Learn while you
fall asleep The educational sleep podcast

From Stage 1 drowsiness to the strange physics of REM. Tonight we trace everything your brain quietly does while you sleep.

Beneath every forest floor runs a vast fungal network. Trees use it to share sugar, send warnings, and look after their young.

A single day on the Nile in 3000 BC. River mud, morning prayers, the scratch of a reed pen on papyrus.

Below 200 metres the sun cannot reach. Down here, creatures make their own light, and life finds extraordinary ways to continue.

Inside great clouds of gas and dust, something pulls inward. Over millions of years, that pull becomes a star.

Inside a hive, 60,000 bees share one purpose, communicating through dance, voting on decisions, keeping perfect temperature.

For centuries the greatest library the world had known. Tonight we walk its reading rooms and trace what was lost.

Solar wind meets Earth's magnetic field at the poles and the sky ignites in curtains of green and violet.

For a thousand years, caravans carried silk, spice, and ideas across deserts and mountains. Tonight we travel one leg of the journey.

Shinrin-yoku has measurable effects on cortisol and heart rate. Tonight we practise it together, slowly, in the dark.

Every autumn, millions of monarch butterflies fly 4,000 kilometres to a forest in Mexico. No individual has ever made the journey before.

The moment humans learned to bake bread is the moment civilisation became possible. Flour, fermentation, and hunger.

In the last hours before sunrise the reef is at its quietest. Coral feeds on the current, fish sleep in mucus cocoons.

The Moon formed when a planet struck the early Earth. Since then it has stabilised our climate and lit human nights.

In 1400s Florence, a small group of artists and thinkers quietly changed how the world looked at itself.

Tea is the most widely drunk liquid on Earth, and it began with a single leaf falling into an emperor's cup four thousand years ago.

A lightning bolt lasts a third of a second and reaches 30,000 Kelvin, five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

In 1977 NASA attached a golden record to Voyager 1. It carries sounds from Earth, now beyond the edge of the solar system.

Two miles beneath the Antarctic ice, in total darkness and near-freezing water, life persists in ways we are only beginning to understand.

A single oak tree can live a thousand years. This is one year, from the first bud of March to the bare branches of December.