Kat Banyard is author of The Equality Illusion and is a founder and Director of UK Feminista - an organisation supporting grassroots feminist activism. She is also the founder of FEM Conferences – an acclaimed series of national feminist conferences.

Kat was previously Campaigns Officer at the Fawcett Society – the UK ‘s leading campaign for women’s rights, and was a regular spokesperson for the organisation in national print and broadcast media. In 2007 she was profiled in Observer Woman magazine as one of ‘The New Feminists’. Prior to her work at Fawcett, Kat worked for the Northern Refugee Centre in Sheffield setting up women’s groups.

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On this week’s show, Neil Denny Rebecca Watson are joined by Tracy King and DC Turner, and special guest Tim Minchin.

Tracy King is the Managing Director of February Marketing is the organiser of TAM London and co-organiser of The Big Libel Gig. She speaks on a range of topics including viral marketing, advertising psychology and using marketing in science communication and critical thinking. She is the Producer of Tim Minchin’s “Storm” movie, a regular writer for Skepchick and The Skeptic Magazine (UK), and her work has appeared in Nature and elsewhere.

DC (Dan) Turner is a designer and animator with a unique style of character design. He has worked for brands including Sony, Vodafone, Barclays, ITV, PKR, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, T Mobile and Woolworths. As well as animated shorts, he designs and builds award-winning Flash games and composes soundtracks.

Tim Minchin is.. well you know who Tim Minchin is.

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Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He is a consultant at New Scientist, and the author of the acclaimed non-fiction title 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense and the techno-thriller Entanglement. Michael’s latest book is The Big Questions: Physics.

His writing has also appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, the Times Higher Education, the Philadelphia Inquirer and (his proudest byline) Playboy. He has lectured at New York University, The American Museum of Natural History and Cambridge University. As well as contributing to traditional outlets for science, such as BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme and Material World, he has a regular live slot on the George Lamb Show on BBC’s 6 Music radio station, where he is regularly asked to explain everything in the universe.

Stuart Clark is one of the UK’s most widely read astronomy journalists. A former editor of Astronomy Now, He has a PhD in astrophysics and until 2001 was director of public astronomy education at the University of Hertfordshire. In 2001 the Independent ranked him alongside Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, as one of the ‘stars’ of British astrophysics teaching. A regular contributor to such magazines as New Scientist and BBC Focus, he is the author of several books, including Galaxy. But it was his first work of narrative nonfiction, The Sun Kings, that established him as a popular science writer par excellence. Stuart’s latest book is The Big Questions: The Universe.

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Ian Sample is an award-winning science correspondent at the Guardian. He was named investigative journalist of the year in 2005 by the Association of British Science Writers. He was previously a feature writer for New Scientist and holds a PhD in biomedical science from Queen Mary, University of London. Ian’s first book is Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle.

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Helen Keen is a stand-up comedian and writer, she was a finalist in the 2005 Funny Women competition and the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year competition and has been nominated for the Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year award. She won the first Channel 4 New Comedy Writing Award in 2005. Since then she has written for, among others, Channel 4′s Friday Night Project and BBC Radio 4′s The Now Show and is currently developing scripts with BBC3, Channel 4 and BBC Radio 4. Helen’s award winning show about space, It is Rocket Science!, is being re-launched at this years Edinburgh Festival and is currently being developed into a show for Radio 4. Helen is also co-hosting a new show, Starstruck!, at Edinburgh with Astrophysicist Dr Sophia Khan.

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Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing or “history of the present”. They include The Magic Lantern, The File, History of the Present and Free World. His latest is Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing From a Decade Without a Name. He is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the George Orwell Prize.

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Rebecca Skloot is a science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Discover, and many other publications. She is the guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011 , a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine, and has worked as a correspondent for WNYC's Radiolab and PBS's Nova ScienceNOW.

Skloot served for eight years on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, where she was a vice president and judge for their yearly book awards. She has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her debut book, took more than a decade to research and write, and instantly became a New York Times best-seller.

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Anil Ananthaswarmy is a consultant editor of New Scientist in London. He has worked at the magazine in various capacities since 2000, most recently as deputy news editor, and has written more than 250 news and features articles. He is also a contributor to National Geographic News. He studied electronics, electrical and computer engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Bachelor of Technology), and the University of Washington, Seattle (Master of Science), and worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley before training as a journalist in the University of California Santa Cruz's renowned science writing programme. Anil is the author of The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe.

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James Hannam is a historian of science specialising in the relationship between science and Christianity in the Medieval and Early Modern eras. He took Masters (2003) from Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD (2008) in the History and Philosophy of Science at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. James' reviews and articles have been published in the academic journals British Journal of the History of Science, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliography Society, Science and Christian Belief and Perspectives on Science and Faith. James Hannam is the author of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science.

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Sue Armstrong is a science writer and broadcaster living in Edinburgh. As a foreign correspondent she worked for a variety of media including the New Scientist and BBC World Service. She has also undertaken a variety of assignments writing reports for the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS. Sue's latest book is A Matter of Life and Death: Inside the Hidden World of the Pathologist.

