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The Secret Seeds of Clouds
Rain clouds and bad weather are the scourge of many a British summer. But where do the grey skies come from and is pollution making them worse? Describing the latest breakthroughs in weather research, Professor Roy Harrison from the University of Birmingham tells Quentin Cooper about witnessing unknown stages of cloud birth for the first time, and how minute particles of pollution can increase cloud cover.

Dr Stephen Dorling from the University of East Anglia takes a wider view and discusses how knowing about air pollution could improve our weather forecasts. But weather can affect pollution too. Could the clouds hold the answer to predicting chemical smog and perfect summer days?

150 Years of Fingerprints
This July sees the 150th anniversary of the first use of fingerprints as a way to uniquely identify a person.

Sir William Herschel (1833 - 1918) was working as Magistrate in India, and he used fingerprints to validate contracts with local people. This began science’s quest to be able to uniquely identify anyone using biological markers.

Quentin Cooper is joined by Dr. Simon Bramble, one of the UK’s leading fingerprint science experts – he is Head of Police Science and Forensics at National Policing Improvement Agency; and by Dr. Peter Gill, co-creator of DNA ‘fingerprinting’ and Senior Lecturer in Forensics at the Centre for Forensic Science, University of Strathclyde. Are fingerprints still up to the mark for solving crimes?