Discovery

Kevin Fong concludes his grand tour of the planet Mars, in search of water. Some of the most spectacular Martian landscapes were carved by vast and violent quantities of water in the planet’s past. The Tolkienesque terrain of Iani Chaos created when gigantic fountains of water burst of the Martian surface. Kevin also talks to scientists on the current Curiosity Mars rover mission about water in the deep history of Gale Crater and its central mountain Mount Sharp. The journey concludes with gullies on cliffs and craters, suggesting that water still gushes on the surface of Mars today. Could this mean that life exists on the Red Planet today?

The planet Mars boasts the most dramatic landscapes in our solar system. Kevin Fong embarks on a grand tour around the planet with scientists, artists and writers who know its special places intimately- through their probes, roving robots and imaginations. This first part of the journey includes Mars’ gargantuan volcanoes, an extreme version of Earth’s Grand Canyon and the cratered Southern Highlands where future explorers might find safety from the Red Planet’s deadly radiation environment.

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Noel Sharkey about psychology and robots; and why he thinks artificial intelligence is a dangerous dream.

In Discovery this week psychologist Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her Life Scientific. For over forty years she’s been researching brain development and how babies and children learn. She’ll be talking about her controversial response to guidance from the American Academy of Paediatrics, that parents should discourage TV viewing in children under 2. She says that if the subject matter is chosen well, a TV screen can be better for a baby than a book.

Like football, science is an international endeavour complete with its own stars and prima donnas. Alok Jha investigates what it takes to make a winning team.

Gareth Mitchell at the BBC Science Africa Festival in Uganda looks at space research - a growth area for science in Africa

Could eating less help us live longer? Peter Bowes investigates.

What if we could stay forever young? Peter Bowes explores the medical possibilities.

Peter Bowes asks what if science could help us stay young forever?

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.

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 eeg. And if you're a fish, it can be one sex first and, later in the life, the other.

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 being, a 400 million year old fish sex movie and the prehistoric turtles which were fossilised in the act of copulation. Discovery on the BBC World Service 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.

Jason Palmer looks at the emerging field of quantum biology. From smell to navigation, it seems that some of the hardest problems in biology could be solved with the insights from theoretical physics.

The ENCODE project recently announced that much of our genome is not junk, in other words doing nothing. Adam Rutherford reports on the significance of this major discovery.