But you'd be wrong. The two-day conference that kicks off in London today has been organised by the Royal Society and features some of the leading international figures from the fields of astronomy, astrophysics and biology.

The discovery of hundreds (the current total stands at 424) of planets orbiting far off stars has brought the prospect of finding life elsewhere in the universe tantalisingly close.

According to Dr Alan Boss, author of The Crowded Universe, there are almost certainly billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone.

He bases that calculation on mathematical modelling of the processes of planetary formation - something astronomers are confident they understand well - and then by multiplying the result by the number of sun-like stars. It's quite a leap, but even if he's way off, with hundreds of billions of stars to choose from the chances are still high.

"Most solar type stars are going to have something earth-like orbiting around them, and a good fraction of those planets are going to be habitable. That is orbiting at a distance from their star where liquid water can exist at or near the surface."

Whether there will be life on earth-like planets is, of course, still an open question. But it's incredible how quickly the debate has moved on from "if" there's life elsewhere in the universe to how we should deal with its discovery.

The professor of evolutionary palaeobiology at Cambridge, Simon Conway Morris, believes we should err on the side of caution. Alien life could be disconcertingly like life on earth, and that could be a problem because we don't have a great record when it comes to exploiting new territory.

Far more likely is the discovery that life exists in a more basic form - some sort of primitive bio-chemical goo. But even that will have a profound impact on the way we think about our place in the grand scheme of things, according to John Zarnecki - who has helped to organise today's event.

"We need to start thinking about the implications for society, for religion" he says, "If, or when, we find evidence of extra terrestrial intelligence".

Whatever form alien life takes, the geneticist Sean B. Carroll believes it will have Charles Darwin's fingerprints all over it.

"If life is a replicating form of whatever it may be, then there's going to be competition among individuals for resources. That competition is going to be won by the fittest in each generation. Darwinian principles will apply."

Some things it seems, death, taxes, evolution by natural selection, are simply universal.

When Professor John Beddington took over as the Government's new chief scientific advisor in 2008 he chose food security - rather than climate change or stem cell research - as the subject of his first public pronouncement.

The world, he warned, was facing a "perfect storm" of interrelated and escalating problems including population growth, climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. Food security was the elephant in the corner.

Well the Government's response - in the shape of a wide ranging report Food 2030 - is published today, and offers nothing short of a vision for farming that puts the consumers at the heart of a strategy to make Britain a food superpower. Speaking on the programme this morning the secretary of State for the Environment Hilary Benn said:

"We've got to produce more food, we've got to do it sustainably, and we've got to make sure that the food we eat safeguards our health".

Stirring stuff, and behind the scenes Food 2030 is being talked-up as the kind of "big idea" to rival the post-war Labour Government's 1947 Agriculture Act - which ushered in a new era of intensive agriculture.

But the bottom line is that farmers are being asked to produce more, from less. More and better food to feed a growing population and tackle health concerns like obesity, but with fewer inputs and less use of precious resources like water and energy to ensure we don't wreck the environment or despoil the countryside in the process.

And how are they going to do that? Well, the report is a little thin on the detail, but the main thrust seems to involve getting more from the science, encouraging people to eat more healthily, cutting red tape and reducing waste.

While the climate talks are deadlocked inside Copenhagen's Bella Centre, outside things are moving fast.

Anti-capitalist activists are planning a four-pronged assault on the conference centre this morning, beginning with a march and rally outside the main gates.

That demonstration has been officially sanctioned by the Danish police, but a second tranche of protesters are planning a more mobile assault on the perimeter fence. They'll be moving around outside, probing for weaknesses and attempting to get in any way they can.

That group will be supported by a fleet of demonstrators on bicycles, whose main aim seems to be to divert police attention, and to provide some entertaining pictures for the world's media.

Finally, a fourth group of demonstrators who have managed to get accreditation will be staging a protest inside the Bella Centre itself. They plan to disrupt the conference, before marching out to link up with the protesters outside.

