India, December 2025
2026 Podcast Recommendations
An interesting, yet admittedly not very relevant, 2-photon microscope image of a larval zebrafish
Zebrafish are an ancient ancestor of humans, existing today with a relatively unchanged neural blueprint from which mammalian brains likely evolved.
With a shared common ancestor with Homo sapiens diverging around 340 million years ago, these ancient fish are a living snapshot into what our brains looked before they became ‘human’.
These fish therefore allow us to explore the differences between us and them, shedding light on what our developed brain areas are actually for.
Photo by Astra Pritchard, University College London, Supervisor. Dr Thomas Ryan, Dreosti LabHere, a fluorescently tagged larval zebrafish is photographed using a 2-photon laser microscope the size of an entire room.
This highly specialised, multi-stage technique took me weeks to master, and brought about an interesting discovery about brain regeneration.
The linguist who discovered the true color of Pompeii.
Giuseppe, a linguist and polymath grew up near Pompeii. He spent countless hours of his childhood exploring and imagining what this place, frozen in time, looked like when animated. Later in life, once he became a renowned linguist, he endeavoured to write a romance novel, entirely in the ancient Pompeiian latin. In doing so, he is set on a nail biting across Europe, and makes a discovery that changes his, and the understanding of popular science, forever.
Interviewed, recorded and edited by Astra Pritchard
My home under the microscope (40x objective)
