Forum des auditeurs passionnés et critiques de France Culture

Katherine Joy studies moon rock. She has studied lunar samples that were brought to earth by the Apollo missions (382kg in total) and hunted for lunar meteorites in Antarctica, camping on ice for weeks on end and travelling around on a skidoo. Working at the forefront of the second wave of lunar exploration, she studied remote sensing data from Europe’s first mission to the moon, Smart 1 which launched in 2003 and data from many subsequent missions. She tells Jim Al-Khalili why she believes the moon is the most exciting destination in our solar system and explains what it can tell us about the long history of planet earth. (...)

4 Extra Debut. Laurie Taylor uncovers the story of Telefon Hirmondo, the world’s first broadcasting organisation in 1890s Budapest. From 2013. (...)
How did Hungary come to lead the world in broadcasting, rather than the USA, Britain or France? The genius of Theodore Puskas is a large part of the explanation. Among the contributors, we hear from his descendant, Barbara Fally-Puskas.

Emma Campbell visits a farm in Worcestershire, as its owner prepares to take his latest crop to market - mistletoe. She finds out about the customs surrounding this festive plant. Mistletoe is now one of the symbols of Christmas. It grows only in certain geographical locations of the UK, and is often found in apple orchards.
In this programme, Emma Campbell visits a farm in Worcestershire where the farmer is cutting mistletoe from his cider apple trees, ready to take to auction. She also speaks to a historian and botanist who explains how mistletoe came to have the festive cultural connections we associate with it today, and visits one of the country's last surviving mistletoe auctions.

Think sprite or hobgoblin and you are nearly there when it comes to the Aye-Aye, surely one of the weirdest looking creatures on earth? With its large saucer-like eyes, massive ears, and long skeletal middle finger which its uses to tap for grubs on logs, this lemur both fascinates and terrifies us. Endemic to the forests of Madagascar, some local people believe that if one looks at you, someone in your village will die. They even hang up an aye-aye on the edge of the village in some areas to ward off evil spirits. We are responsible for the demise of the aye-aye in other ways; by destroying the forests on which it depends. But as we hear, get up close to an aye-aye and you’ll meet one of the most alluring and watchable mammals on the planet. Not merely a creature in close harmony with its disappearing world, but as Brett Westwood and Verity Sharp discover an ambassador for conservation which still has us in its thrall.

Patricia Wiltshire grew up in a mining village in South Wales, left home when she was 17 and worked for many years, first as a medical technician and then as a business secretary (a profession her first husband considered to be more ladylike). When she was studying botany A level at evening classes, her teacher encouraged her to apply for university as a mature student. (She would never have considered it otherwise). And so began her career as a palynologist (studying pollen).
She worked for many years reconstructing ancient environments on archaeological sites. But a phone call from a police detective led to a dramatic change of direction, when she was in her fifties. Since then, Pat has been involved in some of the most high-profile murder cases in Britain, including the murder of two ten year old girls in Soham in Cambridgeshire in 2002.
She tells Jim Al-Khalili how she pioneered the use of pollen as evidence in criminal cases. Studying spores taken from suspects and victims, she can establish who’s been where and when. Her life, she says, has been 'a mess' but, on many occasions, the pollen she has gathered and analysed has helped to see that justice has been done.

In this first episode, with the help of psychologist Drew Westen (author of The Political Brain) and Ed Woodcock (Director of Narrative at creative agency Aesop), John deconstructs the stories deeply woven into the two most successful slogans of recent times - Take Back Control and Make America Great Again. He asks neuroscientist Tali Sharot about how our brains are pre-disposed to respond to story, and talks about nostalgia, master narratives and narrative ecologies with Yiannis Gabriel who studies organisational storytelling. John also visits the Brian Haw collection at the Museum of London to see how counter-narratives can become mainstream, and hears from podcaster Chrystal Genesis about the need to allow different voices the opportunity to challenge the prevailing stories of our times.

In this episode, John reflects on how our understanding of ourselves - and the idea of the self - is shaped by story. He hears from people who are compelled to convey persuasive stories of their lives, for example at the Job Centre, as well as researcher Lynne Friedli who challenges the heroic qualities required by such accounts. John also talks to a therapist who works with narrative Suzanne Elliot, behavioural psychologist Nick Chater who believes we are all brilliant re-inventers of ourselves from one minute to the next, and philosopher Galen Strawson who challenges whether we actually do - or even should - think of ourselves in terms of narrative.

In this episode, we hear from Yarden Katz of Harvard Medical School, theologian Robert Beckford, neuroscientist Tali Sharot, medical humanities researcher Angela Woods, the writer Bernardine Evaristo and psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz.

Susie was dinosaur-mad as a child. But unlike most children, she never grew out of her obsession. She tells Jim about an exciting new stegosaur find in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and describes the time she spent dinosaur hunting (with a toddler in tow) in the Morrison Formation in the American Mid-West: a place where there are thought to be enough dinosaur remains to keep a thousand paleontologists happy for a thousand years.
She is at her happiest out in the field, with a hammer and a notebook, studying rocks and looking for dinosaur remains. We tend to lump dinosaurs together as though they all roamed the earth at the same time which is silly - given that they had the run of the place for nearly two hundred million years. Susie wants to sort out exactly which dinosaurs lived when. Although she warns, the fossil record is woefully incomplete. We will probably only ever know about 1% of what there is to know about all the dinosaurs that ever lived.

A Professor of Marine Biology who was not particularly academic at school, Richard Thompson went to university after running his own business selling greetings cards for seven years.

When the rest of the world was waking up to the harm caused to marine life by larger plastic items, such as plastic bags, he searched for tiny fragments of plastic, some no bigger than a human hair; and found them in oceans and on beaches all over the world. He has spent decades studying the harm these micro-plastics might cause to marine life and is concerned. His work on plastics in cosmetics led to a UK ban on micro-beads in shower gels and exfoliating scrubs. And he advised government to ban single use plastic bags from supermarkets. Rather than demonize plastic, however, he believes we need to learn to love it more. Often plastic it is the best material for the job. Now we need to make sure that all plastic products are designed so that they can be easily recycled at the end of their useful life.

Megan Phelps-Roper reads from her unflinching memoir about what it was like to be raised in Topeka, Kansas in the Westboro Baptist Church – the religious sect aggressive in its homophobia and antisemitism, and notorious for picketing the funerals of American soldiers and rejoicing in the world’s worst disasters. From the age of five Megan was protesting daily, believing that she was doing God's work. Aged 26, Megan came to a realisation. Westboro’s teachings were a monstrous lie and she knew that she must leave, and turn her back on her family, her church — her entire world - and start over.

Ebola, Zika, Sars, Mers - rarely a week goes by without a deadly virus stealing the headlines.

For Jonathan Ball, getting to know a virus at its most basic level is crucial to mounting a defence. As the son of a coal miner, who grew up in a mining village in the 1970s, a future in academic research studying deadly viruses wasn’t really on the agenda.

Yet his work has led him to the forefront of scientific research to find the antibodies that can protect us from some of the nastiest diseases known to humankind.

As Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, he’s interested in how a virus evolves and mutates, as it moves from person to person, so that he can pinpoint chinks in its armour to find a way to disable it.

However, there are occupational hazards to his chosen field of work. Just when his own research was starting to show promise, another team pipped him to the post!

Yet, ever the optimist, he believes this just adds to the excitement.
Producer: Beth Eastwood