BBC Inside Science

The Romans, Vikings and Normans ruled Britain for many years, but few left their genetic calling cards behind in the DNA of today's mainland Caucasian population. That's one of the insights from the most comprehensive analysis yet of the genetic make-up of the UK's white British population. As the study's lead author Peter Donnelly explains it's produced some big surprises, not least how in contrast, the Anglo Saxons invasion was to account for up to 40% of the genetic mix in much of southern Britain. Much of Britain's current historical information is from a relatively small subset of people, but a genetic study like this sheds light on the history of the masses.The Royal Botanical Gardens Kew is currently at the forefront of trialling drone technology to map and locate remote vegetation The aim is to examine plant health and deforestation in detail, particularly in inaccessible areas around the globe. The team led by Justin Moat and Oliver Whaley have recently returned from Peru, where they've examined the fragile ecosystem threatened by mining in the Lomas region. BBC Inside Science's Sue Nelson was deployed to join the Kew team for a Drone test run.As our energy needs become greater, the impetus to tap the sun's energy directly becomes ever more urgent. A new paper published this month has cracked one of the barriers to efficient conversion of water into oxygen and hydrogen, which plants of course do naturally. Adam Rutherford speaks to Nathan Lewis at California's Institute of Technology who has developed an electrically conductive film that could enable devises to harness sunlight to split water into hydrogen. Chemist Andrea Sella assesses how close we are to achieving artificial photosynthesis and solar fuels.And ahead of tomorrow's solar eclipse, Adam speaks to solar scientist Dr Huw Morgan from the University of Aberystwyth, who together with his colleagues in Svalbard is going to use those precious seconds to answer one of the great enduring mysteries of the sun: why is the corona, the fiery crown around the orb, is a great deal hotter than the sun itself?Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Today CERN announced that on 23rd March the largest single machine the world has ever seen gets plugged in, switched on, and rebooted after a 2 year rest. The Large Hadron Collider was crashing particles at energies just off the speed of light, and in doing so, simulating the universe in its neonatal form. It will be shortly achieving energies twice as great as before and as Adam Rutherford hears from particle physicists Tara Shears and Malcolm Fairbairn, vast new opportunities for discovery will open upIn The Archers, the current devastation caused by the rising of the River Am is a stark reminder of the impact of last year's floods and the unpredictable nature of river channels. But a new study argues that if we're to get a better grip on the hazard posed by a river - and even predict the likelihood it will flood - an overlooked factor needs to be embraced. Louise Slater from Queen Mary University of London discusses the missing piece in the puzzleNASA's Space Launch System, or SLS, will be capable of taking astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since the end of the Apollo era in 1972.Its first - unmanned - launch is due in 2018 and yesterday the first ground test on two of the massive boosters was successfully completed . BBC Future Space Correspondent, Richard Hollingham, reports from NASA's assembly facility to get the measure of this interstellar behemoth.The golden age of violin making was dominated by master violinmaking families from the 17th and 18th centuries but what accounts for their revered acoustic power? Adam speaks to violin virtuoso Tasmin Little and hears of a new study by acoustician Nicholas Makris from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who's scanned, measured and documented the violin's changing dimensions to try and account for the unique fullness of sound during this era.Producer Adrian Washbourne.

How does the brain lay down memory? For decades the limits of microscopes have meant that a detailed look at the way brain cells encode particular learned skills and events has proved elusive. But in a report published this week a team of researchers has identified how changes in specific connections encode a particular behavioural response. Adam Rutherford talks to Tony Zador of Cold Spring Harbour laboratories who's become the first to crack a piece of the neural code for learning and memory which could have profound medical insights.350 years ago this week, the world's first scientific journal was published. Philosophical Transactions began by drawing together various letters and reviews that cemented the origin of modern science by publishing Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and other founding members of the esteemed Royal Society. Historian Dr Aileen Fyfe discusses the key moments in the journal's evolution and its legacy today.There's a look at the ongoing representation of women in science following on from a recent report examining the Royal Society's 2014 university research fellows of which only 2 out of 43 were women. The Society's President Sir Paul Nurse discusses how the imbalance in this and in science more generally should be addressed.NASA's Dawn spacecraft is about to arrive in the orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres and will be the first mission ever to successfully visit a dwarf planet. As the spacecraft spirals closer, images have shown numerous craters and mysterious bright spots that scientists believe could reveal how Ceres formed and offer new clues to the origins of our solar system. Adam talks to the mission's deputy scientist Carol Raymond on the latest interpretations of what's currently being observed.Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

