But all is not lost. Step forward the James Webb Space Telescope. A bigger and - so they hope - better "eye in the sky" that will carry forward the Hubble baton, dramatically extending and improving our view of the universe when it launches in 2018.

With a primary mirror boasting a collecting area of 25 square metres the JWST is certainly a lot bigger. So big in fact that that mirror has had to be constructed from 18 interlocking hexagonal segments and protected by a sunshield that, when unfolded in space, will be the size of a tennis court. It will also operate much further from earth, orbiting far beyond the moon at the second LaGrange point some 940,000 miles into space.

Unlike Hubble the JWST will see in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to peer through clouds of interstellar dust and gas to observe the earliest stars and the formation of the first galaxies.

And that's where we come in. A central component of the Webb telescope's visual system is the Mid InfraRed Instrument, or Miri, that's been designed and built by British and European scientists right here in the UK.

About the size of a large hexagonal coffee table, and with its crab-like legs wrapped in insulating foil, at first sight Miri resembles a miniature flat-topped lunar lander from the Apollo era. But as Paul Eccleston, the Assembly Integration and Verification Manager explained when I went to see the instrument in a clean room at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory, this deceptively diminutive stack of electronics packs an impressive punch.

"The light comes in at the bottom, where it's reflected off the pick-up mirror and passed up into the heart of the instrument," he told me. "From there it's split between the imager and coronagraph unit and the top deck where we have the spectrometer. It may be small compared to the rest of the JWST but it's a crucial component, and it's actually the biggest flight astronomy instrument we've ever built in the UK".

One of the first elements of the Webb telescope to be completed, Miri will be formally handed over to Nasa officials at a ceremony in London later today. Speaking on the programme this morning the agency's deputy director Eric Smith said the primary goal for the JWST would be to use the infrared spectrum to see the things that Hubble couldn't.

"Hubble kind of runs out of gas when it comes to the most distant objects in the universe, and that's because the light is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. We want to be able to see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the big bang, and we can't do that with the current generation of ground and space based telescopes."

If Newton saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants so the Webb telescope will build on the legacy of Hubble. It's good to know that at its heart will be an instrument designed and built by British and European scientists.

That's the stark figure on global population that's concentrating minds at the Royal Society, and has led to the publication of its latest report "People and the Planet".

According to the UN that figure is set to rise to 10 billion before the end of the century, while dramatic shifts in the distribution, age composition and mobility of all those extra people will twist the kaleidoscope of the global population challenge.

Most of the growth - some two billion - will come in Africa, where fertility rates remain high. But according to Professor Sarah Harper, the director of the Centre for Population Aging at the University of Oxford and a co-author of the report, we're also getting older, migrating to cities, and increasing our levels of consumption as developing nations like China close the gap on the west.

"We're far too hung up on the numbers, and that's hidden the subtle but important changes going on behind the scenes," she explains. "We're getting much denser as people move to urban areas, we're getting older as people live longer, and the distribution of people is changing as we become more mobile."

It's the link between population growth and unprecedented levels of consumption that's causing most concern. On the one hand the report concludes there's a moral imperative to raise the poorest 1.3 billion out of extreme poverty, but on the other it argues that unsustainable patterns of consumption that deplete resources and damage the environment have to be addressed.

It's a difficult circle to square. The Professor of Environment and Society at Essex University, Jules Pretty, accepts simply telling people to don hair shirts and go without simply won't work.

"The trick will be to encourage more sustainable forms of consumption that don't impact so heavily on the planet's finite resources. At the moment we're moving in the wrong direction so we need to develop different thinking about consumption, different thinking about what a green economy might look like".

So what might a world based on more sustainable models of consumption look like? Jules Pretty offers the example of solar power: "If we all had solar panels on our roofs we'd have millions of net contributors to energy generation" he says, "and if we used that power to charge an electric car we'd get a double benefit".

The planet's continuing ability to sustain us is the "elephant in the corner of the room" according to Georgina Mace, the Professor of Conservation Science at Imperial College London. Overconsumption has put enormous pressure on the natural systems that cycle nutrients, regulate water, provide genetic resources for new food crops and medicines and stabilise our climate.

"As we enlarge our footprint on the earth we're gradually eroding away at the earth's support systems. There's lots of evidence now that we're damaging the ecological resilience of those systems, so we're not doing a good job of gardening the planet."

It's a theme that was stressed by the lead author of the Royal Society's report, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir John Sulston said on the programme this morning "If we don't do something about it things will simply get worse.

"We don't want to go hair shirts, but equally we don't want to end up with pandemics and conflict as a way of limiting our numbers. We must look at population and consumption together and plan to flourish. Very simple".

