Pennie Latin meets the founder of Sci Sisters and the Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Polly Arnold Polly's work focus's around two fundamental forms of waste. She spends her time as chemist lurking around the bottom end of the Periodic Table with elements like uranium and plutonium. This waste she is interested in is nuclear waste and primarily how will it behave as it decays in the future. The other waste she focuses her attention to is what she...

How many of us spend our days surrounded by dead bodies? For Professor Tracey Wilkinson, the Principal Anatomist at the University of Dundee, it is part of her everyday. Tracey is current Cox Chair of Anatomy at the University which is celebrating the 130th Anniversary of the position in 2018. The Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification was the first in the UK to introduce the Thiel soft fix approach to embalming, leading to research which has resulted in new and improved surgical...

Body organs aren't all internal like the brain or the heart. There's one we wear on the outside. Skin is our largest organ, it covers over 2m2. This fleshy covering does a lot more than make us look presentable. In fact, without it, we'd literally evaporate. Skin acts as a waterproof, insulating shield, guarding the body against extremes of temperature, damaging sunlight, and harmful chemicals. It also exudes antibacterial substances that prevent infection and manufactures vitamin D for...

It's all very well being told that the best way to stave off ageing is to do, think, eat or behave in a certain way when you're young, but when you are young, you don't ever believe you're going to get old, so by the time you are getting old it's too late. You've frittered away you're entire youth partying, denying your body sleep and exercise and eating junk food so by the time you're 40, you look 50 and feel 60, aaaaaagh! But is it really too late? Is there something we could, should,...

Should we offer language classes on the NHS? Could bilingualism be more beneficial than medication when it comes to a strong, healthy brain and is monolingualism making us ill? In this Brainwaves, Pennie Latin meets the man behind those bold ideas. Dr Thomas Bak is Reader in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh and clinical research fellow at the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic. A plurilingualist and Gaelic learner, originally from Poland, now based in Scotland his work...

Brainwaves on ME. A story of confusion, misunderstanding, misdirection, misdiagnosis and misery.

What role will robots play in our lives in the future? We already interact with robots on a daily basis but with the development of intelligent, free-thinking robots our relationship with them will change. Sethu Vijayakumar, Professor of Robotics at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and judge on BBC2's Robot Wars, has spent his career in robotics pioneering the use of large scale machine learning techniques for use in healthcare, in our homes and in ground breaking...

Facing imminent extinction the Scottish Wildcat used to to be found widely across the country. Today the most optimistic population count suggests there are around 315 individual wildcats left and they are only in the north of Scotland. Experts have suggested we may have only 5 years to save the species. In response Scottish Wildcat Action is the first national conservation plan with a vision to restore viable population of Scottish wildcats into the Highlands. Their plan is a multifaceted...

Would you, could you or should you donate your body to science? That might be a hard enough question to answer but what about donating your children's tissue to research after their death. This is exactly the situation Sarah Gray and her husband found themselves in when one of their twins, Thomas, died. Thomas, was born with anencephaly and died 6 days after birth. Sarah and her husband donated Thomas's tissues for scientific research. With time Sarah's desire to know what Thomas's tissue...

An intricate yet delicate six sided crystal floats down to earth. It becomes powerful enough to carve our landscape. It is cold enough to kill us and if it becomes unstable it can move at hundreds of miles per hour. All this, yet that crystal is composed of one of life's absolute essentials, water. This Brainwaves is all about the surprising, quirky and fascinating science behind something we all experience in a Scottish winter - Snow and Ice. From the startling beauty of ice crystal...

Until recently, it was thought that our brains were fully developed by early childhood. Driven by the assumption that brain growth was pretty much complete by the time a child began school, scientists believed for years that the adolescent brain was essentially an adult one, only with fewer miles on it. But over the last two decades the scientific community has learned that the teenage years encompass vitally important stages of brain development and research has shown that the adolescent...

A farmer's daughter from Angus, soil has been in Professor Lorna Dawson's family for generations. She just didn't expect her relationship with soil to lead her into a scientific career of solving crime. Now Principal Soil Scientist at the James Hutton Institute she has for over 25 years' researched soil and plant interactions. It was when she was an Edinburgh geology student that her mind was drawn towards forensics. One evening 2 teenage girls went missing from near her student halls, they...

Underneath the waves of Scotland's seas there is a hive of communication going on. Clicks, shrieks, calls and whistles that can be heard for over 15kms. They are highly developed forms of communication, some evidence even shows local dialects among our two main native populations of Bottlenose dolphin in Scotland. What started as a career trying to work out the similarities between how animals and humans perceive the world around them led Professor Vincent Janik, Director of Scottish Oceans...

