I have you loud and clear.

Hello.

Hello.

Welcome.

Science.

And that is the same physics, medicine,

nature,

or space, time, the brain, life, the universe.

Hello, this week we're taking to the road.

Before a child is born, right the way through to old age, air pollution is adversely affecting health.

We'll be asking how clean and safe are our roads.

Congestion is a fact of life these days in cities, but what people find difficult to accept is that the

journey time from day to day will change and they might allow 45 minutes to get to a meeting

one day and the next week it'll take them 90 minutes.

How is traffic controlled in our towns and cities?

We believe that the technologies already exist

for transportation to be zero carbon, zero deaths, and zero waste.

And how can science make roads better?

I'm Katie Haler, and this is the Naked Scientists. The Naked Scientists podcast is powered by UKfast.co. UK. First up, how do you go about actually making a road in the first place?

I put this question to Civil Engineer Julian Lamb, deputy project director for the A14 working on behalf of Highways England.

So donned with a whole load of personal protective equipment, we drove down to a section of the construction works to take a closer

look at what literally goes into a road. We're halfway between two of the bridges that

...