It may be a simple concept, but getting to a sustainable balance between population growth and maintaining the planet remains a huge challenge.

Writing in the journal Nature the team, based at UCL's Institute of Opthalmology, show that transplanting light-sensitive photoreceptors into the eyes of visually impaired mice can restore their vision.

"This is a landmark study" says Professor Robin Ali who led the research. "We've shown for the first time that transplanted photoreceptors can integrate successfully with the retinal circuitry, making synaptic connections, and truly improving vision".

The research involved transplanting immature, or progenitor, rod photoreceptors into the lining of the retina in blind adult mice. Rod cells are especially important for seeing in the dark as they are extremely sensitive to low levels of light. After about four to six weeks the transplanted cells appeared to have integrated well, and formed the connections needed to transmit visual information to the brain.

So well in fact that the mice with newly transplanted rod cells were able to use visual cues to find a hidden platform in a dimly-lit maze almost as quickly as healthy controls.

The loss of light-sensitive photoreceptors is the cause of blindness in many human eye diseases, but there's a long way to go before the technique could be applied in a clinical setting.

"It's a proof of concept" says professor Ali. "What's exciting is that it demonstrates the feasibility of this approach. But it's important to stress we're still a long way from a clinical application in humans".

One problem that remains to be overcome will be sourcing progenitor photoreceptors for transplant in humans. The cells used in this experiment were taken from neo-natal mice - not something that would ever be countenanced in humans. The UCL team are already looking at how they might get round the problem by stimulating embryonic stem cells to differentiate into photoreceptors.

Once they've cracked that all that remains is to repeat the whole process for cone cells - the other type of light sensitive photoreceptor cell lining the retina.

But Moore was fascinated by what he described as the space an object displaced. "The hole became as important, as a shape, as the material that surrounded it. To try to know what actual three-dimensional reality is like".

The young Henry Moore's fascination with geometry was fuelled by regular visits to the Science Museum in the 1920's. Then a student at the Royal College of Art, he was a regular visitor to the museum's mathematics gallery, where a series of string models developed around the turn of the century were on display.

Now these models - and the sculptures and drawings they inspired - have been put on display in a new exhibition "Intersections" jointly hosted by the Royal Society and the Science Museum.

"What's different about this exhibition" says the curator, Cambridge University's Barry Phipps, "is that we're not just looking at the end product of an artist's thinking. We're thinking with Henry Moore, looking into his mind to see what an artist of such stature takes from a mathematical model, to inspire new forms in his own sculpture".

The models - elaborate cat's-cradles of interwoven straight lines, or strings - are beautiful structures in their own right.

With no computer graphics to help them, the Royal Society's librarian Keith Moore, says mathematicians were forced to build them to visualise their ideas about curved space.

"You can use them to develop curves, cones, and no end of interesting geometric shapes" he says. "You get some very interesting effects if the strings are made of different colours and you can begin to represent different dimensions, not in terms of abstract numbers but in terms of a physical experience".

Walking round the exhibition I bumped into Alex Bellos, the author of Alex's Adventures in Numberland. "My first thought is rather one of surprise" he says. "You tend to think of mathematical art as quite stern and devoid of life. But the strings, added to the sculptures, really brings them alive".

"The great quote about the beauty of mathematics" he added "is from Bertrand Russell who said the beauty of mathematics is the cold and austere beauty of a sculpture. And here we have sculptures expressing that beauty and there's nothing cold or austere about them".

Scientists have used genetic engineering to add a peppermint plant gene to wheat that expresses an alarm pheromone that aphids associate with danger.

It's the same smell that aphids themselves produce when they're under attack from a predator - warning other bugs to keep clear. And in one of those twists so often found in nature, the odour also attracts the aphids' natural predators - parasitic wasps and labybirds - resulting in a double whammy of fewer pests and more predators homing in on the crop.

Aphids are a major pest problem for cereal crops across northern Europe, causing £80m to £120m worth of losses to UK farmers every year. Millions more are spent on expensive, highly toxic and carbon intensive pesticides to protect against infestation. By exploiting the natural defences some plants have evolved to combat the threat, the scientists (based at the Rothamsted Research Station in Hertfordshire), hope to boost cereal production and cut costs in an ecologically-friendly way.

"It's a very clever combination of biotechnology, chemistry and natural ecology" according to Professor Maurice Maloney the Director of Rothamsted Research. "Using GM as a tool to enhance natural defence mechanisms is a big step forward for crop protection that also benefits the environment".

