The Challenger shuttle disaster, seen here, was unusual if last night’s Horizon is to be believed, because no-one got out alive. Mostly, even in the worst plane, train, and car crashes, *someone* gets out. And you might have thought that if you watched this instalment of Horizon, you’d learn something to increase your chances of being that someone.

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This is the heart of the Z-machine (“zee machine”). Looking and sounding like something from science fiction, this is today’s science fact. It’s one of the research projects that might – just might, with enough funding and enough will – solve the world’s energy problems. Or, alternatively, it might not. But if it doesn’t there are other fusion projects waiting in the wings to secure what is probably humanity’s greatest prize: freedom from our dependence on fossil fuels. From a disappointingly slow start this episode of Horizon grew into one of the most fascinating glimpses into one possible future that I’ve ever seen.

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“Dreams can come true,” sang Gabrielle, and she was closer to the truth than she knew according to a fascinating insight into dreams and dreaming served up by the third instalment in the latest series of Horizon, which is rapidly shaping up to be one of the best series of recent years. So whether you’re inventing the sewing machine, rehearsing for that important meeting, or listening out for subliminal messages about the state of your marriage, dreams can help.

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Yes, it’s happening. Yes, It’s our fault. The two conclusions from the first two parts of The Climate Wars were followed up in this last instalment – entitled Fight for the Future – with two stark questions: What can we do about it? And how bad is it going to get? One of these questions has a very simple answer. The other? Not only is the answer very complex and hard to divine, it took pretty much the whole of the rest of the programme to explain why.

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The incoming president of the United States – who will take office in just a few months’ time – will have to grapple with some of the greatest questions of Physics, Chemistry and Biology the world has ever faced. Sadly, the track record of US presidents has been going downhill since Kennedy set the goal to land a man on the moon, and with the current president it hit a new low. Bush didn’t even appoint a scientific advisor until he had been in power 18 months. With one finger poised over the button that could destroy the planet, it’s important that the president should have a grasp of things scientific. Unfortunately, if he has to rely on this programme for that understanding, he will achieve a sum total of knowledge not much greater than the average schoolboy, and if he follows the example of Horizon’s annoying presenter he won’t even be able to pronounce “nuclear” correctly.

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I caught another one of those rapid-fire statistics from the intro piece this week. 1 in 10 of us is infected with chlamydia. 1 in 10!! That’s… about 6 million people! Strewth. Anyway, Sexually Transmitted Infections or STIs were one of the subjects for this second instalment of Anna Richardson’s romp through all things sexual. A journey, it has to be said, that has set the cat among the pigeons with a small group of viewers who still have a rather Victorian attitude to sex. “Do we really need to see penises?” asked one irate viewer, “and before the watershed too!” Err, that’s the idea friend. In both senses. Early, so that kids can watch with their parents and strike up a family debate (some hope of that in some households it seems) and unashamedly unembarrassed so that myths are dispelled and, perhaps, a few folk can finally jettison their prurience about the human body.

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Having set the scene last week about what climate change actually means, this week Dr Iain Stewart set about the climate change sceptics. Is global warming man-made at all (they ask)? Is it anything to do with CO2? Is it even really happening? The answers, Dr Stewart insists, are crucial, because “our future depends on it.” Well no, actually. Our future depends on doing something about it. Not just sitting about at summits and agreeing that it’s happening. And given that at least one eminent scientist has revealed the unpalatable truth that the MINIMUM we need to do, in the UK, is move immediately to 100% electric vehicles throughout the country AND generate the power for these vehicles exclusively from non-carbon sources, I don’t think much is going to happen any time soon, do you? Still, maybe that’s a question for another day. For now, we’ve got some sceptic-bashing to do.

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Thirty years ago, as we’ve mentioned before, the top climate worry was not about global warming but global cooling. The imminent arrival of the next Ice Age. The heavy winters of the 1960s convinced scientists that all that fossil fuel burning and smog was effectively shielding the Earth from the sun, resulting in catastrophic cooling that would have us all taking lessons from the Inuit. In a way, they were half right. The smog had been having an effect. But it wasn’t the effect they’d predicted.

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Buried 100 metres below the French/Swiss border just outside Geneva sits the 27-kilometre ring of the Large Hadron Collider. It has been cooled over the past few months to its operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero and now waits to be switched on at around 8.30am next Wednesday morning. For the moment, nothing disturbs it apart from the attentions of the world’s media, who are whipping themselves up into a frenzy of excitement (and, in some cases, faux-fear), apparently not realising that nothing much will happen in those highly-magnetised vortices for about another month. So why is it exciting? Why have they spent 6 billion Euros (approximately) building it? And why are the answers it will provide important?

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Next week the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will switch on to begin the largest scientific experiment the world has ever seen. To investigate the conditions in the few picoseconds immediately after the Big Bang and to find the elusive particle that will confirm the latest theories of physics: the Higgs Boson. But 50 years ago the Big Bang Theory was just one possible explanation of the observable universe, and not a very popular one at that. In this fascinating program, BBC Four looked back at fifty years of BBC science coverage, mapping the theory’s journey from outlandish to widely accepted, and showing how each improvement in scientific techniques and technologies simultaneously helped to prove the theory but also asked further, more tantalising questions.

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Robert Winston is a man who embodies the word “gravitas.” He does this by speaking very slowly and meaningfully in a deep voice and naturally it helps that he knows a lot about his subject. Usually. In tonight’s programme, he admitted to being a bit at sea with the technical terms that were sprayed about in the German clinic where 75-year-old Alec Adamson was having stem cells injected into his heart in an effort to redress 40 years of damage. The question posed in this second of the SuperDoctors series was: “stem cells. Any good, are they?” And in view of the above, a second question was posed by me: “if you don’t understand it mate, what chance do we stand?”

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Not sure what the point of this show was, except to provide another vehicle for Nicky Campbell to air his trademark annoying mix of patronising explanations and overhyped unrealistic outrage. If you’d lived through any of the unfortunate events of last summer in various parts of the country, I’d imagine the last thing you need is an hour-long reminder of what it was like. Especially if you’re still camping out in a mobile home waiting for the shell of your former home to dry out or, even worse, if you’d lost a loved one.

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After a couple of weeks where the Horizon subjects have been, shall we say, a little uninspiring, I had great hopes for this week’s instalment. Cosmology is one of my lifetime loves and I have my SETI@home 2,500 work units certificate (just in case anyone should need convincing I’m interested in the concept of life on other planets you understand). What’s more the discovery of Earth-like planets has been much in the news in recent months, as has the development of the technique that has made this possible, so I settled back in anticipation of learning something new and exciting.

I was forgetting one thing. This is Horizon in 2008. Dumbed down to a level that makes it “accessible” to an infant school pupil and chock full of visual effects presumably intended to jazz it up for an easily bored audience, this was one of the most disappointing programmes in the series so far.

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