Brainwaves

With the battle against climate change never far from many of our minds this week, 6 years on from when Brainwaves first visited, Pennie Latin returns to the Flow Country in Caithness and Sutherland to remind us how that much-maligned, but globally rare, feature of the Scottish landscape: the peat bog might be crucial as a carbon sink. Because it is now deemed so precious a group called ‘ The Peatlands Partnership’ has been formed with the aim of applying to get the Flow Country designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If it successful then the area will rank alongside the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef as one of the most important natural sites in the world but, could this precious landscape itself be in danger of the effects of climate change? We'll be discovering how new research hopes to find out.

How comfortable are you with virtual reality? We're not just talking about gaming but across your life and your family's life? With virtual reality being developed in just about every area of our lives Pennie Latin weighs up the value of VR. There's no doubt VR is a powerful tool and results from research into the potential for using VR to treat mental health issues like schizophrenia and anxiety are looking very promising but how worried should we be about that power? Does the fact that VR can be so immersive and engaging mean it also needs to come with a warning? Pennie will be visiting Oxford University to try out some of the latest immersive therapies for herself plus she'll join a primary school in the Highlands to see VR being piloted in an educational setting. So on balance will we love or loathe the prospect of a VR saturated world...listen to find out!

Who doesn't love dinosaurs? Dr Steve Brusatte certainly does and his knowledge, story telling and passion for the subject are utterly infectious. In this Brainwaves Pennie Latin joins Steve in his Edinburgh laboratory to discuss the 5 fossils which best capture his love of the subject together with a flavour of a story which lasted over 180 million years then ended so dramatically with a mass extinction. Among his chosen 5 fossils Steve discusses the Sauropod trackways he discovered on the Isle of Skye, Scotland's Jurassic Park, in 2015 and the extraordinary fossil of a Zhenyuanlong which he first saw in China and is a brilliant example of a feathered dinosaur.

Top para-cyclist Karen Darke MBE won silver in London and gold in Rio now she's trying to make it to a third consecutive Paralympic games in Tokyo but its a tough challenge. So Karen's enlisted the help of Williams Advanced Engineering to see if they can bring a Formula 1 approach to maximising her performance this summer. In this Brainwaves Pennie Latin joins Karen behind the scenes to see just what science and technology can offer our elite athletes.

Professor Lesley Yellowlees CBE has an extraordinary passion for life and for her work as an inorganic chemist. A leading figure in the fields of spectroelectrochemistry and solar energy research Lesley's also a pioneer - she was the first female head of Chemistry and then of Science and Engineering in Edinburgh. She was also the first female president of the Royal Society of Chemistry and is a passionate champion for diversity in science. In this fun, fast talking and hugely engaging conversation Lesley chooses 5 objects which capture her fiery character; love of family, food and travel, and the work that drives her so much.

How often do you do a number '2'? Seriously! And do you know how often your friends and family members have a poo? No? So how do you know if you're normal and what does a well functioning gut system mean when it comes to our toilet habits and our health? Pennie Latin goes on a frank and fearless journey to find out more about the human gut system. Along the way she talks to Kevin Whelan, Professor of dietetics at King's College London, about what normal is when it comes to going to the loo. Dr Alan Walker, principal investigator at the Rowatt Institute in Aberdeen, shows Pennie how they're using an artificial gut to research how microbes in our gut interact with the food we eat and she takes a tour of EnteroBiotix where faeces from healthy donors are processed to make a radical treatment for c difficile infection. Pennie also manages to persuade a family to keep a 'jobbie journal' for a week so they keep account of the regularity and consistency of their toilet habits. Bold, brave and utterly fascinating, join us for an irresistible slice of everyday science which impacts each and every one of us!

Pennie Latin joins marine ecologist and deep ocean explorer Dr Jon Copley for a fascinating insight into his extraordinary world. Jon is a 'bathynaut' (someone who has gone deeper than 200 meters under the ocean) who specialises in researching hydrothermal vents deep under the ocean. His watery office is a small acrylic bubble capable of diving to incredible depths which allows him to explore, observe and research the amazing array of life which inhabits the half of our world which is covered by water more than 2 miles deep. In a single drop of sea water there are a million bacteria, and a bath tub of water, says Jon, will give you as many life forms as there are stars in our galaxy! Unfortunately as well as finding new species Jon is also witness to man's impact on the deep ocean environment and finds evidence of human rubbish even thousands of meters under the sea. So join Jon and Pennie as they dive deep into the subject of oceanography, you'll hear some remarkable stories and discover species which will take your breath away but there's a few thought provoking lessons along the way too.

