The Life Scientific

Until recently, it was thought that human brain development was all over by early childhood but research in the last decade has shown that the adolescent brain is still changing into early adulthood. Jim Al-Khalili talks to pioneering cognitive neuroscientist Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore who is responsible for much of the research which shows that our brains continue to develop through the teenage years. She discusses why teenagers take risks and are so susceptible to influence from their peers as well as her childhood growing up with the constant threat of attacks from animal rights groups.

Matt Taylor talks to Jim Al-Khalili about being in charge of the Rosetta space mission to the distant comet, 67P. It is, he says, 'the sexiest thing alive', after his wife. He describes his joy when, after travelling for ten years and covering four billion miles, the robot, Philae landed on the speeding comet 67P; and turned the image tattooed on his thigh from wishful thinking into a triumph for science. Matt's father, a builder, encouraged him to do well at school. He wanted him to get a job in science and Matt didn't disappoint, joining the European Space Agency in June 2005. His charm and exuberance have brought competing teams together as they fight for their science to have priority on Rosetta. His enthusiasm has helped to spark and fuel a global interest in the mission and he deeply regrets his choice of shirt on one occasion. Producer: Anna Buckley.

John O'Keefe tells Jim Al-Khalili how winning the Nobel Prize was a bit of a double-edged sword, especially as he liked his life in the lab, before being made famous by the award. John won the prize for his once radical insight into how we know where we are. When he first described the idea of 'place cells' in the brain back in 1971, many scoffed. Today it's accepted scientific wisdom that our spatial ability depends on these highly specialized brain cells. A keen basketball player,John says, he has put this principle to the test by trying to shoot hoops with his eyes closed. But this belies the years of painstaking experiments on rats that John performed to prove that a rat's ability to know where it is depends not only on its sense of smell, but also on a cognitive map, or internal GPS, inside the rat's brain. He describes how he listened in on the unique firing patterns of individual rat brain cells using the tiniest electrodes: "You almost imagine they are singing to you", he says, as he imitates th

Professor Dave Goulson has been obsessed with animals since he was a child. He collected all kinds of creatures and went as far as doing home made taxidermy. He's now Professor of Biological Sciences at Sussex University where he specialises in bumblebees. Dave Goulson talks to Jim al-Khalili about how he took five years to work out how bees know which flowers to go to for the most nectar, and why he set up a charity to encourage the public and farmers to plant more flowers for bumblebees to feast upon. Recently Dave has found himself in a media storm as he's been studying the effects of pesticides called neo-nicotinoids on bumblebees. After he and others published research showing that the neo-nicotinoids have a detrimental effect on the foraging of bumblebees, the EU has brought in a temporary ban on some of them. But some farmers say that their harvests will be poor if they can't use these pesticides. Dave and Jim discuss the balance between conserving nature and feeding people.

Jim al-Khalili talks to Professor Dame Sally Davies about being a champion for patients and a champion for women. As Chief Medical Officer, the first woman to fill the post, she guides government decisions on pressing health issues such as antimicrobial resistance, mental health and, most recently, Ebola. Having spent many years working as a haematologist, focussing on sickle cell disease, Dame Sally now works tirelessly to put scientific evidence at the heart of Government decisions that affect out health. And it's this quest for evidence that has inspired much of her career. As Director General for Research and Development at the Department of Health, she saw the opportunity to overhaul health research in the National Health Service, focussing on the needs of patients. It was a hugely controversial idea which others had tried to implement, and failed. But she stuck to her guns and the National Institute for Health Research, which she created, is now the envy of the world. Named one of the most powerful

Richard Fortey found his first trilobite fossil when he was 14 years old and he spent the rest of his career discovering hundreds more, previously unknown to science. Professor of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, he talks to Jim Al-Khalili about why these arthropods, joint-legged creatures which look a bit like woodlice and roamed the ancient oceans for almost 300 million years, are so important for helping us to understand the evolution of life on our planet. These new trilobite fossils were found at an exciting time for the earth sciences because of the emergence of plate tectonics. The discovery of communities of trilobite fossils could be used to reconstruct the shape of the ancient world and Richard used the new discoveries to help map the geologically very different Palaeozoic continents and seas. He admits that he's a born naturalist, fascinated by all aspects of the natural world (he's a leading expert on fungi) with a powerful drive to communicate its wonders to a wider public. His boo