Richard Bernard, from Climate Justice Action, said the aim was to create a space, both politically and physically, to discuss the real issues facing the world's poor and disenfranchised. He claims the UN Conference on Climate Change has been hijacked by the rich nations and big business interests.

Needless to say the Danish authorities are determined to prevent any demonstration from disrupting the talks. Some sort of confrontation seems inevitable.

It was a day of high drama and more than a little shambling chaos at the Copenhagen climate change conference.

On the outside thousands of people - all accredited - spent the day trying (and mostly failing) to get in....while on the inside delegates from the developing world were staging a walkout.

The main session of the conference was suspended for five hours when the G77 group, which represents 130 developing nations and includes China, India and Brazil, withdrew accusing their Danish hosts of trying to stitch up a deal behind closed doors.

The row exposes a deep rift between rich and poor nations that could scupper hopes of a deal. At it's heart of course is money - who will pay, and how much, to help developing countries deal with the impact of global warming.

In the end the ruffled feathers were smoothed over, and now the focus is very much on the arrival of Prince Charles.

If he can get past the accreditation commissars he'll be addressing the summit later this morning, lobbying for a meaningful final agreement and for action on de-forestation.

Then, this afternoon, Gordon Brown arrives - well ahead of many of the world leaders attending the summit. That may be because the Prime Minister sees himself in the role of honest broker - the man to mediate between the rich nations and the developing world.

He believes his track record on alleviating poverty in Africa, on the financial crisis, and on climate change (he promised to come to Copenhagen while others held back), gives him credibility in both camps.

It's a dangerous strategy, one that could blow up in his face if a deal can't be agreed. But the Prime Minister's experience chairing the G20 taught him that if you want to secure a deal you have to get your hands dirty - you can't just turn up on the final day and expect everything to fall into place.

Emerging from what one of its founders, the chemist Robert Boyle, described as an "invisible college" of 17th century natural philosophers, who met first in Oxford and later in London to discuss the ideas of Francis Bacon, the Royal Society was officially constituted at Gresham College in November 1660.

But what was different about the Royal was its emphasis on the application of science for the benefit of mankind, and crucially on the use of observation, measurement and experimentation.

As the Sussex University astronomer and author of The Fellowship: A History of the Royal Society Dr John Gribbin says, the key change was the idea that the universe is governed by laws that we can understand here on earth.

"This is the idea that came to be known as the clockwork universe. That the universe runs on physical laws that we can understand, and apply equally on the surface of the Moon and Mars, and not by the capricious whim of the Gods".

To mark this historic milestone the Society is launching a new website featuring 60 of the most exciting, influential and inspiring inventions and discoveries that have been published in its journal (see the audio slideshow) - itself the oldest peer review scientific journal still in continuous publication - Philosophical Transactions.

Highlights include an account of Daines Barrington's examination of an eight year old Mozart (to establish whether he really was a child genius), Isaac Newton's landmark paper on the refraction of light, Crick and Watson's description of the structure of DNA, and Stephen Hawking's ground breaking early work with Roger Penrose on the structure of black holes.

Enjoy.

It's a remarkable example of Darwinian natural selection at work in humans.

Villagers suffering from a major epidemic of Kuru, a fatal CJD-like brain disease, seem to have developed a strong genetic resistance to the condition.

The infection, which is associated with mortuary feasts, where mainly women and children consume the remains of respected relatives, devastated populations in the remote eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. Things go so bad that in some villages there were no women of child-bearing age left alive and the practice was banned in the late 1950's and quickly died out.

But it seems that natural selection was already developing a response of its own. Scientists working on the new variant of CJD associated with eating meat from cattle infected with BSE have found that people living around the Purosa valley in Papua New Guinea, where Kuru was most rife, have a unique genetic variation that seems to offer high, or even complete, protection against the disease.

