Discovery

Discovery this week goes in search of the Gangetic River Dolphin, an extraordinary creature which inhabits the muddy waters of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.

Not long ago, the dolphin was a common sight for people along these mighty water ways, but now it's one of the world's rarest freshwater mammals.

Andrew Luck-Baker joins Indian biologists studying the dolphins and the threats to them along the stretch of the Brahmaputra in the state of Assam.

In a joint project between Aaranyak, an Indian conservation organisation, and the Zoological Society of London, the scientists are also mobilising local communities to protect this special animal and the ecosystem they share with it.

After the most daring and complex landing of a robot on another planet, the search for evidence of life on Mars enters a new era.

Nasa's Curiosity rover is now sitting inside Gale Crater, a vast depression close to the Martian equator.

Also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, the one tonne machine is the most sophisticated science robot ever placed on another world.

Over the coming years Curiosity will climb a mountain at the crater's heart, gathering evidence on one of science's greatest questions – was there ever life on Mars?

The $2.5 billion project will discover whether Mars once had conditions suitable for the evolution and survival of life.

BBC Space specialist Jonathan Amos talks to mission scientists about where Curiosity is going and what it will do as it trundles up Mars' Mount Sharp.

(Image: Nasa's Curiosity rover. Credit: Nasa/JPL-Caltech/PA Wire)

Gareth Mitchell meets the engineers who are designing flying cars and green aircraft.

Gareth has a go at flying a personal aircraft in the flight simulator at Liverpool University. Doctors Mike Jump and Mark White explain that the EU-funded project MyCopter is seriously looking at the prospect of flying personal vehicles that are as easy to drive as a car.

Sophie Robinson, a Ph.D student at Liverpool University, explains how her research into the safety and stability of auto-gyros, flying machines that already exist for personal travel, could set standards for the flying cars of the future.

Prof Jeff Jupp, who worked on the wings of the largest passenger plane, the A380, talks about alternative fuels to kerosene and new designs for engines. These look rather old-school, as they have propellers, but they will make the aircraft more energy efficient. But there may be a downside in that they could be noisier and slower than jet engines.

Dr Will Graham describes the work he has done on the Silent Aircraft project, in which the engines are set inside the wings.

(Image: The SkyRider, one of the concepts of the MyCopter project. Image courtesy of Gareth Padfield, FS&C)

Gareth Mitchell meets the engineers who will transform the way we fly around the world and finds out what aircraft might look like in the future.

Gareth visits the flight gallery at the Science Museum in London with the curator, Dr Andrew Nahum, who shows him how the basic shape of aircraft has hardly changed in 70 years, since the days of the DC3. Andrew Nahum also talks about why Concorde was in service for such a short time.

David Caughey, Emeritus Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cornell University, points out that the blended wing shaped aircraft is more energy efficient. So Gareth asks why we don't see them in service today - the answer is that apart from the innate caution of the airline manufacturers, the passengers would have no windows and it could be hard to evacuate such a craft speedily in an emergency.

Gareth talks to Professor Jeff Jupp who worked on the wings of the largest passenger plane, the A380, about the technical challenges.

Professor Paul Weaver at Bristol University tells Gareth about his work on making wings that change shape like birds'.

And Colin Sirett, Head of Research and Technology at Airbus UK, discusses some ideas for planes of the future, such as see-through fuselages and pods that take passengers from the airport and attach to the aircraft.

(Image: The Douglas DC-3)

Chemist Andrea Sella explores the current race to do photosynthesis better than nature ever achieved.

In just a few hundred years mankind has burnt fossil fuels that had taken natural photosynthesis billions of years to create.

Now, around the world hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent on the race to develop a robust, cheap and efficient way to turn the light from the sun into fuels we can use.

At a time when politicians everywhere debate the economic and climatic burdens of our future energy needs, such a "solar fuel" would be a genuinely novel alternative energy.

(Image: Some beech leaves. Credit: Martin Dohrn /Science Photo Library)

Could creating "blood" in the laboratory make infections passed on through blood transfusions a thing of the past? Vivienne Parry investigates.

The drive behind the quest for creating a blood substitute was originally from the US Military - during the Vietnam War a clean, reliable and portable alternative to donor blood would have helped to save many lives.

Donated blood can only be kept for a limited time, needs refrigerating and has to be cross matched according to which ABO group people belong to. The "universal donor" - O negative blood - can be used on accident victims before a match is found. But it's in very short supply and often many units of blood are required.

The history of creating blood has had a chequered past - with some products abandoned because of side effects and others proving too costly to produce. One analysis of clinical trials on blood substitutes in 2008 revealed a higher incidence of heart attacks in patients who'd been given them, compared with those who received human blood.

Some scientists have tried using the pigment found in oxygen-carrying red blood cells - haemoglobin. This molecule is normally packed into the cells, so that it can "grab" oxygen breathed in by the lungs and release it in minute capillaries, providing the body with the oxygen needed to surivive. But "free" haemoglobin is toxic to the body - presenting researchers with a technical challenge.

Another approach has been to grow human red blood cells from cells extracted from umbilical cords - known as blood pharming. But with the average blood transfusion containing 2.5 million million red blood cells the scale of production would have to be enormous. A special cocktail of growth factors coax these stem cells into becoming red blood cells just like those the body produces naturally.

(Image: A syringe filled with blood)

Gene therapy - repairing malfunctioning cells by mending their DNA - offers an elegant solution to diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, caused by a single flawed gene.

It's a very simple concept to describe - simply insert a 'normal' gene to do the job - but it's this process, the delivery of the gene, that's proving to be so difficult and time consuming. Since the first human study began in 1990 the field has struggled with various technical challenges and set-backs.

