Discovery

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Scott's Legacy: Programme 3 - Mars Apr 30, 2012

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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.

Scott's Legacy: Programme 2 - Moon Apr 23, 2012

Show notes

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 that a Mars sized planet crashed into the early Earth. The molten rock that was blasted into orbit by that collision coalesced as our lunar neighbour.

Sending astronauts back to explore the rocks of the Moon could solve the most important mysteries about the early Earth - when did life first evolve and under what sort of conditions? Their findings could also settle the questions about the origins of our oceans here on Earth .

Among Kevin's other interviewee are NASA's Chief Administrator Charles Bolden, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt (the only geologist to walk on the Moon), NASA scientists Chris McKay and Jennifer Heldmann, Dr Ian Crawford of Birbeck College, University of London and space historian Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institute.

Scott's Legacy: Programme 1 - Antarctica Apr 16, 2012

Show notes

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 Antarctica was once a balmy forested place.

They mapped the magnetism around the South Pole for both science and navigators.

They found many new species of animals and revealed the extraordinary winter breeding habits of the penguins.

The dedication to scientific discovery is most poignantly revealed by fossils that Scott's party collected after their disappointment of being beaten by Amundsen and a few weeks before they froze to death trudging across the Ross ice shelf.

They found a particular plant fossil which had been one of the Holy Grails on the early explorations of Antarctica's interior.

Its discovery proved an hypothesis raised by Darwin among others that all the southern continents were once linked together by a landmass that would lain where Antarctica is today.

The fossils were also important evidence to support the new and controversial theory of Continental Drift - a theory which now underpins the entirety of modern Earth science.

(Image: Historical image of the team of the Terra Nova Expedition standing by a Norwegian tent at the South Pole. Credit: Science Photo Library)

Titanic - In Her Own Words Apr 09, 2012

Show notes

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, the network of young Marconi wireless operators on different ships and land stations frantically communicated with each other across the cold expanses of the North Atlantic in an effort to mount a rescue for the doomed vessel.

All these messages were recorded at the time in copper-plate handwriting, now scattered across the world in different collections, but together forming a unique archive.

Conceived and created by Susanne Weber.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

The Human Race: Global Body - Sydney Apr 02, 2012

Show notes

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 Robyn Norton, Director of the George Institute and Professor of public health at the University of Sydney and Professor of Global Health and James Martin Professorial Fellow, University of Oxford.

(Image: Computer artwork of the blood circulation system in a human figure. Credit: Science Photo Library)

The Human Race: Global Body - Los Angeles Mar 26, 2012

Show notes

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 this huge city?

It's a city with a long history of immigrants settling from all over the world.

Lynne Malcolm explores how some of these inhabitants have adapted biologically to their new environment over time, and what the impact is on their health and bodies.

BBC Correspondent, Valeria Perasso, discovers however, that it's not all good news, with obesity on the rise in the city and there are also massive discrepancies in the standards of health, and quality of life amongst its inhabitants.

(Image: a female face surrounded by a distorted DNA autoradiogram. Credit: Science Photo Library)

The Human Race: The Global Body - Manila Mar 19, 2012

Show notes

Lured by the bright lights, or driven from the countryside by political and economic turmoil, population pressures, and environmental vulnerability, billions of people have been migrating to the cities in the developing world.

The BBC's correspondent in Manila Kate McGeown, discovers what happens to our human bodies when we leave the fields and shorelines and head into the big city.

She reports back to Lynne, how traffic, pollution, smoking, overcrowding and lack of affordable fresh food is sparking an epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and cancers.

Often outweighing the benefits of higher wages, better access to healthcare and education.

The Human Race: The Global Body - Sri Lanka Mar 12, 2012

Show notes

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 of Sri Lanka to see what life is like for fishermen and to the mountains where people live off the variety of crops they grow for themselves. These populations are pretty healthy. But he also discovers that some of the rural inhabitants – the tea pickers – have a much harder time.

There’s a report on how an inherited disease, thalassaemia, that makes people debilitated, and is quite common amongst Asian people is treated in Sri Lanka. And the programme discovers that thalassaemia survives because it confers resistance to malaria.

(Image: Conceptual computer artwork of a male figure seen against autoradiograms of genetic sequences. Credit: Science Photo Library)

Fukushima nuclear accident Mar 05, 2012

Show notes

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 going on - in many cases people evacuated to areas with higher radiation levels than those they fled.

As a result, deep mistrust developed towards government or TEPCO pronouncements on the nuclear incident.

In this special one hour edition of Discovery Mariko Oi, visits the Fukushima prefecture to find out what has happened since.

She meets scientists working to piece together an accurate picture of the effects of the radioactive fall out, both on the environment and human health.

She hears from local community grassroots organisations, many people living in fear of radiation, they argue for a mass clean up operation to reduce radiation levels to zero and further evacuations, especially of children.

Mariko examines the current decontamination efforts, which involve removing and disposing of huge quantities of soil and concrete contaminated with caesium 137 – a radioactive isotope which can persist in the environment for 30 years or more.

The programme questions whether attempting to remove such contamination is really effective - or even necessary, and contrasts the fears of radiation with the scientific reality.

(Image: A journalist watching stricken Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant at Okuma town in Fukushima prefecture. Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Episode 2 Feb 27, 2012

Show notes

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 Mapping, and has just completed the most detailed survey ever of the Mariana Trench, using sonar.

Alan Jamieson, an ecologist at Oceanlab at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, uses remote controlled submersibles to study the animals and plants that live at extreme pressure in the deepest parts of the oceans.

He tells Rebecca why he believes it is preferable to deploy robots rather than humans to do this research.

Legendary marine biologist and underwater explorer, Sylvia Earle, argues that it is essential for us to visit the depths of the ocean and see the extraordinary environment with our own eyes.

As the former science chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA - the ocean's equivalent of NASA - Sylvia Earle says that the seas have always been the poor relation to space.

Rebecca finds out from Bill Raggio of precision glass company Rayotek in San Diego, how to build a glass sphere for Triton submarines which will stop the three-man crew from being crushed by the pressure a the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

And Sandra Brook from the Marine Conservation Biology Society talks about how research scientists may work with the commercial teams, like Triton, in the future as resources dry up for purely research submersibles.

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