The Hello, welcome to this week's naked scientists with me Chris Smith and also with

Cat Arnie. This week we calculate why your ability to read and do maths might be down to your genes,

how e-labels could revolutionise your shopping and why elephants can't cry.

Plus we're celebrating the 45th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the mission which first

put mankind on the moon.

We'll be looking at lunar rocks, discovering how we could mine the moon for energy solutions, and investigating why Google are dishing out

twenty million dollars a prize money to anyone who can land a robot on the Moon in the

next 18 months. The Naked Scientist Podcast is powered by UKfast.co.uk.

Now is being brainy in your genes or does it come from your upbringing?

Well, the true answer of course lies somewhere in between.

And thanks to a new study we're getting closer to teasing apart the complex relationship between nature and nurture.

Across the world scientists have been studying thousands of 12 year olds

to try and find genes involved in maths and language skills and have come up with a surprising result.

There's actually a substantial link

between the gene variations involved in reading and maths, so if you're genetically

gifted at one you're likely to have gene variations that make you good at the other.

I ask lead researcher Professor Robert Plimin from King's College London

whether our mental agility truly is genetic or heritable.

People might be surprised to know but it's no longer interesting to ask that

question is it heritable because every single study over decades has shown that it is

heritable so we're trying to go beyond heritability and one of the most interesting questions is to ask are the same genes

affecting different traits because you might expect something like reading is very

...