Discovery

2012 Nobel Prize winner, John Gurdon, on cloning a frog decades before Dolly the Sheep

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Jared Diamond about his journey from the gall bladder to global history via a passion for the birds of Papua New Guinea.

Jim Al-Khalili meets science showman Andrea Sella and discovers how his theatrical chemistry demonstrations are thrilling audiences.

Evolutionary biologist Dr Yan Wong asks whether men are at a biological disadvantage when it comes to life expectancy

The most notorious fraud in the history of Science is the focus of this week’s programme. 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 December 1912 it was a sensational find. In 1953 it was revealed as just a horrible hoax. Jonathan Amos talks to palaeontologists and archaeologists about the case of Piltdown Man and asks, could anything as scientifically scandalous happen today?

Finding the Higgs boson was the last piece in physicists' model of matter. But Tracey Logan discovers there's much more for them to find out at the Large Hadron Collider.

Kevin Fong talks to one of the last two men on the moon, forty years after the final Apollo 17 mission launched on 7th December 1972. As an Apollo astronaut, Harrison Schmitt was special. He was the only scientist ever to visit the lunar surface. The field work Dr Schmitt did among the craters, and the rocks he and his fellow astronauts brought back, transformed our knowledge of the Moon and the Earth. Harrison Schmitt also shares the human experience of running around another planet and explains why he thinks we should go back, and beyond.

The science behind hallucination.

The culture and science of hallucination.

Gaia Vince concludes her journey through the geological age humans have launched. After climate change and mass extinction, she now explores how cities, manufactured artefacts (from plastic bottles to mobile phones) and chemical pollution 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-future geologist would recognise them as strange features unique in the planet’s 4 billion year rock record, and as evidence of a planetary shift into the new time period, which today’s geologists call the Anthropocene.

Earth scientists say humanity’s impact on the Earth’s animals and plants is so profound that we have started a new geological time period on the planet. They call it, the Anthropocene. The accelerating extinctions of animal and plant species: the rearing of agricultural animals in their billions: and, what some describe as, the general ‘macdonaldisation’ of life on Earth. All three factors will leave striking evidence in the fossil record in the limestones and sandstones, forming on the Earth’s surface today. Millions of years in the future, a geologist chipping at the rocks of our times might conclude that something in the world happened as big as the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Gaia Vince presents.

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 are in the process of transforming the planet on such a scale that humanity has shifted Earth history into a new geological epoch. Millions of years from now, scientists will be able to read the rocks forming now and see that something profound and unprecedently rapid - from sea level rise to dissolving coral reefs. Drawing from similar episodes in Earth history, leading geoscientists warn of a global blanket of oxygen-starved muds, extinctions of much marine life and a sea level 20 metres higher than today's.

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’s researchers. In this four part series, science journalist Gaia Vince looks at the impact of our planetary transformations from the perspective of geological time. When was the last time comparable events happened in Earth history, and are what are the tell-tale marks we’re making on the planet that define the Anthropocene?

Geoff Watts discovers how new medical drugs will be developed, and the answer is collaboration between big pharma and academia.

Geoff Watts asks why the source of new medical drugs is drying up.