Discovery

Geoff Watts meets researchers looking for clues to the origins of depression as a way of finding new solutions to treating it.

In the first of two programmes Geoff talks to the father of evolutionary medicine, Randolph Nesse and asks why hasn't natural selection made us less vulnerable to psychological diseases?

Could it be that depression is in some way useful to our lives?

(Image: A depressed young boy. Credit: Science Photo Library)

Jason Palmer explores the past, present and future of Seti.

In the second programme he looks at what sort of signal might ET send us, and how might we respond?

Jason talks to Seti's co-founder Frank Drake as well as its current active researchers, including Seth Shostak, Jill Tartar and Doug Vakoch.

In the first of two programmes, the BBC's science reporter Jason Palmer, meets the researchers behind Seti, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and looks at the prospects for success in the face of funding issues and the sheer size of the task.

He talks to Seti's co-founder Frank Drake as well as its current active researchers, including Seth Shostak, Jill Tartar and Doug Vakoch.

(Image: Computer artwork of our solar system. Credit: Science Photo Library)

For more than half a century aeronautical engineers have been working on the dream of hypersonic passenger flight.

London to Sydney in four hours is an often cited goal.

In Discovery Gareth Mitchell looks not at the past history of hypersonics, but at current developments.

He meets engineers working on the propulsion systems and developing new materials specifically for hypersonic flight.

Technologies which could be one applied to space craft as well as aeroplanes.

Folk tales are full of fleeting phenomena like will o' the wisps, faint glows that must have spooked our ancestors.

But these days, it's just about impossible to escape the omnipresent illumination of modern life, and these evocative spooklights have vanished like ghosts.

Chemist Andrea Sella explores the science of lights so dim, they can be witnessed only in complete darkness.

From the spontaneous combustion of marsh gas to the lightning sparks emitted by crushed sugar, Professor Sella finds there's more to light than ever meets the eye.

The Higgs particle is the final cornerstone of scientists’ model of the material universe. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built so researchers could discover it.

Last week, they announced a partial sighting – the ghost of a Higgs particle hoving into view in their plethora of data. But it could be just a phantom, and may start to fade with more data next year.

Roland Pease meets the scientists who are chasing this legendary particle, and gets exclusive access to the preparations for next year’s experiments.

An increasing understanding of genetics has uncovered new targets for antiviral drug treatments.

Although still in the very early stages, scientists say they may be able to develop drug treatments which can be used against a range of viruses.

At present antiviral drugs are very specific, usually attacking just one virus.

However the research which Kevin Fong examines in this edition of Discovery suggests 'broad spectrum antivirals', drugs capable of curing all viral infections from the common cold to HIV, may be with us in a few years time.

Such drugs could revolutionise medicine dealing a blow to viruses in much the same way as the invention of antibiotics did to bacterial infections over the last century.

When leptin failed to be a wonder solution to obesity, this hormone produced by fat cells, disappeared from the headlines.

Twenty years on scientists now believe leptin is critical to how the body works, regulating appetite, the immune response, inflammation and depression.

Vivienne Parry investigates.