Frontiers

Virtual Therapy Dec 24, 2014

"e-Therapy" has come a long way since the (slightly tongue in cheek) days of ELIZA, a very early attempt at computer based psychotherapy. ELIZA was little more than an algorithm that spotted patterns in words and returned empty, yet meaningful-sounding questions back at the user.

All sorts of e-therapies are now available to help low-moderate level mental health issues.

But could Virtual Reality technology bring the next great leap in our understanding of mental processes, and, in turn, be the basis of future psychotherapies? Quentin Cooper meets some of the researchers trying to find out.

Can Maths Combat Terrorism? Dec 23, 2014

Dr Hannah Fry investigates the hidden patterns behind terrorism and asks whether mathematics could be used to predict the next 9/11.

When computer scientists decided to study the severity and frequency of 30,000 terrorist attacks worldwide, they found an distinctive pattern hiding in the data.

Even though the events spanned 5,000 cities in 187 countries over 40 years, every single attack fitted neatly onto a curve, described by an equation known as a 'power law'.

Now this pattern is helping mathematicians and social scientists understand the mechanisms underlying global terrorism.

Could these modelling techniques be used to predict if, and when, another attack the size of 9/11 will occur?

Producer: Michelle Martin.

Animal Personality Dec 10, 2014

Professor Adam Hart explores the newest area in the science of animal behaviour - the study of personality variation within species as diverse as chimpanzees, wandering albatrosses, sharks and sea anemones. What can this fresh field of zoology tells us about the variety of personality among humans?

We are all familiar with the variety of temperament and character in the dog, Canis lupus familiaris, but this is the product of selective breeding by humans over generations.

A more surprising revelation is that up and down the animal kingdom, Nature favours a mix of personality types within a species. Oxford ornithologists working in nearby Wytham Woods have discovered that in a small bird species such as the Great tit, both bold and shy individuals prosper in different ways. The same applies to hermit crabs and sea anemones in the rock pools along the South Devon coast. In these creatures, scientists see a stripped down equivalent of the Extraversion-Introversion dimension of human personality. In sharks, researchers have discovered that there are sociable individuals and others who prefer their own company.

Human personality is generally tested with questionnaires. Animals have to be assessed by more indirect, arguably more objective methods. Techniques range from squirting rock pool creatures with syringes of water to pushing a blue spacehopper with a stick towards a nesting Wandering Albatross.

The commonest personality trait identified so far in non-human animals is Extraversion-Introversion. In primates, personality variation is more multidimensional. Psychologists have agreed on five fundamental dimensions of human personality - Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism and Conscientiousness. Among different monkey and ape species, primatologists have documented variation in 3 or more of these traits. In fact, in chimpanzees, they have discovered the Big Five plus an additional personality dimension which we humans lack, fortunately.

Adam Hart asks if how relevant the recent discoveries in animal personality research are to understanding the nature of personality in people, and whether this is an aspect of human nature which is still undergoing evolution.

Adam Hart is an evolutionary ecologist and Professor of science communication at the University of Gloucestershire.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Image credit: Nicole Milligan

Vagus Nerve Dec 08, 2014

Many people are living with chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel conditions in which the body attacks itself. Although drug treatments have improved over recent years they do not work for everyone and can have serious side effects.

Now researchers such as neurologist Dr Kevin Tracey of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, and rheumatologist Professor Paul-Peter Tak of Amsterdam University, are trying a new approach to improving the lives of these patients. They are firing electrical pulses along the vagus nerve, a major nerve that connects the brain with all the organs. The technology to do this has been around for some decades as stimulating the vagus nerve has been used to help people who have epilepsy that isn't controlled with drugs since the 1990s.

Gaia Vince talks to these pioneers of this new field of research. And she hears how there may be ways of improving the tone of the vagal nerve using meditation.

