unusual and surprising noises.As an acoustic engineer, Trevor started his career tackling unwanted noises, from clamour in the classroom to poor acoustics in concert halls. But his jaunt inside a sewer sparked a new quest to find and celebrate the 'sonic wonders of the world'.In this episode he shares these sounds with Jim Al-Khalili and discusses the science behind them.Producer: Michelle Martin.

Despite decades of conservation work, in zoos and in the field, the rate at which species are going extinct is speeding up. Georgina Mace has devoted her Life Scientific to trying to limit the damage to our planet's bio-diversity from this alarming loss. For ten years she worked on the Red List of Threatened Species, developing a robust set of scientific criteria for assessing the threat of extinction facing every species on the planet. When the list was first published, she expected resistance from big business; but not the vicious negative reaction she received from many wildlife NGOS. Her careful quantitative analysis revealed that charismatic animals, like the panda and the polar bear, are not necessarily the most at risk. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Self-taught Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Faraneh Vargha-Khadem has spent decades studying children with developmental amnesia. Her mission: to understand how we form memories of the events in our past, from things we've experienced to places we've visited and people we've met. She talks to Jim about the memories we lay down during our lives and the autobiographies stored in our brains that define us as individuals. Faraneh was also part of the team that identified the FoxP2 gene, the so called 'speech gene', that may explain why humans talk and chimps don't. Plus Faraneh discusses how her Baha'i faith informs her scientific thinking.