Material World - 16/04/2009

Quentin Cooper talks from the Edinburgh International Science Festival. The world's first retro-fitted carbon capturing coal-fired power station will soon begin operating in France. Stuart Haszeldine, head of the Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage, talks about the realities of scrubbing, sequestering and and whether Britian might be falling behind. Barbara Webb of Edinburgh University's School of Informatics talks about her work building and studying robot insects. A robotic cricket can teach us a lot about how to make better robots, but also how insects must actually work. Quentin also looks at the life of John Maddox, whose unorthodox approach to editing the journal Nature arguably changed the face of modern science.