New Space to Fly Dec 03, 2014

As our skies become more crowded Jack Stewart examines the long awaited modernisation of air traffic control. With traffic predicted to reach 17 million by 2030 more flights will mean more delays. For many a new approach to controlling flights is long overdue since aircraft still follow old and often indirect routes around the globe, communication between the ground and air is still by VHF radio, and any flexibility is heavily constrained by a fragmented airspace operated by many national authorities.

Jack Stewart examines how aviation technologists have come up with a radical solution: it enables pilots once airborne, to choose their own route. "Free Routing ", it's argued, will allow more direct flights, no planes to be caught up in holding patterns, reduced fuel emissions and flights departing and arriving on time. Crucially, free routing will enable a tripling of flights than currently we're capable of controlling.

But will the ability of pilots to choose their own routes increase the risk of collision? Researchers argue it will in fact produce even safer skies. Jack Stewart visits NATS air traffic control centre that annually looks after the safety of over 2 million over British airspace to hear how such a system could evolve.

Jack finds out how free routing could work from the engineers at Indra UK - who're trialling such a system in airspace controlled by the NATS Prestwick air traffic control centre. In a new approach they're turning "reactive" air traffic control into a more strategic approach with computer designed flight trajectories utilizing much of the currently underused satellite navigation that is fitted on modern aircraft. It will enable aircraft to be safely spaced closer together and at the same time predict potential "conflicts" of spacing much further ahead of the routes being taken, leaving less room for human error.

And as automation begins to play a greater role in all aspects of flight planning and control is the era of pilotless planes moving a step closer?

Producer: Adrian Washbourne

The Rosetta Mission Nov 12, 2014

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to 67P/Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko reached its most dramatic moment on 12th November. BBC News correspondent Jonathan Amos has covered the event for a special edition of Radio 4's 'Frontiers' programme.

In August, the Rosetta spacecraft was the first to go into orbit around a comet; its images of the extraordinarily rugged landscape of this 4 kilometre space mountain of ice and space dust have already left everyone awestruck. Previous missions have been fleeting fly-bys.

On the day of the landing the orbiting mothercraft released a small robotic probe, named Philae, to fall and land on the cometary surface. It will be the first to sample and analyse directly the make-up of a comet, and photograph a comet's landscape from an explorer's eyeview.

Jonathan Amos presents 'Frontiers' from mission control at the European Space Operations Centre in Germany on the day of the landing.

The probe's deployment is not the final stage of the Rosetta mission. The mothercraft will accompany Comet C-G for the next year as both approach the Sun and then turn back out into deep space. Rosetta will be making measurements all the way as the comet's icy nucleus heats up and produces its great tail of gas and dust. Flying Rosetta as the comet becomes florid will also be a tricky business.

Comets are widely believed to be made of material unchanged since the planets came into existence, 4.5 billion years ago. They represent the original stuff of which planets were built. The Rosetta orbiter's and lander's findings may well tell us whether comets brought water and life's chemical ingredients to get life started on Earth. Jonathan talks to mission scientists and other comet experts about why they want to study comets in such detail and what Rosetta should tell us about comets in their own right as the most spectacular and most enigmatic objects in the solar system.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Cosmology Jul 09, 2014

In March astronomers in the BICEP2 collaboration announced they had found gravitational waves from the Big Bang. But now the evidence is being questioned by other scientists. Dr Lucie Green reports on the debate and asks if scientists can ever know what happened billions of years ago when the universe was formed. Image: The BICEP2 telescope at twilight, which occurs only twice a year at the South Pole. The MAPO observatory (home of the Keck Array telescope) and the South Pole station can be seen in the background. Image copyright: Steffen Richter, Harvard University.

Swarming robots Jul 02, 2014

Adam Hart looks at how new developments in understanding insect behaviour, plant cell growth and sub cellular organisation are influencing research into developing robot swarms.

Biological systems have evolved elegant ways for large numbers of autonomous agents to govern themselves. Staggering colonies built by ants and termites emerge from a decentralized, self-governing system: swarm intelligence. Now, taking inspiration from termites, marine animals and even plants, European researchers are developing autonomous robot swarms, setting them increasingly difficult challenges, such as navigating a maze, searching for an object or surveying an area. At the same time, an American team has announced that its group of robots can autonomously build towers, castles and even a pyramid.

