Author: BBC World Service

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CrowdScience - How does a single cell become me?

Our bodies are made of cells, tens of trillions of cells. They all have particular roles and functions in the body, from digesting food, to producing hair, to hunting down pathogens. But all of this incredible complexity started as just a single cell.

Gila, from Israel, asked CrowdScience to find out how the development of incredible structures, and systems in the body are coordinated by the cells. Are cells communicating? How do cells know what they should be doing?

To find out, Geoff Marsh meets a Cambridge researcher uncovering the first cell division in our lives, and peers into a fertile chicken egg to see the developing embryo as it grows a limb. CrowdScience finds out why scientists like Dr Megan Davey use chickens to understand the development of human fingers and investigates how individual cells with the same DNA manage to choreograph a dance of cell replication, movement and communication to create our bodies in all of their complexity.

Presenter: Geoff Marsh Producer: Rory Galloway

(Photo: Cells grouped together. Credit: Getty Images)

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World Book Club - Donna Leon – Death at La Fenice

This month World Book Club talks to award-winning American writer Donna Leon about her celebrated novel Death at La Fenice. When legendary German conductor Helmut Wellauer is found dead in his dressing room two acts into a performance of La Traviata at Venice’s spectacular opera house, police commissario Guido Brunetti is called in. Despite being used to the corruptions of the city, as labyrinthine as the gorgeously crumbling city itself, Brunetti is shocked at the number of enemies Wellauer has made on his way to the top - but just how many have motive enough for murder? Find out more by tuning in to hear Donna Leon talking to her readers in the studio and around the world about murder and mystery in Venice.

(Image: Donna Leon. Photo credit: Regine Mosimann/Diogenes Verlag/AG Zürich.)

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Brick

'I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,' Caesar Augustus apparently boasted. If so, he wasn’t the only person to dismiss the humble brick. They’ve housed us for tens of thousands of years. They are all rather similar – small enough to fit into a human hand, and half as wide as they are long – and they are absolutely everywhere. Why, asks Tim Harford, are bricks still such an important building technology, how has brickmaking changed over the years, and will we ever see a robot bricklayer?
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CrowdScience - Did cooking make us human?

Many of us enjoy cooking – but when did we switch from eating our food raw, to heating it? Listener Logan enjoys his beef burgers rare, but wants to know why he still feels compelled to grill them? Presenter Anand Jagatia travels to a remote South African cave where our ancestors first used fire at least a million years ago, which one man says could help prove when our species started cooking.

And he talks to a scientist who shows how the composition of food changes when it’s cooked, to allow us more access to give us more access to calories - and hears how a completely raw food diet could have disastrous consequences for health.

Producer: Marijke Peters Presenter Anand Jagatia

(Image: A large pan held over an open fire. Credit: Getty Images)

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Mail order catalogue

Some say the Montgomery Ward shopping catalogue is one of the most influential books in US history. It transformed the middle-class way of life in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Ward struggled to get people to understand mail order shopping. His prices were so low, people thought there was a catch. Soon, though, this type of retail would improve roads and the postal service. Tim Harford describes how similar dynamics are changing today’s middle-classes in China, with the internet replacing the postal service and e-commerce the new mail order.
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30 Animals That Made Us Smarter - Tardigrade and vaccine transport

A bizarre looking creature that may help us make vaccines last longer to move them across the globe. It is less than a millimetre long but the tardigrade is tough - really tough! Its extraordinary survival abilities may hold the key to helping us extend the shelf life of both blood and vaccines. This could extend the distances they can be transported, saving more lives. With Patrick Aryee. www.bbcworldservice.com/30animals #30animals
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CrowdScience - Could viruses help fight super-bugs?

We are slowly running out of ammunition to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria. Listener Peter wants to know whether a therapy that he’d heard about in the 1980s could be revived to help us where antibiotics falls short.

CrowdScience travels to Georgia where “phages”, viruses that hunt and kill bacteria, have been used for nearly 100 years to treat illnesses ranging from a sore throat to cholera. Phages are fussy eaters – a specific phage will happily chew on one bug but ignore another. In Georgia, scientists have kept rare phages safe for decades and are constantly on the look-out for new ones.

CrowdScience presenter Marnie Chesterton speaks to the scientists and doctors who are pioneering phage-therapy as well as overseas patients who have travelled thousands of miles in hope of finding a cure.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Louisa Field

(Photo: Bacteriophage infecting bacterium. Credit: Getty Images)

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Bicycle

The bicycle was to prove transformative. Cheaper than a horse, it freed women and young working class people to roam free. And the bike was the testing ground for countless improvements in manufacturing that would later lead to Henry Ford’s production lines. Tim Harford considers whether the bicycle has had its day, or whether it’s a technology whose best years lie ahead.