After all, revolutionary breakthroughs are rarely found in the comfy middle ground, but rather at the cutting edge of what's not yet possible.

So it comes as something of a surprise to find a group of scientists inviting the public to tell them how far they should go with a controversial area of research. But that's exactly what the Academy of Medical Sciences is doing today. It's launched a new study into the use of animals containing human genetic material in medical research.

The work, which involves genetically engineering animals (typically mice) to include human genes associated with specific disorders, allows researchers to study human diseases in animal models in the laboratory.

In research aiming to treat a blood disorder for instance, that might involve knocking out the gene that codes for haemoglobin in a mouse, and replacing it with the human version of the same gene. That way, researchers are able to study the impact of any new technique or treatment on human, rather than mouse proteins.

It's an area of medical research that has proved incredibly successful over the past 40 years, making a huge contribution to our understanding of disease processes, and helping to develop treatments and cures for a wide range of genetic disorders.

But as the power and sophistication of the techniques has developed, so it has become possible to do more and more.

While it might be acceptable to transfer an entire human chromosome into mice to study a chronic degenerative disorder like Multiple Sclerosis, would we feel the same about a rat with an equivalent proportion of human neural material - brain cells - in its genetic make up? Would we be comfortable adding human brain function to another primate? Or how about the genes associated with speech?

These are the sorts of question professor Martin Bobrow, who will chair the AMS working group, says the public have a right to decide.

"Some of these developments challenge our idea of what it is to be human. It is important to ensure that this exciting research can progress within limits that scientists, the government, and the public support."

Certainly it would challenge attitudes to research on animals profoundly, if the macaque in the cage was heard to wish the researcher a "good morning" as he came into the lab each day.

Royal Research Ships, it seems, are a little like giant telescopes.

Instead of buying, or hiring one, and sailing away to conduct their experiments in a one-off voyage, scientists "book time" on the research ship that's passing closest to the feature they want to study. The ships themselves plough endlessly this way and that across the high seas.

It's the most efficient way of managing what are admittedly expensive bits of kit - the RRS James Cook cost the Natural Environment Research Council some £36 million in 2006 - but it means they're constantly at sea. When one does finally put in to port, there's something of a mad scramble to load it up with experimental equipment that may not be needed for months or even years.

That's what was happening when I caught up with Dr Jon Copley from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. I found him packing the last of his scientific gear tackle and trim into a shipping container deep in the hold of the James Cook, which had put in to Falmouth to take on supplies earlier this week.

Drums of chemicals and packing cases, even a fridge-freezer, were all wedged into the container and securely strapped down - it's important that nothing breaks free during a storm.

The next time any of it sees the light of day will be in February, when the James Cook will be over the East Scotia Ridge to the west of the South Sandwich Islands in the southern ocean - a remote part of the chain of underwater volcanoes and hydrothermal vents that snakes its way, like the seam on a tennis ball, for 40,000 miles around the planet.

As a marine biologist, Jon Copley is interested in the complex web of life that has evolved around these hydrothermal vents.

"The mid ocean ridges are where under sea volcanoes are creating new earth's crust. Geologists and physicists are trying to understand these processes, and biologists are studying the lush colonies of life that have grown up around these hot springs," he says.

It may seem incredible, but even after 30 years of exploration we still know more about the surface of Mars or Venus than we do about the crushing, inky, blackness of the ocean floor. According to Dr Tim Shank from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution this, rather than space, is the real New Frontier.

"I used to think that the age of discovery was over. That Vasco Da Gama and all these people had found everything there was to find," he says.

"But the reality is we've barely touched exploration on our planet. It is just remarkable what's down there and what we haven't seen yet".

Part of the reason why we haven't seen it yet is the difficulty - and cost - associated with conducting research thousands of miles from dry land, and thousands of feet beneath the waves.

No one country or scientific institution can hope to do it all, and so in an effort to pool resources and avoid unnecessary duplication scientists have formed InterRidge, a kind of international academic talking-shop to plan and co-ordinate efforts to explore the deep oceans.

The UK takes the chair of InterRidge in January, and two of the first projects it will oversee are Jon Copley's expeditions to the Scotia Ridge and the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean.

