An exclusive edition of the perennially popular BBC Radio 4 series for gardeners everywhere. Gardening can be both a challenge and a joy. Get it right, and it can provide boundless pleasure; get it wrong, and it is a source of infinite frustration. Help is at hand, however, in this specially recorded 'Gardeners' Question Time' compilation, in which...

Join Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss in this absorbing guide to the sounds of our most popular farmland birds, as heard on BBC Radio 4. In the fifth of our series of bird guides, Brett Westwood is joined once again by enthusiastic birdwatcher Stephen Moss, and with the help of recordings made by wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson they present th...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. Human beings have long been fascinated by the brain and how it fulfils its many functions. This groundbreaking cultural history explores the development of our ideas about t...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. In Episode 1, 'A Hole in the Head', the focus is on trepanation, the practice of drilling holes in the skull believing that such operations might correct physiological or sp...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. In Episode 2, 'The Blood of The Gladiators', the focus is Ancient Greek scholarship, with Hippocrates' astonishingly prescient belief in the brain as the chief organ of cont...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. In Episode 4, 'Spirits in the Material World', the focus is on Thomas Willis, the 17th century physician after whom the 'Circle of Willis' - the circuit of arteries supplyin...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. In Episode 5, 'The Spark of Being', the focus is on electricity and communication, within the brain and between the brain and the rest of the body. When John Walsh showed, i...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. Episode 7, 'Mind the Gap', focuses on how the microscope allowed neurologists to deatil the structure of brain cells. While Sigmund Freud, who started out as a neurologist,...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. Episode 7, 'Mind the Gap', focuses on how the microscope allowed neurologists to deatil the structure of brain cells. While Sigmund Freud, who started out as a neurologist,...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. Episode 8, 'The Agony and the Ecstasy', focuses on the collaborative work between Otto Loewi in Austria and Henry Dale in England. They established that communication within...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. Episode 9, 'All Or Nothing', focuses on the invention of the electroencephalograph, which made our brain waves visible. Invented by Hans Berger, one of its main proponents w...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. Episode 10, 'Einstein's Brain' focuses on how advances in neurology have influenced our understanding of human's as 'neurochemical selves'. Examining the recent trend to exp...

Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery, to the smartphones available today. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible and hears how the technology suc...

Stephen Fry meets the brains behind the mobile phone. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: In this first episode, Stephen Fry explores the creation of the mobile phone network. Richard Frenkiel, a Bell Labs engineer, who created the cellular networks on which all mobile phones depend, was himself never part...

Stephen Fry meets the brains behind the mobile phone. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible and hears how the technology succeeded, in ways that the geeks had not necessarily intended. In this second episode, he traces the evolution of the mobil...

Stephen Fry meets the brains behind the mobile phone. In this third episode, he looks at the discovery of text messaging. The engineers who designed the early texting facilities didn't imagine that anyone might want to reply. (Just in case, they added a short list of possible pre-set answers: yes, no and maybe). In the eighties, when network covera...

Stephen Fry meets the brains behind the mobile phone. In this third episode, he looks at the discovery of text messaging. The engineers who designed the early texting facilities didn't imagine that anyone might want to reply. (Just in case, they added a short list of possible pre-set answers: yes, no and maybe). In the eighties, when network covera...

Stephen Fry meets the brains behind the mobile phone. Today, 85% of the silicon chips inside all mobile phones are designed by one Cambridge-based company, ARM. Two computer engineers needed some micro-processors but didn't like what they saw and decided to make their own. Strapped for cash, they designed chips that were small, cheap and exceptiona...

With George Monbiot, Paul Allen and Peter Harper. Have you got what it takes to get to zero carbon? Our expert panel set one average family the task of eliminating their carbon footprint... and living with the consequences. Originally broadcast in March 2009. Starring Kate Ashfield, Don Gilet, Poppy Lee Friar, Ryan Watson, Malcolm Tierney, Jonathan...

Wolfgang Stoecker is on a mission to explore the cultural meanings of dust. Cologne-based artist Stoecker has collected samples of dust from historic buildings across Europe and beyond. With the help of scientists and an electron-microscope, he has analysed the dust and discovered it contains tiny fossils, particles from the Sahara, pollutants of v...

The geeks are coming. And our world needs them. Whether we want to improve education or cut crime, to enhance public health or to generate clean energy, we need the experimental methods of science - the best tool humanity has yet developed for working out what works. Yet from the way we're governed to the news we're fed by the media we're let down...