Becky Ripley and Emily Knight examine the naked mole rat, a saber-toothed sausage of a rodent, which seems to defy the mammalian laws of aging. It lives way longer than what is expected of a rodent and is now the focus for much medical research as scientists try to understand more about their aging process in the name of human life extension. Of course, we all want to age slower and live longer, but does that mean we should continually strive to extend human life expectancy forever and...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight find out what ants teach us about surviving a pandemic. As social animals, we're particularly susceptible to disease, so perhaps there are lessons to be learned from other sociable species in how we manage this. Ants are one of the most social species on the planet, and it turns out they know a thing or two about self-isolation and social distancing. The story of how we protect each other (and ourselves) is a story that takes us from the complex maze of an...

Naturebang is back. Becky Ripley and Emily Knight are again trying to make sense of what we humans are all about, with a little help from the natural world. And this week, they’re getting lost. Navigating our world is a challenge faced by every creature that moves. From dung beetles mapping the desert dunes, to eels circumnavigating the globe, each finds its own way about with unerring accuracy. How do they do it? And how is that going to help Becky and Emily get out of the woods? The...

Ah, true love. Who can quantify that heady rush, the joy of another’s company, the unshakable bonds between one lover and another? Well, vole experts can. This tiny rodent is not just an anagram of love, it can also teach us a lot about why we fall. And why we sometimes stray. Prairie Voles form life-long monogamous bonds, together until death they do part. Almost identical Meadow Voles don’t, living the single life, and mating at will. It all comes down to brain chemistry. And it turns...

If you think you’re in control, think again. What invisible forces might be guiding your behaviour, your decisions, your most intimate emotions? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight take a trip into the bizarre nightmare world of the undergrowth, and watch ‘zombie ants’ stumble forward, blindly following the orders of the deadly fungi controlling their brains. Parasites often get the upper hand of their hosts, manipulating their behaviour in sometimes horrifying ways. But is that true of humans...

Strange things dwell out in the open ocean. Bobbing atop the waves, Becky Ripley and Emily Knight meet one such creature, the Portuguese Man O’War. With its bulbous air-sacs and trailing tentacles you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a jellyfish, but you’d be wrong. It’s a colony, a society of tiny individual animals, who work together to eat, hunt and reproduce as one. In the Age of the Individual, we humans like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient little nodes who don’t need nobody....

The humble sea sponge has been around for over 500 million years. We may think of them as ‘simple’ animals, with no brain, no nerves and no organs. But they have a pretty good party trick up their fleshy sleeves. Push a sponge through a mesh, until all that remains is a cloud of cells. Pour those cells into a tank, and watch as the cells reform themselves, like the terminator, back into a sponge. Becky Ripley and Emily Knight ask: is it the same sponge it was before? In the human world,...

Starling murmurations, those swirling, shifting sky-patterns made by hundreds of birds moving in synchrony, are one of nature’s greatest spectacles. How do they avoid crashing into each other? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight delve into the maths behind the movement with some computer modelling to help them chart the flight patterns, and discover the secret. As for us humans, sadly we don’t fly together through the sky in swirling clouds. But there are patterns to how we interact with one...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions. Science meets storytelling, with a philosophical twist.