A computer system has taught itself how to play dozens of video games. AI researchers claim this is a significant step toward machine intelligence, because the learning process is similar to how humans learn. The program, labelled DQN by its creators at Google DeepMind, performed as well as or better than humans at assorted Atari video games, such as Breakout, and Pong. This style of "Deep learning" is useful because it can be more readily applied to real world scenarios. As Adam Rutherford discovers,it's a short step from mastering a driving simulation game to self-driving cars.Desalination to produce fresh drinking water is on the rise, but the bi-products of the process - acidic brine and carbon dioxide, are a growing environmental problem Adam Rutherford talks to Dr Philip Davies who's devised a new idea for treating brine from desalination plants that could help curb carbon dioxide emissions and go a long way towards addressing acidification of our oceans.Plymouth music festival, Biomusic, features a new work by composer Eduardo Miranda, inspired by a fungus mould. Roland Pease meets the musical pioneer who finds music in biological tissuesA new exhibition at the Wellcome Foundation explores the history, science and art of forensic medicine, from the crime scene to the courtroom. Adam heads down to 'Forensics: the anatomy of crime' for a tour with forensic scientist Dr Angela Gallop, who worked on high profile cases including the murders of both Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence, and also meets exhibition curator Lucy Shanahan.

Discussing Alzheimer's disease, false memories, and cutting-edge research at the Diamond Light Source facility. Exploring the challenges in finding effective treatments for Alzheimer's and the concept of implanting false memories in individuals. Also, delving into the potential impacts of space travel on human physiology through a unique twin study.

Adam Rutherford explores new insights into what lies at the very centre of the Earth. New research from China and the US suggests that the innermost core of our planet, far from being a homogenous iron structure has another, distinct region at its centre. He talks to the study's lead researcher Xiangdong Song and to geophysicist Simon Redfern about what this inner-inner core could tell us about the very long history of the Earth and the long suspected swings in the earth's magnetic field.Professor Andrea Sella, from University College London is a recipient of the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize, in recognition, like Faraday himself, of exemplary science communication to the lay public. Andrea gave his prize lecture this week, describing chemistry as one of the 'crowning intellectual achievements of our age'. How justified is the claim? What have chemists ever done for us?The sea forms the basis of ecosystems and industries, and so even subtle changes to the waters could have serious knock on effects. Dr Susan Fitzer from the University of Glasgow has been wading into Scottish lochs to study shelled creatures; they form a vital basis for marine ecosystems and the global food industry. But what effects could ocean acidification have on this vital organism?And to mark Darwin Day Adam Rutherford examines the origins of Creationism and its most recent variation Intelligent Design. Why do opinion polls in the US routinely find that about half of the population denies the truth of Darwin's theory and believes instead that humans were created supernaturally by God at some point within the last few thousand years? He hears from historian Thomas Dixon, and from Eugenie Scott, former director of the National Centre for Science Education - a US organisation committed to keeping evolution (and now climate change) in the US schools' curriculum.Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

Suzanne Amador Kane discusses analyzing footage from cameras on a Goshawk. The Planck Consortium's new findings on the universe are explored. The passing of Carl Djerassi and Charles Townes is remembered by science writer Philip Ball.

