BBC Inside Science

This week in the US, public discussions are taking place into controversial Gain of Function research. Who should decide the limits of studies where scientists make new, deadlier viruses in the laboratory? Dr Filippa Lentzos, biosecurity expert from King's College, London, lists a litany of accidental security breaches from the past. Should we stop this kind of dangerous research, or encourage it, in the interests of national security?

Mindfulness is a hot topic at the moment. As part of BBC School Report, students from Connaught School for Girls in Leytonstone have tested themselves to see whether meditation helps with their studies. Tracey Logan discusses the scientific research underpinning this trend with psychologist Claudia Hammond.

The Royal Society released a report this week entitled "Parent, Carer, Scientist." The idea is to encourage an environment in research institutions where scientists can have a life as well as a vocation. Professor Ottoline Leyser, Professor of Plant Development and Director of Cambridge University's Sainsbury Laboratory, discusses what needs to change to ensure more female scientists to stay in science.

How do snakes move across sand? BBC science reporter Jonathan Webb meets Perrin Schiebel, at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A physicist, she works with a giant sand pit and high-speed cameras, putting snakes through their paces to unpick how they can push their bodies off the sand without sinking into it.

This week is birthday time for the 3000-strong group of 70 year olds who might qualify for the title of longest-serving science guinea pigs. Participants in The National Survey for Health and Development cohort study have been closely monitored since their birth in 1946. Joining Adam Rutherford to discuss how this and other similar studies have influenced our lives, and what data we should collect on today's babies, are the Head of the National Survey for Health and Development at MRC's Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at University College London, Professor Diana Kuh, and Professor Debbie Lawlor, programme lead at the Medical Research Council's epidemiology unit at Bristol University.

A team of British team has picked up £1 million from The Brain Prize, which is issued by a Danish Charity annually. Tim Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris have won for their work on how memories are formed. BBC science reporter Jonathan Webb is a former neuroscientist and brings us up-to-date with the latest thinking on how we remember.

Finally, grey hair and mono-brows have been all over the news this week with some follicular genetics. A team from UCL assessed the hair types of several thousand Latin Americans and cross-referenced this with their genomes to see what bits of DNA are associated with those characteristics. They found a set of gene variants - or alleles - some known to us, some new, that appear to be part of the reason we have straight hair or curly, bushy brows or mono-brows. Dr Kaustubh Adhikari from UCL is the lead author on the study.

Producer: Jen Whyntie.

Britain faces a referendum on whether to leave Europe. Science, and scientists, often cross borders in collaborations, so what would the implications be for a British exit from the EU? The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee have an ongoing inquiry into how EU membership influences British science. Inside Science condenses the pertinent points.

The stem cells that make up our organs 'know' whether they are 'male' or 'female', and that this sexual identity could influence how they grow and behave. Dr Irene Miguel-Aliaga, at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London, wanted to ask a very basic question: whether it is just the cells of the sex organs of a fully developed organism that 'know' their sexual identity, or whether this is true of cells in other organs too - and whether that matters. It was previously thought that non-reproductive organs are the same in both sexes, and function differently because of the differences in circulating hormones, but her new research suggests that cells know their sex.

At Birmingham University, chemical engineers have built a working prototype of an artificial human colon, the first of its kind. The colon does the last bit of moving your food out of your body, mixing it, squeezing the last few nutrients and excess water out of it. The team want to use it to measure drug delivery to the colon.

Talking with your mouth full is an unattractive trait, but for other, non-human, great apes it is a normal part of meal time. The noises recorded by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology are from the silverback Western lowland Gorilla. Primatologist Eva Luef explains that this humming and singing during meal time is a way of signalling without wasting valuable eating time.

Gravitational waves were announced last week, in what may be the science discovery of the decade. The Ligo detector, the most sensitive instrument on the surface of the planet, detected the ripples given off by the collision of two black holes. Adam Rutherford puts a selection of listener questions to UCL cosmologist Dr Andrew Pontzen.

In March 2015, Campbeltown, Glasgow Prestwick, Stornoway, Newquay, Llanbedr and Leuchars were shortlisted by the government as possible sites for a "cosmodrome" or spaceport. With the UK space industry worth an estimated £40 billion by 2030, various stakeholders met for the UK spaceport conference at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London to discuss the progress of the project. What would the impact be for scientists, industry and the public?

