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Daily
Every morning
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Tuesday recap
Professor Sophie Scott opened the 2017 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by framing sound as the ‘language of life,’ explaining why humanity chose laughter for the Voyager Golden Record and setting out to explore how vocalizations evolved from insects to mammals. She demonstrated that laughter is a basic social signal, showing participant Doug Collins’ contagious laugh and a tickled rat named Mould that emits high‑pitched chirps. The lecture traced the earliest airborne sounds to crickets, whose wing‑stridulation produces regular mating calls, and then moved to the human ear, illustrating how vibrations travel from the pinna to hair cells in the cochlea. Hands‑on experiments reinforced the concepts: a volunteer played a guiro to mimic cricket stridulation, a 150‑year‑old tuning fork revealed vibration physics, and Schlieren photography visualized sound waves from a clap. An interview with an elephant keeper highlighted how elephants communicate over kilometers using infrasound detected through both ears and footpads. By linking evolutionary biology with physics, Scott underscored sound’s efficiency for rapid, long‑distance signaling—insights that inform bio‑inspired communication systems, improve animal‑welfare monitoring, and deepen our understanding of neural processing of auditory information.
Becky Shipley’s Discourse lecture frames the emerging health‑data revolution as a catalyst for transforming how societies prevent, monitor, diagnose, and treat disease. She argues that unprecedented measurement capabilities—driven by AI, machine learning, quantum computing, genomics and wearable sensors—must be paired...
The video explains that a single dose of antidepressants does not instantly lift mood, but it does alter cognition and how the brain interprets everyday stimuli. Camilla Nord notes that even a single or few doses can change perception of faces...
In this episode of the Ri Science Podcast, renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth joins the host to dissect the enduring mystery of consciousness and ask whether a truly conscious artificial intelligence could ever arise. Drawing on Thomas Nagel’s classic “what it is like...
The video outlines how astronomers prioritize exoplanets for life‑search missions, emphasizing the blend of theoretical habitability criteria and practical observational limits. With over 6,000 known worlds, only about ten lie close enough and within the right temperature range for current...
The video features Dame Sally Davies warning that antimicrobial resistance threatens to undo the advances of modern medicine, from organ transplants to chemotherapy. She frames the issue as a potential return to a pre‑antibiotic era where only fresh air, sunlight...
The video examines how a distinctive foot structure in theropod dinosaurs, especially the Tyrannosaurus rex, enabled efficient locomotion. By focusing on the reduction of the central metatarsal, the presenter explains how this anatomical tweak transformed the foot into a single,...
The short video explains quantum tunneling, a counter‑intuitive quantum‑mechanical effect that allows particles to pass through energy barriers, and highlights its role in powering the Sun. Using a ball‑and‑hill analogy, the narrator shows that unlike a classical ball, an electron or...
In the final installment of the 2015 Christmas Lectures, Dr. Kevin Fong turned his focus to the "next frontier"—human‑led exploration beyond low‑Earth orbit. Drawing on his experience protecting astronauts for NASA and the recent activities of Tim Peake aboard the International...
