Discovery

Is our taste in music, and how it's changed over the centuries, governed by creative genius or simply by survival of the fittest sounds, chosen by us the consumer? Does Darwin's theory of natural selection apply to more than just life on the planet? The idea of survival of the fittest and cultural evolution can be applied to many aspects of our lives; from fashion to the naming of our children. In...

What can astronomy tells us about great literature? Forensic astronomer Don Olson tells Andrew Luck-Baker about two of his investigative cases. He explains how plotting the path of the moon in 1816 solved a controversy about Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. The Texas State University professor also outlines his theory that a star referred to in Shakespeare’s Hamlet was inspired by a spectacular...

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. He asks who will get us there and why we really need to explore the Red Planet. (Image: An image, released by NASA, of the terrain of Mars taken by the Curiosity r...

Jim Al-Khalili finds out about the life scientific of the British Antarctic Survey biologist Lloyd Peck. Amongst other creatures he studies giant sea spiders. They and other small animals grow far bigger than usual in the extreme cold. Diving is an important part of Lloyd's job and Jim hears what it's like to play football under the ice. Studies suggest that the sea temperature is rising, and Lloy...

One hundred years ago, Scott reached the South Pole. Fifty years later, the first geologist briefly walked on the moon. Kevin Fong asks if why we might want to return to the lunar surface and what will get us. He talks to that first lunar geologist of Apollo 17, Harrison Schmitt and Nasa's Chief Administrator Charles Bolden, among others.

Jim Al-Khalili meets Cambridge University neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian. She talks about her Life Scientific finding drugs to slow down the memory losses that happen in Alzheimer's disease. She worked in some of the first memory clinics that were set up in the US and the UK to help people who had problems remembering and has developed tests to find out if peoples' forgetfulness is the first sign...

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...

Discovery this week goes in search of the Gangetic River Dolphin, an extraordinary creature which inhabits the muddy waters of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. Not long ago, the dolphin was a common sight for people along these mighty water ways, but now it's one of the world's rarest freshwater mammals. Andrew Luck-Baker joins Indian biologists studying the dolphins and the threats to them alon...

After the most daring and complex landing of a robot on another planet, the search for evidence of life on Mars enters a new era. Nasa's Curiosity rover is now sitting inside Gale Crater, a vast depression close to the Martian equator. Also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, the one tonne machine is the most sophisticated science robot ever placed on another world. Over the coming years Curiosi...

Gareth Mitchell meets the engineers who are designing flying cars and green aircraft. Gareth has a go at flying a personal aircraft in the flight simulator at Liverpool University. Doctors Mike Jump and Mark White explain that the EU-funded project MyCopter is seriously looking at the prospect of flying personal vehicles that are as easy to drive as a car. Sophie Robinson, a Ph. D student at Liver...

Gareth Mitchell meets the engineers who will transform the way we fly around the world and finds out what aircraft might look like in the future. Gareth visits the flight gallery at the Science Museum in London with the curator, Dr Andrew Nahum, who shows him how the basic shape of aircraft has hardly changed in 70 years, since the days of the DC3. Andrew Nahum also talks about why Concorde was in...

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...