Gill Skene didn't know what was wrong with her after the traumatic birth of her daughter, she just knew she wasn't depressed and she wasn't behaving normally. Flashbacks and paranoia culminated in a moment when Gill realised she was capable of attacking her husband after he came between her and her baby, she sought help and was diagnosed to postnatal PTSD. In this moving and thought provoking Brainwaves, Pennie Latin hears from Gill and her husband, Mark, then sets out to investigate what we know about a mental health condition which is estimated to affect 30,000 women in the UK each year. Along the way Pennie discovers its not just birth mothers who are vulnerable to stress following a difficult birth, clinical staff are also presenting with PTSD. Pennie asks how much we know about the condition and what can be done to identify and support sufferers.

We live in this amazing country so why would we want to just pour a cocktail of random pharmaceuticals into the environment? As Pennie Latin discovers, to her astonishment, in Scotland we’re doing that each and every day just by taking a pee. It’s not just peeing the medicines out either, we’re even adding to the problem when we think we’re being conscientious by flushing unwanted pills down the loo. When you take into account the 1.4 million prescriptions dispensed in Scotland every year, that's a lot of potential for pharmaceutical pollution. In this Brainwaves Pennie hears about a pioneering and unique collaboration involving NHS Highland, researchers from the University of the Highland and Islands and Glasgow Caledonian University, together with Scottish Water and SEPA who have come together to share wisdom, research, data and ideas for how to stop this environmental problem before it gets any worse. Its an extraordinary story and one where we all have a part to play. Music by Blue Dot Sessions

September 7th 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of a unique and remarkable study into how our brains age. But it's a story which has roots back in 1921. Almost all the Scottish children born in that year were given a test in 1932, when they were 11, into their thinking abilities. It happened again in 1947 with a second group of 11-year-old Scottish children born in 1936. The results of those two sets of tests were tucked away until, in 1999, Professor Ian Deary and his colleagues from the University of Edinburgh unearthed the orginal data and had the idea of inviting many of those original participants back to be tested again in a unique study. Over 500 volunteers from those born in 1921 and over 1000 from those born in 1936 came forward and ever since their thinking skills have been closely studied and scrutinised, tested and their brains scanned to see whether they might reveal some of the secrets to ageing well. What impact does your thinking ability at the age of 11 have on your thinking ability as you reach old age? Are there particular activities, hobbies, careers or behaviours which contribute to healthy cognitive ageing? Why do people who drink more alcohol seem to perform better on cognitive thinking skills tasks? Before you raise a glass in delight, the answer is not as straightforward as you might think! The richness of the data collected by the Lothian Birth Cohort Studies over the past 20 years is unprecedented and has contributed to over 500 papers. The participants themselves have become global superstars in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive ageing. In this special Brainwaves, Pennie Latin joins the 20th anniversary celebrations in Edinburgh, hears from Professor Ian Deary and his team and meets some of the participants themselves, including 98-year-old Margaret MacKie who still does the Scotsman cryptic crossword everyday and says her ambition is to complete it six days in a row! It's a remarkable success story of a unique collaboration between a generation of Scots and a pioneering team of researchers that will leave a legacy we all might learn from.

Becoming part man and part machine may seem like something from a science fiction film, but cyborgs are moving among us in Scotland today. People who have had body parts replaced or enhanced are living in every community. In this programme we'll be exploring the benefits of becoming bionic, and asking how much has to be replaced before we stop being human. A researcher shares the stories she's gathered from people living with cardiac implants. A pioneer of Scottish engineering talks about the challenges involved in creating the bionic hand, then we visit a research facility in Livingston to see what the future holds for limb replacement. A teenage bionic man shows us how the technology works day to day, and we speak to the biohacker who is upgrading her body through operations carried out at her kitchen table. The world's first cyborg, Professor Kevin Warwick, explains the pros and cons of getting chipped. Then we step into a virtual world where smells and sounds can be seen with our eyes.