Adam Hart reports on the latest developments in controlling groups of robots, and asks why models taken from the behaviour of social insects such as bees, ants and termites may be far more complex than previously thought. He also delves deep into the cells of plants looking at how the physical and chemical triggers for plant growth might be useful in robot design.

Anaesthesia Jun 25, 2014

General anaesthetics which act to cause reversible loss of consciousness have been used clinically for over 150 years. Yet scientists are only now really understanding how these drugs act on the brain and the body to stop us feeling pain. Linda Geddes reports on the latest research using molecular techniques and brain scanners.

Linda visits the Anaesthesia Heritage Centre where William Harrop-Griffiths, President of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland, tells her about the discovery of agents that knock us out.

As an operation takes place in the Royal United Hospital in Bath, Professor Tim Cook explains the role of the anaesthetist.

Linda talks to Professor Nick Franks of Imperial College, London, about his research into how anaesthetics work at the level of the cell. Irene Tracey, Professor of Anaesthetic Science at Oxford University, discusses how her fMRI scans of people as they slowly undergo anaesthesia have revealed how the brain switches off. Professor Steven Laureys, Head of the Coma Science Group at Liege University in Belgium, explains how understanding anaesthesia can help coma patients and what it tells us about the difficult question of human consciousness.

Power Transmission Jun 18, 2014

Gaia Vince looks at the future of power transmission. As power generation becomes increasingly mixed and demand increases, what does the grid of the future look like?

Ageing and the brain Jun 11, 2014

Geoff Watts investigates the latest thinking about our brain power in old age.

He meets researchers who argue that society has overly negative views of the mental abilities of the elderly - a dismal and fatalistic outlook which is not backed up by recent discoveries and theories.

Geoff talks to Professor Lorraine Tyler who leads a large study in Cambridge (CamCAN) which is comparing cognition and brain structure and function in 700 people aged between 18 and 88 years old.

He also meets scientists and participants involved in an unique study of cognition and ageing at the University of Edinburgh. It has traced hundreds of people who were given a nationwide intelligence test as children in 1932 and 1947. Since the year 2000, the study has been retesting their intelligence and mental agility in their 70s to 90s. The Lothian Birth Cohort study is revealing what we all might do in life to keep our minds fast and sharp well into old age.

One new and controversial idea holds that cognitive decline is in fact a myth. A team in Germany, led by Michael Ramscar, argues that older people perform less well in intelligence and memory tests because they know so much more than younger subjects and not because their brains are deteriorating. Simply put, their larger stores of accumulated knowledge slow their performance. Their brains take longer to retrieve the answers from their richer memory stores.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Driverless cars Jun 04, 2014

Most traffic accidents are caused by human error. Engineers are designing vehicles with built in sensors that send messages to other cars, trucks, bikes and even pedestrians, to prevent collisions happening. The idea is to make the vehicles react to whatever's going on faster than the human drivers.

Jack Stewart drives around the university town of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, in some of the many vehicles that are fitted with experimental devices in the world's largest connected vehicles project. He finds out how the system works from researchers at UMTRI, the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, and Kirk Steudle, Director, Michigan Department of Transportation.

Jack has a ride in Google's driverless car which has no steering wheel and no pedals. Google's Chris Urmson explains the company's approach to autonomous vehicles.

Jack visits Stanford University's driverless car project where Professor Chris Gerdes shows him Shelley, an automated Audi that races around a track at speed as well as a human driver. Chris is collaborating with a philosopher to explore some of the difficult questions around autonomous vehicles, such as who's liable if there's an accident. Is it the human or the car?

Chronotypes Dec 19, 2013

Are you a lark or an owl? Are you at your best in the morning or the evening? Linda Geddes meets the scientists who are exploring the differences between larks and owls. At the University of Surrey's Sleep Research Centre she talks to its director, Professor Derk-Jan Dijk, and finds out her own chronotype by filling in a questionnaire.