The pheromone, E-beta-Farnesene, is produced by aphids as a chemical distress signal that's released when they come under attack from predators. It acts as a deterrent, warning other aphids to stay away, but in the continuing arms race of natural selection some plants - including some species of peppermint - have evolved the ability to mimic the smell, expressing their own versions of E-beta-Farnesene.

The job of engineering the pheromone producing gene into a high performance wheat variety - cadenza - was taken on by Professor Johnathan Napier in the 1980's.

"Although the basic idea is quite simple," he says, "it's taken the best part of 20 years to refine and perfect the transfer. The problem is getting the plant to express the aphid alarm pheromone at appropriate levels and in a very pure form. You want the aphid to pick up on the scent of another terrified aphid, not just that the plant is a bit smelly."

The science may be clever, but it's already attracting the kind of criticism levelled at earlier trials of genetically modified crops. Pete Riley from the anti-GM campaign group GM Freeze says there are a number of unpredictable risks attached to conducting research in the open countryside.

"Insects adapt quickly," he says, "and if you expose them to this pheromone for any length of time they're likely to get habituated to it and ignore it. There are also safety concerns about whether this gene will change the chemistry of wheat in ways we can't predict".

Speaking on the programme this morning Professor John Pickett, who leads the research on new approaches to pest control at Rothamsted, said they had conducted extensive safety tests in the laboratory ahead of the field trial, and that although the risk of something unforseen could never be completely eliminated, that had to be weighed against the potential benefits to society.

It remains to be seen whether this new, more subtle, approach to genetic engineering that relies on exploiting and enhancing a plant's natural defences will re-ignite the GM wars.

One by one airlines, ports, ferry companies and handling agents have been targeted on social media sites and bombarded with letters complaining about their involvement in the trade.

The tactic has been remarkably successful: the national carrier British Airways was one of the first to back out, followed more recently by P&O, SeaFrance, DFDS Seaways and many of the smaller carriers. An investigation by the Today programme has revealed that the last major ferry operator willing to transport animals destined for research, Stena, pulled out in January.

Only 1% of the animals used in laboratory experiments are imported from overseas, but scientists say even this limited trade is vital because they need access to the best specialist breeding facilities in Europe and around the world.

If they can't get the specific strains they need - mostly genetically engineered mice - researchers say the UK will struggle to maintain its position at the forefront of bio-medical research, and ultimately patients will suffer.

"When only a few companies were affected that wasn't a game changer" says Professor Dominic Wells from the Royal Veterinary College, "but it's now getting to the point where enough companies have been intimidated that we can see a potentially massive impact on the collaborative nature of research, and which will slow research progress".

The effective isolation of British research facilities represents a potentially serious blow to the country's standing as a major player in the life sciences sector according to the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. The life sciences sector generates some £50 billion a year and employs more than 165,000 highly skilled workers. But that won't last if researchers can't get the animal models they need to study disease and develop new drugs.

"It's a major problem, a problem of great significance" according to the ABPI's chief executive Steven Whitehead, "this research must not be allowed to go anywhere else. We have the intellectual capacity, we have the industrial capacity, we have a supportive government committed to life sciences, and we want this discovery work to take place here".

'Commercial solution'

A big part of the problem is that the UK is an island, presenting a series of bottle-necks or pressure points that the former science minister Lord Drayson says animal rights activists have been quick to target.

"The extremists have been very clever at identifying weak links in the chain," he says "and to target the people at those weak links to stop the process as a whole. The important thing now is for the government to get together with the transport industry and to agree to support the life sciences so that companies can't be picked off one at a time".

None of the animal rights activists involved in the campaign wanted to talk to us, and nor did the transport companies. P&O did release a statement last night confirming that they would not carry animals destined for use in medical research.

The Medical Research Council, the Association of Medical Research Charities, the Wellcome Trust and the Laboratory Animal Breeders Association released a statement this morning pointing out that it takes years to breed specific strains of animals for research purposes. If sharing such animals was stopped then individual institutes would have to breed their own lines, requiring the unnecessary use of many more animals over successive generations.

Earlier this year the prime minister referred to the life sciences as the "jewel in the crown" of the UK economy. Speaking on the programme this morning the Science Minister David Willetts said the government was working closely with both the transport sector and the pharmaceutical industry to try and find a solution.

"What we're trying to achieve, with a new code of practice for transport and the transport sector as a whole seeing their responsibilities, I still hope we can reach a solution which means we can carry on having world-class research in Britain," he explained.The Science Minister David Willetts said that "the government is working with the life sciences industry and transport sector to tackle this problem. A cross-Whitehall group has been working since January to bring together the pharmaceutical and transport industries to broker a commercial solution. We will continue to work to secure a way forward that ensures the highest standards in animal transportation and continuing success of research in the UK.

