Home Planet - 02/03/2010

The new series kicks off with a remarkable revelation about how our minds might be controlled by parasites within our brains. Are we really just vehicles for their survival? Inundation by the sea is often portrayed as the end to any agricultural soil. Yet many parts of the world successfully grow all sorts of crops on land reclaimed from the sea. Is the salination really as serious as it is made out to be? Why does wood buried deep inside a living tree emerge in so many different colours, and do hibernating animals have some mechanism to stop their limbs seizing up after months of inactivity? Why, too, is the Richter scale logarithmic and is there something special about logs that allows us to understand them more easily? Join Richard Daniel and his guests - ecologist Dr Lynn Dicks of Cambridge University, forest ecologist Dr Nick Brown of Oxford University and Professor Philip Stott, an environmental scientist from the University of London.