The scientists from the MRC's Prion Unit studied over 3,000 people from the area, including 709 who had participated in cannibalistic mortuary feasts, 152 of whom subsequently died. They discovered that many of the survivors, and their children, seemed to have a unique variation in the prion protein gene G127V.

Speaking on the programme this morning the director of the unit, Professor John Collinge, said it was a fascinating example of Darwinian selection at work. "This community has developed its own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic. The fact that it has happened in decades is remarkable".

The discovery is exciting because it could help scientists to understand the genetic mechanisms that underpin the development of CJD in people and even BSE in animals.

But it's also important because many of those same genetic mechanisms play a vital role in the development of other debilitating brain conditions including Alzheimers and Parkinson's disease.

In could be that the cannibalism in Papua New Guinea holds the key to cures for a wide range of degenerative brain disorders.

Some time in the next few days the Large Hadron Collider - the giant atom smashing machine buried beneath the alps on the Swiss-French border near Geneva - will be fired up again. Streams of protons travelling at close to the speed of light will hurtle both ways around the 27 kilometre ring that makes up the bulk of the machine.

Amid much fanfare the LHC flickered briefly into life in September 2008. But just nine days later that join - one of 24,000 - shorted out, triggering a dramatic rise in temperature and a sudden release of liquid helium.

The scientists at CERN don't like to talk about an explosion - operations group manager Steve Myers refers to "strong forces" being brought to bear - but in all more that 37 of the giant dipole and quadrupole magnets, each weighing several tonnes and connected together in sequence like the carriages of a train, were shunted out of position. It must have been quite a bang.

Part of the reason why it's taken so long to get the LHC back on track has been the need to ensure nothing like that could possibly happen again.

As Paul Collier explained to me down in the LHC tunnel, the problem with any superconducting machine is that it has to operate at such low temperatures to reduce resistance (the LHC operates at minus 271 degrees).

"When you cool down everything gets shorter. So one of the problems with any superconducting machine is electrical problems, things that only appear when components shrink or change dimension so dramatically. Then you can have wires that suddenly touch or snap."

But getting the LHC up and running again is only a first step. The real work - the new science - will be done by the giant experimental detectors that straddle the ring at the points where the proton beams cross.

The energy released in these collisions will re-create the conditions that existed a split second after the big bang itself, giving us vital insights into the nature of the material world, revealing the secrets of dark matter, and even pointing the way to a theory of everything.

Professor Jim Virdee, the lead scientist on the CMS detector - the biggest of the four main experiments at CERN - admits to a degree of frustration at the delay. Now, at last, he's ready to get going again.

"We're incredibly keen, incredibly excited again. In a sense we're half way there. The construction is finished now and the extraction of new science is about to begin. Some incredible discoveries are ahead of us".

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.

"We can solve the climate crisis. It will be hard, to be sure, but if we choose to solve it I have no doubt whatsoever that we can and will succeed".

Al Gore has come a long way in the four years since the publication of An Inconvenient Truth. That - and the Oscar winning documentary that accompanied it - was polemic: a diatribe that at times beat the reader over the head with the bar-graphs and statistics of global warming.

Our Choice, by contrast (and as the title implies), is much more inclusive. The man who introduces himself these days as, "the man who used to be the next President of the Unites States," has mellowed.

Of course that doesn't mean he's any less certain. If anything, he says, the scientific picture is even more complete, the evidence even stronger.

What has changed is that the former vice president seems to have decided to try and take people with him. As the African proverb he quotes at the beginning of the book says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."

Al Gore wants to go far, and Our Choice is about the solutions to the climate crisis rather than the problems.

And he's surprisingly optimistic. Speaking on the programme this morning Al Gore acknowledged that the Copenhagen climate talks were unlikely to deliver the kind of comprehensive, legally binding agreement, he had hoped for. But the opportunity was still there to commit nations to changing course, and to reducing incredibly harmful global warming pollutants.

"The Glass" he says, "is more than half full".

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.