"The use of animals in research remains essential to develop new treatments and drugs, improve our understanding of disease and prove the safety and effectiveness of drugs and chemicals before they go forward for human trials.

"The UK benefits from one of the most stringent regulatory environments regarding the use of animals in scientific research. Animal testing is only approved if there is a very strong scientific case and where no practicable alternatives exist."

So what then? Such a fuss has been made about finally nailing down the Higgs you could be forgiven for thinking that - once the champagne had been quaffed and the Nobel Prizes handed out - we could all pack up and go home.

Not a bit of it. Only two of the four main experimental detectors straddling the 27km ring of the LHC are even looking for the Higgs and both are interested in much, much more.

The mission statement for the Atlas experiment - titled Mapping the Secrets of the Universe - makes no mention of the Higgs, preferring to focus on the forces that have shaped our universe, extra dimensions of space, the unification of fundamental forces and evidence for dark matter candidates.

"We're all very excited about finally sorting out the Higgs hypothesis one way or the other," says Professor Andy Parker, head of high energy physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and a senior member of the Atlas team.

"But that is just one part of a great process, and we have a huge number of other things we're also looking for. There's no pause in the march of science in this case."

Elsewhere, at the Alice experiment, they're colliding heavy lead ions to explore the creation of matter itself and the nature of the strong nuclear force in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.

"We're recreating, in a sub-atomic fireball, the conditions that existed a millionth of a second after the Big Bang," explains Dr David Evans, head of the Birmingham team working on Alice.

"It's so hot and so dense that even protons and neutrons melt, and we end up with a sort of primordial soup known as the quark-gluon plasma."

Dr Evans is particularly frustrated by the emphasis on the Higgs. It's important, he believes, but there's a lot more going on at Cern.

"What's even more worrying is that if the Higgs is ruled out people will say the LHC is a failure," he adds.

"Actually, it gets even more exciting."

Even the man who set the whole ball rolling back in the 1960s, Peter Higgs, has weighed into the argument, saying that the authorities at Cern have made a serious mistake by putting so much emphasis on the particle that bears his name.

"They've talked up the search for the Higgs boson too much," he told Prospect magazine.

"So much so that they're in danger of having their paymasters say 'Oh well, you've found it now, you don't need to run that expensive machine any more'".

UCL Professor Jon Butterworth concedes there probably has been too much focus on the Higgs, but you couldn't blame scientists for taking advantage of the free publicity that resulted from the media's apparently insatiable appetite for a tangible eureka moment.

"Even for people like me the Higgs is just the first thing on the to-do list," he says.

"This machine opens a door to a new room, but we've got to have a good look around in that new room. It's a very important question but it's far from the only one."

At 7,500 light-years from earth - deep in the heart of the southern Milky Way - this cloud of glowing gas and dust is one of the closest stellar nurseries to earth. An incubator that includes some of the heaviest and brightest stars in the night sky.

But what's really interesting about this series of images is the insight it gives into the way astronomers use infrared light to penetrate the foggy veil of particles obscuring the view.

This handy time-lapse video switches from visible to infrared wavelengths as it zooms in on interesting features around the Carina Nebula.

It shows not only the brilliant massive stars and brightly lit clouds of dust visible to conventional optical telescopes, but also the hundreds of thousands of other, much fainter and more distant, stars that are normally hidden from view.

The impenetrable glowing fog is created by the light absorbing and scattering properties of gas and dust particles. But because infrared light operates at longer wavelengths its signal passes through the clouds relatively unscathed.

The team, led by Thomas Preibisch from the University Obversatory in Munich, used the VLT's HAWK-1 infrared camera to generate hundreds of individual images that have been combined to create the footage.

Towards the bottom left is the mysterious and highly unstable star Eta Carinae - the second brightest star in the night sky for several years in the 1840's, and destined to explode as a supernova in the near future. The bright star cluster close to the centre of the picture is Trumpler 14 with even more stars in the cluster visible in the infrared view, while the small concentration of yellow stars over on the left-hand side have been revealed for the first time.

Clearly there's more to infrared astronomy than meets the eye.

So the space race put a man on the moon, but it also generated dramatic advances in computing, engineering, materials science and navigation - advances that we all take for granted today.

In the same way the last big atom smasher at Cern, the LEP, gave us MRI scanners and the World Wide Web.

Now another team of physicists, this time working with the ALICE accelerator at the Science and Techhnology Facilities Council's Daresbury Science Laboratory in Cheshire, believe they may have come up with their own unique contribution to medical science.