Big brains have traditionally been considered an advantage. Animals with larger brains are better at using tools, working as a social group and assessing how to react to predators. But when Dr Eric Abelson cross referenced relative brain size against the mammals on the endangered list, he found something surprising. Many animals with the bigger brains are threatened within extinction. He talks to Adam about why that may be.

Tim Cockerill, ecologist and adventurer, returns from Papua New Guinea to discuss how one group of indigenous people have decided to work with scientists in order to conserve and study their local environment.

The universe is silent no longer - physicists at the LIGO observatory have detected gravitational waves.

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, with its giant laser beam arms totalling 5 miles across the remote Hanford desert, is the largest lab on the surface of the planet. It was constructed in the Columbia Basin region of south-eastern Washington specifically to detect gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of space-time.

First predicted a century ago by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves are produced by exotic cosmic events, such as when 2 black holes collide. Scientists have hunted for them for decades with increasingly sensitive equipment. The laser beam tubes of the observatory have proved sensitive enough to detect the signal from deep space as small as a thousandth the diameter of a proton.

Tracey and studio guest Dr Andrew Pontzen from UCL examine the science of gravitational waves, and how LIGO is both an eye and an ear on the motion of distant objects. They scrutinise the cutting-edge technology, which has to be of almost unimaginable sensitivity to enable detection of some of the universe's most dramatic events.

Inside Science also shines a spotlight on the passion of individuals who have worked for nearly three decades on a single science experiment, inventing a whole new branch of physics in order to prove the last piece of Einstein's theory of general relativity, and to "hear" the universe in a whole new way.

Some much-needed good news for our troubled bees and other pollinators: between 1998 and 2007, the amount of nectar produced from Britain's flowering plants rose by 25%. A new study suggests this may be due to reductions in atmospheric pollution. But researchers looked at records spanning over 80 years, and also found that the UK flowers which provide nectar suffered substantial losses during the 20th century. Considering the services that nectar-feeding pollinators perform for agriculture and our ecosystems, this is something worth knowing. Professor Jane Memmott, ecologist at the University of Bristol, explains how bad things really are for Britain's pollinators and what lessons conservation could learn from her team's latest findings about nectar.

In 2014, neuroscientist Dr Phil Kennedy flew to Belize and paid a surgeon to insert electrodes into his otherwise healthy brain, in order to experiment on himself. His aim was to unpick the electrical signals given from his brain during speech. BBC science reporter Jonathan Webb went to his lab in Georgia, US to meet the maverick. Jonathan and Tracey discuss the motivation, scientific outcome and ethics behind Dr Kennedy's highly unusual experiment.

The aim of hologram technology, according to Birmingham University researchers, is to make it cheaper, faster and better. Holographic tattoos are a solution they are developing. Currently, holograms are made with lasers and mirrors. Roland Pease went to visit researchers Dr Haider Butt, Bader Al Qattan and Rajib Ahmed in order to make his very own hologram.

On 4th February 50 years ago, the Soviet lander Lunar 9 sent a signal back from the moon. Scientists at Jodrell Bank intercepted this and realised that it sounded like a picture image. Professor of Astrophysics at Manchester University Tim O'Brien explains how, with the help of a fax machine borrowed from the Daily Express, British scientists scooped the first pictures of the moon's surface.

The Zika virus is dominating the news this week. The latest data says it's been found in 21 countries so far. The symptoms are generally mild, but the possibility of a link to microcephaly has been raised in Brazil. Microcephaly is a serious condition where children are born with abnormally small heads and sometimes incomplete brain development. Trudie Lang, Professor of Global Health at Oxford University, and virologist Professor Jonathan Ball from Nottingham University discuss what we know so far.

All the way from Antarctica our reporter Victoria Gill brings us the latest news about the citizen science project 'Penguin Watch'. Victoria installed new cameras with Dr Tom Hart and collected guano with Hila Levy. Gemma Clucas (Oxford and Southampton University) gives an update on what will happen with the collected data.

Back in October we featured a major paper by a team of scientists lead by Dr Andrea Manica from Cambridge University. By comparing the 4500 year-old genome of a prehistoric man called Mota to other genomes from living Africans they had mapped a migration of Middle Eastern farmers back into the whole African continent. This week, colleagues identified an error in the way the original team had processed the data, thus overturning one of the key results. But the rest of the findings remain intact. Andrea talks to us about how and why science must make corrections along the path of progress.

