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BBC World Service

Discovery

Imagine if you were listening to an opera or a Taylor Swift concert, and as the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the music was accompanied by a rainbow of colours only you could see. Perhaps while listening to your friends talking, you simultaneously experience a smorgasbord of tastes, with different words evoking different flavours, maybe a delicious ice cream, or something as disgusting as ear wax...
This merging of the senses is known as synaesthesia, and it’s the rich research world of neuropsychologist Professor Julia Simner. Julia runs the Multisense lab at the University of Sussex and has pioneered research into understanding how special brains process our sensory world in special ways. In the studio she tests Jim to see if he might be a synaesthete or have aphantasia, which is the inability to view images in the mind’s eye. The results are surprising.
Julia’s discovered links to autism, and to different personality types, as well as a number of previously unknown sensory differences.
She describes her career and her life as a series of swerves, or sliding door moments, that have led her to study the subject and the people she’s passionate about. She says that the more she looks for these unusual traits in us the more she finds.

The Life Scientific: Julia Simner

Caroline Smith is passionate about space rocks, whether they’re samples collected from the surface of asteroids and the Moon and hopefully Mars one day soon, or meteorites, those alien rock fragments that have survived their fiery descents through our atmosphere to land here on Earth. She is Head of Collections and Principal Curator of Meteorites at the Natural History Museum, home to one of the finest meteorite collections in the world. Her interest in rocks began while wandering the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, as a child, picking up the ones that caught her eye and bashing them with a hammer, hoping to find treasure inside, whether it’s gold, diamonds or dinosaur fossils. Her work today, studying rocks that have landed here on Earth or those still out there in space, is no less ambitious. She analyses their chemical composition looking for tantalising clues that might reveal how our Solar System formed, and potentially the presence of the chemical building blocks necessary for life itself.

The Life Scientific: Caroline Smith

From humble beginnings in his native Sri Lanka, to a more than 40 year academic career at Queen’s University Belfast, Prof. AP (Amilra Prasanna) De Silva’s research into molecular photosensors has led to a pioneering career in that’s evolved from chemistry to medical diagnostics on one hand, to information processing on the other. Prof. De Silva challenged cultural expectations and overcame the lack of opportunities in chemistry that were available in Sri Lanka in the early 1970s. He first moved to Belfast to pursue research in photochemistry at Queen’s University. Inspired by his grandmother’s struggle with high blood pressure he engineered a unique sodium photosensor by marrying fluorescent molecules with chemical receptors. As a result of his international collaborations, a commercial, portable sensor was developed to detect salts and minerals in the blood. Its speed of analysis has since saved countless lives and improved healthcare around the world. AP talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his passion for engineering molecules and how his photochemical innovations have since crossed into computer science. They’ve been developed to perform molecular computations far inside the human body - where silicon microchips fear to tread. A new deeper understanding of life inside our tissues and cells beckons.

The Life Scientific: AP De Silva

In July 1545, King Henry VIII watched from Southsea Castle on England's south coast as his fleet sailed out to face the French - only to witness his prized warship, the Mary Rose, sink before his eyes. Raised from the Solent in 1982, the ship is now the centrepiece of the Mary Rose Museum, along with thousands more artefacts that were recovered from the seabed. But keeping the 500-year-old ship and its associated Tudor relics in good condition is no small task, which is where Dr Eleanor Schofield comes in. As Director of Collections at the Mary Rose Trust and a materials engineer by training, Eleanor has spent years tackling the unique scientific challenges of conserving centuries-old wood and metal. From the United States to Portsmouth, Eleanor's research is helping ensure this iconic vessel remains 'ship-shape' for generations to come. In a special edition of The Life Scientific, recorded in front of an audience at the museum in Portsmouth's Historic Dockyards, Professor Jim Al-Khalili discovers how cutting-edge science is keeping history afloat.

The Life Scientific: Eleanor Schofield

There are problems and tasks so hard and complicated that it would take today’s most powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack them. But in the next decade, we may well have quantum computers which could solve such problems in seconds.

Professor Sir Peter Knight is a British pioneer in the realms of quantum optics and quantum information science. During his three decades as a researcher at Imperial College London, he has advanced our understanding of the physics which underpins how quantum computers work.

Quantum optics was a new field of physics at the start of Peter Knight’s career in the early 1970s and he tells Jim Al-Khalili about the excitement and opportunities for a young scientist at the birth of a new scientific discipline. He also talks about the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. Since his retirement in 2010, Peter Knight has been the driving force behind this £1 billion government-funded endeavour which has positioned the UK as a world leader in the development and commercialisation of quantum computing and other revolutionary quantum inventions.

The Life Scientific: Peter Knight

The very latest developments in the world of Earth science with Roland Pease, recorded at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans, where thousands of Earth, atmospheric, glacial, ocean and hydrologic scientists come together to promote discovery in Earth science for the benefit of humanity.

Twenty years on, we discuss the enduring lessons from the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005, hearing from Lieutenant General Russel Honoré who led the military relief effort, and Roland speaks to Jill Trepanier, hurricane climatologist from Louisiana State University. 