Linda discovers why we have circadian rhythms and why they don't all run at the same rate. Dr Louis Ptacek from the University of California, San Francisco, explains his investigation of the genes of families whose members get up very early in the morning and of those who get up very late.

She finds out why our sleep patterns change as we age - teenagers really aren't good at getting up in the morning. Professor Mary Carskadon from Brown University explains that although some schools have experimented with a later start there is no plan to put this into universal practice.

Linda talks to Professor Til Roenneberg from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich about his concept of social jetlag. And she hears about research trying to reduce the exhaustion often suffered by shift workers. Dr Steve Lockley of Harvard University tells her about using blue light to improve the wellbeing of people with medical conditions.

Geo-engineering Dec 11, 2013

Geoengineering is a controversial approach to dealing with climate change. Gaia Vince explores putting chemicals in the stratosphere to stop solar energy reaching the earth.

When volcanoes erupt they put sulphur in the stratosphere. The particles reflect solar rays back into space and the planet cools down. Scientists are suggesting that it could be possible to put sulphur into the stratosphere using specialised aircraft or a very long pipe. But if this was implemented there could be impacts on rainfall and the ozone layer.

Another idea is to spray seawater to whiten clouds that would reflect more energy away from the earth.

Gaia Vince talks to the researchers who are considering solar radiation management. She also hears from social scientists who are finding out what the public think about the idea and who are asking who should make decisions about implementing this way of cooling the planet.

Nitrogen Fixing Dec 04, 2013

3.5 billion people are alive today because of a single chemical process. The Haber-Bosch process takes Nitrogen from the air and makes ammonia, from which synthetic fertilizers allow farmers to feed our massive population.

Ammonia is a source of highly reactive nitrogen, suitable not just for fertilizer but also as an ingredient in bomb making and thousands of other applications.

Now we make around 100 million tonnes of ammonia annually, and spread most of it on our fields.

But this is a very inefficient way to use what amounts to 1-2% of the planet's energy needs. Only around 20% of fertilizer made ends up in our food.

Prof. Andrea Sella explores some of the alternative ways we might make fertilizer.

Legumes, such as peas and beans, allow certain cells in their roots to become infected by a specific type of bacteria. In return, these bacteria provide them with their own fertilizer.

Could we infect the plants we want to grow for food - such as cereals - in a similar way to cut down the climatic and environmental impact of Haber-Bosch?

Self-Healing Materials Nov 27, 2013

Quentin Cooper takes a look at the new materials that can mend themselves. Researchers are currently developing bacteria in concrete which, once awakened, excrete lime to fill any cracks. In South America you can choose a car paint that heals its own scratches. And there are even gold atoms which can migrate to mend tiny breaks in jet turbine blades.

Engineers normally design things so the likelihood of breaking is minimised. But by embracing the inevitability of breakage, a new class of materials which can mend cracks and fissures before you can see them may extend the lives of our cars, engines, buildings and aeroplanes far beyond current capability.

The Power of the Unconscious Nov 20, 2013

We like to think that we are in control of our lives, of what we do, think and feel. But, as Geoff Watts discovers, scientists are now revealing that this is just an illusion.

A simple magic trick reveals just how limited our conscious awareness of the world is, and how easy it is to fool us.

So if our conscious brain can cope with so little, what is responsible for the rest? Science is starting to reveal the crucial role of a silent partner inside our heads, that we are completely unaware of - our unconscious.

In this programme, Geoff enlists the help of not just brain scientists, but a conjuror and a musician to reveal the pivotal role the unconscious plays in pretty much everything we do, think and feel. This new-found knowledge is enabling scientists to harness its powers for both medical and military benefit.

Gut Microbiota Nov 13, 2013

What is it about the microbes in our guts that can have such an impact on our lives?