Heard a few stories about giant dinosaur fossils lately? Usually the giant A-list superstar fossils get all the attention. But according to curator Mark Carnall, about 90% of the collections are mainly uninteresting specimens. Marnie Chesterton went out to meet Mark at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford. He celebrates fragmentary fossils in his blog 'Underwhelming Fossil Fish of the Month'. Warning: Lower your expectations!

Producer: Jen Whyntie

Our ability to extract DNA from old bones is improving, giving us a much clearer picture of who our ancestors were, and what they did. Two new papers out this week in Nature Communications are filling in some gaps in our knowledge of the history of Britain. One of the pieces of research - led by Professor Dan Bradley from Trinity College Dublin - examines DNA from individuals who died in northeast England at the beginning of the first millennium of the current era. The other paper analyses the genomes of East Anglian people who lived at a similar and slightly later time, and the lead author is Dr Stephan Schiffels. He worked at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge at the time of this research, and is now based at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Professor Mark Thomas from University College London is a co-author on Dan Bradley's paper and joins Adam Rutherford to discuss this research in the context of its rapidly changing field.

Concorde flew its first commercial flight on the 21st January 1976. To mark its 40th birthday, Concorde engineer Christopher Mitchell and Concorde pilot David Rowland talk about the extraordinary aeroplane's scientific and engineering legacy.

What looked like an innocent rocky outcrop in the Argentinian desert turned out to be something completely different: An eight foot long femur, belonging to the world's largest dinosaur. Ben Garrod is one of the team who has put together this as yet unnamed behemoth. He talks us through the extraordinary discovery and journey to investigate a new species - and it's only just beginning. The work has been documented as part of the TV programme 'Attenborough & the Giant Dinosaur', due to air at 6.30pm this Sunday 24th Jan on BBC One.

Finally, today's headlines indicate that we might have been missing something fairly substantial in our very own solar system: A new ninth planet. However, as BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos tells us, this isn't yet confirmed. With Dr Ellen Stofan, NASA Chief Scientist.

Producer: Jen Whyntie.

The 100,000 Genome Project aims to sequence the DNA of 100,000 patients. One of those patients is four-year-old Georgia Walburn-Green. Her symptoms did not fit into any known disease category. Prof Maria Bitner-Glindzicz at University College London used early results from the 100,000 Genome project to diagnose Georgia's condition.

Roland Pease reports on helping stem cells survive using a kind of 'blood paint'. By dipping the cells in myoglobin, researchers at Bristol University have found a way to improve both the vigour and survival of stem cells.

The expanding nuclear programme in the UK will continue to produce nuclear waste - in lower volumes than previously produced, but we already have a large stockpile that has already been produced over the last 50 years. Countries around the world are facing a similar challenge: What do we do with the waste? Dame Sue Ion, engineer and expert advisor to the nuclear industry, discusses common practices and alternative approaches to nuclear waste disposal.

Many dinosaurs had big, iconic features like frills, plates, horns and spines that may have been tools or weapons, but Dr David Hone's (Queen Mary University of London) research on the small, herbivorous dinosaur Protoceratops andrewsi reveals that they may also serve another purpose in the dinosaur society: sexual selection. Could these features be what attracts one dinosaur to another?

Producer: Deborah Cohen and Jen Whyntie

El Niño is releasing vast quantities of heat normally stored in the Pacific, causing floods, droughts and fires. Adam Rutherford discusses the latest with our El Niño expert Roland Pease.

This weather event arrives every 2-7 years but it's hard to work out how profound it will be. Back in May last year, the Met Office climate scientist Adam Scaife correctly predicted an El Niño. He returns to give an overview of this phenomenon.

How does an altered weather pattern in the Pacific end up altering the weather in Cumbria. Tim Stockdale at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Richard Allan at Reading University explain the science behind the current events.

The rains are coming to drought-ridden California as a result of El Niño. Jack Stewart explains why this is not entirely a good thing.

Professor Sue Page from Leicester University and Professor Martin Wooster from KCL study the Indonesian fires exacerbated by an El Niño event. They describe the devastating effects of these fires. An estimated 15,000 death can be attributed to the previous El Niño burning and it has added 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.