Discovery

Chemist Andrea Sella explores the current race to do photosynthesis better than nature ever achieved. In just a few hundred years mankind has burnt fossil fuels that had taken natural photosynthesis billions of years to create. Now, around the world hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent on the race to develop a robust, cheap and efficient way to turn the light from the sun into fuels we c...

Could creating "blood" in the laboratory make infections passed on through blood transfusions a thing of the past? Vivienne Parry investigates. The drive behind the quest for creating a blood substitute was originally from the US Military - during the Vietnam War a clean, reliable and portable alternative to donor blood would have helped to save many lives. Donated blood can only be kept for a lim...

Gene therapy - repairing malfunctioning cells by mending their DNA - offers an elegant solution to diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, caused by a single flawed gene. It's a very simple concept to describe - simply insert a 'normal' gene to do the job - but it's this process, the delivery of the gene, that's proving to be so difficult and time consuming. Since the first human study began in 1990 th...

Alan Turing, born 23 June 1912, is famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War II. But for mathematicians, his greatest work was on the invention of the computer. Alan Turing's brilliance at maths was spectacular. Aged 22, just a year after his graduation, he was elected a fellow of King's College Cambridge. And it was just a year after that, that he turned his attention to probl...

Alan Turing - born a hundred years ago on June 23 - is most famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War II. But for mathematicians, his greatest work was on the invention of the computer. Discovery explores the legacy of the great man with a two-part special. Alan Turing's brilliance at maths was spectacular. Aged 22, just a year after his graduation, he was elected a fellow of K...

Two teams of virologists found themselves at the heart of bioterrorism maelstrom late last year when their studies on mutant bird flu were suppressed by US authorities. While security experts feared the reports were recipes for bioweapons of mass destruction, the researchers argued they held important lessons for the threat of natural flu pandemics developing in the wild. Now the authorities have...

Astronomer Marek Kukula from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich explores the scientific implications of the forthcoming transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, a rare astronomical event that will not occur again until 2117. Previous transits have helped establish fundamental facts about our solar system, including the distance and relative positions of all the planets that orbit our sun. But...

Professor Jim al-Khalili talks to Cern physicist Tejinder Virdee, about the search for the elusive Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle". Last December, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider caught a tantalising glimpse of the Higgs; but they need more data to be sure of its existence. Twenty years ago, Tejinder set about building a detector within the Large Hadron Collider that'...

Plastic Surgery does not always have a good press, more often associated with the excesses of Hollywood. But the birth of modern day reconstruction has far nobler roots. Dr Kevin Fong looks at the surprising, and heroic origins of the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery. It is a field that was born in response to the great air-battles of World War II, and the development of a new fighter p...

How fixed are our moral beliefs? Can these beliefs be reduced to neurochemistry? While we may believe that our moral principles are rigid and based on rational motives, psychological and neuroscientific research is starting to demonstrate that this might not actually be the case. In this edition of Discovery, Dr Carinne Piekema investigates how scientific studies are starting to shed light on how...

Imagine if your health as an adult is partly determined by the nutrition and environment you were exposed to during a critical period of development - the first 1000 days of life. A strong body of scientific evidence supports this explosive idea, and is gradually turning medical thinking on its head. To understand the cause of chronic adult disease, including ageing, heart disease, diabetes, osteo...

One hundred years ago, the first humans reached the South Pole of this planet. More than 40 years ago, man first walked on the moon. When will our species first set foot to explore the planet Mars? Kevin Fong seeks a likely launch date, and asks who will get us there and why we really need to explore the Red Planet.

Can the heroic age of Antarctic exploration help to show us the way back to the Moon? One hundred years ago, Scott reached the South Pole. However, more than four decades passed before people went back there. On the Moon, Neil Armstrong took his leap for mankind in 1969 and it has been forty years since the last astronaut left the lunar surface. Presenter Kevin Fong talks to space scientists and h...

Kevin Fong looks beyond the failure of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole and focuses instead on the scientific legacy of Scott's explorations of Antarctica between 1901 and 1912. In recent years, much has been written about Scott the polar loser and bungler. But that personalised focus ignores the pioneering scientific research and discoveries. The revelation...

To mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, the BBC's Sean Coughlan narrates one of the most authentic versions of events in existence. Using voice synthesis to re-create the strange, twitter-like, mechanical brevity of the original Morse code, this programme brings to life the tragedy through the ears of the wireless operators in the area that night. On the night of the disaster,...

In the last of the Global Body series, Lynne Malcolm is joined by a panel of experts to discuss the future of the health of the human body. Lynne is joined by, Tony McMichael – Professor of Population Health at the Australian National University in Canberra; Professor Maxine Whittaker, form the Australian centre for International and Tropical Health at the University of Queensland and Professor Ro...

As part of the BBC World Service's Human Race season, ABC in Australia's Lynne Malcolm explores how Homo sapiens have adapted to changes in their environment, economy and social structures; how health is affected by new environments and lifestyles; and what might happen to the human race in the future? Is the 'Hollywood Dream' of a city of beautiful, fit, wealthy people anything near the truth for...

As part of the BBC World Service's Human Race season, ABC in Australia's Lynne Malcolm explores how Homo sapiens have adapted to changes in their environment, economy and social structures; how health is affected by new environments and lifestyles; and what might happen to the human race in the future? Lured by the bright lights, or driven from the countryside by political and economic turmoil, po...

As part of the Human Race season on the BBC, Discovery starts its exploration into the Global Body. Over the next 4 weeks, Lynne Malcolm finds out how the modern world is affecting our biology. The series starts in Sri Lanka, where it asks whether the predominantly rural lifestyle of fishermen and farmers is well suited to the human body. BBC Correspondent Charles Haviland takes us to the shores o...

It's nearly a year (11 March 2011) since Japan was struck by a huge earthquake and Tsunami. Clouds of radioactive fall out from damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station spread across heavily populated areas - many kilometres from the plant. The government and power company TEPCO have been heavily criticised for not telling the local population soon enough about what was goin...

Located in the western pacific, the Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the ocean, plunging down 11km. Down there it's pitch black, icy cold and the pressure is immense. Now explorers with funding from the private sector are planning to return to the bottom of the Trench, for the first time for over 50 years. Rebecca Morelle meets Jim Gardner, who works for the US Center for Coastal and Ocean Ma...

Located in the western pacific, the Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the ocean, plunging down 11km. Down there it's pitch black, icy cold and the pressure is immense. The only time it was visited, was over 50 years ago by US naval lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Picard. Now four teams of explorers are risking their lives in a new race to the deep. Rebecca Morelle travels to Ca...

It sometimes seems to rule our lives and yet some scientists think it is an illusion. From birth to death we seem to be swept up in a relentless and inescapable journey through time, but what is this strange place we call the present moment? Why does the past seem fixed and the future so uncertain. Was the universe born into time or did time arise with the universe? Will time continue forever or w...

Angela Saini explores the revolution taking place in the streets beneath our feet as she reveals the story behind a new urban design movement called shared space. She travels to The Netherlands where shared space was born, inspired by the radical traffic planner, Hans Monderman, who envisaged a world without barriers, signs, pavement and traffic lights. But not everyone is taken with this revoluti...

Geoff Watts meets researchers trying to find a new way to fight depression by studying those who never get it. In the second of two programmes Geoff meets scientists at the University of Manchester, studying the brains of people who have undergone traumatic life events without becoming seriously depressed and comparing them to the brains of those people who do. The hope is that new psychological t...