ALICE is an advanced prototype energy recovery accelerator that focuses the radiation generated by charged particles - in this case electrons - into a powerful infrared laser. A light source that, as well as probing the atomic structure of matter, can illuminate the biochemical composition of human tissue.

With the aid of a scanning electron microscope the team, led by the Professor Peter Weightman at the University of Liverpool, have applied this intense infrared spotlight to tease out the subtle differences between healthy and cancerous tissue in a series of biopsies taken from patients suffering from Barrett's Oesophagus - a benign precursor to oesophageal cancer.

"Early diagnosis is the most important factor for improving the prognosis for patients suffering from oesophageal cancer," Professor Weightman explains. "The images we're generating with ALICE clearly show malignancy developing in cells, the signature of cancer. That's what gives it great potential as a diagnostic tool."

Oesophageal cancer is rapidly emerging as a serious, and intractable, problem. Now the ninth most common form of cancer worldwide, some 8,000 new cases are diagnosed in the UK every year.

The issue, according to Professor Mark Pritchard, a consultant gastroenterologist at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, is that by the time patients present their doctor with symptoms it's often already too late.

"Most people go to their GP when they have difficulty swallowing, that's the most common symptom. But by that time the cancer is often quite advanced. In many cases it has spread outside the oesophagus and treatment is not possible or successful".

Translating this new discovery into a practical application that could be used in a clinical setting - perhaps at the end of an endoscope - remains a huge engineering challenge. But the results demonstrate an important proof of principle: that the infrared light source generated by ALICE can be used to detect the early biochemical changes within tissues as cancer develops.

Chalk another medical advance up to physics.

As the author of Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed, Simon Barnes, puts it, "we're in Sybil Fawlty territory here. It's the bleedin' obvious.

Hearing the sound of a nightingale in full voice materially effected Keats' physical condition. We all know that, Keats just expressed it rather better than most of us could."

It might surprise you then, to discover there's actually no hard scientific evidence to support the assertion that birdsong lifts the spirits, reduces stress or enhances physical well-being.

Until now that is. Stung into action by this apparent gap in our knowledge, researchers at the University of Surrey's Department of Psychology have launched a three-year project looking at the impact of birdsong on the brain and our behaviour.

The study, led by doctoral student Eleanor Ratcliffe, combines conscious online assessments - ranking birdsongs according to preference - with more subtle clinical measures of stress levels and neurological well-being. It will present calls against a range of environmental backgrounds to try and tease out whether it's going for a walk in the countryside or the birdsong itself that makes the difference.

"Anecdotal evidence suggests we respond positively to birds singing," she says, "but we need to build up a clearer picture of how and why birdsong can be of psychological benefit".

The project is being funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the National Trust. "As a lifelong birder," the Trust's ecologist Peter Brash says, "birdsong has been the natural soundtrack to my life. It gets us closer to nature and links people to places and memories in a way that few other sounds can."

The answers should help psychologists to better understand the contribution of birdsong to the restorative impact of natural environments. It's already well established that having a room with a view can speed up the recovery process for post-operative patients in hospital, but exactly how it works, and whether the sounds of nature are important, remains a mystery.

According to the environmental psychologist overseeing the project, Dr Birgitta Gatersleben, the study will help to develop that understanding. "There's a lot of research looking at the restorative effects of natural environments" she says, "but we don't know much about the importance of sound. The study will help us explore when, and how, this might be beneficial for people."

We'll just have to hope that, in analysing the empirical evidence underpinning the restorative power of nature, we don't unpick Keats' rainbow - that natural philosophy (as he would have called science) doesn't "clip an Angel's wings".

Science fiction? Well maybe, but research published in the Journal PLoS Biology today, takes us on the first tentative steps down that road.

You can read more about the experiment here. But the team - led by Dr Brian Pasley at the University of California, Berkeley - began by attaching sensors directly onto an exposed region of the brain associated with processing sound, the Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG), while the subjects were undergoing brain surgery.

They then played the patients recordings of a series of words and monitored their neural activity as the STG processed this information into electrical signals that could be interpreted by the brain.

Incredibly they were able to see not just the specific patterns of neural activity corresponding to the individual words, but - by starting just with that signalling activity - they were able to use a computer algorithm to reconstruct the actual sounds, effectively "hearing" the words the brain was processing.

Speaking on the programme this morning Professor Robert Knight, a co-author on the paper, said the hope was to communicate with patients who couldn't speak for themselves.

"If we can get to that stage then of course you could have a prosthesis, an implantable device, for someone who has a devastating neurological disorder and can't speak," he explained

The obvious example Professor Knight added was the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking. "His brain is clearly brilliant, but he has no way to produce the sound. If you could read his ideas you could put it into a speech synthesiser and he could speak."