The human gut has around 100 trillion bacterial cells from up to 1,000 different species. Every person's microbiota (the body's bacterial make-up) is different as a result of the effects of diet and lifestyle, and the childhood source of bacteria.

Scientists are learning more and more about the importance of these bacteria, as well as the viruses, fungi and other microbes that live in our gastrointestinal tracts. Without them, our digestion, immune system and overall health would be compromised.

Adam Hart talks to researchers who are discovering how important a balanced and robust gut microflora is for our health. And he asks how this can be maintained and what happens when things go wrong.

Oxytocin Jul 17, 2013

The hormone oxytocin is involved in mother and baby bonding and in creating trust. Linda Geddes finds out if taking oxytocin can help people with autism become more sociable.

Larry Young, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, talks about the work in voles that demonstrated the role of oxytocin in pair bonding.

Professor Markus Heinrichs of Freiburg University in Germany tells Linda Geddes about doing the first research on oxytocin in human subjects. He was one of the authors of an influential paper on the hormone and trust, published in Nature in 2005.

As journalists for New Scientist, Linda and her husband, Nic, invited one of the other authors of that paper, Professor Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University in California, to carry out an oxytocin experiment at their wedding.

At Cambridge University, Dr Bonnie Auyeung, is currently carrying out studies to find out if giving the hormone to adults with autism can improve their social skills.

And Professor Jennifer Bartz, from McGill University in Canada, explains how some research suggests that oxytocin doesn't always make people be more trusting and loving. She says the outcome depends on your previous relationship with the person.

Crossrail - Tunnelling under London Jul 10, 2013

Tracey Logan goes underground to find out how Crossrail is using the latest engineering techniques to create 26 miles of tunnels below London's tube network, sewers and foundations and through its erratic, sometimes unpredictable geology. She finds out about the latest science being used in Europe's biggest engineering project.

London sits on a varied geology of deposits of fine-grained sand, flint gravel beds, mottled clay, shelly beds which are sometimes mixed with pockets of water. This sheer variety has presented a challenge to London's tunnel engineers since the early 1800s.

Tracey goes on board one of the huge, 150 metre long, 1000 tonne tunnel boring machines as it makes its way beneath London's Oxford Street. At depths of up to 40 metres it can negotiate London's complex geology with incredible precision and can instantly adjust the pressure it applies at the cutting head to ensure there is no ground movement above.

Its precision engineering means it also follows a route which avoids the many existing foundations, sewers, and the tube network, sometimes travelling just centimetres past the London underground tunnels.

Tracey also finds out how unexploded ordnance from World War II still has to be carefully accounted for while digging beneath the capital.

The tunnel boring machines operate nearly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and so even has an onboard kitchen and bathroom facilities for the 20 or so operators who make up its 'tunnel gang'.

Plate Tectonics and Life Jul 03, 2013

Earthquakes are feared for their destructive, deadly force. But they are part of a geological process, plate tectonics, that some scientists say is vital for existence of life itself. Without the ever-changing land surfaces that plate tectonics produces , or the high continental masses raised above sea level by earthquake activity, planet Earth would atrophy into a lifeless mass like our neighbour Mars. But why is Earth the only planet with plate tectonics? And when did they start. The clues are so faint, the traces so ephemeral, that researchers are only now beginning to find tentative answers. And extraordinarily, some say that life itself has changed the forces in plate tectonics, and helped to shape the world.

Whatever happened to biofuels? Jun 26, 2013

Whatever happened to biofuels? They were seen as the replacement for fossil fuels until it was realised they were being grown on land that should have been used for food crops. But now there is serious research into new ways of producing biofuels, from waste materials, from algae and from bacteria.

Gaia Vince takes to the water of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland where Professor Matthew Dring and Dr Karen Mooney from Queens University, Belfast, are experimenting in growing algae that could be turned into fuel. She visits Professor Alison Smith's algae lab at Cambridge University. Graham Ellis from Solazyme in California explains how his company has already made fuel from algae that has been sold at the pumps and powered a plane, in a mixture with conventional fuel. And Professor Nick Turner at Manchester University and Professor John Love at Exeter University talk about how they are manipulating bacteria to make diesel.

