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Hannah Fry and Dara Ó Briain tackle listeners' conundrums with the power of science!
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · August 2026
Curious Cases turns listener questions into fully worked explanations, checking claims through replication and study detail instead of just asserting them.
Curious Cases begins with a listener's oddly specific question, a frost-patterned windscreen, an attachment to gold, a longing for winter, pain in a hand no longer there, and brings in a guest to work through the answer.
You bring a tiny question; you leave worrying about optimistic tortoises, windscreen frost, and Earth's tilt.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A frost pattern on glass opens onto the surprising molecular difficulty of getting ice started.
This single-episode review finds its hook in a frost pattern and follows it into the odd fact that water can remain liquid below freezing. A listener's crystals set the question in motion, and Tom's below-zero windscreen test in Leeds gives the piece its useful hinge: poured tap…
Gold becomes a compact lesson in chemistry, recycling, and the long journeys materials can survive.
Gold comes through as a material with a strangely durable life: prized, kept, handed down, melted, reshaped, and put back to work. The review's best thread is that sense of continuity, moving from a pharaoh's adornment to a church roof, teeth, electrical circuits, and other…
A thoughtful look at phantom pain, brain maps, and evidence that complicates the expected explanation.
Phantom pain becomes a way into the brain's map of the body, with Hannah Fry and Dara O'Briain following pain and itching in absent limbs toward the theory that brain plasticity has gone wrong.
A missing tortoise leads into a playful look at tortoise behavior, mood, and measurable optimism.
Curious Cases builds a nimble comic-science review around a pleasingly odd question: can a tortoise play, and can anyone read its mood? It begins with Shelby, a household tortoise whose garden disappearance gives the episode a loose domestic hook, then widens into the more…
A playful, grounded look at how planetary tilt shapes winter, jet streams, and British weather.
A question about planetary tilt opens into a clear, grounded tour of winter, jet streams, and the weather patterns that shape life in the UK. Hannah Fry and Dara O'Brien trace the physics of a world without tilt, where the equator-to-pole temperature contrast would stay…
Science news with pets in the room.
Particle accelerators, compost piles and Queen's guitarist, all explained.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Curious Cases turns Jane's January photo from the Somerset Levels into a question about why frost on her car roof formed fern-like patterns that looked like William Morris.
Curious Cases' "Mining for Gold (GOLD!)" opens with Bernie's Whitley Bay question about whether 216,265 tonnes of mined gold can really fit in one Olympic swimming pool.
Curious Cases asks why people with amputated limbs, removed organs, or extracted teeth can still feel pain, itching, or a limb's presence.
Curious Cases asks whether tortoises and other reptiles play, opening with Dara's pet Shelby, a Hermann's tortoise that spent six weeks missing in the garden.
Curious Cases' "Planetary Wobble" asks what Earth would be like if its 23-degree tilt disappeared.
Hannah Fry and Dara Ó Briain use science to solve listeners' quirky conundrums, starting with a discussion about fungi.
Hannah Fry and Dara O Briain use science to answer a listener's question about the shiniest thing in the universe.
Hannah Fry and Dara Ó Briain use science to solve listeners' quirky questions and conundrums.
Hannah Fry and Dara Ó Briain use science to answer listeners' quirky questions with comedic banter.