Maggie Boden is a world authority in the field of artificial intelligence - she even has a robot named in her honour. Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, Maggie has spent a lifetime attempting to answer philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind, but from a computational viewpoint. "Tin cans", as she sometimes calls computers, are information processing systems, the perfect vehicle, she believes, to help us understand, explore and analyse the mind. But questions about the human mind and the human person could never be answered within one single academic subject. So the long career of Maggie Boden is the very epitome of cross-disciplinary working. From medicine, to psychology, to cognitive and computer science, to technology and philosophy, Professor Boden has spent decades straddling multiple academic subjects, helping to create brand new disciplines along the way.

European Inventor of the Year, Chris Toumazou, reveals how his personal life and early research lie at the heart of his inventions. As Chief Scientist at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, Chris inspires engineers, doctors and other scientists to create medical devices for the 21st century. Applying silicon chip technology, more commonly found inside mobile phones, he tackles seemingly insurmountable problems in medicine to create devices that bridge the electronic and biological worlds - from a digital plaster that monitors a patient's vital signs to an artificial pancreas to treat diabetes. His latest creation, coined a 'lab on a chip', analyses a person's DNA within minutes outside the laboratory. The hand-held device can identify genetic differences which dictate a person's susceptibility to hereditary diseases and how they will react to a drug like warfarin, used to treat blood clots. Producer: Beth Eastwood.

Jim al-Khalili talks to Professor Elspeth Garman about a technique that's led to 28 Nobel Prizes in the last century. X- ray crystallography, now celebrating its 100th anniversary, is used to study the internal structure of matter. It may sound rather arcane but it's the reason we now know the structure of hugely important molecules, like penicillin, insulin and DNA. But while other scientists scoop up prizes for cracking chemical structures, Elspeth works away behind the scenes, (more cameraman than Hollywood star), improving the methods and techniques used by everybody working in the field. If only it was as simple as putting a crystal in the machine and printing off the results. Growing a single crystal of an enzyme that gives TB its longevity took Elspeth's team no less than fifteen years. No pressure there then when harvesting that precious commodity.

Jackie Akhavan, Professor of Explosive Chemistry, tells Jim al-Khalili all about the science of explosives. She explains exactly what explosives are and how to make them safer to handle. She started by working on how to make fireworks safer and has been involved in research with bees to see whether they can be used smell different types of explosives. Her current project involves testing the rocket fuel that will be used in Bloodhound, the British designed and built supersonic car that aims to reach a speed of 1,000mph. Her work involves finding out how to best detect explosives in airports and elsewhere, teaching security professionals how to differentiate between false alarms and the real thing. She also works on explosives used in warfare and discusses the ethical issues involved. Producer: Melissa Hogenboom.

Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University describes how he gave up appearing on Top of the Pops to study quarks, quasars and quantum mechanics. Although he describes himself as a simple-minded Northern bloke, he has acquired an almost God-like status on our TV screens; while the 'Cox effect' is thought to explain the significant boost to university admissions to read physics. He talks to Jim Al-Khalili about learning to be famous, his passion for physics and how he sometimes has difficulty crossing the road. In 2005 Brian was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship for his work on high energy particle collisions at CERN and elsewhere - an enviable academic achievement. In 2009, he was voted one of the sexiest men alive by People magazine. He has invented a new kind of celebrity - a scientist who's regularly snapped by the paparazzi. Brian wants everyone to be as excited as he is about the laws that govern our universe: the beautiful, counter-intuitive and often weird world of quantum mechanics tha

Carol Robinson describes her remarkable journey from leaving school at 16 to work as a lab technician at Pfizer, to becoming the first female Professor of Chemistry at both Oxford and Cambridge University, despite an eight year career break to bring up three small children. Getting back into the workplace wasn't easy. Carol was hired for a job for which she was over-qualified because she 'used to be good' and advised not to dress so smartly because people would think she was a secretary. She managed to negotiate a day a week to do her own research and secured much sought after Royal Society funding to support it. For decades, Carol felt insecure about having a degree from a further education college, which she achieved by studying part-time for seven years while working at Pfizer; but now Carol is proud of her unconventional route into academia and actively recruits students to her lab from a wide range of different backgrounds. In her hands, mass spectrometry has been transformed from a routine technique