That's where the fridge-freezer comes in. It's stuffed with frozen chunks of a dismembered whale that washed up dead in Cardiff Bay a few days ago. The carcass will spend a year at 5,500 metres on the deep ocean floor to see what sorts of creatures turn up for a free lunch.

The chances are it'll be something completely new to science...happy hunting.

In this vision of utopia you don't even have to say "lights on" or "time for a cuppa". All you have to do is think it, and technology does the rest.

It's the stuff of science fiction. The kind of futuristic opening scene a film maker might employ to establish that the storyline is set well into the 22nd century.

Or maybe not. Scientists at the University of Southampton have managed to communicate the thoughts of one person to another across the internet without either of them touching a keyboard or voicing any commands. But this is not telepathy: Welcome to the world of Brain Computer Interfacing, or BCI.

The idea behind the research is to translate thoughts into binary signals or commands that can be understood by a conventional computer. So with his motor cortex monitored by electrodes, the first subject is asked to think about moving either his right of left hand. The brain activity that results is transmitted over the internet as either a "one" or a "zero".

At the other end of the system a second subject sits in front of a set of LED lights that flash at a different frequency depending on whether a "zero" or a "one" is received. Crucially the pattern of flashes is too subtle to be consciously seen, but it does register in the subject's visual cortex.

That activity is picked up by a second set of electrodes and the binary series of ones and zeros flashes up on a nearby screen. Bingo! (or perhaps that should be "Eureka!") Thoughts from the motor cortex of one individual have been transmitted to the visual cortex of another across the internet.

"Dramatic proof of principle"

It has to be said the experiment is a little... clunky. It takes a few seconds for the electrodes monitoring the motor cortex to register the imagined left or right movement, and there's a similar gap before the message is downloaded from the receiver's visual cortex. Both are susceptible to a degree of interference in the shape of stray thoughts popping into the participants heads.

But that's just a matter of fine tuning. With refinement, Dr Christopher James who lead the research believes, we could one day use the power of thought to transmit messages and control machinery.

"The experiment provides a dramatic proof of principle. This is brain to brain communication through the power of thought."

It's early days for BCI, but already the US military is investing millions through the defence procurement agency DARPA in similar projects. And, while the idea of targeting enemy combatants or controlling battlefield robots by thought alone may still be the stuff of science fiction, Dr James is already experimenting with a motorised wheelchair that could be steered by the power of the occupant's mind.

BCI could also offer disabled people new ways to control their environment, and to communicate with those around them.

And you can also see an online film about Dr James's experiments .

I have to admit that until today my familiarity with Lichens was limited to a walk on part in an evolutionary tale about peppered moths (more of that in a moment).

But the natural world never ceases to amaze. Lichens, it turns out, are not just good indicators of air quality (thriving where pollution levels are lowest), they're also two organisms for the price of one: a fungi growing in a symbiotic relationship with an alga.

Air pollution comes from a variety of sources, including cars, factories and agricultural processes.

The problem is we can't always see it, but we can measure its impact on the environment, and by building up a comprehensive picture of the distribution of lichens, scientists at Imperial College hope to create a comprehensive map of air quality across the country revealing the pollution hotspots.

And that's where you come in. Taking part is simple and fun. All you need is a copy of the survey fact sheet, and a handy guide to identifying lichens, which can be downloaded here.

Now that story about peppered moths:

During the 19th century sooty smoke from the coal burning furnaces of the industrial revolution killed much of the lichen growing on the trees and blackened the bark.

When peppered moths landed on the trees the lightest, that had been well camouflaged against the lichen, stood out as easy pickings for birds.

It created an evolutionary pressure that favoured darker moths, which became progressively more common, and by 1895 98% of the peppered moths in the vicinity of big cities like Manchester were black.

Since the 1950's when pollution controls have significantly reduced sooty particles in the air, both the lichens and lighter peppered moths have made a comeback.

Proof positive - if proof were needed - that birds evolved from dinosaurs will be unveiled in Bristol today.

It comes in the shape of five new feathered dinosaur species being presented by legendary Chinese fossil hunter Xu Xing at the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology's annual meeting.

