Naked Scientists Special Editions ENHANCED

Biological systems are able to create complex shapes and patterns, like the stripes of a zebra, the shape of your hand or the dynamic displays of a flock of birds. These shapes develop in an emergent and self-organised way, relying on just local interactions between individuals. In contrast, human designed technology is usually created by an external builder. But now, a team of roboticists and biologists have come together to design robot swarms that can self-organise into complex shapes. Hannah Laeverenz Schologelhofer spoke with Sabine Hauert from the Bristol Robotics Lab.

The Ancient Greeks understood that the liver was one of the most incredible organs humans possess when they wrote the cautionary tale of Zeus' punishment of Prometheus, in which poor Prometheus was tied to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, but overnight it would regenerate and grow back, allowing his punishment to continue day after day. Now, in real life, the liver doesn't regenerate quite that quickly, but it is true that it has the ability to grow back and heal itself remarkably well. Georgia Mills spoke to liver scientist Auinash Kalsotra from the University of Illinois, about how and why the liver has this incredible skill.

Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers affecting young women, and it's caused by a virus called Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV, which is spread through sexual contact. The virus causes the cells of the cervix to keeping growing excessively, which eventually damages their DNA, causing cancer. Testing for this cancer can be challenging: these days it involves using DNA tests to look for traces of the virus in a sample. But the viruses are very common, and only a small proportion of people carrying them will actually get cancer; so there are lots of false positives. Now researchers at Queen Mary University of London have found a way to tell who really is at risk, by pinpointing changes to a pattern of chemical markers, called epigenetic marks, that are present on our DNA. A person at risk of cancer develops characteristic changes to these marks, which study author Attila Lorincz can pick out, as he explained to Georgia Mills...

In this episode of the eLife Podcast, the nerves with a taste for salt, why fur seal pups succumb to hookworms, the oldest fossilised flowers ever found, the monkey business of chimp personalities, and the 11 million year old flying squirrel foung in a rubbish tip...

Christmas is a wonderful time of year, but all of the additional transport and consumption adds up, and we are left with plenty of seasonal rubbish and greenhouse gases. So how can you cut down this Christmas? Georgia Mills is here to spoil all of the festive fun...

Clean water is something that we often take for granted, but making it can be a major technological and energy-intensive process. Now, thanks to a system developed by scientists at York University, Toronto, and MIT, there might be a way to do this much more cheaply in future. Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer spoke with York researcher Thomas Cooper, about this new way of using sunlight to clean up water and produce superheated steam.

How can seemingly similar cells behave differently? This is a particularly important question when a small change means that a cell does not function properly and several diseases might be the result of these small changes at the single cell level. But a cell is a complex system, and some of the important molecules inside a cell exist in very small quantities that can be difficult to detect. To address this challenge, a new tool has been developed called 'nano-tweezers'. These tiny devices can extract individual molecules from inside cells. Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer spoke with Joshua Edel from Imperial College London about these 'nano-tweezers'.

Language is all around us, and good language skills are important for getting on in life. But does being good in one language domain, like spelling, mean you'll be good in another, like grammar? And if your child is doing well with language as a toddler, will they still be doing well as a teenager? Recently, results have come out from a study 15 years in the making and Katie Haylor spoke to one of the authors, Rebecca Pearson from the University of Bristol.

When we think of robots we might think of the Terminator, West World, or even something completely different like Big Hero Six - a story about a young boy and his soft medical robot companion Baymax. Doughy and malleable, a robot like Baymax is kind of the holy grail for scientists who are working on making Soft Robots - robots which aren't made of metal or plastic but instead of stretchable, supple materials like rubber, gels, or fabric. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Ilse Van Meerbeek, a PhD student at Cornell University who recently published a paper in Science Robotics about new progress in this field.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats facing mankind today. A new group in the University of Washington in Seattle, have been working to fight this threat. In their study published September 2018, they looked to poison bacteria using the heavy metal gallium, to improve the lives of those with cystic fibrosis. In October 2018, Adam Murphy spoke to two authors of the study. First, Christopher Goss and then colleague, Pradeep Singh

