Seriously...

From the nomads of the vast steppe - to the glamour and adulation of the stage. Kate Molleson unravels the story of Mongolia's remarkable rise to being an opera superpower. And, in this special double bill, producer Steven Rajam joins Rhianna Dhillon to discuss the making of the programmes.

Mongolia is becoming a global leader in opera singing - and completely breaking the mould. Young nomadic herders and horsemen are being plucked from the vast plains and taken to Ulaanbataar - where they're transformed into the next generation of top-flight tenors and baritones.

It's a fascinating synergy of young men with the perfect physique, often honed in a rugged, traditional outdoorsmen culture, and a superb Soviet-era music and arts education system that - just over half a century after its State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet first opened - is delivering the next generation of global singing superstars.

Radio 4 brings you a hypnotic audio portrait, taking you from the open plains, horse lullabies and throat singing of the endless Mongolian landscape to the cultural melee of Ulaanbataar - a place of stark contrasts where gleaming 21st century skyscrapers rise, yet where around half the population live in traditional gers (tents). A nation numbering just 3 million people, yet the size of Western Europe, and sandwiched between the gigantic superpowers of Russia and China - how much can Mongolia harness its cultural might to have a voice in global geopolitics?

In the first episode, journalist Kate Molleson documents the story of Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar - last year, the winner of one of the most prestigious prizes in global opera: the BBC Cardiff Singer Of The World Song Prize, whose previous winners include Bryn Terfel and Ailish Tynan. Ariunbaatar was born to a family of nomadic herders, who still live a traditional lifestyle in the immense Mongolian steppe. At his family's ger, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, Kate is treated to a performance of Mongolian longsong - the nation's traditional classical singing art - as well as joining Ariunbaatar on horseback to hear the songs he sang as a young boy, alone in the vast wilderness. Is Mongolia's unique traditional culture - perhaps even its landscape itself - the secret of its extraordinary vocal alchemy?

In the concluding episode, Kate explores the political value of Mongolia's musical prowess. In the Soviet era, the communist government used the people's love of traditional song to advance opera, and with it a certain idea of "civilisation"; in 2017, the current government see Mongolia's operatic might as a way of punching above its weight in global geopolitics. The buzzword on everyone's lips is "soft power" - a way for Mongolia to be part of a global conversation with nations - like its neighbours Russia and China - they could never compete with militarily or economically.

As Mongolia's foremost opera star prepares to take the stage in Ulaanbaatar, Kate explores the diversity of Mongolia's musical makeup in 2017 - from breakout indie acts and hip hop DJs to women throat singers causing ripples in the nation's venerable traditional classical singing art.

Producer: Steven Rajam

Before 9/11 British attitudes to partaking in faith-inspired armed combat were... different.

British Muslims travelled freely to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burma and Kashmir for a few weeks or months, and then returned home to their day jobs or studies - few questions asked.

In this programme, Mobeen Azhar sheds light on the people and organisations involved in this early wave of British involvement in Jihad - the youth organisations which helped send hundreds of young Brits to fight overseas.

The programme also reveals reports featured in magazines published in the 1990s by Lashka-e-Taiba - the terrorist group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Within its pages are detailed reports on how its leader Hafiz Saeed came to Britain in the mid-90s to spread the word on fighting a holy war, find recruits and raise money. The programme hears from those who answered his call - the British Muslims who built bridges with militant groups in South Asia and beyond.

Many of these 'pioneers' came from Britain's Salafi community - followers of a strict, literal interpretation of Islam. Since 9/11 the Salafis - sometimes known as Wahhabis - have often been named as the key influencers in the global jihad, but is that accurate?

The programme also explains the nuances of Salafism and how this early period of British involvement in Jihad was itself hugely divisive within the British Salafi community, creating a schism between a peaceful pious majority, and those who chose to take up arms.

Producers: Richard Fenton-Smith & Sajid Iqbal.

Rhianna Dhillon brings you another seriously interesting story from Radio 4.

This week, luck.

