Discovery (Science-Technology)

Beaked whales are perhaps the most mysterious and secretive animals to inhabit the sea – despite their elephant-sized proportions. BBC Environment correspondent Richard Black joins researchers off the coast of the Canaries, using sound to investigate their strange world, and to find out why military sonar seems to be killing them.

In Discovery this week, Andrew Luck Baker will be taking us to the dim and distant past, when trees first evolved on the planet. New fossil discoveries in the United States have given scientists their first proper picture of what the earliest forests looked like – rather strange as it turned out. The advent of forests was a momentous event in Earth history – transforming its atmosphere and climate.

Few regions are more divided than the Middle East, so it’s hard to imagine Israelis and Palestinians, Iranians and Pakistanis, Turks and Cypriots sitting side by side, co-operating on a joint project. Yet that is just what has been happening at a laboratory outside Amman in Jordan, where enemies of old are working together to build a scientific experiment for the whole region. In Discovery, Adam Hart-Davis reports from SESAME, where it’s hoped the language of science will heal deep-rooted...

In the Discovery Discussion, Sue Nelson hears about the latest technologies and the environmental drawbacks of oil extraction from the Athabaska tar sands in Canada.

Sue Nelson asks three scientists, what is the point of tracing your DNA ancestry?

Discussion programme on the science behind finance. Over the last few decades the financial industry has attracted many of the brightest young scientists and mathematicians away from academia and into the offices of the investment banks and hedge funds. Many become “Quants” – or quantitative analysts – whose job it is to build the mathematical models and software that the traders use to guide them through the markets, minimizing risk and getting a fair price. Sue Nelson and guests Paul...

Vivienne Parry talks to scientists and psychiatrists who are helping people overcome emotional pain, from the heartbreak of bereavement to serious depression.