The key to stimulus reconstruction is the way that the brain processes both actual sounds and imagined sounds or thoughts about sound.

If you think of a phrase like "the cat sat on the mat" it's almost as if you can hear the words sounding out in your head. That's because the STG translates both real and imagined sounds into neural activity that is processed by the brain in much the same way, creating an electrical template for linguistic thoughts.

Monitoring that template - eavesdropping on the brain - allows you to reconstruct the words. Or at least it will.

The science of stimulus reconstruction hasn't got as far as whole phrases yet, and the computer-generated words released today do sound as if they were spoken under water.

Refining the technique will be a huge challenge, but the experiment is an exciting proof of principle. Then again, it may not be long before Big Brother is doing more than just watching you.

Perhaps, if he'd been just a little bit smarter, Einstein might have been able to unite general relativity with quantum mechanics and come up with a unified Theory Of Everything. Then again, maybe it's enough just to be able to help with your children's maths homework or learn a new language.

Until recently, even such limited ambitions remained firmly in the realm of science fiction, but now scientists researching a new non-invasive brain stimulation technique at Oxford University believe they may have found the answer.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, or TDCS, involves passing a small electric current across specific regions in the brain.

Originally developed to help patients suffering from brain injuries like stroke and learning difficulties, tests in healthy adults show it can also be used to enhance overall cognitive performance. Depending on which part of the brain is stimulated TDCS can be used to improve language and maths ability, problem solving, attention span, memory and even movement and coordination.

"It's not a magic pill" says Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh who lead the research at the University's Department of Experimental Psychology. "You still have to work hard, but it is going to improve the results of that work, enhancing your performance, allowing you to learn more easily and achieve more."

Crucially subjects didn't just perform better at the time, the improvement was still there when Dr Cohen Kadosh retested participants six months later.

Because you still have to do the work, and because Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation is potentially cheap, painless and simple to use, it raises the very real possibility that its use could soon become widespread.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Current Biology, Dr Cohen Kadosh has teamed up with the Oxford ethicist Julian Savulescu to consider the implications.

"This could be the first step down a path not only to maximising human potential but to increasing it" Professor Savulescu says. "It has significant potential advantages to every human being because the capacity to learn is fundamental to our humanity".

The crucial question, he argues, is whether TDCS would be available to everybody, or just the preserve of the rich.

"If some people have access to a technology and others don't that creates inequality, conferring an unfair advantage. But this looks like it could be relatively cheap, and if it's as cheap as other stimulants like caffeine then everyone should have the opportunity to utilise it."

The Cambridge neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian is not so sure. Speaking on the programme this morning she questioned whether it would be a good idea to use electrical stimulation on the brains of children swatting for exams.

"These are powerful tools, and when we do these studies we have to consider the risk benefit analysis. I don't think we know enough about the long-term safety of these techniques to justify using them on the developing brains of children."

Assessing the safety of TDCS is a vital next step according to Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh. But if it is safe, then why not be the best you can be?

It seems that Mary Shelley may have been on to something after all.

Its origins can be traced back to Egyptian mythology and the Eye of Horus, and it appears in both Buddhist and Hindu doctrine. The Buddha himself is often referred to as "the eye of the world", while Lord Shiva has an all-seeing third eye in his forehead that watches over everything that happens in the world.

While the Greeks went for a compound approach - Argus had a hundred eyes - Christian symbolism incorporates a single all seeing Eye of Providence, often framed in a triangle to symbolise the Holy Trinity. It even appears on the Great Seal of the United States, and on the back of a one dollar bill.

Now, it seems, astronomers are keen to get in on the act. This image, captured by the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope, uses infrared light to show the Helix Nebula in all its glory.

The nebula is a complex cloud of dust, ionised material and molecular gas, formed in the death throws of a star the size of our sun.

As the star collapsed to become a white dwarf (the tiny blue dot at the centre of the picture) it shed its outer layers which have radiated out in this distinctive eye-like pattern of concentric rings. While hard to see in visible wavelengths the thinly spread gas - which covers an area some four light years across - is easily captured by the 4.1 metre VISTA telescope's infrared detectors.

The picture also reveals something of the fine structure of the Helix Nebula's rings, with the cooler molecular gas clumping together into filaments spreading out from the centre.

Then again it could just be that Sauron, vanquished from middle earth, is reassembling his forces some 700 light years away in the constellation Aquarius.

Going on the available evidence from our own solar system - and there's no obvious reason to assume it is unusual - you might plump for a ratio of 1:8. That would give you a ballpark figure of some 800 billion planets in the Milky Way, and something like 100 billion times that for the entire Universe.