Fracking doesn't just open up rocks, it divides all kinds of communities across Scotland. In January 2015 the Scottish Government announced a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing taking place in Scotland, putting in place ban on fracking shale rock for oil and gas, while they further consider the implications of fracking. Lots of us have heard the back and forth about whether we should or should not entertain fracking as an answer to our energy requirements in Scotland but how much of that is...

We've been fascinated by it for thousands of years. It was the target of a 20th century technological arms race that would put the first humans in space and on extra-terrestrial soil, sparking exponential advances in spaceflight. Man got there, then left, and hasn't been back for 45 years. But now private investors, Kickstarter funds and international space agencies are clamouring to return. For something we see in the sky most nights it still holds an air of mystique. The Moon. As the...

When Richard Morris was a physics student he volunteered to be a subject in a psychology experiment. It triggered a fascination with the brain that led to him become one of the world's leading neuroscientists. His lifetime work has focused on memory and why, in his own words, it's such an interesting thing. Consider what life would be like if we didn't have memory. Who would we be, how would we know our place in the world? In 2016 for his work looking at how we form memory and specifically...

The sound of the world around us provides us with key indicators to the health of our planet. How those sounds change over time and in space can show how the well-being of earth is changing, both naturally and through man's impact. Soundscape ecology is the study of nature's sounds - from the lapping of the ocean's waves and the rustle of leaves, to the rutting roars of red deer and the whistling of whales and dolphins. But the sound of our world is changing, advances in recording...

Everyone will remember the first time they saw the Northern Lights dance across the night sky. For some it will have been a deeply moving moment, for others, time to capture a photograph. For cultures and communities going back 100's of years the aurora borealis have meant many different things, from the spirits of the dead being whisked away to the omens of the Gods. Whatever your belief, it is impossible to not look at this mythical dance of colours in the night sky as anything other than...

If we do nothing, up to 10 million people a year across the globe will die due to drug resistant bacterial infections by 2050. Antimicrobial Resistance isn't just a massive international problem, it is a problem that faces every single one of us here in Scotland. Bacteria found in Scotland's population are already resistant to the antibiotics of last resort and according to Health Protection Scotland we are facing a substantial Public Health Risk. So what's the answer? That's something...

Time for your phone upgrade? What did you do with the old one? Stick it in a drawer, hand it back to your phone company or just throw it away. Have you ever considered that your smartphone might be a treasure trove of precious metals, a rich vein of gold, silver and platinum? Welcome to the world of the Urban Miners. And it's not just smartphones; almost anything with a circuit board contains precious metal of some sort. If you add up all the electronic and electrical waste across...

Iain Stewart is Professor of Geoscience Communication at Plymouth University. What that really means is that he is a geologist that spends much of his time writing and talking about our planet - how it works, its volatile history and what all that means for those living on it. His work has involved not only looking back millions of years into our past, but trying to work out what we can learn about our future from the inter-relationships between people, places and the environment in our...

Waking in his hotel room Eric Sinclair was paralysed down his left side, his mouth dry and his tongue heavy. He called for help, but all he could do was make a small squeaking sound. He knew very little about stroke until that day, but he was one of the 15,000 people a year who suffer a stroke. Stroke is the third commonest cause of death in Scotland and the most common cause of severe physical disability among adults. Of 100 people going into hospital alive, over a quarter won't survive...

The selfie - just an exercise in self-obsessed narcissism or potential store for scientific research? A picture can tell far more than 1,000 words. A selfie can define you, it can locate you, it can help analyse air quality, they can track cultures and fashions and during the Rio Olympic Games a simple photograph between to Korean athletes crossed a political divide. The selfie is the artistic expression du jour and, love them or hate them, they're not going anywhere fast. But the selfie...

What are strong memories made of? Why do we remember what we remember and which memories last, quite literally, a lifetime while others just fade away? In this Brainwaves special Pennie Latin investigates how our brain makes and retrieves memories; explores how memory changes over time and why we seem to remember certain stages of our lives and particular events more sharply than others and considers the memories which remain most precious as we age. Part of the BBC Scotland Memories and...

They say that power is seductive and that giving it up can be incredibly hard to do. But that is what David Erdal did when he turned his family run business into an employee owned company. He says the consequences for him were embarrassing, emotional, hugely psychologically complex but overall satisfying. He went from being the boss to being just the same as everyone else in the company. In this episode of Brainwaves, Pennie Latin looks at the role of rank and hierarchy in our society. She...