Discovery

What if we could feel more alive and more alert by just eating smaller meals? Extreme calorie restriction may hold the secret to the a longer live. According to some scientists, living to 120 and beyond could be possible - but is it worth a life of hunger and food deprivation? (Image: Woman pinching 'spare tyre' on her waist. Credit: Science Photo Library)

What if we could stay young forever? Peter Bowes continues his quest to find out what science and lifestyle can do to help keep mind and body young. Is it possible to slow down or even reverse the aging process, through exercise? The latest trend in gyms is towards high intensity workouts. Some scientists say they're better for the body than less strenuous exercise like jogging - and just a couple...

What if we could stay young forever? It may be a fantasy, but age management is big business and some people will stop at nothing to roll back the years. Pills, scans, injections, extreme diets and brain training - there's a vast array of apparent solutions on the market - but do they work and are they safe? Is age "reversal" possible? Peter Bowes investigates. (Photo: A woman is covered with shee...

As part of the BBC World Service’s “What if…?” season, biologist Dr Andrew Holding meets some of the people straddling the line between man and machine. Over 50 years ago the term cyborg was first used to describe a person whose capabilities are augmented by mechanical or cybernetic parts. Today, mechanical or electronic prosthetic limbs and organs are rapidly changing more and more of our lives....

When a couple are expecting a baby, the big question is: girl or boy? Adam Rutherford explores the many ways Nature decides that question. If you’re a human, a kangaroo or a komodo dragon, it’s in the sex chromosomes. If you’re a crocodile, it’s the temperature of your egg. And if you’re a fish, it can be one sex first and, later in the life, the other. Adam’s investigation includes conversation w...

Sex is one of Nature’s great forces of change. Yet it is one of life’s great mysteries. Adam Rutherford investigates how and why living things first invented sex about 1.5 billion years ago. He begins by exploring why so many animals and plants have carried on doing it, given that sex has some big disadvantages compared to asexual reproduction.

The oldest known sexual beings, a 400 million year old fish sex movie and the prehistoric turtles which were fossilised in the act of copulation. Discovery this week is strictly adults-only as we begin a three-part natural history of sex. Adam Rutherford talks to the scientists studying the world’s most revealing fossils. (Image: Two carettocheylid turtles, fossilised in mating position. Credit: T...

From smell to navigation, it seems that some of the hardest problems in biology could be solved with the insights from theoretical physics. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book in the 1940s called “What is Life?” in which he speculated on the role of quantum mechanics on the life sciences. Almost 70 years later, both quantum mechanics and biology have moved on a long way. But are the two f...

A decade ago, the Human Genome Project revealed that only 1% of our DNA codes for the proteins that make our bodies. The rest of the genome, it was said, was junk, in other words with no function. But in September another massive international project, called ENCODE, announced that the junk DNA is useful after all. Adam Rutherford reports on the significance of this major discovery. He visits the...

Sir John Gurdon talks to Jim al-Khalili about how coming bottom of the class in science was no barrier to winning this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. We're familiar with Dolly the Sheep but many people find the idea of cloning humans rather disturbing. It seems to cut to the core of who we are; but, scientifically speaking, we are getting closer to a time when cloning people might...

Science polymath and celebrated author, Jared Diamond has tackled some of the big questions about humanity: what is it that makes us uniquely human not just a third species of chimpanzee; and why do some societies thrive and others struggle to survive, or collapse? Jim Al-Khalili talks to Jared Diamond about how his passion for the birds of Papua New Guinea overtook his medical interest in the gal...

Andrea Sella is a science showman, whose theatrical demonstrations of chemistry are filling theatres up and down the country. He talks to Jim al-Khalili about his life scientific. Andrea is also Professor of Materials and Inorganic Chemistry at University College London and he and Jim discuss whether he would rather be known for his research into rare metals than for his whizz bang displays.