Xu, dubbed the "Indiana Jones" of palaeontology for his swashbuckling exploits in the deserts of northern China, claims the fossils - including the spectacular four-winged Anchiornis Huxleyi - confirm the bird-dinosaur theory is correct.

"These exceptional fossils provide us with the evidence that has been missing until now. It all fits neatly into place and we have tied up the loose ends." he says.

Anchiornis is officially described in a paper in the journal Nature for the first time today. The type specimen is exceptionally well preserved, with long feathers covering its arms tail and feet, suggesting that a four-winged stage may have existed in the transition to birds.

The idea that birds might have evolved from theropod dinosaurs comes from the striking anatomical similarities between them. Notably the three-toed foot, light hollow bones, and furcula or wishbone. More recent evidence shows that birds and dinosaurs shared behavioural traits like brooding and nesting.

Victorian scientists were well aware of these similarities from the fossil record, but the tipping point came with the discovery of Archaeopteryx in a Bavarian quarry in 1860. With its well developed wings and feathered plumage it was clearly a bird. But it also had claws on its arms and a long bony tail.

Coming so soon after the publication of "On the Origin of Species" (in 1859), the discovery was quickly hailed as the missing link that proved Darwin's ideas about evolution right. Others claimed Archaeopteryx came too late in the fossil record.

The problem is that by plugging an apparent gap in the fossil record Archaeopteryx inevitably created new ones on either side. Until recently, there had been no intermediate fossils showing the steady step by step evolution of dinosaurs into birds either before or after archaeopteryx. A series of discoveries in the 1990's - many of them by Xu Xing - filled the more recent of these gaps. His latest finds, of feathered dinosaurs pre-dating archaeopteryx, complete the picture.

So next time you watch a robin flitting around in the garden, or listen to a blackbird singing, think Allosaurus or even Velociraptor.

The global warming narrative - that mankind's addiction to burning fossil fuels is rapidly changing the climate - may be about to go seriously off message.

Far from suggesting the planet will get warmer, one of the world's leading climate modellers says the latest data indicates we could be in for a significant period of steady temperatures and possibly even a little global cooling.

Professor Mojib Latif, from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany, has been looking at the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. When he factored these natural fluctuations into his global climate model, professor Latif found the results would bring the remorseless rise in average global temperatures to an abrupt halt.

"The strong warming effect that we experienced during the last decades will be interrupted. Temperatures will be more or less steady for some years, and thereafter will pickup again and continue to warm".

With apologies to Al Gore, professor Latif's finding is something of an "inconvenient truth" for the global warming debate.

And the timing couldn't be much worse. World leaders are due to meet in Copenhagen in December to hammer out an agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Treaty. It certainly won't help if there are a couple of inches of snow on the ground outside the convention centre, and climate models are predicting a sustained period of steady, or even falling, global temperatures.

Professor Philip Stott believes climate sceptics may seize on the research as evidence that the whole global warming hypothesis is fundamentally flawed: If natural cycles can interrupt, or even reverse climate change, maybe we don't need to take it so seriously.

It's not a view shared by professor Latif, who points to the resumption of warming as the cycle completes itself in a few years. The best we can hope for, he says, is a brief respite from global warming.

But the complex message professor Latif's research confronts us with, points up another issue debated on the programme this morning: The thorny issue of the media's handling of science.

The Science Minister Lord Drayson sparked a row when he claimed that the coverage of scientific issues was in rude health at the World Conference of Science journalists. Ben Goldacre, the author of "Bad Science" took exception, arguing that most editors were only interested in revolutionary cures for cancer, or whether coffee made you fat.

After a heated exchange in the blogosphere the two have agreed to debate the issues at the Royal Institution tonight.

It's a little after nine o'clock on the morning of Monday the 10th of September 1984, and a young research scientist is in the darkroom at the University of Leicester's genetics department, developing x-ray films for a project looking at patterns of genetic variance between three members of the same family.

As he pulls the first negative from the developing tank and inspects it, the penny drops. Alec Jeffreys - now Sir Alec, the Royal Society's Wolfson Professor of Genetics - was looking at the first DNA fingerprint, the unique "supermarket bar-code" that sets out each individual's genetic profile.

