Discovery

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 of dementia. More recently she has turned her attention to drugs that can improve the performance of surgeons or pilots or other professions where it is important to be alert for long times. Barbara says that they could even be used to make us more entrepreneurial. And some students are taking them as they think they could be giving them an edge in exams. Jim and Barbara discuss the thorny ethical issues raised by these uses of these drugs.

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 revelations transformed Antarctica from an unknown quantity on the map into a profoundly important continent in the Earth's past and present. Before Scott and Shackleton trekked across the vast ice sheets in the early 1900s, no-one was sure whether there was even a continent there. Some geographers had suggested Antarctica was merely a vast raft of ice anchored to a scattering of islands. The science teams on Scott’s expeditions made fundamental discoveries about Antarctic weather and began to realise the frozen continent's fundamental role in global climate and ocean circulation. They discovered rocks and fossils which showed

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 along the stretch of the Brahmaputra in the state of Assam. In a joint project between Aaranyak, an Indian conservation organisation, and the Zoological Society of London, the scientists are also mobilising local communities to protect this special animal and the ecosystem they share with it.

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 Curiosity will climb a mountain at the crater's heart, gathering evidence on one of science's greatest questions – was there ever life on Mars? The $2.5 billion project will discover whether Mars once had conditions suitable for the evolution and survival of life. BBC Space specialist Jonathan Amos talks to mission scientists about where Curiosity is going and what it will do as it trundles up Mars' Mount Sharp.(Image: Nasa's Curiosity rover. Credit: Nasa/JPL-Caltech/PA Wire)

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 Liverpool University, explains how her research into the safety and stability of auto-gyros, flying machines that already exist for personal travel, could set standards for the flying cars of the future.Prof Jeff Jupp, who worked on the wings of the largest passenger plane, the A380, talks about alternative fuels to kerosene and new designs for engines. These look rather old-school, as they have propellers, but they will make the aircraft more energy efficient. But there may be a downside in that they could be noisier and slower than jet engines. Dr Will Graham describes the work he has done on the Silent Aircraft project

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 service for such a short time. David Caughey, Emeritus Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cornell University, points out that the blended wing shaped aircraft is more energy efficient. So Gareth asks why we don't see them in service today - the answer is that apart from the innate caution of the airline manufacturers, the passengers would have no windows and it could be hard to evacuate such a craft speedily in an emergency. Gareth talks to Professor Jeff Jupp who worked on the wings of the largest passenger plane, the A380, about the technical challenges. Professor Paul Weaver at Bristol University tells Ga

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 can use. At a time when politicians everywhere debate the economic and climatic burdens of our future energy needs, such a "solar fuel" would be a genuinely novel alternative energy.(Image: Some beech leaves. Credit: Martin Dohrn /Science Photo Library)

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 limited time, needs refrigerating and has to be cross matched according to which ABO group people belong to. The "universal donor" - O negative blood - can be used on accident victims before a match is found. But it's in very short supply and often many units of blood are required.The history of creating blood has had a chequered past - with some products abandoned because of side effects and others proving too costly to produce. One analysis of clinical trials on blood substitutes in 2008 revealed a higher incidence of heart attacks in patients who'd been given them, compared with those who received human blood.Some sci

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 the field has struggled with various technical challenges and set-backs.But over a decade on, researchers are beginning to report successes in treating several devastating diseases. Geoff Watts finds out about some of the new techniques for gene therapy, and discovers how these are now being used in a trial of a new method of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis. Twelve years ago, a group of scientists from Imperial College in London, Oxford and Edinburgh formed the Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium. This year they started the world's biggest trial of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis.Funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Tru

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 problems in the foundations of mathematics and ended up showing that a simple machine, set up to read and write numbers and to run a few basic functions, could in principle do all the things that are do-able in mathematics. His 'universal' machine was just a concept - a paper tape that could be read, interpreted and acted on robotically. But the concept was profound. World War II shortly afterwards took Turing's talents into other directions, but even while designing machines at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma codes, he was wondering how much more a computing machine might do - play chess for example.And althoug

