The Life Scientific BBC Radio 4
Documentary on One RTÉ Radio 1
If science has always been a turn-off – a return to the gassy chemistry lab of long ago - just press the pause button on that old 1970 physics class – because the Life Scientific is a true treasure trove.
This week the question was how a giant cuckoo chick makes its tiny reed warbler parent feed it enough.
Prof Nick Davies and colleagues carried out a series of crafty experiments in the Cambridgeshire fens to find out.
The baby cuckoo grows to be seven times the size of its tiny duped parents. But how does it get the reed warblers to provide enough food to feed it up?
The answer is to do with the ferocity of its begging cries. The reed warblers listen to the chicks and the cuckoo chick has, said Prof Nick Davies,“the most fantastic begging call”.
One cuckoo makes the cries of a whole brood of reed warblers.
A little loudspeaker attached to a nest broadcasting the cuckoo call caused the reed warbler parents to immediately up their game... the vocal stimulus of lots of hungry chicks sped up on the fast food delivery service.
The human cost of studying volcanoes, the point of mathematics and that huge question – do we have free will – all come under the microscope.
The gift of the series is the gift of all good journalism, making the complicated simple and clear – it makes this radio science programme a turn-on as opposed to a turn-off, even for those of us who never ever quite made friends with the periodic table.
RTÉ’s Documentary on One series features some real jewels.
A recent radio doc tells the story of Margaret Kearney Taylor who ran an elegant tearoom in Madrid for 50 years. But behind the faint chink of the china cups what nobody knew was that she helped in the rescue of Allied servicemen and Jewish refugees during the Nazi terror of World War II.