Pennie Latin sits down at the kitchen table to discuss the future of food. We'll hear about innovations that are taking place across Scotland to alter the meals we put in our mouths. You might be partial to a bit of carrot cake, but how about a slice of bread that could count as one of your five-a day? Are you happy for scientists to breed berries which can reduce your risk of certain diseases? We know that Omega 3 is good for us, so is it OK for the fish we eat to have been reared on a special diet in order to boost the levels on our plate? How do you feel about "Health by Stealth" - are you happy for employers, schools, or governments to determine what we can eat, if it would lead to a healthier population? Pennie and a panel of guests chew over these issues.

Scotland has a serious drug problem with its drug death rate, per head of population, roughly 2.5 times that of the UK as a whole. Based on the latest figures from the Scottish Government drugs deaths more than doubled in the 10 years up to 2017. In this Brainwaves Pennie Latin joins Dr Craig McKenzie, co-director of the recently formed Forensic Drug Research Group in Dundee, to find out how he's taking a fresh approach to understanding our relationship with illicit drugs. Craig explains how he's working in close collaboration with drug recovery groups and organisations like the Scottish Prison Service to better understand patterns of drug use in Scotland, particularly when it comes to polysubstance drug use where users are mixing prescription medicines with street drugs, stimulants and narcotics. He also gathers information from online sources which help him predict which new drugs might appear in Scotland in the near future, what kind of strength they'll be and what harm they might do to users. The programme also hears from Professor Kevin Read, Head of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics at the world-leading Drugs Discover Unit, to hear how he's collaborating with Craig so they can better understand how new drugs and combinations of drugs are metabolised by the human body. As we'll hear, Kevin's role usually involved the discovery of new medicines and pharmaceuticals, so the partnership with Craig has opened his eyes to a whole new appreciation of the complexity of the illicit drugs market and the challenges it presents for Scotland.

How high is your pain threshold? Pennie Latin considers her own tolerance and meets those who have developed ways to increase theirs. Doctors discuss what happens within our bodies, and try to determine if it is a physical or emotional response that is triggered. Why do we cope better with pain in certain situations, and why does this threshold vary so much from person to person? We’ll hear how tactics like hypnotherapy and swearing can help. Then we consider if pain is a necessary thing for our survival. Why are scientists building pain receptors into synthetic skin? And if we had no sensation of pain would our lives be easier or more difficult?

Professor Niamh Nic Daeid, one of the world's leading forensic scientists, takes Pennie Latin behind the scenes at Dundee's Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science. From looking into the past with the arrival of a heart which could have significant royal history which Niamh's team are challenged to uncover, to stepping into the future and a virtual reality crime scene which could change the face of how forensic experts access and gather information across the globe. As well as explaining why forensic science is in such dire need of change Niamh reveals how her own passion for fire scene investigation began at a surprisingly early age and why fire scene investigation remains a dinner table conversation whenever her family come together.

How many times have you got into a silly argument about the washing up or homework or money worries? We all experience all kinds of niggles during the course of life – at work, home, with extended family or friends – but none of us like arguing and constant conflict can have a big impact on our health and happiness. So what’s the answer? Well it’s all about learning to listen better, empathise, take a long hard look at your own behaviour, all the kinds of things which feel pretty much impossible in the thick of the fight! So in this Brainwaves Pennie Latin talks to a range of experts about what we can do to better understand why we get into the conflict we do and how we might practise the art of pausing and stopping the arguments in our lives so we can end up a bit happier and healthier.

Our climate is changing. The effect of carbon dioxide on our climate change was first considered in the 19th Century, but it wasn’t until the late 1980’s that we started to take its effect seriously. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change was established to try and work out the effect of the burning fossil fuels on our climate. Cited as one of the world’s most influential scientific minds, Professor Gabi Hegerl’s career has been defined by our climate. She had a significant role on the Intergovernmental Panel and today still researches how our climate, of the last 1,000 years, has changed and how man has influenced it. But more importantly for Gabi is the answer to the question of what we can do to try and return our climate to its natural equilibrium and what the co-benefits of changing our behaviour might be to our health.

