How Plants Became Carnivores
How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t there, some plants can adapt in unexpected…
History Extra podcast: Why Greenwich is the home of time
Why is a small observatory in south east London so important to the story of how we tell the time? Speaking to Elinor Evans, Emily Akkermans, Curator of Time at the…
How It’s Made: Crayons, Highlighters, & Other Writing Utensils
Explore the fascinating world of how everyday items are manufactured and produced.
Are Animals Religious?
Are humans the only religious species? New research on chimpanzees, elephants, and other animals challenges our assumptions about awe, grief, ritual, and the emotional roots of religion.
What Fantasy Gets Wrong About Sacred Groves
Fantasy loves sacred groves as untouched relics of a lost world. This video shows what scholars actually find on the ground, and why sacred groves thrive not through isolation, but…
How Dinosaur Extinction Gave Us Fruit
One of the most surprising effects of the cascade of changes that played out in the wake of dinosaur extinction may have been the evolution of a world absolutely teeming…
When Ancient Weeds Fooled Us
Ancient weeds began mimicking early crops again and again over the course of the agricultural revolution, as ancient farmers made similar mistakes in different places at different times.And it turns…
Not Just the Tudors: When Europe met Islam
In the Early Modern period the boundaries between Christian and Islamic civilisations were far more porous than we imagine: Isaac Newton’s library included Arabic biographies of the Prophet Muhammad; the…
Chinese Porcelain
A BBC Documentry
Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold
Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other. But…