On this week’s show, Neil Denny and Rebecca Watson talk to comedian Helen Keen.

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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On this week’s Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to Timothy Garton Ash.

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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On this week's Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to Rebecca Skloot.

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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