But over a decade on, researchers are beginning to report successes in treating several devastating diseases. Geoff Watts finds out about some of the new techniques for gene therapy, and discovers how these are now being used in a trial of a new method of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis.

Twelve years ago, a group of scientists from Imperial College in London, Oxford and Edinburgh formed the Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium. This year they started the world's biggest trial of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis.

Funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, the Medical Research Council and The National Institute for Health Research , the trial will treat 120 CF patients with either a placebo or a healthy copy of the gene that causes CF. The gene is wrapped up in a fat globule, or liposome and delivered in aerosol form directly to the lungs.

(Image: Eric Alton)

Alan Turing, born 23 June 1912, is famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War II. But for mathematicians, his greatest work was on the invention of the computer.

Alan Turing's brilliance at maths was spectacular. Aged 22, just a year after his graduation, he was elected a fellow of King's College Cambridge. And it was just a year after that, that he turned his attention to problems in the foundations of mathematics and ended up showing that a simple machine, set up to read and write numbers and to run a few basic functions, could in principle do all the things that are do-able in mathematics. His 'universal' machine was just a concept - a paper tape that could be read, interpreted and acted on robotically. But the concept was profound.

World War II shortly afterwards took Turing's talents into other directions, but even while designing machines at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma codes, he was wondering how much more a computing machine might do - play chess for example.

And although the war work might have delayed Turing's academic work, it greatly accelerated progress in electronics, so that in 1945 he returned to his first love, creating a complete design for what he expected to be the world's first fully programmable computer, the National Physical Laboratory's ACE - the Automatic Computing Engine. In the end, beset by hesitation and bureaucratic delays, the ACE was overtaken by a rival team in Manchester, whose Small Scale Experimental Machine first ran on 21 June 1948. But the Manchester Baby as it became known, fulfilled the requirements laid down in Turing's seminal 1936 paper, and in a handful of instructions had the power to do any kind of maths or data processing, like a computer of today does.

Turing soon joined the Manchester team, and again with remarkable prescience started work on artificial intelligence, wondering whether electronic machines could be programmed not just to do maths, but to think in the way human minds do - a hot topic of debate even now.

Those explorations were cut short by his death in 1954, two years after he’d been prosecuted for his homosexuality. His death at a time when official secrecy still hid his code-breaking work, and when the history of computing was already being written meant that few appreciated his central role in today's dominant industry. But some enthusiasts hope they can write him back in where he belongs.

In this second of two episodes devoted to Turing, the BBC's Roland Pease follows the events following Turing's design for the ACE machine at NPL, and the race against the Baby Computer in Manchester.

(Image: Alan Turing. Credit: Bill Sanderson/Science Photo Library)

Alan Turing - born a hundred years ago on June 23 - is most famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War II. But for mathematicians, his greatest work was on the invention of the computer.

Discovery explores the legacy of the great man with a two-part special.

Alan Turing's brilliance at maths was spectacular. Aged 22, just a year after his graduation, he was elected a fellow of King's College Cambridge. And it was just a year after that, that he turned his attention to problems in the foundations of mathematics and ended up showing that a simple machine, set up to read and write numbers and to run a few basic functions, could in principle do all the things that are doable in mathematics.

His 'universal' machine was just a concept - a paper tape that could be read, interpreted and acted on robotically. But the concept was profound.

World War II shortly afterwards took Turing's talents into other directions, but even while designing machines at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma codes, he was wondering how much more a computing machine might do - play chess for example.

And although the war work might have delayed Turing's academic work, it greatly accelerated progress in electronics, so that in 1945 he returned to his first love, creating a complete design for what he expected to be the world's first fully programmable computer, the National Physical Laboratory's ACE - the Automatic Computing Engine.

In the end, beset by hesitation and bureaucratic delays, the ACE was overtaken by a rival team in Manchester, whose Small Scale Experimental Machine first ran on June 21 1948. But the Manchester Baby, as it became known, fulfilled the requirements laid down in Turing's seminal 1936 paper, and in a handful of instructions had the power to do any kind of maths, or data processing, like a computer of today does.

Turing soon joined the Manchester team, and again with remarkable prescience started work on artificial intelligence, wondering whether electronic machines could be programmed not just to do maths, but to think in the way human minds do - a hot topic of debate even now.

Those explorations were cut short by his suicide in 1954, following prosecution for his homosexuality. His death at a time when official secrecy still hid his code-breaking work, and when the history of computing was already being written meant that few appreciated his central role in today's dominant industry. But some enthusiasts hope they can write him back in where he belongs.

In this first of two episodes devoted to Turing, producer Roland Pease follows the events leading up to Turing’s design for the ACE machine at NPL.

(Image: Alan Turing. Credit: Bill Sanderson/Science Photo Library)

Two teams of virologists found themselves at the heart of bioterrorism maelstrom late last year when their studies on mutant bird flu were suppressed by US authorities.

While security experts feared the reports were recipes for bioweapons of mass destruction, the researchers argued they held important lessons for the threat of natural flu pandemics developing in the wild.

Now the authorities have backed down and the reports have been released. Kevin Fong hears how tiny variations in the genes of bird flu can completely change the behaviour of the pathogens and he asks whether deliberate genetic manipulation in the lab can replicate the natural genetic variations occurring in farms around the world.

In 2009, the new strain of H1N1 flu emerged from a few villages in Mexico to infect the world in weeks. What experts fear is that a simple genetic change to H5N1 bird flu could allow it to spread as fast, but with far deadlier consequences. They argue that by identifying dangerous variants in the lab first, we'd be better prepared with vaccines ahead of the danger.

Producer Roland Pease.

(Image: A coloured transmission electron micrograph of the H5N1 virus, better known as bird flu. Credit: Science Photo Library)