Podcasts

Listen to Plus editor Rachel Thomas explain herd immunity on the Guardian Weekly Science podcast.

Will we one day have digital versions of our entire body to help us make medical and life style decisions and see what medical treatments are right for us? Find out in this podcast.

Explore the connections between mathematics and music at the La La Lab exhibition.

In this podcast we explore the famous curve, talk about how to communicate science in a crisis, and explain the maths of herd immunity in one minute.

At Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday symposium we talked to Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, some of Hawking's former students, and his graduate assistant.

What's a multiverse? What's the future for intelligent life? And what happened 380,000 after the Big Bang. At Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday conference we talked to physicists David Spergel and Raphael Bousso to find out more.

On the 100th anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan being elected fellow of the Royal Society Ken Ono tells us about his work.

Are the unchanging numbers that define our universe really unchanging?

Could it be that the Universe is a mathematical structure? Find out more with Max Tegmark.

Find out why scientists trying to build quantum computers might do worse than talk to birds.

If you have ever been in an MRI scanner you'll appreciate David Donoho's work, which has revolutionised this imaging technique.

The furore around the MMR vaccine and autism has shown that vaccination can be an emotive issue. We talk to an expert about the math used to make sure it's safe.

We revisit this year's Fields medals, which were awarded in Rio de Janeiro in August.

Time is a problem, not just for you and me, but also for philosophers. What exactly is time? Why does it have a direction? And was there a beginning of time? Find out more in this podcast.

How many times do we think of it a day? How many times we do it? And with how many people? Find out about the stats of sex with David Spiegelhalter.

We explore infinity, from shock waves to black holes, and from Aristotle's ideas to Cantor's never-ending tower of infinities.

Find out how maths gave the Olympic cycling venue in London its elegant form.

It looks like an egg, it wriggles, and it shouldn't really exist: introducing the Gömböc.

What do the human brain, the Internet and climate change have in common? They're all hugely complex and can only be understood with maths.

Does it? We talk to some big names in the field to find out.

The Universe is an infinitely self-perpetuating foam of bubbles.

Open door number 6 and step inside a mathematical space!

The Fourier transform is a piece of maths that is, almost single-handedly, responsible for the digital revolution. We asked Chris Budd what the Fourier
transform does, and how it does it. This podcast accompanies the Plus
article Saving lives: The mathematics of tomography.