Frontiers
Channel Details
Frontiers
Programme exploring new ideas in science and meeting the scientists and researchers responsible for them, as well as hearing from their critics
Recent Episodes
30 episodes
Virtual Therapy
"e-Therapy" has come a long way since the (slightly tongue in cheek) days of ELIZA, a very early attempt at computer based psychotherapy. ELIZA was li...
Can Maths Combat Terrorism?
Dr Hannah Fry investigates the hidden patterns behind terrorism and asks whether mathematics could be used to predict the next 9/11.
When comput...
Animal Personality
Professor Adam Hart explores the newest area in the science of animal behaviour - the study of personality variation within species as diverse as chim...
Vagus Nerve
Many people are living with chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel conditions in which the body attacks itself. Although...
New Space to Fly
As our skies become more crowded Jack Stewart examines the long awaited modernisation of air traffic control. With traffic predicted to reach 17 milli...
The Rosetta Mission
The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to 67P/Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko reached its most dramatic moment on 12th November. BBC News corresponde...
Cosmology
In March astronomers in the BICEP2 collaboration announced they had found gravitational waves from the Big Bang. But now the evidence is being questio...
Swarming robots
Adam Hart looks at how new developments in understanding insect behaviour, plant cell growth and sub cellular organisation are influencing research in...
Anaesthesia
General anaesthetics which act to cause reversible loss of consciousness have been used clinically for over 150 years. Yet scientists are only now rea...
Power Transmission
Gaia Vince looks at the future of power transmission. As power generation becomes increasingly mixed and demand increases, what does the grid of the f...
Ageing and the brain
Geoff Watts investigates the latest thinking about our brain power in old age.
He meets researchers who argue that society has overly negative v...
Driverless cars
Most traffic accidents are caused by human error. Engineers are designing vehicles with built in sensors that send messages to other cars, trucks, bik...
Chronotypes
Are you a lark or an owl? Are you at your best in the morning or the evening? Linda Geddes meets the scientists who are exploring the differences betw...
Geo-engineering
Geoengineering is a controversial approach to dealing with climate change. Gaia Vince explores putting chemicals in the stratosphere to stop solar ene...
Nitrogen Fixing
3.5 billion people are alive today because of a single chemical process. The Haber-Bosch process takes Nitrogen from the air and makes ammonia, from w...
Self-Healing Materials
Quentin Cooper takes a look at the new materials that can mend themselves. Researchers are currently developing bacteria in concrete which, once awake...
The Power of the Unconscious
We like to think that we are in control of our lives, of what we do, think and feel. But, as Geoff Watts discovers, scientists are now revealing that...
Gut Microbiota
What is it about the microbes in our guts that can have such an impact on our lives?
The human gut has around 100 trillion bacterial cells from...
Oxytocin
The hormone oxytocin is involved in mother and baby bonding and in creating trust. Linda Geddes finds out if taking oxytocin can help people with auti...
Crossrail - Tunnelling under London
Tracey Logan goes underground to find out how Crossrail is using the latest engineering techniques to create 26 miles of tunnels below London's tube n...
Plate Tectonics and Life
Earthquakes are feared for their destructive, deadly force. But they are part of a geological process, plate tectonics, that some scientists say is vi...
Whatever happened to biofuels?
Whatever happened to biofuels? They were seen as the replacement for fossil fuels until it was realised they were being grown on land that should have...
19/06/2013
England's chief medical officer recently warned that within twenty years, the spread of antibiotic resistance may have returned us to an almost 19th c...
Build Me a Brain
When President Obama recently complained, that although "we can identify
galaxies light years away, study particles smaller than an atom ... we<...
Forensic Phonetics
Many crimes are planned, executed and sometimes gloated over using mobile phones. And the move to digital means that recordings are cheap and easy to...
05/12/2012
A decade ago, the Human Genome Project revealed that only 1% of our DNA codes for the proteins that make our bodies. The rest of the genome, it was sa...
Brain Machine Interfaces
Can reading the mind allow us to use thought control to move artificial limbs?
Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, is one of the world's leading r...
Anthropocene
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 Anthrop...
Why do women live longer than men?
In the UK today, male life expectancy is 78 years old, whereas women will on average live four years longer.
Evolutionary biologist Dr Yan Wong...
Future of Particle Physics
Finding the Higgs boson on July 4th was the last piece in physicists' Standard model of matter. But Tracey Logan discovers there's much more for them...