19/06/2013 Jun 19, 2013

England's chief medical officer recently warned that within twenty years, the spread of antibiotic resistance may have returned us to an almost 19th century state of medicine. Infections following routine operations will be untreatable and fatal because so many common bacteria will have acquired immunity to all the available antibiotic drugs.

The vast majority of the antibiotics we rely upon today were developed between the 1940s and 1970s. There has been no new class of antibiotic for 25 years.

A radically different approach to dealing with bacteria would be stop them from communicating and coordinating their attacks, rather than trying to kill them. The bugs would be rendered harmless and much less likely to develop drug resistance.

This is the hope of researchers who are working on an aspect of bacterial life known as Quorum Sensing. Bacteria may just be single-celled organisms but microbiologists now realise they have a kind of social life. They need to cooperate and coordinate their attacks on the bodies they infect.

Many kinds of bacteria only become dangerous to us when they sense that their numbers are high enough. Only when they 'know' that there are enough of them to overwhelm human defences, do they release their toxins and cause illness and death.

They monitor the number of their fellow bugs by sensing the concentration of a message molecule which they all manufacture and secrete into the environment. It's a rudimentary form of communication which many bacteria use to synchronise their activities.

In Frontiers, Geoff Watts talks to scientist and doctors who are exploring this phenomenon in disease-causing bacteria, and trying to devise ways of interfering with the microbial communications. One line of thinking is the development of drugs which stop the microbes from either 'talking' or 'hearing' the chemical messages.

Another more radical idea is to treat infected patients with doses of the kind of bacteria causing the illness - except that the 'medicinal' bugs would be ones that would subvert the communication system and bring the infection to an end. At least, that is the theory.

Build Me a Brain Jun 14, 2013

When President Obama recently complained, that although "we can identify galaxies light years away, study particles smaller than an atom ... we still haven't unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears" - he called on scientists to unravel the trillions of neural connections inside our brains that make our minds work.

Some researchers are already doing that - trying to understand the brain by starting to build one. At Reading University, at the newly constructed Brain Embodiment Laboratory, researchers plan to connect cultures of living human neurons to robots to give meaning to their neural activity. At Georgia Tech, Atlanta, neuroengineer Steve Potter agrees that cultured neurons not connected to the outside world suffer sensory deprivation. His neural arrays descend into spasms of epileptic activity when left alone. When plugged in, they can control machines across the planet.

"I believe these cultures are half-way to having a mind," says Potter. "Wired up to listen to their own outputs, they could be self aware."

Other researchers are building brains from inanimate materials - using tendrils of silver, silicon and sulphur that spring into life like activity when wired up to electricity. At Stanford University, plans are afoot to meld them with living neurons - perhaps to enhance our thought processes.

These devices can learn, remember and process information - but do they think? Can these scientists really build a brain? And what would it tell us about ours if they could?

Forensic Phonetics Dec 12, 2012

Many crimes are planned, executed and sometimes gloated over using mobile phones. And the move to digital means that recordings are cheap and easy to make for the criminals themselves, as well as for their victims and witnesses.

Ranging from death threats left on voicemails and hoax 999 calls to fraudulent calls to banks and conversations between terrorists, phoneticians analyse the minute acoustic components of the human voice to determine not only what was said but to create a profile of the culprit, or work out if a suspect's voice matches the voice in the criminal recording.

While it's not possible to identify a unique 'voiceprint', as it is with fingerprints and DNA, speech scientists are developing new ways of teasing out the distinctive characteristics in human speech to improve their ability to identify a particular speaker.

Forensic audio specialists can now determine with surprising accuracy whether a digital recording has been tampered with, and when exactly it was made. The gentle 'hum', that is constantly emitted from electrical power sources, is embedded in digital recordings. So by extracting this 'hum', which is emitted in a random pattern, forensic scientists can now pinpoint the date and time of the recording.

