CrowdScience

For decades, people suffering from chronic depression have relied on medicines that affect the levels of chemicals in the brain like serotonin, which regulate mood and emotion. But ten percent of people don’t benefit from any of the existing treatments for this devastating condition.

Sisters Annie and Kathryn have both been diagnosed with long-term depression that makes it hard for them to experience pleasure as others do. But they’re interested in whether there are new solutions on the horizon that could improve their wellbeing, in particular ones that don’t necessarily involve conventional medication.

Datshiane Navanayagam learns how a technique called mindfulness could strengthen neural connections in bits of the brain that communicate with each other. This, it’s said, may harness the ability of the brain to adapt and self-repair which can change people’s emotional responses to life’s ups and downs. She meets a psychologist who shows how this simple technique could improve our overall ability to process information and reverse negative thought patterns.

CrowdScience also hears about cutting edge research into the use of psychedelics as potential treatment for depression and heads to the UK’s only centre for ketamine therapy, where patients say a drug once popular with partygoers, is having a profound effect on their mental health.

Produced by Marijke Peters for BBC World Service.

(Photo: A woman sitting on the top of a mountain and meditating. Credit: Getty Images)

Singing can lift our spirits, but research suggests it could also benefit our health, improving breathing for people with lung conditions and helping us cope with dementia. Could it even have a preventative effect?

CrowdScience heads to Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK county of Gloucestershire - one of the first places to pioneer this kind of “social prescribing” - to find out. Presenter Anand Jagatia teams up with panellists Dr Daisy Fancourt, Senior Research Associate in Behavioural Science, Dr Simon Opher, family doctor and Clinical Lead for Social Prescribing, and Maggie Grady, Director of Music Therapy at charity Mindsong to learn more. They’re joined on-stage by their Breathe In Sing Out and Meaningful Music volunteer singing groups to find out what this much-loved musical pastime can do for us.

Producer: Jen Whyntie

(Photo: Students singing in a choir with their teacher. Credit: Getty Images)

Medical intervention has disrupted natural selection in humans as many more children survive into adulthood than did a few centuries ago. And as our DNA continues to evolve, in order to adapt to our environment, how might human beings of the future be different from us? Anand Jagatia explores how some humans, over just a few thousand years, have adapted genetically to live at high altitudes of the Tibetan Himalayas or in the cold climates of Inuit Greenland.

Presenter: Anand Jagatia. Produced by Dom Byrne and Melanie Brown for BBC World Service

(Photo: People in a crowded street. Credit: Getty Images)

As scientists keep finding ever more fascinating facts about the invisible housemates that share our homes, we dust off our episode on what might be lurking in quiet household corners or under our beds.

(Photo: A woman using a damp sponge to clean dust collected on a window sill. Credit: Getty Images)

Where the conditions are right, life can arise. But what might the ‘right’ conditions be? Could the dark sector of our Universe be inhabited? That’s what Gautam from Delhi, India has been wondering. He points out that dark matter and dark energy make up around 95% of the Universe and the remaining segment is normal matter - the stuff we’re all made up of. Given that there’s so much of this dark material, could dark life have evolved? Marnie Chesterton investigates with Dr Matt Middleton, Dr Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil and Dr Renato Costa.

(Photo: Arrangement of Nebula, Stars and a colourful galaxy. Credit: Getty Images)

Our bodies are made of cells, tens of trillions of cells. They all have particular roles and functions in the body, from digesting food, to producing hair, to hunting down pathogens. But all of this incredible complexity started as just a single cell.

Gila, from Israel, asked CrowdScience to find out how the development of incredible structures, and systems in the body are coordinated by the cells. Are cells communicating? How do cells know what they should be doing?

To find out, Geoff Marsh meets a Cambridge researcher uncovering the first cell division in our lives, and peers into a fertile chicken egg to see the developing embryo as it grows a limb. CrowdScience finds out why scientists like Dr Megan Davey use chickens to understand the development of human fingers and investigates how individual cells with the same DNA manage to choreograph a dance of cell replication, movement and communication to create our bodies in all of their complexity.

