Discovery

Kevin Fong talks to one of the last two men on the Moon, 40 years after the final Apollo 17 mission blasted off on 7 December 1972. As an Apollo astronaut, Harrison Schmitt was special. He was was the only geologist ever to explore the lunar surface. The field work Dr Schmitt did, and the rocks he and his fellow astronauts brought back, revolutionised our understanding of the Moon and the Earth. Dr Schmitt also shares the human experience of running around another planet and explains why he thinks we should go back, and beyond. The conversation also features archive recordings of the two Apollo 17 moon walkers, Schmitt and Commander Eugene Cernan talking from the lunar surface and Challenger module to NASA’s mission control in Houston in 1972.Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

In this programme, Geoff Watts meets researchers attempting to unlock the mysteries of hallucination as well as some of those who experience the phenomenon. Geoff visits Dr Dominic Ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and undergoes a stroboscopic experiment designed to induce hallucinations in subjects whilst their brains are being scanned. We hear some of the vivid accounts from hallucinators, including Doris, who has macular degeneration. Over the last year, her failing eyesight has resulted in an array of objects and images appearing before her with startling clarity, from relatively benign baskets of flowers to the rather more distressing sight of dark, haunting figures sitting by her bed. Her condition is known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome and Dr Ffytche estimates that over two million people suffer from this in the UK alone, mostly in silence, due to the fear of being labelled as 'mad'. Geoff also visits Kelly Diederen's lab at Cambridge University, which is investigating the origin of auditory hallucinations - hearing voices. Common in people with schizophrenia, Dr Diederen is instead, scanning the brains of so-called "healthy hallucinators," individuals who otherwise lead perfectly functional lives save for the fact that they hear voices on a daily basis. Could they hold the key to understanding and treating a key symptom of psychosis?(Image: Close up of the face of an anonymous male. Credit: BBC)

Geoff Watts meets researchers attempting to unlock the mysteries of hallucination as well as some of those who experience the phenomenon. Hallucinations aren't what they used to be. Time was when reporting a divine vision would bring fame or fortune. The Enlightenment changed all that and nowadays you'd be more at risk of being handed a prescription for a major tranquilliser for reporting what you saw or heard. Hallucinating, in essence, the experience of seeing or hearing (and sometimes smelling or touching) something that by any objective measure, isn't there, has been linked to a wide variety of causes. But there are also examples of otherwise 'healthy' individuals who have experienced vivid and sometimes distressing hallucinations. With the advent of fMRI scanning, researchers can observe the hallucinating brain in action, it is these 'healthy' individuals who are beginning to open the doors of perception and which may provide new insights and treatments for psychosis and schizophrenia. (Image: Coloured lights and dots, Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Gaia Vince concludes her journey through the geological age humans have launched. After climate change and mass extinction, she now explores moves how the world’s cities and manufactured artefacts (from mobile phones to plastic bottles) might become 'fossilised' and incorporated into the geological record. Some are bound to survive in crushed form for the rest of the Earth’s existence. Any distant-future geologist would recognise them as strange features unique in the planet’s 4 billion year rock record: chaotic rock layers preserving urban rubble and underground tunnels - mudstones unnaturally rich in zinc, cadmium and mercury – and the occasional crushed mobile phone or plastic bottle transformed from polymer to delicate coal. These rocks and artificial ‘fossils’ will be evidence of a planetary shift into the new time period, which today’s geologists call the Anthropocene.(Image: A pile of mobile phones, Credit: Getty Images)

Earth scientists say humanity’s impact on the Earth has been so profound that we have started a new geological time period on the planet. They call it, the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince explores our fundamental changes to the biosphere. The accelerating extinctions of animal and plant species: the rearing of agricultural animals in their billions: and, what some describe as, the general ‘macdonaldisation’ of life on Earth. All three factors will leave striking evidence in the fossil record in the limestones and sandstones, forming on the Earth’s surface today. Millions of years in the future, a geologist chipping at the rocks of our times might conclude that something in the world happened as big as the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.Are we responsible for the sixth great mass extinction in Earth history and forcing the planet down a different trouser leg of geological time, as one scientist puts it?

Humanity’s impact on the atmosphere with fossil fuel burning is so profound that we’re creating a new geological time period, say geologists. They’ve named it, the Anthropocene.In this part of her journey into the Anthropocene, Gaia Vince explores how fossil fuel burning will leave enduring marks in geological record forming on the Earth in current times. Climate change and ocean acidification are in the process of transforming the planet on such a scale that humanity has shifted Earth history into a new geological epoch. Millions of years from now, scientists will be able to read the rocks forming now and see that something profound and unprecedently rapid – from sea level rise to dissolving coral reefs. Drawing from similar episodes in Earth history, leading geoscientists warn of a global blanket of oxygen-starved muds, extinctions of much marine life and a sea level 20 metres higher than today’s.