We all remember the floods across much of central and southern England this time last year, and the devastating effect they had on people's lives and livelihoods. Today, a group of researchers at Cardiff University published a report on how people's perception of climate change has evolved in the wake of the floods. To what extent has our belief in man-made climate change altered? Do we now regard last year's events as a sign of things to come? Adam Rutherford talks to Nick Pidgeon from Cardiff University's School of Psychology who led this UK wide studyEarlier this week an international group of climate scientists, geographers and ecologists met at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden to wrangle how we can practically make the best of the Anthropocene - the new geological epoch that many consider that we now find ourselves in. Gaia Vince author of Adventures in the Anthropocene, reports from the Stockholm meetingAt the UK's Satellite Application Catapult in Harwell, a project has been unveiled that seeks to offer real time data on the world's fishing fleet to help governments police illegal fishing. Pulling together data from shipping registers, satellite images, radar and ships' own transponders, Eyes on the Sea automatically scans for suspicious activity and can alert human users and allow them to see what ships are up to. The Pew Charitable Trusts hope that vessels carrying illegal cargoes can then be tracked across the ocean, and any port receiving them would know where they had been and what they had been up to.How complex cells evolved is a mystery. Current theories on the evolutionary jump, between 1 and 2 billion years ago, from life forms based on a simple prokaryote cell to the complex multiple eukaryote cells with a cell nucleus and a host of complex internal machinery, fails to explain much of what we see within animal, plant and fungi cells today. Adam talks to Buzz Baum a cell biologist at University College London who has devised a new testable model which appears to explain one of biology's most basic questions.Producer: Adrian Washbourne.

It is likely that scientists will soon engineer strains of "friendly" bacteria which are genetically recoded to be better than the ones we currently use in food production. The sorts of bacteria we use in cheese or yoghurt could soon be made to be resistant to all viruses, for example. But what if the GM bacteria were to escape into the wild?Researchers writing in the Journal Nature propose this week a mechanism by which GMO's could be made to be dependent on substances that do not occur in nature. That way, if they escaped, they would perish and die.George Church, of Harvard Medical School, tells Adam Rutherford about the way bacteria - and possibly eventually plant and animal cells - could be engineered to have such a "failsafe" included, thus allowing us to deploy GM in a range of applications outside of high security laboratories. Adam reports from this week's launch in Paris of the International Year of Light marking 100 years since Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Amongst the cultural and scientific events at UNESCO in Paris, Nobel Prize winner Bill Philips explains how using lasers can achieve the most accurate atomic clocks imaginable and we hear how Google X is embracing new ways to manipulate light to ignite some of the team's futuristic technologies And as the global decline in coral reefs continues as a result of human activity, Adam talks to Hawaii based biologist Mary Hagedorn who is using unusual techniques normally adopted for fertility clinics, to store and regrow coral species that are in dangerProducer: Adrian Washbourne.

This year is the Food and Agriculture Organisation's International Year of Soils.Adam Rutherford, ably assisted by Manchester University's Richard Bardgett, takes a look at new research seeking to further our understanding of soil behaviour that determines much of our existence.A handful of soil contains many tens of thousands of different species of microbial life, all competing to the death with each other for nutrients and resources. Yet most of those species are very poorly understood, because hitherto scientists have only been able to grow a small percentage of them in the lab.Last week's announcement of a new class of antibiotic - teixobactin - owes a lot to soil; Two buckets of it from the back garden of one of the researchers.Kim Lewis of Northeastern University in the US describes the new technique that could open up the whole biodiversity of a clump of soil to future medicines.Meanwhile, Monsanto, Novozyme and Morrone Bio in the US are just some of the big agricultural corporations exploring what useful microbes could be spread on seeds and crops to increase yields and reduce the needs for fertilizers.Soils, apart from feeding us and helping us fight disease, also have a crucial regulatory role in our climate.Sue Nelson reports on a new soil moisture monitoring network being set up in the UK that uses cosmic rays to measure the water content. The Cosmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System, COSMOS-UK, is being set up by the CEH, based out of Edinburgh.On a global scale, soils are a hugely important reservoir of carbon. Iain Hartley of the University of Exeter talks about the vast amounts of carbon - more than all the carbon in all the trees and air - held in frozen soils in the far northern reaches of the earth. If these vast plains of permafrost were to melt in a warming world, the positive feedback loop caused by the resulting methane and CO2 released could be a bigger problem than many of our climate models allow for.But could we manage the soils beneath our feet better?David Manning of Newcastle University suggests that minerals could be added to brownfield (urban) soils to help them capture and sequester staggering amounts of CO2 from the air to help us offset anthropogenic emissions.Producer Adrian Washbourne.