Whether we believe in luck or not, we do use the word- a lot! More as a figure of speech than an article of faith perhaps but some do pray for luck, others fantasise about it - and bad luck or misfortune is a staple of comedy

Can luck be said to exist as some force in our lives and if so, what is its nature? How have people thought about luck in the past and what's changed today? Can you bring good luck upon yourself - there's a school of thought these days that thinks you can without appealing to the divine or supernatural.

In Good Luck Professor Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University looks at notions of luck in gambling, traces the origins of how we think about fate and fortune, the religious and psychological view of luck and how the emergence of theory of probability changed our view of it.

He is convinced by the philosopher Angie Hobbs that there is one form of luck it is rational to believe in and by psychologist Richard Wiseman that there is a secular solution to bringing about good fortune in your life.

Good Luck Professor Spiegelhalter, is presented by David Spiegelhalter and produced in Salford by Kevin Mousley.

Luke Jerram is that rare bird, a genuinely popular yet acclaimed contemporary artist. And he's obsessed with the moon. So he's made one: seven metres wide featuring 120dpi detailed NASA imagery, and he's taking it around the world. This is his story, as well as the moon's..

Every day Luke Jerram cycles to his studio across the river in Bristol and watches its dramatic changes. It has the second highest tidal range in the world and it's the moon that makes this happen. Luke's become fascinated with finding out everything he can about the cultural, artistic and poetic significance of the moon, and the latest scientific developments around it. It both reflects our culture and inspires it.

Being colourblind he's interested in all forms of light, and moonlight is fascinating and has very particular properties. The fact we see 'the man in the moon' is a perceptual and optical illusion. But again, different cultures see different imagery - in China they see the Hare in the Moon.

Luke presents his own story of making these works and hearing people's responses to them, woven in with the new soundtrack he's commissioned from composer Dan Jones. We talk to fellow contemporary moon obsessives James Attlee and Jay Griffiths, but it's all filtered through the very particular consciousness of one artist and his imagination, and the hard slog of his creative process.

Producer Beth O'Dea.

How do we prepare for the distant future? Helen Keen meets the people who try to.

If our tech society continues then we can leave data for future generations in huge, mundane quantities, detailing our every tweet and Facebook 'like'. But how long could this information be stored? And if society as we know it ends, will our achievements vanish with it? How do we plan for and protect those who will be our distant descendants and yet may have hopes, fears, languages, beliefs, even religions that we simply cannot predict? What if anything can we, should we, pass on?

For centuries tales were shared around the camp-fire; modern settlements share data via wi-fi. But what hasn't changed across the ages is our passion for histories and information - we shape and make sense of our lives by telling stories about what has happened to us, and relax by reading or seeing fictions about the lives of imagined characters. From cave-dwellers to millennials , stories have been organised in pretty much the same way - with a beginning, middle and end, although, in contemporary culture, now less frequently in that order.

All storytellers have used techniques of tension, delayed revelation, surprise twists. But - now - the art of narrative is being fundamentally changed by new technologies, which offer fresh ways of telling stories and different places for them to be told, redefine narrative genres, and allow audiences unprecedented opportunities to inter-act with and even co-author the content.

In this, the first part of a new three part series, Mark Lawson speaks with some of the leading figures in British TV - including showrunner Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty), producer Nicola Shindler (Red Productions) writer Paula Milne (The Politician's Wife, Angels), Charlotte Moore (BBC Director of Content) - to examine how the stories being told on television in the digital age have adapted to the advent of streaming services, binge-watching and catch-up TV.

Presenter: Mark Lawson

Zoologist and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society, Lucy Cooke, unleashes her inner sloth to discover why being lazy could actually be the ultimate evolutionary strategy.

The explorers of the New World described sloths as 'the lowest form of existence', but sloths are actually some of the most enduring of all tropical mammals. They make up one third of the mammalian biomass in rainforests and have survived some 64 million years - outliving far flashier animals like sabre tooth tigers.

