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In this Week’s programme Gareth Mitchell looks at the future of road transport. According to transport researchers the car as we know it will have to become a thing of the past if traffic is to continue flowing. Drivers will need to be more like passengers and leave much of the decision making about what vehicles do on our roads to computerised transport management systems.

It’s just over a century since scientists first showed that cosmic rays can come from distant stars. Subsequent research into their effects here on earth has led to the worrying conclusion that they could destroy much of our global communications infrastructure. We hear about those early cosmic ray pioneers and the role of hot air Balloons in determining where they come from, with Professor Alan Watson from Leeds University. And speak to Dr Christopher Frost from The Rutherford Appleton laboratory’s Neutron Irradiation facility, who is trying to recreate the effects of those rays to see how they affect modern electronics.

And from our ‘So You Want to be a Scientist’ experiment, we look more widely at what makes us talk the way we do.