Join Neil this Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed at www.resonancefm.com worldwide.

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Martin Robbins is a researcher and science writer. he currently works in R&D solving scientific problems for a small software company, and previously worked as an ecological modeller for the British Antarctic Survey. The common research theme in Martin's career to date has been understanding complex systems in various domains. Martin is the proprietor of the Lay Scientist blog, and a regular contributor to the Guardian's Comment is Free. He is currently writing a book about Bad Science in the Developing World.

Richard Wilson read Philosophy at University College London and his first book, Titanic Express, recounts his search for the truth about the death of his sister Charlotte, who was killed in Burundi in 2000. He now works for a human rights organisation and lives in London. Richard's latest book is Don't Get Fooled Again: The Sceptic's Guide to Life.

Join Neil and Richard this Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed at www.resonancefm.com worldwide.

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Jonathan Balcome is an independent animal behaviour research scientist and a consultant for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine He is the author of Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, and most recently Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals.

Christine Ottery is a journalist and blogger published on Guardian.co.uk and Comment is Free, Timesonline.co.uk, Newscientist.com and Theecologist.co.uk. She is also a researcher for George Monbiot and multimedia Science Journalism MA student at City University.

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Ian Sinclair is a British writer, documentarist, film maker, poet, flaneur, psychogeographer, metropolitan prophet and urban shaman, keeper of lost cultures and futurologist. His books include Downriver, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Lights Out for the Territory, Dining on Stones, London Orbital, and most recently, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. He is the editor of London: City of Disappearances. He lives in Hackney.

Join Neil this Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed at www.resonancefm.com worldwide.

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Paul Davies is an internationally acclaimed physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, where he runs the pioneering BEYOND Centre for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He also chairs SETI's Post-Detection Taskgroup, so if scientists succeed in finding intelligent life, he will be among the first to know.

In addition to his many scientific awards, Davies was the recipient of the 1995 Templeton Prize – the world's largest annual prize for intellectual endeavour – and a Glaxo Science Writers' Fellowship. He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Mind of God, About Time, How to Build a Time Machine and The Goldilocks Enigma. The asteroid 1992OG was officially renamed Pauldavies in his honour. Paul's latest book is The Eerie Silence: Are we alone in the Universe?

Join Neil this Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed worldwide.

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Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, and a contributor to Wired, The Guardian, Popular Science, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. A visiting senior lecturer at the Open University, he was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He is currently on the advisory council of the Open Rights Group.

His novels are published by HarperCollins UK and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. His latest novel is Makers, and his last, New York Times Bestseller Little Brother, was published in May 2008. A new young adult novel, For the Win, will be published in May 2010.

Little Brother was nominated for the 2008 Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards. It won the Ontario Library White Pine Award, as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in America's top 1000 independent bookstores in 2008.

Join Neil and Rebecca this Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed  worldwide.

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In the Land of the Free is a documentary feature that examines the story of Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King. They are known as the Angola 3 and have spent almost a century between them in solitary confinement in Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary in the USA. Herman and Albert are still held in solitary confinement after thirty six years. The film is directed by Vadim Jean (Leon the Pig Farmer, Hogfather).

Join Neil this Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed at www.resonancefm.com worldwide.

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Ian McEwan has written two collections of stories, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, and 12 novels including The Cement Garden, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Enduring Love, Atonement and Saturday. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. Ian's latest novel is Solar, to be published by Jonathan Cape on the 18th March 2010.

Adam Rutherford has a PhD in genetics, is an editor at Nature, hosts the Nature podcast, writes for the Guardian, fronted the BBC4 series Cell, and recently hosted a documentary about morality on Radio 4.

Join Neil and Adam on Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed at www.resonancefm.com worldwide.

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Stephanie Merritt was deputy literary editor of The Observer from 1998-2005 and is now a feature writer. She has contributed to a variety of newspapers and magazines as well as radio and television. She is the author of two novels, Gaveston (Faber, 2002) and Real (Faber, 2005), one non-fiction, The Devil Within, (Vermilion 2008) and the screenplay for Real, commissioned by Gabriel Byrne’s Plurabelle Films. She also curates the Talks and Debates programme at Soho Theatre. Stephanie’s latest book, written under the pseudonym S.J. Parris is Heresy, a historical murder mystery starring Giordano Bruno.

Join us on Friday evening at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London, or via the Resonance FM live feed worldwide.

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Tom Standage is the business editor of The Economist. He started his career as the Science and Technology Editor at the Guardian, and has written several books which merge popular science and history including The Victorian Internet, The Neptune File, The Mechanical Turk. and A History of the World in 6 Glasses in which he explores a notion that six drinks in history – beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola – could be seen as technological catalysts in advancing culture. He says of his books “I think the right attitude to new technologies is to regard them with historically-informed scepticism. My approach is intended as a sort of antidote to the scourge of mindless product stories: when something new comes along, I like to point out that it isn’t new at all. This isn’t quite as gratuitous as it sounds; it is quite often possible to learn useful lessons from history, particularly the history of technology”

Tom’s latest book is An Edible History of Humanity, published in paperback by Atlantic in early March 2010. This is Tom’s second visit to Little Atoms.

