Stripping down science, the naked scientists.

The Naked Scientists. Hello, it's Sunday, April the 3rd.

Welcome to the Naked Scientists with me

Chris Smith and me Dave Ansel. This week we're celebrating the anniversary of

the first mobile phone call. It was made on this day in 1973 in New York. Now, almost 40 years later, the number of

mobile phones on earth has grown to over 5 billion, nearly as many as there are people.

And even Everest now has coverage thanks to a mast which has been installed near to the base camp,

which is ironic given that you can make a call from Everest, but I can't even make a call from my village just outside Cambridge.

But our mobile phone's actually safe?

Well, we'll be talking with the researcher behind one of the world's largest scientific studies

which has been set up to find out.

We'll also hear how scientists are developing new ways to keep the

conversation flowing by correcting the areas in mobile phone signals caused by poor

reception. It's a trick that we can also save scratch CDs from the dustbin.

We've drilled some holes at the beginning of the first track of the CD.

The CD uses an air correction mechanism which should be able to, well hopefully play the sound despite the fact that we've drilled

holes in it.

So it should be able to overcome the channel disturbance that we've introduced.

You can hear how that CD sounded when we played it later in the show, Chris.

Thank you, Dave.

Plus, we've also got news of how a chemical can combat a fear of heights,

and why the worm opinion polls that are shown during live TV political debates could be seriously

...