Rebecca Morelle looks at some of the new research in this growing area of forensics, including the credibility of ear witness accounts and whether it's possible to distinguish hoax 999 calls from genuine ones.

This branch of forensics has played a crucial role in a number of high profile cases, including the conviction of John Humble as the hoax caller claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper, and identifying the mystery cougher who tried to defraud the gameshow 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'.

Producer: Beth Eastwood.

05/12/2012 Dec 06, 2012

A decade ago, the Human Genome Project revealed that only 1% of our DNA codes for the proteins that make our bodies. The rest of the genome, it was said, was junk, in other words with no function. But in September another massive international project, called ENCODE, announced that the junk DNA is useful after all. Adam Rutherford reports on the significance of this major discovery.

He visits the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute outside Cambridge where the vast amount of data about our genome is produced and analysed. And he finds out how this new information is beginning to give insights into the origin and treatment of diseases, such as cancer.

Adam also discovers that the study of genomes has changed dramatically since he finished his PhD: it's now all done in machines and not at the lab bench.

Brain Machine Interfaces Nov 28, 2012

Can reading the mind allow us to use thought control to move artificial limbs?

Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, is one of the world's leading researchers into using the mind to control machines. One of his aims is to build a suit that a quadriplegic person can wear and control so that he or she can kick a football at the opening of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. His lab is working on ways of providing a sense of touch to these limbs so that the prosthetics feel more like a part of a person's body and less like an artificial appendage. Geoff Watts visits Nicolelis' laboratory to see just how near we are to achieving his aim on the football pitch.

Anthropocene Nov 21, 2012

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.

Science writer Gaia Vince looks at the impact of these planetary transformations from the perspective of geological time. When was the last time comparable events happened in Earth history, and are what are the key marks we're making on the planet that define the Anthropocene?

Gaia explores the distinctive fossil record we will leave behind on the planet. Leading biologists and palaeontologists say this that will mark out the Anthropocene as a distinctive chapter in Earth history - on a par with the evidence of the mass extinction which took out the dinosaurs and launched a geological era 65 million years ago. "This time, we are the asteroid," says Berkeley's Antony Barnosky. Extinction rates around the world are approaching those estimated for times in the deep past when most species became extinct.

Far future fossil hunters may also discover a weirdly large number of large-sized fossil mammal species bones in the rocks of our times. Even more unnaturally, they come from just a tiny handful of species and they will be in the strata across every continent- a geological representation of billions of domestic livestock and the billions of people they fed.

Some of our cities may also be preserved as 'artificial' layers of rock in the geological record. They will be like no other strata before in the history of the Earth. But what would a fossilised metropolis - with its concrete and glass buildings and underground train tunnels and sewers - look like in ten million years?

Why do women live longer than men? Nov 14, 2012

In the UK today, male life expectancy is 78 years old, whereas women will on average live four years longer.

Evolutionary biologist Dr Yan Wong looks at the latest evidence suggesting that where ageing is concerned, men seem to be at a genetic disadvantage. From research on ancient Korean eunuchs to laboratory fruit flies, new studies seek the answer to why males across the animal kingdom live faster and die younger.

So, is the gender gap here to stay?

Future of Particle Physics Nov 07, 2012

Finding the Higgs boson on July 4th was the last piece in physicists' Standard model of matter. But Tracey Logan discovers there's much more for them to find out at the Large Hadron Collider. To start with there is a lot of work to establish what kind of Higgs boson it is.

Tracey visits CERN and an experiment called LHCb which is trying to find out why there's a lot more matter than anti-matter in the universe today. Dr Tara Shears of Liverpool University is her guide.

Tracey also talks to physicists who are hoping to find dark matter in the debris of the collisions at the LHC. Scientists know there's plenty of dark matter in the universe, from its effects on galaxies, but they don't know what it is. Tracey discovers that this fact isn't stopping the particle physicists carrying out experiments.

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