Quietly and without debate our lives have been taken over by a weapon of mathematical domination. The algorithm. Algorithms are one of the most powerful forces of our time. Replacing humans in decision making that affects almost every aspect of our lives these mathematical codes manipulate what we see, do, eat, how we live and who we love. But how many of us understand even what an algorithm is let alone the impact they have on our lives? This Brainwaves is all about unpacking the mystery of the algorithm and trying to make a little bit of sense of their role in our lives.

Professor James Boardman, neonatologist and Scientific Director of the Jennifer Brown Laboratory in Edinburgh, talks about his research into the effects of a baby being born too small or too soon on how the brain develops outside the womb. Its a fascinating, engaging and emotionally challenging role which sees him tread a path between time working as an NHS consultant with premature babies in Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary neonatal care unit and conducting research with these tiny babies using state of the art technology and brain imaging techniques to try to understand the causes and consequences of pre-term birth.

Loch Ness is a monster of a loch - so vast it holds more water than all the lakes and rivers of England and Wales combined - which is why, when it comes to studying it, it presents something of a challenge to scientists and researchers. This Brainwaves is not going to provide any answers to that question…but we are going in search of unknown species and the intriguing science that Loch Ness can provide us with. The whole monster obsession with this Loch has been obscuring our view of this remarkable stretch of water which, thanks to how it was formed, has given us a giant natural outdoor laboratory. Pennie Latin heads out onto and into the water to discover the scientific riches that lie under the surface of myth and legend!

Astrophysicist Professor Catherine Heymans is on a quest to understand the dark side of our Universe. Observations suggest that 95% of the Universe is made up of something invisible, something we can't see or touch called dark matter and dark energy. We only know it exists because of its impact on the things we can see and touch but beyond that we really know very little about it. So how can you study something you can't see, feel or observe through a telescope? In this fascinating conversation Catherine shares her deep rooted passion for tackling huge questions, the origins of her love of exploration and why she believes there is indeed alternative life out there but she doesn't think we'll ever get to meet it.

It's 80 years since the Manhattan Project saw the first nuclear bomb developed and latterly unleashed on the world. In the aftermath enthusiasm for nuclear power and innovation went into overdrive but at what cost? In this Brainwaves Pennie Latin visits Douneray Power Station in Caithness where the long process of decommissioning is still in progress, to explore what the nuclear fuelled invention of the post war era now means for scientists working in Scotland. Why is the job of cleaning up after the nuclear era so complicated in the UK and what, if anything, have we learned from those scientific innovators of the past.

Ring tones, notifications, sirens, traffic, electronic gadgets, the noise is endless! So, in a bid to escape and find a bit of respite from our increasingly noisy world, Pennie Latin goes in search of a slice of silence. Its a journey that takes her from a world war II fuel tank hidden in the heart of the Highlands which houses the longest echo on record to an anechoic chamber where silence is absolute. In between she considers the value of silence and whether you can ever truly switch off the world, physically or mentally. Is silence a commodity worth pursuing or, at the end of the day, does the cost of finding silence outweigh the benefits? So, will Pennie find silence and what will it yield if she does?

From the chemical structure of different plastics to what exactly should we be putting in our recycling bins, Brainwaves explores what it is about plastics that has made them environmental enemy number one.

Pennie Latin meets the founder of Sci Sisters and the Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Polly Arnold Polly's work focus's around two fundamental forms of waste. She spends her time as chemist lurking around the bottom end of the Periodic Table with elements like uranium and plutonium. This waste she is interested in is nuclear waste and primarily how will it behave as it decays in the future. The other waste she focuses her attention to is what she sees as the waste of talented women who, for a variety of reasons, leave their careers in STEM. To address this she started SciSisters, a network for women in STEM to provide a platform for promoting their areas of expertise and at the same time providing support for women working in a field with a strong gender imbalance.