But - as any good statistician will tell you - a sample size of one is hardly scientific.

To get a better idea astronomers have used a variety of methods including the Dopler effect (subtle wobbles in a star's position caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet), and transits (periodic dips in luminosity as a planet crosses in front of its parent star) to infer the existence of extra solar planets.

Planet spotting took a huge leap forward with the launch of the Kepler Space Observatory in 2009. Using the transit method it has taken the total number of candidate planets to over 700 as it repeatedly photographs the stars in a narrow patch of space between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Kepler's planet count remains a work in progress, but research published in the journal Nature indicates that even its final results may represent a massive underestimate.

The team, lead by Arnaud Cassan at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, used a novel technique - gravitational microlensing - to estimate how common planets may be in the Milky Way.

After a six-year search that surveyed millions of stars they conclude that planets may be commonplace.

"Remarkably," Professor Cassan says, "the data shows that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy. We also found that lighter planets, such as super-Earths or cool Neptunes, must be more common than heavier ones."

Using gravitational microlensing to detect exoplanets relies on the way that the gravitational field of a star acts like a lens, magnifying the light from a background star.

If the star has a planet, or planets, orbiting around it the effect will be amplified - with each planet making a detectable contribution to the brightening effect on the background star.

Microlensing is a very powerful tool, with the potential to detect exoplanets that could never be seen in any other way. But it's also astonishingly rare - depending on the chance alignment of a background and lensing star at the precise moment that a planet transits in front of that.

The team turned up just three direct exoplanet detections in six years worth of microlensing data, but by combining that with seven sightings from previous data, and crunching the probabilities from the huge number of non-detections, they estimate that one in six of the stars hosts a planet the size of Jupiter, half have Neptune-like planets and two thirds have super-Earths.

The results, they claim, suggest that the average number of planets around a star is greater than one. Making planets the rule rather than the exception.

The chalk boards - crammed with indecipherable equations - bear testament to the latest efforts of his students, while the walls strain under the weight of both the accumulated memorabilia of a lifetime's achievement at the cutting edge of science, and Professor Hawking's unique status as a scientist who has transcended the boundaries of academia and entered the public consciousness.

Stills from his numerous appearances as a cartoon character in The Simpsons and Futurama vie for space with photographs of the great and good. There's even a recent letter from Michelle Obama on display.

Not bad for a man who was told he had just months to live when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963.

Professor Hawking shrugged off that dire medical prognosis long ago, and will celebrate his 70th birthday on Sunday. To mark the occasion Cambridge University is hosting a scientific conference featuring such luminaries as this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Saul Perlmutter, and the Astronomer Royal Lord Rees.

Professor Hawking will give the keynote address - on fundamental physics at the extremes: black holes and the Big Bang.

I'm glad to say Professor Hawking also agreed to talk to us, and in the spirit of celebration, we thought it would be a good idea to throw the floor open to you the listeners.

The response was simply overwhelming with hundreds of questions flooding in from all over the world via twitter, email and on our facebook page.

Recording an interview with Stephen Hawking presents its own unique problems. He has to write answers to even the most basic questions through a computer connected up to a camera trained on his eye - an incredibly laborious process that averages about a word a minute.

But you never hear any complaint from him, and clearly his mind - and his sense of humour - is as sharp as ever. The audience for his keynote address in Cambridge on Sunday are in for a treat.

The image was captured using ESO's Very Large Telescope and shows the rose tinted heart of this stellar nursery with its newest offspring burning a bright bluish-white. The dominant reddish colour is produced by hydrogen gas glowing in the intense ultraviolet light of these hot young stars.

It was taken with the FORS (focal Reducer and Spectrograph) instrument on Antu, one of the four unit telescopes of the VLT. Exceptionally steady air during the observations has helped to make this one of the sharpest images ever taken from the ground.

Their animated video zooming in on the Omega Nebula is also worth a look.

But why is that? Is she reaping the rewards of a good diet and healthy lifestyle, or is she just one of the lucky ones who owes her longevity and robust health to "good genes"?

Lady Boothroyd wanted to know what the world of biomedical science had to say about it - but you have to be careful what you wish for when editing this programme - and I don't think she was expecting to become the guinea pig in a scientific study when she agreed to meet the director of Kings College London's Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, professor Tim Spector, at St Thomas' Hospital shortly before Christmas.

Professor Spector is one of the world's leading experts on aging and had prepared a battery of tests and scans to assess Lady Boothroyd's susceptibility to age-related decline.

He's particularly interested in the interplay between nature and nurture, and the role that environmental factors like diet, exercise and exposure to toxins can play in switching genes on and off. We'll hear more about these epigenetic factors in aging when the results of Lady Boothroyd's blood tests are back in the new year.

