Royal Institution Christmas Lectures - Episode Guide

Dr. Mark Miodownik explains how scientists have pieced together some of the physical rules that govern the strength, lifespan and dance moves of animals.

Size Matters: Why Chocolate Melts And Jet Engines Don't

Episode: 2010-12-29 | Airdate: Dec 29, 2010

Mark Miodownik zooms into the microscopic world beneath our fingertips and reveals how this world can make objects behave like magic.

Size Matters: Why Mountains Are So Small

Episode: 2010-12-30 | Airdate: Dec 30, 2010

Mark Miodownik investigates the world of the very big and very tall. He reveals that, at this scale, everything is governed by a battle with gravity.

Season 2011

Meet Your Brain: What's in Your Head?

Episode: 2011-12-27 | Airdate: Dec 27, 2011

Why does the brain look like a giant walnut, how does it fit in enough wiring to stretch four times around the equator, and why could a magnet on the head stop someone mid-sentence? In the first of this year's Christmas Lectures, Professor Bruce Hood gets inside the human head to explore how the brain works. He measures the brain's nerve cells in action, reads someone's mind from 100 miles away, and reveals how the brain ultimately creates its own version of reality.

Meet Your Brain: Who's in Charge Here?

Episode: 2011-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2011

The brain is constantly being bombarded with information, so how does it decide what to trust and what to ignore, without the person even being aware of it? Professor Bruce Hood gives the second of this year's Christmas Lectures - testing the limits of the memory, finding out how humans learn, how the brain takes shortcuts and why multitasking can be dangerous. Bruce makes people say the wrong thing and fail to see what is right in front of them. Can one really believe one's eyes? Possibly not.

Meet Your Brain: Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking?

Episode: 2011-12-29 | Airdate: Dec 29, 2011

Have you ever seen a face in a piece of burnt toast, or given your car a name? Why do you feel pain when someone else is hurt? Why are people so obsessed with other people? In the last of this year's Christmas Lectures, Professor Bruce Hood investigates how our brains are built to read other people's minds. With a little help from a baby, a robot and a magician, Bruce uncovers what makes us truly human.

Season 2012

The Modern Alchemist: Air: The Elixir of Life

Episode: 2012-12-26 | Airdate: Dec 26, 2012

Peter Wothers explores what alchemists knew about air and reveals how our knowledge can be used to control fire, defy gravity and harness lightning's power.

The Modern Alchemist: Water: The Fountain of Youth

Episode: 2012-12-27 | Airdate: Dec 27, 2012

Peter Wothers finds out if the elements lurking in the water can restore his youth and discovers how exploding balloons could solve the energy crisis.

The Modern Alchemist: The Philosopher's Stone

Episode: 2012-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2012

Dr. Peter Wothers explores the elements within the earth and discovers just difficult it is for chemists to extract the planet's greatest treasures.

Season 2013

Life Fantastic: Where Do I Come From?

Episode: 2013-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2013

Alison Woollard reveals how the transformation from a single cell into a walking, talking, multi-trillion-celled organism we call the human body takes place.

Life Fantastic: Am I a Mutant?

Episode: 2013-12-29 | Airdate: Dec 29, 2013

Dr. Alison Woollard unravels the mystery of why evolution by natural selection has given such stunning diversity on our planet - the answer being by genetic mutation.

Life Fantastic: Could I Live Forever?

Episode: 2013-12-30 | Airdate: Dec 30, 2013

Dr. Alison Woollard looks at why we die and how 'cell death' enables the development and survival of most multi-celled organisms from hedgehogs to humans.

Season 2014

Sparks Will Fly: The Light Bulb Moment

Episode: 2014-12-29 | Airdate: Dec 29, 2014

Danielle George looks at the light bulb to show how to hack, adapt and transform technologies found in the home to have fun and make a difference to the world.

Sparks Will Fly: Making Contact

Episode: 2014-12-30 | Airdate: Dec 30, 2014

Danielle George looks at the telephone to show how to hack, adapt and transform technologies found in the home to have fun and make a difference to the world.

Sparks Will Fly: A New Revolution

Episode: 2014-12-31 | Airdate: Dec 31, 2014

Danielle George looks at the simple motor to show how to hack, adapt and transform technologies found in the home to have fun and make a difference to the world.

Season 2015

How to Survive in Space: Lift Off!

Episode: 2015-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2015

In the first lecture, Kevin Fong explores and probes what it takes to lift off into space. What keeps astronauts safe and on track as they are propelled into orbit?

