Citizen science projects, plants and greenhouse gases - Planet Earth Podcast - 12.12.11

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: Tamara Galloway, Matt Cole and Ceri Lewis of the University of Exeter talk about their research on the effects of fragments of plastics from food packaging, drinks bottles and even facial scrubs on marine wildlife.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: Ilik Saccheri and Arjen Van 't Hof of the University of Liverpool describe how the British Peppered Moth changed from peppered to black during the Industrial Revolution in northern England.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: a look at the potential to generate up to 20 per cent of the UK's electricity from tidal energy; and why understanding the nuts and bolts of turtles' sex lives could help protect those most at risk.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: why textbook illustrations of our early ancestors may have to be re-drawn; and why underwater canyons contain a wealth of life, including some rather ugly-looking worms.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: decoding the ash tree's entire genetic sequence to produce a strain which is more resilient to ash dieback; the challenges of extracting biofuels from algae; and the latest news on Planet Earth Online.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: how a virus brought to the UK by insects poses a worrying threat to the country's great tit population; and which new technologies could affect global biodiversity in 2013.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: why understanding where plankton congregates can help us protect basking sharks and other marine creatures; how primates planning ahead tells us about our own intelligence; and how to predict dangerous climate tipping points.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: a look at some of the highlights from 12 months of the Planet Earth Podcast, including: a hairy crab; earthquake monitoring in Turkey; air quality around London before the Olympics -- and early disease detection; Europe's oldest cave art; what the first creatures to walk on land looked like; and seabirds.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: how you can get involved in any one of the wealth of UK citizen science projects that have taken off recently, and why a little-known gas given off by many trees, ferns and mosses, could be contributing to global warming.

This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: an online tool to identify bats is helping to protect them, and it could make a scientist of us all. Also, an audio diary from a researcher from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science who's on the Isle of Arran in Scotland; and why there's more to ageing than telomeres.