Hello and welcome to Backchat. If the Nature podcast is the speech at your graduation ceremony,

Backchat is the party after the after party. And it is a graduation of sorts this month,

as I'm soon to be joining the features team, so this will be my last Backchat for a while at least,

never say never. This month, Morocco puts itself on the human evolution map.

UK researchers react to this month's election with a collective, wait, what? And how physicists

hope to break their own model of how the universe works. I'm Kerry Smith and my all London

crew this week features Richard Van Norton. Hi, I edit for Nature House of London. Lizzie Gibney.

Hello, I cover physical sciences.

And Ewan Calloway.

Hello there.

I write about all things living, including ancient humans who once lived.

Coming up some very old fossils, probably homo sapiens.

I say probably because Ewan isn't 100% sure and is beginning to wonder whether we should really care too much about the taxonomy anyway.

Physicists are bored of the standard model, but what could possibly replace it?

Lizzie will be telling us a few ideas that they have later.

But before all of that, let's just barge straight in with the recent UK election.

Lizzie and Richard, you were among the millions who stayed up to watch the results and

two of the few who actually had to write coherently about it and edit the following day.

Lizzie, just tell us what happened.

So yeah, I had actually planned to get more sleep than I ended up getting.

I thought, you know, I'll get up early, but like at six or something and get cracking on my story. But actually, after going to sleep at half past midnight, I woke up half three. And the result was so exciting that for a politics nerd like me, I did not go back to sleep, which is great because it meant that we had a story filed nice and early. So it was definitely an upset.

Theresa May, UK Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party,

...