How to Survive in Space: Life in Orbit

Episode: 2015-12-29 | Airdate: Dec 29, 2015

In the second lecture, Kevin Fong explores life in orbit on board the International Space Station. Tim Peake sends reports about living and working in space.

How to Survive in Space: The Next Frontier

Episode: 2015-12-30 | Airdate: Dec 30, 2015

In the final lecture, Kevin Fong investigates how the next generation of astronauts will be propelled across the vast chasm of space to Mars and beyond.

Season 2016

Supercharged - Fuelling the Future: Let There Be Light!

Episode: 2016-12-26 | Airdate: Dec 26, 2016

Celebrating 80 years since the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were first televised, chemist Professor Saiful Islam explores one of humankind's biggest challenges - how to generate and store energy, with guest appearances from Christmas Lecturers past. In his first lecture, Saiful investigates how to generate energy without destroying the planet in the process. Saiful begins his lecture by being plunged into darkness. Armed initially with nothing but a single candle, his challenge is to go back to first principles and bring back the power in the energy-hungry lecture theatre. Along the way he explains what energy is, how we can transform it from one form to another, and how we harness it to power the modern world. A fascinating and stimulating celebration of the stuff that quite literally makes the universe tick - the weird and wonderful world of energy.

Supercharged - Fuelling the Future: People Power

Episode: 2016-12-27 | Airdate: Dec 27, 2016

Celebrating 80 years since the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were first televised, chemist Professor Saiful Islam explores one of humankind's biggest challenges - how to generate and store energy, with guest appearances from Christmas Lecturers past. In his second lecture, Saiful investigates how humans as living pulsing machines actually use energy, asking whether it's possible to 'supercharge' the human body and increase its performance. Live experiments explore everything from the explosive potential of everyday foods, to what we put into our bodies (and what comes out!), as well as how we measure up to the machines we use every day. Saiful even experiments on himself, showing images captured inside his own stomach. Every single one of us is an incredibly sophisticated energy conversion machine, finely tuned over millions of years of evolution. So will we ever be able to improve the human body's performance? Can we ever do more with less energy?

Supercharged - Fuelling the Future: Fully Charged

Episode: 2016-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2016

Season 2017

The Language of Life: Say It With Sound

Episode: 2017-12-26 | Airdate: Dec 26, 2017

From musical mosquitoes to rumbling elephants, Say It with Sound explores how humans and other animals use noises to communicate.

Sophie Scott, a professor of neuroscience at University College London, is joined in the theatre by a chorus of chirping crickets, hissing cockroaches and groaning deer to reveal the very different ways that animals have adapted their bodies to send audible messages that are vital to their species. She also explores how and why the human voice evolved to become the most versatile sound producer in the natural world. In a dramatic experiment Professor Scott reveals how our vocal cords can open and close more than a thousand times a second and how we can use our throats for breathing, eating and communicating.

Professor Scott demonstrates what sound actually is and how it travels, not just through air, but water and solid materials. Unpacking the power behind sound, she uses it to shatter glass and reveal how the human body can resonate in a way that amplifies our voices to send our messages further. She also explores how different species use very different frequencies to communicate and why humans can only hear a fraction of these animal messages.

Professor Scott investigates why our voices all sound very different, to the degree that we all have unique vocal prints. She also looks at how computers are learning to recognise these. She further shows how we have developed the biological functions that enable us to create such incredible noises - from the arias of an opera singer to the complex sounds of a beatboxer.

The Language of Life: Silent Messages

Episode: 2017-12-27 | Airdate: Dec 27, 2017

In this second lecture, Professor Sophie Scott explores the world of silent communication in the animal kingdom and the human world - showing how much we can actually say without ever opening our mouths or making a noise.

The Language of Life: The Word

Episode: 2017-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2017

One skill in particular seems to give humans an advantage over all other animals - our superior talent for language. We have the power to express exactly what's on our minds through speech and writing. This final lecture asks where our incredible linguistic ability comes from and whether any other animals use language in any form at all.

Season 2018

Who Am I?: Where Do I Come From?

Episode: 2018-12-26 | Airdate: Dec 26, 2018

In lecture one we explore our animal family, meeting our distant cousins – from fish to fruit flies – unearthing clues to our evolutionary past and revealing surprising similarities as we discover our true place in the tree of life

Who Am I?: What Makes Me Human?

