Discovery

Astronomer Marek Kukula from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich explores the scientific implications of the forthcoming transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, a rare astronomical event that will not occur again until 2117.

Previous transits have helped establish fundamental facts about our solar system, including the distance and relative positions of all the planets that orbit our sun.

But now, the forthcoming transit in June 2012, the last this century, will help planet hunters searching for other worlds across the galaxy (exo-planets).

As Marek discovers, technology now makes it possible to pinpoint not only a planet's mass, size, and distance from its star but we can also establish whether it has an atmosphere and what that atmosphere might consist of and therefore whether it could theoretically support life.

Thanks to the next transit event, the search for another Earth has taken a bold step forward.

(Image: Venus (black dot) is silhouetted as it orbits between the Sun and the Earth during the transit of Venus seen from Bangkok on 6 June 6 2012. Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Professor Jim al-Khalili talks to Cern physicist Tejinder Virdee, about the search for the elusive Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle".

Last December, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider caught a tantalising glimpse of the Higgs; but they need more data to be sure of its existence.

Twenty years ago, Tejinder set about building a detector within the Large Hadron Collider that's capable of taking 40 million phenomenally detailed images every second.

Finding the Higgs will validate everything physicists think they know about the very nature of the universe: not finding it, will force them back to the drawing board.

By the end of the year, we should know one way or the other.

Plastic Surgery does not always have a good press, more often associated with the excesses of Hollywood.

But the birth of modern day reconstruction has far nobler roots.

Dr Kevin Fong looks at the surprising, and heroic origins of the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery.

It is a field that was born in response to the great air-battles of World War II, and the development of a new fighter plane - the Hawker Hurricane - that left its legacy not just in terms of success in the air, but in the devastating injuries caused to many of the airmen who flew them.

He looks at the work of pioneering surgeon Archie McIndoe and his brave airmen "guineapigs" who underwent months, if not years, of painful surgery that led to the birth of modern day reconstructive surgery.

How fixed are our moral beliefs? Can these beliefs be reduced to neurochemistry?

While we may believe that our moral principles are rigid and based on rational motives, psychological and neuroscientific research is starting to demonstrate that this might not actually be the case.

In this edition of Discovery, Dr Carinne Piekema investigates how scientific studies are starting to shed light on how our social behaviour is affected by our environment and neurochemistry.

She discusses with Carol Dweck about how people's moral opinions can be modified through behavioural techniques, and with Molly Crockett and Paul Zak about how similar effects can be brought about by directly altering brain chemistry.

While this knowledge might have future benefits, the ability to alter people's behaviour and attitudes towards others also raises potential ethical issues.

In the final part, Carinne talks with neuroethicist Neil Levy who invites us to consider the philosophical questions raised by such advances.

Imagine if your health as an adult is partly determined by the nutrition and environment you were exposed to during a critical period of development - the first 1000 days of life.

A strong body of scientific evidence supports this explosive idea, and is gradually turning medical thinking on its head.

To understand the cause of chronic adult disease, including ageing, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity and lung problems we need to look much further back than adult lifestyle – but to the first 1000 days.

Dr Mark Porter investigates this influential idea and meets the world experts leading this burgeoning field of research.

He talks to David Barker, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Southampton and the man behind the Barker Theory.

This links the risk of developing illnesses in adult life to poor nutrition in the womb – typically evident when a baby is born underweight.

Low birth weight is associated with a number of long term health problems in adults, ranging from osteoporosis to stroke.

Chronic disease may be expressions of key developments in the womb. "That does not mean you are doomed, it means you are vulnerable" explains Professor David Barker.

Researchers have studied the Dutch Famine or 'Hunger Winter' at the end of the World War II where babies developing in the womb were exposed to severe conditions.

Nearly 70 years later, Tessa Roseboom, a researcher at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, has found long term health risks for Dutch adults who were in the womb during that difficult winter.

In recognising the long term impact of events during these early critical phases of development, the medical profession could dramatically change its approach to disease prevention.