Baby girls born today in the UK can expect to live to 82 years old, whereas boys on average will die 4 years earlier. Evolutionary biologist Dr Yan Wong looks at the latest evidence suggesting that where ageing is concerned, men seem to be at a genetic disadvantage. From research on ancient Korean eunuchs to laboratory fruit flies, new studies seek the answer to why males across the animal kingdom...

The most notorious fraud in the history of Science is the focus of this week’s Discovery. Exactly one hundred years ago, British scientists announced their discovery of fossilised skull and jaw bones of what appeared to be the earliest human – a species of humanity closer to our prehistoric ape ancestors than any found before it. In 1912 it was a sensational find. In 1953 it was revealed as a horr...

Finding the Higgs boson on July 4th 2012 was the last piece in physicists' Standard model of matter. But Tracey Logan discovers there's much more for them to find out at the Large Hadron Collider. To start with there is a lot of work to establish what kind of Higgs boson it is. Tracey visits CERN and an experiment called LHCb which is trying to find out why there's a lot more matter than anti-matt...

Kevin Fong talks to one of the last two men on the Moon, 40 years after the final Apollo 17 mission blasted off on 7 December 1972. As an Apollo astronaut, Harrison Schmitt was special. He was was the only geologist ever to explore the lunar surface. The field work Dr Schmitt did, and the rocks he and his fellow astronauts brought back, revolutionised our understanding of the Moon and the Earth. D...

In this programme, Geoff Watts meets researchers attempting to unlock the mysteries of hallucination as well as some of those who experience the phenomenon. Geoff visits Dr Dominic Ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and undergoes a stroboscopic experiment designed to induce hallucinations in subjects whilst their brains are being scanned. We hear some of the vivid accounts from hall...

Geoff Watts meets researchers attempting to unlock the mysteries of hallucination as well as some of those who experience the phenomenon. Hallucinations aren't what they used to be. Time was when reporting a divine vision would bring fame or fortune. The Enlightenment changed all that and nowadays you'd be more at risk of being handed a prescription for a major tranquilliser for reporting what you...

Gaia Vince concludes her journey through the geological age humans have launched. After climate change and mass extinction, she now explores moves how the world’s cities and manufactured artefacts (from mobile phones to plastic bottles) might become 'fossilised' and incorporated into the geological record. Some are bound to survive in crushed form for the rest of the Earth’s existence. Any distant...

Earth scientists say humanity’s impact on the Earth has been so profound that we have started a new geological time period on the planet. They call it, the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince explores our fundamental changes to the biosphere. The accelerating extinctions of animal and plant species: the rearing of agricultural animals in their billions: and, what some describe as, the general ‘macdonaldisati...

Humanity’s impact on the atmosphere with fossil fuel burning is so profound that we’re creating a new geological time period, say geologists. They’ve named it, the Anthropocene. In this part of her journey into the Anthropocene, Gaia Vince explores how fossil fuel burning will leave enduring marks in geological record forming on the Earth in current times. Climate change and ocean acidification ar...

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is so profound that we’re creating a new geological time period. Geologists have named the age we’re making the Anthropocene. The changes we’re making to the atmosphere, oceans, landscape and living things will leap out of the rocks forming today to Earth scientists of the far future, as clearly as the giant meteorite that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs does to today...

We are in desperate need of new medicines for the major diseases facing us in the 21st century such as Alzheimer's and obesity. And we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that are now resistant to many old varieties. As bringing new and improved drugs to patients becomes more difficult and more expensive - it can take 20 years and around $1 billion to bring a medicin...

We are in desperate need of new medicines for the major diseases facing us in the 21st Century such as Alzheimer's and obesity. And we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that are now resistant to many old varieties. As bringing new and improved drugs to patients becomes more difficult and more expensive - it can take 20 years and around $1 billion to bring a medicin...

Nine million people in the UK alone have significant hearing problems. The mechanisms in our ears that help us hear are incredibly sensitive and are easily damanged by environmental hazards such as loud noises and chemicals or simply the passage of time. Despite the fact that many of us will gradually lose our ability to hear as we as a society grow older, many of us don’t actually know that much...