How many of us spend our days surrounded by dead bodies? For Professor Tracey Wilkinson, the Principal Anatomist at the University of Dundee, it is part of her everyday. Tracey is current Cox Chair of Anatomy at the University which is celebrating the 130th Anniversary of the position in 2018. The Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification was the first in the UK to introduce the Thiel soft fix approach to embalming, leading to research which has resulted in new and improved surgical procedures and the design and development of new medical technologies and surgical devices. Starting in the dissecting room, in this Brainwaves, Pennie Latin follows Tracey for a day to find out more about her role as Principle Anatomist, the research she heads ups and how her passion for anatomy is being passed on to medical students, surgeons and researchers around the world.

Body organs aren't all internal like the brain or the heart. There's one we wear on the outside. Skin is our largest organ, it covers over 2m2. This fleshy covering does a lot more than make us look presentable. In fact, without it, we'd literally evaporate. Skin acts as a waterproof, insulating shield, guarding the body against extremes of temperature, damaging sunlight, and harmful chemicals. It also exudes antibacterial substances that prevent infection and manufactures vitamin D for converting calcium into healthy bones. Our skin is a huge sensor packed with nerves for keeping the brain in touch with the outside world. At the same time, skin allows us free movement, proving itself an amazingly versatile organ. From the anatomy class to the skin labs of the future, this Brainwaves looks at this extraordinary organ that we all share and the science behind some cutting edge innovation happening to replace, repair and improve damaged skin.

It's all very well being told that the best way to stave off ageing is to do, think, eat or behave in a certain way when you're young, but when you are young, you don't ever believe you're going to get old, so by the time you are getting old it's too late. You've frittered away you're entire youth partying, denying your body sleep and exercise and eating junk food so by the time you're 40, you look 50 and feel 60, aaaaaagh! But is it really too late? Is there something we could, should, might do in middle age to hold back the tidal wave of old age? Welcome to The Intervention Factory - an on-going Scottish research project, designed by Associate Professor from Heriot Watt, Dr Alan Gow, aimed at understanding which ordinary, everyday actions and behaviours could be the key to helping us stay sharper for longer. In this Brainwaves, Pennie Latin listens in to Alan's Edinburgh Fringe Show at the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas based on our cognitive decline and then explores the a piece of research called the What Keeps You Sharp survey which explores how accurate our own ideas are about what does and doesn't keep us younger for longer.

Should we offer language classes on the NHS? Could bilingualism be more beneficial than medication when it comes to a strong, healthy brain and is monolingualism making us ill? In this Brainwaves, Pennie Latin meets the man behind those bold ideas. Dr Thomas Bak is Reader in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh and clinical research fellow at the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic. A plurilingualist and Gaelic learner, originally from Poland, now based in Scotland his work focuses on the interaction between bilingualism and cognitive functions across our lifetime, in particular the effects of language learning in delaying diseases such as dementia.

Brainwaves on ME. A story of confusion, misunderstanding, misdirection, misdiagnosis and misery.

What role will robots play in our lives in the future? We already interact with robots on a daily basis but with the development of intelligent, free-thinking robots our relationship with them will change. Sethu Vijayakumar, Professor of Robotics at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and judge on BBC2's Robot Wars, has spent his career in robotics pioneering the use of large scale machine learning techniques for use in healthcare, in our homes and in ground breaking unmanned missions to Mars, the precursor to a potential human Martian colony. We shouldn't be afraid of robots, he says. Instead we need to become comfortable that robots will be more efficient than us and make less mistakes than us. Our future is shared and fully autonomous robots. Humans just need to become content with relinquishing some control of our world. In this Brainwaves, Pennie Latin meets Sethu Vijayakumar in his lab in Edinburgh, along with some of his robots - from a relatively simple prosthetic forearm to one of the most advanced humanoid robots in the world, Valkyrie.

Facing imminent extinction the Scottish Wildcat used to to be found widely across the country. Today the most optimistic population count suggests there are around 315 individual wildcats left and they are only in the north of Scotland. Experts have suggested we may have only 5 years to save the species. In response Scottish Wildcat Action is the first national conservation plan with a vision to restore viable population of Scottish wildcats into the Highlands. Their plan is a multifaceted approach. It involves tagging, tracking and mapping wildcats in their natural habitat. Domestic cat owners have a role to play too. The biggest threat to the wildcat is hybridisation with domestic and feral cats. Which begs the question should we be neutering domestic cats that are near wildcat habitats? And if all this fails should we follow what worked for the Iberian Lynx and develop a captive bred population with the intention of releasing them into the wild later on? But is it too late and at what cost? Should we really be ploughing all these resources and expertise into saving them? In this Brainwaves Pennie Latin meets some of the researchers, conservationists and scientists who are trying save the iconic Scottish Wildcat.