Watch this space.

I know Professor Hawking is that rare thing - a scientist who has transcended the boundaries of academia and entered the public consciousness - but even so the reaction to our "call out" for questions has been overwhelming.

At the turn of the last century Lord Kelvin famously said we were nearing the limits of what there was to know. All that was left was ever more precise measurement. Well, it seems there are plenty of you out there who disagree. There are still a great many questions for physics to answer.

It's an eclectic mix, from the practical - What would be the impact on Einstein's theory of relativity if the neutrino is confirmed to be able to travel faster than the speed of light? - to the philosophical: Was there a "time" when there was "nothing"?

The humorous: When should I start talking to my kids about the wave-particle duality of light? - to the personal: If I could tell a 12-year-old Stephen Hawking all he would achieve, would he be as impressed as the rest of us?

You can see a compilation of the best on our website although there are so many we may have to convene our own scientific symposium to get through them.

Now there's an idea...

The European Southern Observatory's Council will consider a package of measures, including approval for some elements of the telescope that could take years to construct and building an access road up the side of a mountain in Chile, this afternoon.

Speaking ahead of the meeting the ESO's Director General Tim de Zeeuw suggested the omens were good for both the interim package and final approval of the 1.1 billion euro project in 2012.

"We are getting close to the target where many of the member states will be able to say not only that they want to be part of this project but also that they have the money. I'm hopeful that the Council can take the final decision in the course of 2012 and unleash the full project".

It's a prospect that has the astronomical community in a state of high excitement. With a main mirror nearly 40 metres in diameter the E-ELT is five times bigger than anything in existence today. According to Dr Isobel Hook, who chairs the E-ELT science working group, the telescope will offer an unprecedented view of the cosmos.

"The main improvement with this telescope over anything that's gone before is its size. The huge area allows you to collect light from much fainter more distant objects, while the diameter is what gives you the superb resolution - the sharpness of the images".

Such extravagant claims about the game-changing potential of new scientific instruments are easily - and often - made, but the step change in the power of astronomical observation the E-ELT represents is of the same magnitude as the leap from the naked eye to the first telescopes used by Galileo and Thomas Harriot 400 years ago.

"Just think what we learnt from those first observations" says project scientist Roberto Gilmozzi, "seeing the stars in the Milky Way, seeing the craters on the moon, seeing the moons around Jupiter. It changed our whole view of the Universe."

If the E-ELT can achieve even a fraction of that game-changing potential it will be well worth the money.

The so-called patent cliff - when drug companies' exclusive rights to a series of money-spinning drugs and treatments expire - is rapidly approaching, productivity from research and development continues to languish in long-term decline and customers like the NHS are becoming more savvy when it comes to demanding value for money.

So far, so familiar. But when Pfizer pulled the plug on its research facilities at Sandwich in Kent with the loss of more than 2,000 jobs earlier this year, the full implications of this looming shake-up in the pharmaceutical sector were laid bare.

According to the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University and former President of the Academy of medical Sciences, Sir John Bell, the decision was a wake-up call for action.

"Pfizer's departure from Sandwich caught people unaware. It sent shockwaves up and down Whitehall because people recognised how important this sector is to the UK economy."

The speech by the prime minister, and the brace of reports the government is publishing outlining its long-term strategy and a review of innovation in the NHS, represent its response to that shockwave.

"We get that the game has changed," David Cameron will say. "We're going to be more flexible, more competitive, more hungry for business than ever before."

"The two reports we're publishing today are testament to our ambition: not just to hang on in there with a significant foothold in the global market, but to take an even bigger share of that market in the years to come."

The package includes a £180 million catalyst fund to support biomedical start-ups bridge the gap between exciting new drug discoveries and the final delivery of treatments to patients - the so called "valley of death" that sees so many potentially promising companies go to the wall.

The government is also launching a consultation on how to open up the NHS to life science companies - allowing them to exploit the huge wealth of data the health service holds, accelerate clinical trials and offer patients faster access to novel drugs and treatments.

A measure that was warmly welcomed by the President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse.

"What I think is most interesting about this is the potential for a cultural change at the National Health Service. To consider it not just as an organisation delivering care, but as a fantastic research resource as well. That could make a very significant impact".

Speaking on the programme this morning the Science Minister David Willetts acknowledged more needs to be done to ensure the pharmaceutical industry sees the UK as the place to invest in a life sciences sector fit for the 21st century.

"Bringing our science base and the NHS together so that the UK is the best place in the world for companies to invest in the discovery, development and commercialisation of medical innovations".