Episode: 2018-12-27 | Airdate: Dec 27, 2018

Lecture two covers the story of our recent evolution from early two-legged hominins to modern humans – revealing how a humble African ape became a successful global species. Alice and Aoife uncover the story of our journey out of Africa as we spread across the globe, and ask what sets us apart from the other, now extinct, hominin species.

Who Am I?: What Makes Me, Me?

Episode: 2018-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2018

Lecture three, we see how the interplay between genetic variation and the environment makes us all different – even identical twins. We'll interrogate emerging genetic technologies – from fixing gene errors to personalised medicine – and ask how far we should go with genetic testing.

Season 2019

How to Get Lucky

Episode: 2019-12-26 | Airdate: Dec 26, 2019

Dr Hannah Fry, through a host of live experiments, uncovers the secrets of luck to discover what really controls our destiny, from dodging erupting volcanoes to pulling Christmas crackers.

How to Bend the Rules

Episode: 2019-12-27 | Airdate: Dec 27, 2019

Dr Hannah Fry reveals how data-gobbling algorithms have taken over our lives and now control almost everything we do, without us even realising.

How Can We All Win?

Episode: 2019-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2019

Dr Hannah Fry tests the limits of our control, from gravity-defying stunts to human-sized drones, and delves into the world of fake news to separate the truth from the lies.

Season 2020

Engine Earth

Episode: 2020-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2020

Professor Chris Jackson reveals how, for billions of years, volcanic activity drove climate change on planet Earth. Now, it is humans.

Water World

Episode: 2020-12-29 | Airdate: Dec 29, 2020

Dr Helen Czerski explains why the ocean is so vital to life on earth and what we need to know to be good citizens of our ocean planet.

Up in the Air

Episode: 2020-12-30 | Airdate: Dec 30, 2020

Dr Tara Shine takes a deep breath and explores the gases that make up the air we breath. One of them might provide the answer for heating and transport in the future.

Season 2021

The Invisible Enemy

Episode: 2021-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2021

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam is joined by leading experts to explore viruses, the immune system and modern testing technology.

The Perfect Storm

Episode: 2021-12-29 | Airdate: Dec 29, 2021

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam is joined by leading experts to reveal the secrets of contagion and the mathematics of disease.

Winning the War

Episode: 2021-12-30 | Airdate: Dec 30, 2021

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam is joined by leading experts to unlock the science of vaccines, variants and viral genetic codes.

Season 2022

Dead Body

Episode: 2022-12-26 | Airdate: Dec 26, 2022

Professor Sue Black has been dubbed the ‘corpse whisperer' for her role in deciphering the messages hidden within a dead body. In this first lecture in the Royal Institution's 2022 Christmas series, she is joined by Silent Witness's Emilia Fox to reveal the secrets of forensic science.

Sue shows how the stories of our lives are hidden in the very fabric of our bodies by examining an archaeological skeleton, using techniques she uses in modern-day forensic investigations. She gradually builds up its identity until a pile of old bones once again becomes a real person. She explains how extraordinary clues in our bones can reveal everything from our age and our sex to our diets and our ancestry – there's even a bone in our ear that can reveal where our mother lived while she was pregnant.

Professor Black's investigations into the trauma marks visible in the 1,000-year-old skeleton's bones reveal where this person died, and how they died. In the process, she tells this individual's extraordinary life story and sheds light on one of the darkest days in English history.

Missing Body

Episode: 2022-12-27 | Airdate: Dec 27, 2022

Professor Sue Black investigates a Christmas murder mystery to show how serious crimes are solved when there isn't a body.

Sue is joined by an expert team including leading police specialists, forensic scientists and an award-winning dog. Assisting them, the audience help to unravel the mystery, using the latest forensic cameras, fingerprint techniques and DNA analysis. Remarkable soil analysis shows how a suspicious pair of muddy boots can be traced back to the most precise location.

With insights into real serious crime investigations, Sue and her team draw on all their experience to solve the mysterious case.

Living Body

Episode: 2022-12-28 | Airdate: Dec 28, 2022

The final lecture in the series begins with a ‘heist'. A jewel thief steals a precious man-made diamond from the Royal Institution's collection. Can forensic evidence conclusively identify and convict the criminal responsible?

To find out, the Royal Institution's lecture theatre is transformed into a courtroom and the audience acts as jury on the case, with a special guest king's counsel invited to defend the suspect. Forensic evidence is based on probability; it can never be 100 per cent certain. So, how convincing does the evidence need to be for the court of the Royal Institution's own jury to reach a guilty verdict?

Includes insights from real criminal investigations.