"Within seconds it was obvious that we had stumbled upon a DNA based method not only for biological identification, but also for sorting out family relationships," he says.

It's a good story, and from the self-deprecating way he tells it, you might be fooled into thinking this was just another one of those days: An incremental advance along the road to a better understanding of the biology that makes us all tick. But what Sir Alec had discovered was truly revolutionary. One of those "eureka!" moments that are actually quite rare in science, and open the floodgates on a whole new area of research.

Although he says he immediately appreciated the implications, Sir Alec admits he was ill-prepared for what happened next.

The first case came in March 1985 when the technique was used to decide an immigration case. The first paternity dispute followed soon after, and later that year the team was asked to help with the investigation of the rape and murder of two young girls in nearby Enderby. When Colin Pitchfork was convicted of both crimes in 1988 it was largely on the basis of DNA evidence.

Twenty five years on and genetic profiling has transformed the way criminal investigations are conducted. The techniques used have been extensively refined and improved, and today it's even possible to recover a DNA fingerprint from a surface an offender has merely brushed up against.

The Forensic Science Service's Alison Fendley says that's lead to a step change in the investigation of crime, "The biggest breakthrough in this or the last century".

Speaking on the programme this morning the chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency, Peter Neyroud said DNA profiling was helping to solve nearly 400 murders every year, 800 rapes and serious sexual assaults, and some 8,000 burglaries. By next year he hopes further improvements in the technique will allow samples to be processed within an hour or two at the scene of a crime.

Sir Alec has no problem with that, or with the authorities keeping a DNA database of convicted criminals to help in future investigations. But he is very worried by what he describes as "mission creep" - the retention of samples from innocent people caught up in an investigation but subsequently cleared.

We're getting close to 5 million people on the DNA database now, he says, and something like 800, 000 of them are entirely innocent. That raises all sorts of questions about stigmatisation and discrimination.

"My genome is my property, not the state's," he says.

What fellows may not have been expecting was a broadside from one of their own: the Government's former Chief Scientific Adviser Sir David King, and the man who described climate change as the most serious threat to humanity.

Speaking on the programme this morning Sir David described geo-engineering as expensive and essentially useless. A fig leaf for those who want to pursue a business as usual approach to carbon emissions, and he's worried that the world's leading scientific academy should be seen to endorse the concept.

"I'm just concerned that there will be a misunderstanding about this and that geo-engineering could be used as an excuse for inaction".

The report "Geo-engineering the Climate" makes clear that intervening on a planetary scale to reverse the damage done by global warming should not be seen as an alternative to cutting carbon emissions. There were major uncertainties over the cost, effectiveness, and environmental impact of almost all the schemes considered, but geo-engineering was both technically possible and potentially useful.

Professor John Shepherd, who chaired the study said, "Geo-engineering and its consequences are the price we may have to pay for failure to act on climate change".

Sir David King responded by urging the Royal Society to focus on promoting technologies that could make a positive contribution to reducing emissions, things like solar, wind, wave and nuclear energy.

He said it was vital we didn't do anything to undermine efforts to secure a new global deal on carbon emissions when ministers met in Copenhagen in December.

If you thought geo-engineering was the stuff of science fiction - all giant sun shades in space - think again.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has produced a report focusing on practical geo-engineering solutions that are either available now, or soon will be.

The report lays out a 100-year road map to "de-carbonise" the global economy and the vision includes forests of artificial trees built along motorways, shiny silver roofs that reflect sunlight, and algal bio-reactors running up the sides of buildings.

Some climate scientists say we may only have a few decades left to avoid dangerous climate change, but geo-engineering - the idea of redressing the balance of the atmosphere by blocking the suns rays, or siphoning off harmful greenhouse gases, could buy us more time.

Artificial trees do pretty much the same job as real trees, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere, but up to a thousand times more efficiently.

The Institution's Dr Tim Fox claims a single artificial tree could remove as much as ten tonnes of carbon a day, and just 100 000 units would be enough to capture the UK's entire transport emissions.

"After decades of failed mitigation, geo-engineering may give us those extra few years to transition to a low carbon world and prevent any one of the future climate change scenarios we all fear".

