Speechification

Deep beneath the earth, in mines and under mountains, are James Bond-esque lairs filled with scientists... Sue Nelson explores the world of dark matter researchers, a great piece on the geography of scientific investigation and the excitement and politics of small teams competing for a common goal. Don't miss the links from the programme page either. [MP3]

This is factual radio that'll make you giggle out loud with pleasure. So assured, so clever, so wise. And Jad Abenrad and Robert Krulwich do this practically every week (MP3).

And you might want to give some money to WNYC to help pay for the production of this stuff - since they don't have an inflation-protected licence fee to depend on.

Robert Krulwich is the older, funnier one from WNYC's Radio Lab, a show we've featured here quite often. He's also NPR's science specialist and makes terrific science inserts for shows like Weekend Edition and Morning Edition. We don't make science programmes like this in Britain. It's clever and funny and formally bold: Krulwich builds a short piece about neuroscience and the integrity of the self around Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway: a nicely arranged collision of science and art. The MP3 is here, there's a programme archive here and a podcast here.

Radio National recently dusted off a few archive programmes to mark the work of producer Tony Barrell. I'll post a few of the shows here, for sure. This one's a beauty - on the life and work of photographer Edward Muybridge, and thus the nature of time. Some charming moments, not least a few shards of Philip Glass cross-fading into the sound of a train. But also some mind-boggling insights into time itself, from scientists and skateboarders. An absolutely lovely piece of work.

Radio Eye: The Space Between Time [mp3]

Here's a particularly egregious example of the wastefulness of the BBC's programme archiving policy. Heather Couper's marvelous Cosmic Quest is a thirty-part series about the history of astronomy that's been going out over the last six weeks on Radio 4: a top dollar resource for enthusiasts, educators and the generally curious. The first twenty-five episodes of the series have been thrown away already and you're going to have to get your skates on if you want to hear the last five because they too will have been overwritten by the end of this week.

I know this is more a sin of omission than of commission—that's just the way the automated archiving set-up works. I also know that there'll be some rights issues here (I imagine Couper herself has plans for further exploitation of the series and BBC Wordwide probably has an option to repackage the shows) but I believe that it's essentially a kind of public service vandalism to commission such powerful stuff and not to create a permanent home for it online where licence fee-payers, schools, parents and the rest can get at it.

The optimal location for a content asset like this, created using public funds for use by the British public, is in a public place like the BBC's web site. Any other use of this asset will, inevitably, under-utilise it (even if thousands can be persuaded to buy it on CD or in book form) and the BBC's purpose here ought to be to make the best possible use of it by sharing it as widely as possible.

So, enough with the whinging. Here's the final episode, about the search for extraterrestrial life. You can listen to an omnibus edition of the last week's shows here for the time being and, I notice, the whole series seems to be knocking around the torrentsphere in chunks of various sizes if you're that way inclined.

Scientific American's Science Talk is one of my favourite podcasts. I like friendly and knowledgeable presenter Steve Mirsky. Here's an episode from a couple of weeks ago in which Mirsky and some journalists from IEEE Spectrum rubbish the geek dream of 'the singularity', which is something I approve of. The Science Talk podcast is here and the other Scientific American podcasts are here. The MP3 is here.

A particularly good Moral Maze from a stage at The Cheltenham Science Festival (which sounds like a riot). Rancorous and funny by turns. And Melanie Phillips is always a laugh isn't she? Had me shouting and grumbling at the radio throughout (MP3).

Here's another lovely series of Radio 3's The Essay. In this one we learn from four archaeologists that the discipline extends further than you may have expected. To the surface of the moon (or at least the parts of it affected by human visitors), for instance. Also to Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland where Republican hunger strikers died, a wood by a B-road near Sheffield where 19th and 20th Century graffiti artists carved their names on the trees and the fields in Essex where some radio masts once stood. Really fascinating, surprising stuff. Here's episode one (MP3), which is the one about the moon. You can hear the other three here for the next few days (the fourth episode's Real stream jumps and skips a bit, beware).

Journey Into Space was the original BBC sci-fi series, a hit on the radio in the fifties, running eventually to over 60 shows. It's also been a late night stalwart for BBC 7, always there for the lonely insomniac, making for dreams populated by theremin and booster rockets. The Saturday play last week was a specially written new episode, taking the story 30 years forward, into 2013. David Jacobs is splendid as Jet Morgan, he somehow has exactly the right voice for someone who's been entirely alone in a spaceship for thirty years and is perfectly fine with it. MP3 here.

I'm a little late with this, but things pertaining to Sir Arthur C. Clarke tend to have a timeless quality. Just after his recent death, ABC Radio National's Late Night Live show re-broadcast an interview with Clarke from 2001. It's a gentle listen, as host Philip Adams carefully and respectfully coaxes memories out of Clarke - on such matters as working with Stanley Kubrick, science and religion, marriage, writing, pondering death and satellites, and so on. We also discover that 2001 is one of the Pope's favourite movies. All of this quietly and humbly revealed in Clarke's warm Somerset burr, still detectable over a crackly line from Sri Lanka to Sydney.

Late Night Live: Arthur C. Clarke [mp3]