Rather than having had a quiet history, the Earth’s past has been rather turbulent. We look at the latest research into some of the most interesting events in our planet’s history – what happened, when it happened and how it affects us now. Some of the incidents covered include the ‘snowball Earth’, the day the Earth went green, the Permian extinction and the last ice age.  

 

In the year India celebrates 60 years as a republic, Jad Adams describes how Gandhi turned his sartorial habits into a weapon in the fight for independence. His transformation from ‘dandy Gandhi to naked fakir’was part of the calculated moulding of his public image, enacted over decades. It was not until he was over 50 that Gandhi created the winning combination that was to make him the icon of nationalist India, forever known as Mahatma, ‘father of the nation’.

 

Paul Parsons reports on the history of collection samples from space and looks at recent missions to catalogue and capture samples from the cosmos – what is arriving back from outer space, how is it being analysed, the procedures for collection samples and what great discoveries might be just round the corner.

 

Dan Cossins follows the scientists as they journey to the ends of the Earth in the hunt to identify some of the 6 million or so species as yet unknown to us. Over land and under sea, we show some of the new, quirky marine and terrestrial species they find. He identifies new species hotspots and asks what science and the world at large has to gain from finding these new flora and fauna.