Presenter: Geoff Marsh

(Photo: Cells grouped together. Credit: Getty Images)

Many of us enjoy cooking – but when did we switch from eating our food raw, to heating it? Listener Logan enjoys his beef burgers rare, but wants to know why he still feels compelled to grill them? Presenter Anand Jagatia travels to a remote South African cave where our ancestors first used fire at least a million years ago, which one man says could help prove when our species started cooking.

And he talks to a scientist who shows how the composition of food changes when it’s cooked, to allow us more access to give us more access to calories - and hears how a completely raw food diet could have disastrous consequences for health.

Producer: Marijke Peters

(Image: A large pan held over an open fire. Credit: Getty Images)

We are slowly running out of ammunition to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria. Listener Peter wants to know whether a therapy that he’d heard about in the 1980s could be revived to help us where antibiotics falls short.

CrowdScience travels to Georgia where “phages”, viruses that hunt and kill bacteria, have been used for nearly 100 years to treat illnesses ranging from a sore throat to cholera. Phages are fussy eaters – a specific phage will happily chew on one bug but ignore another. In Georgia, scientists have kept rare phages safe for decades and are constantly on the look-out for new ones.

CrowdScience presenter Marnie Chesterton speaks to the scientists and doctors who are pioneering phage-therapy as well as overseas patients who have travelled thousands of miles in hope of finding a cure.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

(Photo: Bacteriophage infecting bacterium. Credit: Getty Images)

We are all made of particles – but what are particles made of? It’s a question that’s been perplexing scientists for centuries - for so long, in fact, that listener Doug in Canada wants to know if there’s a limit to how much they can ever discover.

CrowdScience heads out to CERN, in Switzerland, to find out. Birthplace of the internet, home to the Large Hadron Collider, and the site of the Higgs Boson’s discovery – the fundamental particle that is thought to give all other particles their mass, and one of the most important scientific finds of the 21st Century. But that revelation wasn’t an end to the quest – in fact, it has raised many more questions for the physicists and engineers involved. Dr David Barney, CMS, and Dr Tara Nanut, LHCb, tell us why.

And now they have announced that they are considering building a new, larger particle collider to find answers. The Future Circular Collider would be a hundred kilometres long and sited partly under Lake Geneva, smashing together sub-atomic particles at unprecedented energies in the hope of revealing the fundamental building blocks of all matter in the Universe. But any outcomes are by no means certain, and it could cost up to €29 billion. Perhaps physicists need to think completely differently about how to unpick what makes our universe – we see how one research team at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford is doing just that, as they’re developing a collider that is not kilometres but centimetres long. Dr Charlotte Palmer, University of Oxford, tells us how.

However these fundamental questions are tackled, critics say that the money could be better spent on other research areas such as combating climate change. But supporters argue that its discoveries could uncover new technologies that will benefit future generations in ways we can’t predict. Anand Jagatia meets the scientists responsible to making this next giant leap into the quantum unknown.

(Photo: CMS experiment at CERN, Switzerland. Photo credit: CERN)

Humans seem programmed to appreciate beauty - whether that’s an attractive face, a glorious sunset, or a stirring piece of music. Of course, our individual tastes are all different, and culture plays a huge part too - but why are we so struck by whatever it is we find beautiful? What is that pleasurable sensation we get when we see or hear something we like? And has the ability to appreciate beauty given us any evolutionary advantages?

In a special edition of CrowdScience from the International Science Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, we are joined by a panel of experts to explore how far science can explain the mystery of beauty. We look to biology, the brain, art and mathematics, to see how patterns, rhythms and symmetry contribute to our experience of beauty. And we ask whether machines can recognise or ‘appreciate’ beauty – and to what extent artificial intelligence is starting to confuse or influence what we think of as beautiful.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

Photo: A peacock. Credit: Getty Images/bobbieo