One hundred years ago, the first humans reached the South Pole of this planet. More than 40 years ago, man first walked on the moon. When will our species first set foot to explore the planet Mars? Kevin Fong seeks a likely launch date, and asks who will get us there and why we really need to explore the Red Planet.

Can the heroic age of Antarctic exploration help to show us the way back to the Moon?

One hundred years ago, Scott reached the South Pole. However, more than four decades passed before people went back there. On the Moon, Neil Armstrong took his leap for mankind in 1969 and it has been forty years since the last astronaut left the lunar surface. Presenter Kevin Fong talks to space scientists and historians to find out if Robert Scott's Antarctic exploits provide a road map for future human exploration of the Moon and the planet Mars.

Imperial and geopolitical motivations lay behind both South Polar exploration and the effort which took humans briefly to the lunar surface. But what would get us back to the Moon - would it be geopolitical rivalry or science?

In times of economic austerity (in the West at least), what scientific questions are important enough to justify exploration of the Moon? The six short Apollo visits to the lunar surface were enough to crack the mystery of how the Moon itself formed - namely that a Mars sized planet crashed into the early Earth. The molten rock that was blasted into orbit by that collision coalesced as our lunar neighbour.

Sending astronauts back to explore the rocks of the Moon could solve the most important mysteries about the early Earth - when did life first evolve and under what sort of conditions? Their findings could also settle the questions about the origins of our oceans here on Earth .

Among Kevin's other interviewee are NASA's Chief Administrator Charles Bolden, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt (the only geologist to walk on the Moon), NASA scientists Chris McKay and Jennifer Heldmann, Dr Ian Crawford of Birbeck College, University of London and space historian Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institute.

Kevin Fong looks beyond the failure of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole and focuses instead on the scientific legacy of Scott's explorations of Antarctica between 1901 and 1912.

In recent years, much has been written about Scott the polar loser and bungler.

But that personalised focus ignores the pioneering scientific research and discoveries.

The revelations transformed Antarctica from an unknown quantity on the map into a profoundly important continent in the Earth's past and present.

Before Scott and Shackleton trekked across the vast ice sheets in the early 1900s, no-one was sure whether there was even a continent there.

Some geographers had suggested Antarctica was merely a vast raft of ice anchored to a scattering of islands.

The science teams on Scott's expeditions made fundamental discoveries about Antarctic weather and began to realise the frozen continent's fundamental role in global climate and ocean circulation.

They discovered rocks and fossils which showed Antarctica was once a balmy forested place.

They mapped the magnetism around the South Pole for both science and navigators.

They found many new species of animals and revealed the extraordinary winter breeding habits of the penguins.

The dedication to scientific discovery is most poignantly revealed by fossils that Scott's party collected after their disappointment of being beaten by Amundsen and a few weeks before they froze to death trudging across the Ross ice shelf.

They found a particular plant fossil which had been one of the Holy Grails on the early explorations of Antarctica's interior.

Its discovery proved an hypothesis raised by Darwin among others that all the southern continents were once linked together by a landmass that would lain where Antarctica is today.

The fossils were also important evidence to support the new and controversial theory of Continental Drift - a theory which now underpins the entirety of modern Earth science.

(Image: Historical image of the team of the Terra Nova Expedition standing by a Norwegian tent at the South Pole. Credit: Science Photo Library)

To mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, the BBC's Sean Coughlan narrates one of the most authentic versions of events in existence. Using voice synthesis to re-create the strange, twitter-like, mechanical brevity of the original Morse code, this programme brings to life the tragedy through the ears of the wireless operators in the area that night.

On the night of the disaster, the network of young Marconi wireless operators on different ships and land stations frantically communicated with each other across the cold expanses of the North Atlantic in an effort to mount a rescue for the doomed vessel.

All these messages were recorded at the time in copper-plate handwriting, now scattered across the world in different collections, but together forming a unique archive.

Conceived and created by Susanne Weber.

Producer: Alex Mansfield