We also hear about the mouth of the Mississippi River, known as the Bird's Foot Delta, south of New Orleans. Carol Wilson, assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Louisiana State University, tells us how important these wetlands are as storm protections, yet they’re under threat from sea level rise and lack of sediment.

Roland takes a look at fifty-thousand-year-old Antarctic ice whilst speaking to Ed Brook, Professor at Oregon State University and director of COLDEX (Center for Oldest Ice Exploration), whose team is searching for ice which is potentially ten million years old. And he speaks to Allison Chartrand, assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who has been working to reveal the hidden landscapes of Greenland under the ice. 

And Bob Hazen, scientist at the Carnegie Science Earth & Planets Laboratory, takes us back to the origins of life on Earth. He is investigating rocks which could be over four billion years old and may contain molecular fragments of ancient life.

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Jonathan Blackwell

Frontiers of Earth Science

The very latest developments in the world of space science with Roland Pease, recorded at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans, where thousands of space and planetary scientists come together to promote discovery in space science for the benefit of humanity.

Roland talks to Andy Rivkin, planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, about planetary defence from asteroids, including the small potential for asteroid 2024 YR4 to hit the moon in 2032.

We hear from Craig DeForest, principle investigator for the PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere), which is a constellation of four small satellites that aim to learn how the Sun's corona becomes the solar wind. And Lara Waldrop, principle investigator of the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, discusses the Earth's exosphere which plays an important role in Earth’s response to space weather caused by the Sun.

We also talk lunar earthquakes, or moonquakes, and plans to put seismometers on the moon to measure them with Philippe Lognonné, professor at Université Paris Cité and planetary seismologist at Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, and Ceri Nunn, lunar seismologist from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Jonathan Blackwell

Frontiers of Space Science

Quantum theory – our best understanding of the world at the smallest level – is famously weird and notoriously confusing. It’s a theory that seems to say particles can be in two places at once, or somehow “know” if you’re looking at them. Or at least, that’s what you might have heard. But is that really what quantum theory tells us about reality?

To find out, presenter Marnie Chesterton travels to the birthplace of quantum theory: the remote, windswept island of Helgoland. Here, a century ago, a young scientist called Werner Heisenberg made a leap of understanding that laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, and changed the world.

To mark a century of quantum, leading physicists from across the globe have gathered on Helgoland for a conference, and Marnie joins them with an unconventional plan. She’s allowed to ask them JUST ONE QUESTION, in the hope it can get to the heart of what this strange and difficult subject is really about: “What IS quantum?”

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Anand Jagatia
Editor: Martin Smith
Production Co-ordinator: Jazz George

What is Quantum?

"My ideas are often labelled as impossible, or useless, or both. Usually when people say that I'm on the right track." George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and one of the pioneers of modern genomics. He's also someone who makes a habit of finding solutions to the seemingly impossible. Over the course of his career so far, George developed the first method for direct genomic sequencing, helped initiate the Human Genome Project, and founded the Personal Genome Project: making huge quantities of DNA data publicly available for research. Today, as a professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, he’s working on some of the most headline-grabbing - and controversial - science on the planet: from the so-called "de-extinction" of woolly mammoths, to growing transplant-suitable organs in pigs, to virus-proofing humans. When inspiration strikes, there seems to be little that will slow him down - even the fact that he has narcolepsy, the neurological disorder that causes sudden sleep attacks. In fact, as George tells Professor Jim Al-Khalili, some of his best ideas come in those moments between waking and sleep...

The Life Scientific: George Church

Movies might have us believe that bomb disposal comes down to cutting the right wire. In fact, explosive devices are complex and varied - and learning how to dispose of them safely involves intense training, as well as the ability to stay calm under pressure. This was the world of Dr Gareth Collett, a retired British Army Brigadier General and engineer, specialising in bomb disposal; whose 32-year military career took him around the world, including heading up major ordnance clearance projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. After retiring from the army, Gareth became a university lecturer – but following his diagnosis with bladder cancer, started researching a possible link between bomb disposal veterans and higher rates of urological cancers. In conversation with Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Gareth discusses this ongoing research, dealing with PTSD - and why he just can't watch Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker...

The Life Scientific: Gareth Collett

On this mission, SOFIA is setting out to study Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, by flying into the faint shadow that it casts as it blocks the light from a faraway star. It’s a phenomenon called an occultation, and if the mission succeeds, it will reveal new details about Titan’s atmosphere.

SOFIA is a very unusual observatory. It is a 747 aircraft with a hatch in the side, which opens in flight to reveal a large, custom-built telescope – carefully engineered to work inside a moving jet plane. Its full name is the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, and it’s a joint project of Nasa and the German space agency, DLR.
 
The catch? That shadow is moving across the earth at 22 kilometres per second.
 
Join Dr Jonathan Webb from the ABC in Australia for episode one of The Chase - a special four-part series about science on the run.

(Photo: SOFIA is a heavily modified 747SP which was acquired by Nasa in the mid-1990s after spending 20 years as a passenger jet. (Credit: Wayne Williams)

Eye in the Sky

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