Would you, could you or should you donate your body to science? That might be a hard enough question to answer but what about donating your children's tissue to research after their death. This is exactly the situation Sarah Gray and her husband found themselves in when one of their twins, Thomas, died. Thomas, was born with anencephaly and died 6 days after birth. Sarah and her husband donated Thomas's tissues for scientific research. With time Sarah's desire to know what Thomas's tissue has been used for got the better of her. She went on an extraordinary journey to understand the full extent of Thomas's legacy, visiting the institutions which had received parts of his liver and eyes and tracing the scientific impact of his donation. Joanne Mullarky is a research nurse at the University of Bradford's Human Tissue Bank. When she heard Sarah's story she changed the way she worked and now today thinks that a stronger relationship between academic institutions and donor parents is vital to increasing the amount of tissue donated. Tissue that is currently rarely donated. A Brainwaves special recorded in front a live audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Honest, thought provoking and profoundly moving, Sarah's story of Thomas's donation will question the way we think about life after death and the extraordinary gift of giving a dead body to science.

An intricate yet delicate six sided crystal floats down to earth. It becomes powerful enough to carve our landscape. It is cold enough to kill us and if it becomes unstable it can move at hundreds of miles per hour. All this, yet that crystal is composed of one of life's absolute essentials, water. This Brainwaves is all about the surprising, quirky and fascinating science behind something we all experience in a Scottish winter - Snow and Ice. From the startling beauty of ice crystal formation to the science of drilling down to find the oldest ice on the planet. Pennie Latin climbs mountains, goes back in time and asks what makes the perfect snowball in this intriguing episode of Brainwaves that will make you look out the window wishing for the next snowfall.

Until recently, it was thought that our brains were fully developed by early childhood. Driven by the assumption that brain growth was pretty much complete by the time a child began school, scientists believed for years that the adolescent brain was essentially an adult one, only with fewer miles on it. But over the last two decades the scientific community has learned that the teenage years encompass vitally important stages of brain development and research has shown that the adolescent brain is still changing into early adulthood. This has impacts on learning and multitasking, stress and memory, sleep, addiction, and decision-making. For parents, these consequences often manifest themselves in a variety of behaviours. In this episode of Brainwaves on The Adolescent Brain, Pennie Latin examines the relatively young field of teenage neurology. Examining what science has discovered about brain functioning, wiring and capacity to try and explain how these eye-opening findings not only dispel commonly held myths, but also yield practical suggestions that will help adults and teenagers negotiate the often frustrating and misunderstood adolescent years.

A farmer's daughter from Angus, soil has been in Professor Lorna Dawson's family for generations. She just didn't expect her relationship with soil to lead her into a scientific career of solving crime. Now Principal Soil Scientist at the James Hutton Institute she has for over 25 years' researched soil and plant interactions. It was when she was an Edinburgh geology student that her mind was drawn towards forensics. One evening 2 teenage girls went missing from near her student halls, they turned up dead the next day. Little did Lorna know that one day she would become pivotal in the forensic case of The World's End murders. Her role as Head of the Soil Forensic Science Group has led her to work on over 70 criminal cases across the globe. It's the detailed analysis of the microbial DNA held within the soil that has led to her pioneering work becoming so effective at finding bodies, caches of drugs and overturning alibi's in courtrooms. There is however one case that she has been working on for several years which remains incomplete. In this episode of Brainwaves Pennie Latin joins Lorna Dawson on site as she starts a new search for the remains of the missing Scottish schoolgirl Moira Anderson.