Join us on Friday evening, 5th March at 19.00 to 19.30 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed worldwide.

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Stuart Clark is one of the UK’s most widely read astronomy journalists. A former editor of Astronomy Now, He has a PhD in astrophysics and until 2001 was director of public astronomy education at the University of Hertfordshire. In 2001 the Independent ranked him alongside Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, as one of the ‘stars’ of British astrophysics teaching. A regular contributor to such magazines as New Scientist and BBC Focus, he is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Galaxy. But it was his first work of narrative nonfiction, The Sun Kings, that established him as a popular science writer par excellence.

Marcus Chown’s first book, Afterglow of Creation, has just been re-published in paperback by Faber & Faber.

Join us on Friday evening, 19th February at 19.00 to 19.30 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed worldwide.

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Dr Karen James is a postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Botany of the Natural History Museum, working on the development of a DNA-based identification system for plant species. She also coordinated the museum’s Darwin bicentenary science campaign including a survey of the museum’s Darwin specimens and a Galapagos mockingbird conservation genetics project. She is the director of science for The HMS Beagle Trust which aims to build a modern seagoing version of HMS Beagle for scientific research, public engagement and learning.

Join us on Friday evening, 12th February at 19.00 to 19.30 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed worldwide.

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Christopher Hird is a leading figure in UK independent documentary making. He is chair of the Channel Four Britdoc Foundation; a trustee of the Grierson Trust, the Wincott Foundation and Index on Censorship. In January 2008 Christopher Hird started Dartmouth Films, and has produced such films as Cameron’s Money Men, Inside the Saudi Kingdom, Black Gold, and most recently, The End of The Line.

A former journalist working on The Economist, the New Statesman (of which he was deputy editor) and the Sunday Times, where he was editor of the investigative section, Insight. A casualty of the Murdoch regime, he moved into television starting as a reporter on Channel Four’s current affairs programme before co-founding Fulcrum TV, of which he was joint managing director for more than 20 years before it closed in 2007.

Join us at the usual time, 19.00 on Friday 5th February on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the Resonance live web feed worldwide.

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Stewart Brand trained originally as an ecologist. His legendary Whole Earth Catalogue (1968-1985) won the US National Book Award in 1972. Brand, whose previous books include The Media Lab, How Buildings Learn, and The Clock of the Long Now, is president and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation and co-founder of the Global Business Network. Stewart’s Latest book is Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Published in January 2010 by Atlantic Books.

The first of our monthly guest hosts is Becky Hogge. Becky Hogge is a freelance writer and researcher. Formerly executive director of the Open Rights Group, and a former technology director of openDemocracy, she is currently a board member of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Becky writes and broadcasts on technology, civil rights and intellectual property in the digital age for publications such as the New Statesman, The Guardian and Index on Censorship. Read Becky’s New Statesman review of Whole Earth Discipline.

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Professor Brian Cox is a particle physicist, a Royal Society research fellow, and a professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. He is also working on the FP420 R&D project in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 metres from the interaction points of the main experiments. He is best known to the public as the presenter of a number of science programmes for the BBC.

Join us on Friday 8th January at 19.00 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the live feed worldwide.

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There will be a normal length radio edit of the show broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM at 19.00 on Friday 18th December, and a much longer downloadable/podcast version to follow with added bad language and AGW denial.

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Jim Baggott has been studying and writing about the history of physics for nearly 20 years and has won awards for his scientific research and his science writing. His previous books have been widely acclaimed and include A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005 – ‘… like having an informal, intimate conversation with an informed – and informative – thinker’) and Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2004 – … does for quantum theory what Hawking’s A Brief History of Time did for astronomy and cosmology’). Jim’s latest book is Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939–1949.

Join us on Friday 11th December at 19.00-19.30 on Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the www.resonancefm.com live feed elsewhere.

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In addition to his medical works, Tallis is author of many works of fiction and poetry, and has written on the philosophy of the mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism. His books include The Kingdom of Infinite Space, Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and its Discontents, In Defence of Realism, The Knowing Animal, Hunger and Absence. 2007 Tallis was nominated in the Independent as one of “50 Brains of Britain” and in April 2008 appeared as a castaway on Desert Island Discs. This will be Ray’s second appearance on Little Atoms.

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Join us at 19.00 to 19.30 on Friday 30th October on Resonance 104.4FM in London, or via the live feed at the Resonance FM website elsewhere.

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Join Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy at the usual time, 19.00 to 19.30 on Friday 23rd October. Tune in via Resonance 104.4FM in London or via the Resonance FM live feed elsewhere.

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