But perhaps the most eye-catching proposal in the report would be to incorporate algal photo bioreactors in the built environment.

At its most basic that means tubes of vivid green algae running up the sides of buildings, although in time the bioreactors could be incorporated into the fabric of the buildings themselves.

Like trees, algae use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide from the air into plant matter using photosynthesis, with the added benefit that the bio-char produced could be siphoned off and used as an organic fertiliser.

The Institution's report is unlikely to be the last word on geo-engineering. Next week the Royal Society will publish a much broader study that reviews all the options - including the most outlandish, science fiction ideas like sun shades in space - and focussing on the ethical and political problems posed by tampering with the planet's climate systems.

Watch this space.

Designed by Omlet - the company that brought us the "eglu" chicken house - this is beekeeping in its most minimalist, functional form. As the brochure boasts, "making honey with a Beehaus is as simple as 1,2,3".

If that all sounds a little...architectural, it's meant to: the emphasis here is very much on design - even the name, Beehaus, pays tribute to the modernist 20th century Bauhaus movement.

The idea is to encourage a new generation of young, eco-conscious, urban apiarists. The kind of people who already spend a lot of green pounds, probably on organic honey, but who view beekeeping as something rather quaint and old-fashioned. The sort of thing that elderly - and a little eccentric - relatives might get up to at the bottom of country cottage gardens.

But the plight of Britain's bees is now so serious that the Beehaus has won the endorsement of the Government's conservation watchdog, Natural England.

The agency's chief scientist, Tom Tew, wants to raise an army of hobby beekeepers and to encourage gardeners to grow the kind of plants and flowers that will sustain wild bee populations.

"It's a fantastic way of getting people engaged, and getting them closer to nature. It helps them understand the wonder and beauty of nature, but it also helps them understand the huge value that species like the honeybee bring to humans."

But the idea of hundreds of novice beekeepers suddenly starting up their own colonies has raised concerns amongst more experienced apiarists. Although they're keen to see more people get involved the British Beekeepers Association is warning that bees, rather like puppies, are not just for Christmas.

If you want to keep bees, the BBKA's Dr Ivor Davis says, get in contact with a local club or association and find out more about it before taking the plunge.

The telescope had been invented, probably in Holland, a few months earlier. But it had mainly been used as an amusing way of spying on one's neighbours, and by the navy to spot the colours of far off ships.

It was a profound moment in the history of science. The first time any sort of instrument had been used to augment one of the five senses.

Until then astronomy had been conducted with the naked eye. We saw the same starry sky as Aristotle and Plato, and although Copernicus had suggested that the planets orbited the sun rather than the earth, the geocentric Greek model of the universe still held sway.

But if Harriot was first, it was Galileo who cemented the telescope's place in history. His observations of the moons of Jupiter the following year proved that the earth was not the centre of the universe - and no end of trouble it caused him.

Since then of course the telescope, and the instruments mounted on it, have been refined and improved beyond Harriot's wildest expectations.

Today the biggest ground based telescopes, like those at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, boast mirrors ten metres across. We can see further, and at greater resolution than ever before.

With a primary mirror some 42 metres across, and housed in a dome the size of Wembley stadium, the European Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT, will dwarf even the biggest existing instruments. At the moment it exists only in virtual space, but when it's finally built - probably by around 2018 - it will dramatically improve our understanding of the cosmos.

But telescopes enable us to do more than see far off objects in greater detail. Because light travels at a finite speed they're also time machines.

When Harriot pointed his telescope at the moon he was seeing it as it was a couple of seconds earlier. The light from the moons of Jupiter that Galileo observed the following year had taken a few minutes to reach him.

By the same token the ELT will study the light emitted by some of the first galaxies to form more than 13 billion years ago.

According to Andy Martin, the author of Beware Invisible Cows, it means that nothing is ever really lost. If we want to know whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, he says, all we need to do is get to a point some 46 light years from earth and train a powerful telescope on the grassy knoll.

It's somehow comforting to think that if there's an advanced civilisation out there inhabiting a planet some 400 light years from earth, and they happen to point their version of the Extremely Large Telescope this way on Sunday, they just might catch a glimpse of Thomas Harriot staring back at them through his Dutch Trunke.