Imagine the scene; you visit your shed and notice the plastic clips you placed on the side bench have been collected up an put into an tub of peanuts for the birds. You empty the ice cream tub. Next morning everything has been placed back in the tub, alongside screws, nuts and bolts. Must be a ghost, right? This happened to Steve Mckears, a pensioner from Severn Beach, near Bristol. Wondering whether his shed was now home to a tidy ghost, he left a camera out to investigate the phenomenon. It turned out a house-proud mouse was coming out at night and putting the items back into the tub. In ou ..read more

Is a pandemic the best time to develop your zombie apocalypse plan? Put it this way, there is a lot we can learn from the current situation. After all, no-one mentioned that the apocalypse would involve epic missions to find toilet paper or washing your hands to the tune of Happy Birthday. So let’s get started. Looks like we’re a bit low on candles and gaffer tape… First step is to make sure you are prepared. Obviously we all have a zombie apocalypse draw, that’s a given, we just need to make sure it is up to date. No you do, honestly. Where do you keep your spare batteries? Candles and match ..read more

Ever noticed those fruit flies buzzing around your overly ripe bananas? Only a couple of millimetres long, these tiny flies are attracted to rotting, fermenting fruit for food and a place to lay their eggs. Small, rapidly reproducing with a short life span, this humble fly is a geneticist’s dream. One research project, investigating the human brain’s reward systems, found that male fruit fly who were rejected by females, drank four times as much alcohol as those who had sex. Never mind the love life of the fruit fly, why did the researchers use them to investigate the human brain? Why are fru ..read more

Next time you make tea listen carefully as you add hot water to the cup. Try pouring the same volume of cold water into the same type of cup. Can you hear a difference? We carried out this experiment during our Blue Planet II episode. Recent research suggests that 93% of adults can tell whether water is hot or cold just by listening to the pouring sounds and this ability develops over the first six years of life. So why can we hear the difference? Let’s take a look at the science. What sound does water make? You may be surprised to hear that water by itself produces very little sound. When a ..read more

The Small Screen Science Blog has been selected by Feedspot as one of the Top 100 Science blogs on the web! Covering topics as diverse as forensic entomology in 13th century China and using science to make a chocolate ganache, we hope to provide you with interesting reads which complement our podcast episodes. We’ve been busy planning Series 2 and are in the process of recording interviews for the 7 new episodes, one of which has been chosen by our patrons on Patreon. Our patrons have also been enjoying additional bonus podcast shorts, including: an interview with Allyson MacVean OBE where sh ..read more

As part of our podcast episode ‘Blood-Sucking Science’ we interviewed Dr Daniel Streicker, from the University of Glasgow, about vampire bats, how they hunt in the dark and feed on their prey. How do vampire bats hunt in the dark? They have a variety of different sensors that they use to find prey, and these sensors work at different scales. For figuring out where they are, where they fly out in the beginning of the night, to where they find their prey, I think they must rely on memory, maybe a little bit of smell, just to know where to start looking. Once they get into the vicinity of the an ..read more

We have decided not to release an episode today. Like many, we’ve been trying to learn more about black history and our own white privilege. We would like to use this space to recommend and share some of the podcasts that we have spent time listening to this week. Some have helped improve our history knowledge and education, some are interviews or interesting and insightful conversations, and others are great content produced by black voices, which we would like to help amplify. Have You Heard George’s Podcast Louis Theroux Grounded (episode 4 with Lenny Henry). About Race with Reni Eddo ..read more

We have all watched TV forensic pathologists pause whilst photographing the body, grab a pair of tweezers and bag a piece of trace evidence from under the fingernails or inside a wound. In the storyline, this fibre or sliver of glass proves to be crucial damning evidence against the killer. So how important is trace evidence and is it true every contact leaves a trace? Locard’s Exchange Principle is named after Edmond Locard, known as the ‘Sherlock Holmes of France’ he was one of the founding fathers of forensic science. Locard opened the world’s first police scientific laboratory in 1910 in ..read more

You might be surprised to learn that the charity Parkinson’s UK recommend dance classes to anyone diagnosed with Parkinson’s’ - a neurodegenerative disease that causes sufferers to struggle with movement and worsening control of motor functions. Sufferers often develop tremors and shakes, and increasingly slowed movement and muscle stiffness as the condition progresses. It might not sound like a natural stepping stone for signing up to dance classes, but exercise has been shown to help slow the progression of the condition’s symptoms. So, whether individuals have just received a diagnosis or a ..read more

Karen Collins Avid readers of crime fiction will be familiar with the ‘little grey cells’ of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes’ examination of trace evidence, both of which lead to the conviction of many fictional criminals. Less well known, if at all, is Song Ci, whose casebook ‘Washing Away of Wrongs’ provided coroners with a step-by-step guide to autopsy and forensic investigation. Why is his work so significant? Nomenclature of human bones in Sòng Cí: Xǐ-yuān lù jí-zhèng, edited by Ruǎn Qíxīn (1843) Unlike Holmes and Poirot, Song Ci was a real person, a Chinese judge who lived over 700 y ..read more