Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

This is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4.

First broadcast on the 1st of June, and it's a very special edition live from the Hay Festival.

Now we're discussing the potential utility of useless knowledge or blue skies

research versus directly applied scientific research. Hello, we're live at the Hay Festival today.

Officially it's called the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, though today we're going to bring you some science at its most basic level.

Louis Pasteur said, there does not exist a category of science

to which one can give the name applied science.

There are sciences and the application of science bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Today we're analyzing that relationship between the tree and the fruit.

Now listeners will know that we often talk very excitedly about astrophysics and we celebrate

discoveries of universal significance such as gravitational waves last year or the explorations

of the planets.

That is some seriously expensive research, but does it matter? And you'll know that I get

very excited by evolution, particularly human evolution and genetics, and we're going through a

bit of a boom time and that subject at the moment.

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