- Frank Witte
Recent Mars missions have produced compelling evidence for what was once a wet world, where life could well have flourished. Now scientists are about to embark on a mission with the best chances yet of finding it. Touching down near the Martian north pole, the Phoenix lander will begin looking for the chemical hallmarks of life past and present. But what do we already know about our near planetary neighbour? Frank Witte finds out...
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- Catherine Zentile
The buzz of a bumblebee is one of the quintessential sounds of summer time. But this ‘slender sound’ and ‘faint utterance’ that was so admired by Wordsworth is under threat because bumblebees are in crisis: of the 25 species native to Britain, three have already been declared extinct. But why are they suffering and what can we do to stem the problem...?
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- Robinson Fulweiler
Climate change has been blamed with altering the environment – from animal migrations to sea level. Now it's also affecting nutrient cycling. Excess nitrogen discharged into estuaries used to be removed by a bacterial process in the sediments. But recent research shows a dramatic change...
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- Anne Hinton
The world has heard much about the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 and the vast loss of life associated with this, but what were the tectonic events that lead to it?
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- Emma Gatti
The Pythia, the prophetess at the Oracle of Delphi, was said to be able to communicate with Apollo by going into a trance. But science has shown that these trances weren't down to divine intervention - instead they were the result of inhaling noxious gases from nearby geological fault lines...
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- Chris Smith
What is a thunderstorm, how is lightning generated by clouds, how much energy is there in a lightning bolt, and could it be harnessed to power a town?
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- Alex Thompson
What's the evidence that the world's becoming a warmer place, or are claims of climate change quite literally just hot air? Atmospheric scientist Alex Thompson puts the greenhouse effect under the spotlight...
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- Robinson Fulweiler
Equivalent in land area to 14 Isle of Mans, or Rhode Island State twice over, the Louisiana Wetlands are one of the most important acquatic ecological sites in the world. But now they're disappearing, fast - an area the size of a tennis court slips into the sea every thirteen seconds. But what is this wilderness and what can be done to save it...?
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- Nick Heath
By now we’re familiar with apocalyptic visions of a scorched and flooded world ravished by global warming. But this gloomy prognosis is now set to take a nosedive beneath the ocean waves.
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- Helen Scales
Helen looks at how marine reserves in Florida and St Lucia set up to protect space rockets, and local livelihoods have affected fish stocks both inside and outside the reserves.
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