Every year, hundreds of millions of people contract malaria; this is a parasitic infection spread by mosquitoes. The parasite does two things when it grows in the body: either it clones itself to make millions more malaria parasites in that infected individual, and makes them sicker in the process; or, it produces a different form of the parasite that's sexually active and specialised to infect mosquitoes so it can spread to another human. And this week scientists in Edinburgh have discovered that malaria bases the decision on whether to boost its numbers in an infected person, or to try to spread to other individuals, by counting its own population. Understanding how this works, they think, might provide us with new ways to tackle the problem. Petra Schneider told Chris Smith what she's found...

Do you like to lie out on the beach in the summer, or are you more likely to be found hiding in the shade? Well, how you answer might depend on how quickly you seem to get sunburnt. We all know that we should wear sunscreen when out and about in the summer to protect our skin and so reduce our risk of skin cancer, but new research from the Weill Medical College of Cornell might allow us to ditch the sunscreen at some point in the future. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Dr Jonathan Zippin, a dermatologist and skin researcher, about his lab's key discovery in the science of skin.

When we think of our immune system, most of us will be familiar with the white blood cells that circulate around our body to target and kill the bacteria and viruses that make us sick. But, we actually also have a special type of immune cell sitting in some of our body surfaces, like our skin and our gut, and new research suggests that these cells might hold the key to future cancer and allergy treatments. Eva Higginbotham spoke to Professor Adrian Hayday from the Francis Crick Institute and King's College London, about his new paper describing the unique way these cells actually work, and why they might be an important player in the fight against certain diseases.

We get so many good questions sent to us here at The Naked Scientists, that sadly we can't fit them all into our monthly question and answer shows. So here's an extra slice of science for you from our November 2018 QnA. Roger got in touch to ask whether artificial intelligence will be making medicines in the future, and we also heard from Sean about some rather intelligent ravens...

The wildlife impact of urban sprawl, how climate change will affect the distribution of mosquito-borne outbreaks, Devil Facial Tumour Disease 2, how LSD works in the brain and gender bias in peer review all go under the microscope in this latest episode of the eLife Podcast.

Today marks 100 years since the end of World War 1. This conflict caused the deaths of around 16 million people, and the new developments in artillery meant that new and nasty injuries were defying our ability to treat them. Ironically, this meant WW1 actually lead to huge advances in medicine, and neuroscience. But, thanks to a charity, Headway, it's also helping people with brain injuries today. Georgia Mills has been finding out how

Glioblastoma is an aggressive and often deadly cancer of the brain. Understanding it is vital to improving patient outcomes. In a new study published in Nature Genetics, a group in Cornell University has been sequencing genes to understand which ones are switched on by the tumours. To learn more, Adam Murphy spoke to Charles Danko, of the Baker Institute for Animal Health and the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine...

Good dental hygiene is crucial in the fight against gum disease, which can lead to a common condition called periodontitis. It comes about when changes to the bacteria in the mouth cause a reaction called inflammation in areas around the teeth, potentially destroying tissue and bone and causing tooth loss. But quite why an altered microbiome causes this inflammation isn't known, so there are no targeted treatments, and surgery is the main option for severe cases. But now scientists have spotted that periodontitis patients have higher numbers of immune cells called TH17 cells in their mouths, and by targeting these cells, they managed to slow down the progression of the disease in mice. Katie Haylor spoke with Niki Moutsopoulos from the National Institute of Dental and Crano-facial Research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire have come up with an explanation for the wobble seen in jets of matter being blasted from regions surrounding some supermassive black holes: Another nearby supermassive black hole! Dr Martin Krause tells us how we can see them at all...

Nowadays, tuberculosis takes more lives than any other infectious disease. Cases are on the decline but emerging antibiotic resistance threatens to interrupt that pattern. Tamsin Bell spoke with Professor Francois Balloux from University College London to learn about how this infectious disease evolved...