The secret to the sloth's success is their slothful nature and their suite of energy-saving adaptations. In fact slothfulness is such a successful strategy, that there are examples all over the animal kingdom, including, surprisingly, worker ants. Recent studies in humans have shown the many health benefits of adopting a slower pace of life. Sleep itself is universal amongst the animal kingdom. All animals do it, but why remains a mystery. What is clear though, is that unleashing your inner couch potato is no bad thing, be you sloth or human.

Lucy discovers the genius behind the sloths laid back attitude and fights the corner for laziness.

Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

Dreaming of a Dark Christmas, in Iceland

At the darkest time of the year in Iceland scary creatures come out to play. Storyteller Andri Snær Magnason used to be terrified by his grandmother's Christmas tales of Gryla the 900 year old child eating hag and her thirteen troll sons - the Yule Lads - who would come down from the mountains looking for naughty children in the warmth of their homes. These dark lullabies partly hark back to a pre-Christian Christmas when people worshipped the Norse gods.

As Iceland opens up to global influences after centuries of isolation Andri travels from farmstead to lava field and reflects on these traditions: whether the elves still crash your house to throw a Christmas party or the cows still talk on New Year's Eve; and what happens when you have to spend Christmas alone, locked inside Ikea?

Featuring the Graduale Nobile Choir conducted by Árni Heiðar Karlsson

Partially recorded in Binaural Stereo. Listen on headphones for the best effect.

Additional sound design by Phil Channell

Producer Neil McCarthy.

Historian and psychoanalyst Daniel Pick of Birkbeck College, University of London tells the story of how aerial bombardment - from Zeppelins to B52s, from H-Bombs to drones - has made the unconscious mind a field of battle.

Daniel explores how, in the shadow of the First World War, Freud turned his analytical eye from desire to the 'death drive', and how psychoanalysts probed what might happen if another war came.

Would survivors of mass aerial bombardment hold up psychically, or would they collapse into infantile panic? Or would they become uncontrollably aggressive?

And why do humans come to be so aggressive in the first place?

When the war - and the bombers - did come to Britain, it appeared that survivors were much more stoical and defiant than had been expected.

But, as Daniel discovers, brave faces concealed a great deal of psychological damage.

With historian Lyndsey Stonebridge, he visits the Wellcome Library to see - courtesy of the Melanie Klein Trust - the case notes of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein on her analysis of a troubled ten year old boy, 'Richard'.

What do Klein's notes, and Richard's extraordinary drawings, reveal about his attitude to being bombed?

Daniel examines how, with the advent of the Cold War and the distinct possibility that bombs and missiles could destroy civilisation, technocrats trying to plan for the end of the world coped with staring into the abyss.

Finally, Daniel shows how a radical new turn in aerial bombardment opens up this field anew. Nuclear weapons can destroy the planet; but what does it do to the mind to live under the threat of 'surgical' attack by unmanned drones?

With: Derek Gregory, Peter Hennessy, Dagmar Herzog, Richard Overy, Lyndsey Stonebridge

Producer: Phil Tinline.

Why do some of us do bizarre things in our sleep? Like riding a motorbike, using a shoe to 'phone for a pizza or even having sex while sleeping? These are complex behaviours and yet sleepwalkers aren't aware of what they're doing and often have no memory of their strange night-time activities.

These sleep disorders are known as non-REM parasomnias and include conditions like night terrors and sleep eating.

So why does it happen? Sleepwalking usually occurs during deep sleep, when something triggers the brain to wake - but not completely. So the areas that control walking and other movement wake up, yet other parts, involved in awareness and rational thinking, remain asleep. What's confusing is that sleepwalkers look awake - their eyes are open - but they're really not awake. They're not really asleep either. The brain is awake and asleep at the same time. We have known this happens in some animals, who can sleep with half of their brain at a time. But recently, we have learnt that similar things can happen in the human brain.

In the first of a three-part series, neurologist, Dr Guy Leschziner, talks to patients he's been treating at his sleep clinic at Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals in London. They include Jackie who began sleepwalking as a child and continued her strange night-time behaviour as an adult, riding her motorbike whilst sleeping.

These remarkable sleepwalking experiences help us to understand the complex workings of the human brain.

Presenter: Dr Guy Leschziner