How can we keep our homes cool in a changing climate?

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After three UK heatwaves, we turn to science for solutions that could keep us safer, and cooler, in our homes. Professor of Zero Carbon Design at the University of Bath, David Coley, explains how our houses could be better designed to handle climate change.

This week the UK Space Conference has come to Manchester. Victoria Gill is joined by Tim O’Brien, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, for the latest space science news.

We also hear from technology journalist Gareth Mitchell on a curious headache for the tech companies rolling out driverless taxis, in the form of plastic bags.

And we speak to a group of high school students who have been spending their lunch breaks extracting and analysing daffodil DNA.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Dan Welsh, Jonathan Blackwell, Clare Salisbury Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.7	Hello, delightful, curious-minded listeners.
0:08.1	Welcome to BBC Inside Science, a programme first broadcast on the 17th of July 2025.
0:13.7	I'm Victoria Gill.
0:15.3	And as many of us have spent this week sweltering and sheltering in this extreme summer weather,
0:20.6	we will be looking at the
0:21.6	science behind keeping the buildings we live and work in cool as the world heats up.
0:26.8	And the rise of the robotic taxi will be getting under the bonnet of driverless car design.
0:32.6	And in the week that the UK Space Conference has come to Manchester, just down the road,
0:36.2	I am joined by Professor of Astrophysics
0:38.3	and Friend of Inside Science, Tim O'Brien. Hello, Tim. Hello. It's lovely to have you in the studio again.
0:43.6	What have you been up to? As you say, with the Space Conference being here this week, we actually
0:47.7	hosted a visit just the other day by John McFall. Ah, he's Astronaut, John McFall. Yeah, European Space Agency astronauts in reserve at the moment, but he's a, he came to
0:59.4	Jodrell and I got to show him around the place, but he also did a bunch of schools, talks and
1:03.8	a public event in the evening as well, which was very popular.
1:07.0	That's exciting.
1:07.8	Yeah, I mean, ESA have been looking at the possibility of having people with physical disabilities in space.
1:13.7	And so he volunteered on that basis.
1:16.4	And he's been through a whole sort of process of checking the safety.
1:21.3	He lost his lower leg in a bike accident when he was a teenager and now he has a prosthetic limb.
1:27.2	Is that right? Yeah, from above the knee. yeah. So he's got quite a fancy prosthetic leg, actually. There's this sort of mechatronic thing with lots of sensors and things. And so that needed to be, you know, checked out for going into space for safety like any other piece of equipment. But there's sort of interesting sort of little wrinkles with it, really, with, for example,
1:46.4	in that environment, it can off gas, they call it.
	...

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