Brainwaves on ME. A story of confusion, misunderstanding, misdirection, misdiagnosis and misery.

What role will robots play in our lives in the future? We already interact with robots on a daily basis but with the development of intelligent, free-thinking robots our relationship with them will change.

Sethu Vijayakumar, Professor of Robotics at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and judge on BBC2's Robot Wars, has spent his career in robotics pioneering the use of large scale machine learning techniques for use in healthcare, in our homes and in ground breaking unmanned missions to Mars, the precursor to a potential human Martian colony.

We shouldn't be afraid of robots, he says. Instead we need to become comfortable that robots will be more efficient than us and make less mistakes than us. Our future is shared and fully autonomous robots. Humans just need to become content with relinquishing some control of our world.

In this Brainwaves, Pennie Latin meets Sethu Vijayakumar in his lab in Edinburgh, along with some of his robots - from a relatively simple prosthetic forearm to one of the most advanced humanoid robots in the world, Valkyrie.

Facing imminent extinction the Scottish Wildcat used to to be found widely across the country. Today the most optimistic population count suggests there are around 315 individual wildcats left and they are only in the north of Scotland. Experts have suggested we may have only 5 years to save the species.

In response Scottish Wildcat Action is the first national conservation plan with a vision to restore viable population of Scottish wildcats into the Highlands. Their plan is a multifaceted approach. It involves tagging, tracking and mapping wildcats in their natural habitat. Domestic cat owners have a role to play too. The biggest threat to the wildcat is hybridisation with domestic and feral cats. Which begs the question should we be neutering domestic cats that are near wildcat habitats? And if all this fails should we follow what worked for the Iberian Lynx and develop a captive bred population with the intention of releasing them into the wild later on?

But is it too late and at what cost? Should we really be ploughing all these resources and expertise into saving them?

In this Brainwaves Pennie Latin meets some of the researchers, conservationists and scientists who are trying save the iconic Scottish Wildcat.

Would you, could you or should you donate your body to science? That might be a hard enough question to answer but what about donating your children's tissue to research after their death. This is exactly the situation Sarah Gray and her husband found themselves in when one of their twins, Thomas, died.

Thomas, was born with anencephaly and died 6 days after birth. Sarah and her husband donated Thomas's tissues for scientific research. With time Sarah's desire to know what Thomas's tissue has been used for got the better of her. She went on an extraordinary journey to understand the full extent of Thomas's legacy, visiting the institutions which had received parts of his liver and eyes and tracing the scientific impact of his donation.

Joanne Mullarky is a research nurse at the University of Bradford's Human Tissue Bank. When she heard Sarah's story she changed the way she worked and now today thinks that a stronger relationship between academic institutions and donor parents is vital to increasing the amount of tissue donated. Tissue that is currently rarely donated.

A Brainwaves special recorded in front a live audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Honest, thought provoking and profoundly moving, Sarah's story of Thomas's donation will question the way we think about life after death and the extraordinary gift of giving a dead body to science.

An intricate yet delicate six sided crystal floats down to earth. It becomes powerful enough to carve our landscape. It is cold enough to kill us and if it becomes unstable it can move at hundreds of miles per hour. All this, yet that crystal is composed of one of life's absolute essentials, water. This Brainwaves is all about the surprising, quirky and fascinating science behind something we all experience in a Scottish winter - Snow and Ice.

From the startling beauty of ice crystal formation to the science of drilling down to find the oldest ice on the planet. Pennie Latin climbs mountains, goes back in time and asks what makes the perfect snowball in this intriguing episode of Brainwaves that will make you look out the window wishing for the next snowfall.