In October 2013, Jeremy Farrar was appointed Director of the Wellcome Trust - UK's largest medical research funding charity. The Trust funded �750 million's worth of health-related research - about the same as the government's Medical Research Council. This means Jeremy Farrar is a major figure in British science. Since 1996, the doctor and clinical scientist had run the Wellcome-funded Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam - a British-Vietnamese collaboration specialising in infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, TB and avian flu. He lost close friends and colleagues when the SARS pandemic took off in East Asia in 2003, and dealt with the first cases of the dangerous H5N1 bird flu when it arrived in Vietnam the following here. In conversation with Jim Al-Khalili, Dr Farrar talks about the personal and professional impact of those experiences and of his feelings of impotence as a doctor treating HIV/AIDS patients as a junior doctor in London in 1980s. With his intern

Zoe Shipton's fascination with rocks started when she was a child and her father took her camping on a volcano. Now a professor of geology at Strathclyde University she talks to Jim al-Khalili about her research into the way that the earth faults. This has lead her to studying the aftermath of a major earthquake in Taiwan and drilling into rocks in remote parts of Utah. Recently she has been part of a Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering committee that has produced a report on the potential impact of fracking for gas on the UK.

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith chats to Jim Al-Khalili about quarks, bosons, and running the biggest experiments in history. In the late 60s and early 70s Chris was one of the theoretical physicists who were busy sketching what would become known as the standard model of particle physics. An early believer in the physical reality of the "Quark Model", Chris's work helped confirm that the protons and neutrons at the centre of atoms are themselves made up of 3 quarks. He was also influential in showing that Peter Higgs' theory of mass was not just sufficient, but also necessary. So when later he was made Director General of CERN, he was well placed to know, and to explain to the heads of the member states, that investing in the construction of something called the Large Hadron Collider would be a scientifically fruitful thing to do. Indeed, it has been said that there would be no LHC without Chris' calm international scientific diplomacy. Since then, Chris has been influential in several other international big-

Botanist Sandy Knapp tells Jim Al Khalili about her adventures in the wilderness of South America collecting and studying many thousands of plants from a group vital for human nutrition. She talks about her time growing up in Los Alamos in New Mexico, surrounded by a "sea of physicists" and how her love of the outdoors inspired her to take up botany.

Astronomer and Sky at Night TV presenter Chris Lintott tells Jim Al Khalili about his "Citizen Science" project of crowd-sourced astronomy, Galaxy Zoo, and of working with Brian May and the late Sir Patrick Moore.

Janet Hemingway, the youngest woman to ever to become a full professor in the UK, talks about her career at the frontline of the war on malaria. Whilst many researchers look for vaccines and treatments to this global killer, Janet's approach, as a trained entomologist, has been to fight the mosquitoes - the vector - which transmits the malaria parasite.

Professor Sir Michael Rutter has been described as the most illustrious and influential psychiatric scientist of his generation. His international reputation has been achieved despite the fact that as a young doctor, he had no intention of becoming a researcher, nor interest in becoming a child psychiatrist. In fact he became a world leader as both. His career has spanned more than five decades and is marked by a remarkable body of high-impact research and landmark studies. The theme running through all his work has been child development, on the subtle interplay between nature and nurture and on the factors that make the difference between a child flourishing, or floundering. Evacuated during World War Two, to a Quaker family in the USA, Mike Rutter tells Jim Al-Khalili about the impact this move, aged seven, had on him. He describes the inspirational teachers who persuaded him that research and clinical work as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, was for him, and he admits that an early mentor insisted h

Jim Al-Khalili's guest this week is Dame Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office. The conversation ranges from her childhood wonder of clouds to climate change's part in this winter's floods. Julia Slingo's fascination with meteorology began as she, as a sixth former, gazed out of her bedroom window and wondered what controlled the shapes of clouds and why the clouds usually came from the west. In the 1970s she was one of the few women scientists at the British Meteorological Office and worked in the early days of computer modelling of weather and climate. As the first female professor of Meteorology in the UK, she crusaded for greater computing power and capacity to improve both weather forecasting and global climate models. Julia Slingo took up the job of the chief scientist at the Met Office in 2009. Her profile has been high in the last few months following her remarks that the persistent heavy rains and storminess of Winter 2013 to 2014 were likely to be linked to anthropogenic climate chan