Underneath the waves of Scotland's seas there is a hive of communication going on. Clicks, shrieks, calls and whistles that can be heard for over 15kms. They are highly developed forms of communication, some evidence even shows local dialects among our two main native populations of Bottlenose dolphin in Scotland. What started as a career trying to work out the similarities between how animals and humans perceive the world around them led Professor Vincent Janik, Director of Scottish Oceans institute at St. Andrews University, to focussing his work on the nuances of how dolphins address each other, how they communicate. In this episode of Brainwaves Pennie Latin explores what makes dolphin communication some of the most advanced of the animal kingdom and what we can learn about the development of language and brain function in humans by comparing ourselves to the dolphins.

Fracking doesn't just open up rocks, it divides all kinds of communities across Scotland. In January 2015 the Scottish Government announced a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing taking place in Scotland, putting in place ban on fracking shale rock for oil and gas, while they further consider the implications of fracking. Lots of us have heard the back and forth about whether we should or should not entertain fracking as an answer to our energy requirements in Scotland but how much of that is based strictly upon science? In this Brainwaves Pennie Latin explores the science of hydraulic fracturing as a method of extracting oil and gas from the carboniferous shale reserves of Scotland's Midland Valley and picks apart how a detailed understanding and analysis of Scotland's specific geology and landscape helps us to understand both what potential reserves of oil and gas there might be under our feet but also what are the possible implications of mining those reserves through fracking.

We've been fascinated by it for thousands of years. It was the target of a 20th century technological arms race that would put the first humans in space and on extra-terrestrial soil, sparking exponential advances in spaceflight. Man got there, then left, and hasn't been back for 45 years. But now private investors, Kickstarter funds and international space agencies are clamouring to return. For something we see in the sky most nights it still holds an air of mystique. The Moon. As the European Space Agency prepares to land on the lunar surface again this episode of Brainwaves looks at the fascinating relationship between earth and its moon, hearing from those who have orbited the moon and those who are planning to return to it to form a human colony.

When Richard Morris was a physics student he volunteered to be a subject in a psychology experiment. It triggered a fascination with the brain that led to him become one of the world's leading neuroscientists. His lifetime work has focused on memory and why, in his own words, it's such an interesting thing. Consider what life would be like if we didn't have memory. Who would we be, how would we know our place in the world? In 2016 for his work looking at how we form memory and specifically the intricate cellular functions created during the memory making process, Professor Richard Morris was awarded The Brain Prize. It was walking past fish tanks in the back of a marine biology laboratory that originally gave him the idea for an experiment that would change the way we understand how memory is formed. An idea he himself describes as being ludicrously simple. The Water Maze became and still is a standard experiment used in labs around the world to analyse memory. This early work focused on how we form memory, today his fascination lies in what happens when our memory starts to fail. In this episode of Brainwaves, Pennie Latin explores our memory with Professor Richard Morris and why he thinks it's one of the grand challenges of neuroscience.

The sound of the world around us provides us with key indicators to the health of our planet. How those sounds change over time and in space can show how the well-being of earth is changing, both naturally and through man's impact. Soundscape ecology is the study of nature's sounds - from the lapping of the ocean's waves and the rustle of leaves, to the rutting roars of red deer and the whistling of whales and dolphins. But the sound of our world is changing, advances in recording technology mean that we can now very easily listen to that change. But one of the key things for science though is being able to analyse that soundscape and relate it how the natural world is changing. In this episode of Brainwaves, Pennie Latin talks to those who have spent years recording the evolving soundscape of our planet, explores how the sound is being analysed and discovers how sound is being used to measure re-wilding in parts of the Highlands.

Everyone will remember the first time they saw the Northern Lights dance across the night sky. For some it will have been a deeply moving moment, for others, time to capture a photograph. For cultures and communities going back 100's of years the aurora borealis have meant many different things, from the spirits of the dead being whisked away to the omens of the Gods. Whatever your belief, it is impossible to not look at this mythical dance of colours in the night sky as anything other than beautiful. Plasma scientist, Dr Melanie Windridge has devoted herself to understanding the science of the aurora borealis and recording the human connection with them. In this episode of Brainwaves, Melanie explains why there are different colours, how the dancing waves of the lights are a kind of earthly Thai Chi and while the aurora might be beautiful it is actually vital to protect us from violent space weather as we become a more and more tech dependant world.