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is so profound that we’re creating a new geological time period. Geologists have named the age we’re making the Anthropocene. The changes we’re making to the atmosphere, oceans, landscape and living things will leap out of the rocks forming today to Earth scientists of the far future, as clearly as the giant meteorite that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs does to today’s researchers. In this four part series, journalist Gaia Vince looks at the impact of these planetary transformations from the perspective of geological time. When was the last time comparable events happened in Earth history, and are what are the key marks we’re making on the planet that define the Anthropocene?In this first programme, Gaia hears how the hand of humanity on the surface of the continent is geological in its sheer scale and its imprint will remain for millions of years. Through mining and quarrying, we shift billions more tonnes rock and sediment annually than all of the planet’s great rivers and glaciers combined. We are creating new strata in patterns Mother Earth never intended. By turning 40% of the land from wild habitat to food production and then discovering how to turn the atmosphere’s nitrogen into synthetic fertiliser, we’ve become the biggest thing to happen to the whole planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2 billion years. That’s not only causing immediate and serious environmental problems such as oxygen-depleted dead zones in coastal areas and the acceleration of climate change, our rock-shifting and nitrogenous activities will be preserved in the rocks of the future geological record for posterity. Our sedimentary and geochemical signals are exactly the kind geologists use to mark where one period of Earth history ends and another begins.Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker (Image: Anthropocene data visualisation. Credit: International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Globaia)

We are in desperate need of new medicines for the major diseases facing us in the 21st century such as Alzheimer's and obesity. And we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that are now resistant to many old varieties. As bringing new and improved drugs to patients becomes more difficult and more expensive - it can take 20 years and around $1 billion to bring a medicine to market. In the second programme looking at the problem with drug discovery, Geoff Watts asks what can be done to get new pharmaceutical treatments to patients.He discovers that the industry is risk averse and regulations to ensure that drugs are safe and effective are burdensome. But there are pilot projects to speed up the process. Geoff finds out that the experts believe that there needs to be a fundamental change in the drug development process, and the key ingredient is collaboration - between industry and academia and between different drug companies. He also discovers that the medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, is putting money into the development of antibiotics, a field not of interest to many pharmaceutical companies. (Image: Pills in a jar, Credit: Getty Images)

We are in desperate need of new medicines for the major diseases facing us in the 21st Century such as Alzheimer's and obesity. And we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that are now resistant to many old varieties. As bringing new and improved drugs to patients becomes more difficult and more expensive - it can take 20 years and around $1 billion to bring a medicine to market - Geoff Watts asks what's gone wrong and what can be done to get new pharmaceutical treatments to patients.Geoff talks to a number of researchers who have worked both within the pharmaceutical industry and publicly funded laboratories to get their views on why the source of drugs has dried up. These include Dr Patrick Vallance, of global pharmaceutical giant GSK, Professor Paul Workman of the Institute of Cancer Research, and Professor Chas Bountra of Oxford University's Structural Genomics Consortium. They argue that the age of the blockbuster drug which can treat millions of patients is over and that we don't know enough science to be able to find treatments for conditions like Alzheimer's disease. Tilli Tansey, Professor of the History of Modern Medical Science at Queen Mary University in London puts the state of drug discovery in its historical context.(Image: Pills and capsules. Credit: Science Photo Library)

Nine million people in the UK alone have significant hearing problems. The mechanisms in our ears that help us hear are incredibly sensitive and are easily damanged by environmental hazards such as loud noises and chemicals or simply the passage of time. Despite the fact that many of us will gradually lose our ability to hear as we as a society grow older, many of us don’t actually know that much about the causes and consequences of deafness. What does the world sound like to a deaf person? How do the brain and ears work together to make sense of sound? And how far have scientists come in helping to restore impaired hearing? In this edition of Discovery, Dr Carinne Piekema speaks with Harry Thomas who has been deaf since birth along with experts in the field of auditory neuroscience to find out about what it is like living with hearing loss on a personal and scientific level. By recreating everyday sounds as if heard by someone like Harry wearing a hearing aid or with a cochlear implant, she will also try to give a sense of the experience of being a deaf person in our noisy environment.