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 King's College Cambridge. And it was just a year after that, that he turned his attention to problems in the foundations of mathematics and ended up showing that a simple machine, set up to read and write numbers and to run a few basic functions, could in principle do all the things that are doable in mathematics. His 'universal' machine was just a concept - a paper tape that could be read, interpreted and acted on robotically. But the concept was profound. World War II shortly afterwards took Turing's talents into other directions, but even while designing machines at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma codes, h

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 backed down and the reports have been released. Kevin Fong hears how tiny variations in the genes of bird flu can completely change the behaviour of the pathogens and he asks whether deliberate genetic manipulation in the lab can replicate the natural genetic variations occurring in farms around the world.In 2009, the new strain of H1N1 flu emerged from a few villages in Mexico to infect the world in weeks. What experts fear is that a simple genetic change to H5N1 bird flu could allow it to spread as fast, but with far deadlier consequences. They argue that by identifying dangerous variants in the lab first, we'd be b

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 now, the forthcoming transit in June 2012, the last this century, will help planet hunters searching for other worlds across the galaxy (exo-planets). As Marek discovers, technology now makes it possible to pinpoint not only a planet's mass, size, and distance from its star but we can also establish whether it has an atmosphere and what that atmosphere might consist of and therefore whether it could theoretically support life. Thanks to the next transit event, the search for another Earth has taken a bold step forward.(Image: Venus (black dot) is silhouetted as it orbits between the Sun and the Earth during the trans

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's capable of taking 40 million phenomenally detailed images every second. Finding the Higgs will validate everything physicists think they know about the very nature of the universe: not finding it, will force them back to the drawing board. By the end of the year, we should know one way or the other.

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 plane - the Hawker Hurricane - that left its legacy not just in terms of success in the air, but in the devastating injuries caused to many of the airmen who flew them. He looks at the work of pioneering surgeon Archie McIndoe and his brave airmen "guineapigs" who underwent months, if not years, of painful surgery that led to the birth of modern day reconstructive surgery.

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 our social behaviour is affected by our environment and neurochemistry. She discusses with Carol Dweck about how people's moral opinions can be modified through behavioural techniques, and with Molly Crockett and Paul Zak about how similar effects can be brought about by directly altering brain chemistry.While this knowledge might have future benefits, the ability to alter people's behaviour and attitudes towards others also raises potential ethical issues. In the final part, Carinne talks with neuroethicist Neil Levy who invites us to consider the philosophical questions raised by such advances.

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, osteoporosis, obesity and lung problems we need to look much further back than adult lifestyle – but to the first 1000 days.Dr Mark Porter investigates this influential idea and meets the world experts leading this burgeoning field of research. He talks to David Barker, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Southampton and the man behind the Barker Theory. This links the risk of developing illnesses in adult life to poor nutrition in the womb – typically evident when a baby is born underweight. Low birth weight is associated with a number of long term health problems in adults, ranging from osteoporosis

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 historians to find out if Robert Scott's Antarctic exploits provide a road map for future human exploration of the Moon and the planet Mars.Imperial and geopolitical motivations lay behind both South Polar exploration and the effort which took humans briefly to the lunar surface. But what would get us back to the Moon - would it be geopolitical rivalry or science?In times of economic austerity (in the West at least), what scientific questions are important enough to justify exploration of the Moon? The six short Apollo visits to the lunar surface were enough to crack the mystery of how the Moon itself formed - namely t

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 revelations transformed Antarctica from an unknown quantity on the map into a profoundly important continent in the Earth's past and present. Before Scott and Shackleton trekked across the vast ice sheets in the early 1900s, no-one was sure whether there was even a continent there. Some geographers had suggested Antarctica was merely a vast raft of ice anchored to a scattering of islands. The science teams on Scott's expeditions made fundamental discoveries about Antarctic weather and began to realise the frozen continent's fundamental role in global climate and ocean circulation. They discovered rocks and fossils which showed