Twins in space

Twins in Space
Astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly. Image: NASA/Robert Markowitz. (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Landing a human on Mars is closer to becoming a reality. But one big question remains: how will the human body cope with the rigours of long distance space travel?

Jeffrey Kluger of Time's covering a NASA mission involving twins Scott and Mark Kelly, that will study the effects that a year in space has on the human body.

Tech: clickbait

How do tantalising headlines linking to articles work and how do they make money?

Tech correspondent Peter Griffin answers listener Mona-Lynn's question about clickbait.

Kitten
A kitten.

Spain's cycling boom

Peter Walker of The Guardian has been for a ride on Seville's cycle network. It's the centre of a cycling boom in Southern Spain.

Invisible Girlfriend

Matthew Homann is co-founder of Invisible Girlfriend, a paid service offering you a virtual partner to send you texts and tweets.

United Noshes

United Noshes
Photo: United Noshes/Laura Hadden.

United Noshes is a dinner club with a difference. It's the idea of a couple in Oregon who are running a series of 194 dinner parties, one for each member of the United Nations, in alphabetical order.

They started in July 2011 in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn with Afghanistan. Since then a mix of friends and strangers have sampled the delights, and some challenging dishes, from places like Guatemala, Djibouti, Estonia, Jordan and Indonesia.

Next up is Lesotho, and after that they hit the halfway mark with Libya. That means they should get to Zambia and Zimbabwe sometime in 2019, after a culinary journey lasting about 8 years!

Jesse Friedman of United Noshes told This Way Up's Simon Morton that it can be tough to find a single meal that can represent an entire country, just as finding dishes for tiny nations can be tricky.

But Mr Friedman says it's been a great way of meeting people and exploring local food markets on the hunt for new ingredients.

"You do have to compromise with some things...but in general most of the ingredients you can find. You know most cultures are cooking with onions and garlic and there's this core set of ingredients that's pretty common throughout. In terms of the cooking itself there have definitely been some challenges....but I'm kind of starting to get the knack of it!"

Scary smartphone story

Peter Etchells of Bath Spa University, and the science blog network coordinator for The Guardian, on the real story behind a scary headline linking smartphone and tablet use to brain damage in toddlers.

Drugs from Dirt

Drugs from dirt wsu edu

Drugs from Dirt is a project looking for the drugs and medicines of the future.  It's trying to find the next generation of anti-cancer drugs and antibiotics by examining soil samples collected from all over the world.

99 Lives

Bobo Caravaggio
Bobo.

Professor Leslie Lyons of the University of Missouri is leading the 99 Lives project, a plan to sequence the domestic cat gene in order to fight the diseases that are affecting them, and us.