The Life Scientific

As a child growing up on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya, Washington Yotto Ochieng once watched a plane cross the night sky and told his mother he wished he could travel on it. But he remembers her encouraging him to dream bigger...

Today, Washington is a Professor of Engineering at Imperial College London, and President of the Royal Institute of Navigation. Over a career bridging industry and academia, he has helped s...

Working on a remote tropical island in the Atlantic might sound like some sort of romantic idyll - but trying to conduct scientific research on a windy, isolated volanic outcrop is no picnic, as Lucy Carpenter can attest!

Lucy is an atmopsheric chemist and a Professor at the University of York, whose work has helped to transform understanding of how oceans shape the air above them. She was one of the founding scientists behind the C...

As recently as a few years ago, the idea of a self-administered injection that would deliver proven weight-loss results might have sounded fantastical. Today, these medications are a reality and a global phenomenon; hailed in many quarters as “miracle drugs" for their success in treating obesity and diabetes.

They do this by replicating a gut hormone called GLP‑1, which tells the brain you’ve eaten enough and nudges the pancreas to...

It's a rare thing to encounter a medical specialist who has experience of his field from the expert and the patient perspective - but not unheard of...

Jim Ashworth-Beaumont is an orthotist and prosthetist who spent years helping people adapt to life with artificial limbs and musculoskeletal supports, before a near-fatal accident left him relying on both.

This twist of fate might have derailed many - but Jim drew on reserves of resil...

Ever heard of the unsuccessful Dutch painter who decided to humiliate his critics by forging Vermeers, which the artworld subsequently dubbed 'masterpieces'? Or the businessman who bought a Marc Chagall painting that he displayed with pride for years, before a television investigation revealed to his horror that it was a fake?

Today we're exploring the scientific techniques used to reveal forged artworks - and bring down scammers st...

Tony Juniper is an environmentalist who has worn many hats, over the course of his career.

After developing a passion for birds in childhood, his first job saw him working to save endangered parrots - including a successful effort to bring back the Spix's macaw from the edge of extinction. Tony went on to hold leading campaigning roles with some of the world's best known environmental organisations, from Friends of The Earth to the ...

The COP30 climate summit is taking place in the Brazilian city of Belém, a gateway to the Amazon rainforest, which continues to face widespread deforestation. We all know that our climate is changing and that we are largely responsible for this, but we can’t tackle the problem unless we understand what’s going on.

One scientist who’s done more than most to rectify this is Professor Pierre Friedlingstein. He’s a prominent climate sci...

Imagine if you were listening to an opera or a Taylor Swift concert, and as the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the music was accompanied by a rainbow of colours only you could see. Perhaps while listening to your friends talking, you simultaneously experience a smorgasbord of tastes, with different words evoking different flavours, maybe a delicious ice cream, or something as disgusting as ear wax... This merging of the senses...

Caroline Smith is passionate about space rocks, whether they’re samples collected from the surface of asteroids and the Moon and hopefully Mars one day soon, or meteorites, those alien rock fragments that have survived their fiery descents through our atmosphere to land here on Earth.

She is Head of Collections and Principal Curator of Meteorites at the Natural History Museum, home to one of the finest meteorite collections in the w...

From humble beginnings in his native Sri Lanka, to a more than 40 year academic career at Queen’s University Belfast, Prof. AP (Amilra Prasanna) De Silva’s research into molecular photosensors has led to a pioneering career in that’s evolved from chemistry to medical diagnostics on one hand, to information processing on the other.

Prof. De Silva challenged cultural expectations and overcame the lack of opportunities in chemistry tha...

There are problems and tasks so hard and complicated that it would take today’s most powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack them. But in the next decade, we may well have quantum computers which could solve such problems in seconds.

Professor Sir Peter Knight is a British pioneer in the realms of quantum optics and quantum information science. During his three decades as a researcher at Imperial College London, he ha...

In July 1545, King Henry VIII watched from Southsea Castle on England's south coast as his fleet sailed out to face the French - only to witness his prized warship, the Mary Rose, sink before his eyes.

Raised from the Solent in 1982, the ship is now the centrepiece of the Mary Rose Museum, along with thousands more artefacts that were recovered from the seabed. But keeping the 500-year-old ship and its associated Tudor relics in go...

"My ideas are often labelled as impossible, or useless, or both. Usually when people say that I'm on the right track."

George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and one of the pioneers of modern genomics. He's also someone who makes a habit of finding solutions to the seemingly impossible.

Over the course of his career so far, George developed the first method for direct genomic sequencing, helped initiate the Human Genome P...

Movies might have us believe that bomb disposal comes down to cutting the right wire. In fact, explosive devices are complex and varied - and learning how to dispose of them safely involves intense training, as well as the ability to stay calm under pressure.

This was the world of Dr Gareth Collett, a retired British Army Brigadier General and engineer, specialising in bomb disposal; whose 32-year military career took him around th...

Many people will be familiar with Parkinson’s disease: the progressive brain disorder that causes symptoms including tremors and slower movement, leading on to serious cognitive problems. You might not know that it’s the fastest-growing neurological condition in the world. Today it affects around 11.8 million people and that’s forecast to double by 2030.

Dr Sonia Gandhi is one of the scientists working to change that trend. As Prof...

How do you feel about snakes? What about highly venomous ones?

For Mark O’Shea, close encounters with the world’s most rare and deadly snakes are not only his profession, but his passion. Mark is a Professor of Herpetology - the area of zoology focusing on reptiles and amphibians - at the University of Wolverhampton.

After dropping out of college in his teens, Mark's life could have taken a very different direction; but prompted by ...

There can't be many people in the world who've saved lives in hospital emergency rooms and also helped care for the wellbeing of astronauts in space – but Kevin Fong’s career has followed a singular path: from astrophysics and trauma medicine, to working with NASA, to becoming an Air Ambulance doctor.

Kevin is a consultant anaesthetist and professor of public engagement and innovation at University College London. He’s worked on the...

Chemical reactions are the backbone of modern society: the energy we use, the medicines we take, our housing materials, even the foods we eat, are created by reacting different substances together. If we zoom in, it’s the atoms within these substances that rearrange themselves to give rise to new substances with the properties we need.

However, chemical reactions are far from perfect. They're often inefficient and their waste prod...

Have you ever considered the lighter side of dark matter? Comedy has proved an unexpectedly succesful way to engage people with science - as today's guest knows first-hand.

Astrophysicist Catherine Heymans is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh and the current Astronomer Royal for Scotland. She’s spent her career studying dark matter and dark energy: the mysterious ingredients that make up an estimated 95% of our cosmos, but...