The Best Episodes of Rough Science

The five scientists are taken to a mystery location in the Mediterranean. Their first challenge is to determine their latitude and longitude and thus pinpoint exactly where they are. They are also asked to create insect repellent and a radio.

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The castaways are challenged to create an electric battery from natural materials, a power meter for testing the battery, and a camera and film, as well as natural dyes to make a flag.

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Moving on from the battery in episode 2, this time the scientists face the challenge of building an electric generator to run on natural energy.

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The team are asked to create soap and toothpaste using only ingredients they can find in the wild, and a record player from scrap material.

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The second series takes five scientists to the Carribean island of Carriacou, where their first challenge is to create a scale map of the island - using paper and ink derived from the local vegetation. The team are also challenged to build a sound-recording device from scrap.

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Cut off from their usual laboratory equipment, the team are challenged to create their own from scratch - including a microscope, biology lab and weather station.

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The team turn their attention to communication in the third episode from Carriacou. Kate challenges them to build a transmitter and radio reciever to send messages across the island, plus a kite and an accurate clock using only basic materials.

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Keeping cool is the focus of the latest batch of scientific challenges. Using only the basic equipment provided, plus whatever plants they can find on the island, the team are given the task of devising a refrigeration device, and a thermometer for measuring the results.

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The Rough Scientists are challenged to devise an underwater lighting system to help them explore the waters around Carriacou - but they can only use natural power sources.

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With the team about to leave their tropical island base, it's time for a party. The team face the challenge of creating a light-and-sound show to celebrate their success in the previous challenges - but will this one prove too tricky even for them?

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In the first set of gold-mining challenges in New Zealand's Westland National Park, Ellen, Mike B and Mike L attempt to pan gold from a river while Jonathan builds a metal detector and Kathy devises a balance scale capable of weighing tiny amounts of gold to the nearest millionth of a gram.

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Mike L, Kathy and Jonathan are set the task of building an automated gold-panning machine, while Ellen is challenged to work out the date of the most recent major earthquake in the area. The team's resident chemist Mike B is charged with the task of creating a skin-cream to help protect the scientists' hands in the cold New Zealand winter. And Kate reveals to the team their ultimate goal for the series.

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Ellen's task this week is to devise a way of waterproofing a tent that Mike B and Mike L will take on an expedition to seek out gold. Meanwhile Kathy and Jonathan build a seismograph using parts from an old alarm clock.

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The entire team are taken on a journey to the Franz Josef glacier and must pool their knowledge to work out both how fast the glacier is moving, and how fast it is melting. They must also create heat to keep themselves warm - but without lighting a fire.

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With the team's time in New Zealand running out, Kate offers the team some extra gold to help them make their jewelery. But it's buried somewhere on a nearby mountainside - so the scientists will need cunning to work out exactly where. Meanwhile Kathy searches for gold on a beach, and the two Mikes work out how to extract the gold from rocks collected earlier in the series.

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The culmination of the group's New Zealand adventure. The team have found enough gold to carry out their final task, but they still face the challenge of purifying the gold and working it into a piece of jewelery.

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Week one's challenges are heavily focused on the "exploration" theme. Jonathan's challenge is to make a rover; a remote controlled vehicle that could explore strange new worlds. Staying with the theme of exploration, Iain and Ellen have to use their geological and botanical skills to search for water in the desert. Assuming they find some water, Kathy and Mike are going to have to find a way of purifying it to make it safe for drinking and they're going to have to make it taste good as well, because at the end of day three Kathy and Mike's purified water will be up against drinking water.

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No space mission can succeed without communication, so our second set of Rough Science space challenges are all based around making contact. Jonathan and Kathy have to come up with a way of communicating that doesn't use sound waves - because in the vacuum of space, there's nothing for them to move through. It took two years and a million pounds to develop a pen for use in space - one that would work in zero gravity. Ellen and Mike have no money and just three days to come up with their own version. Iain's challenge is very different. He has to find a way to communicate with aliens!

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Although everyone thinks of space as very cold, in fact, if you stood on the sunny side of the moon, the temperature would be hot enough to boil the blood in your body. Spacesuits are designed to protect astronauts from these extremes of temperature. So for this week's challenge the Rough Scientists have to collectively design a cooling system for their very own spacesuit. And to test it out, at the end of day three, they're going to have to go to Death Valley and do a mock moon walk in their spacesuit - hopefully staying deliciously cool. They decide that they need to make a portable Rough Science fridge. Ellen creates a copper pipe system that will go from the fridge to the spacesuit, carrying cool water from the fridge to the astronaut. Jonathan devises a pump to keep the water moving through the system. Kathy suggests that the fridge should use the principle of evaporation - the same principle that cools us when we sweat. She needs to get water evaporating inside the fridge. And the best way to do that is to lower the pressure; this speeds up evaporation and therefore cooling. But there's a problem - all that evaporating water is trapped inside the fridge, and unless they can get it out then it will destroy the vacuum. Fortunately there's a magic mineral called zeolite that has a special property - it absorbs water vapour. So if they can find zeolite and put it in the fridge it will suck up the water vapour, preserving the vacuum. Mike attempts to extract zeolite from washing powder, whilst Iain tries to find naturally occurring zeolite in the rocks around the mine. So at the end of day three the Rough Scientists decamp to Death Valley where Ellen is dressed in their spacesuit for a spacewalk which will reveal whether their cooling system really can keep someone cool in one of the hottest places on Earth.

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This week's programme is all about meteorites and asteroids. Not too far from the Rough Science base on the edge of Death Valley is Meteor Crater. Iain, Kathy and Mike have to work out how big the meteor that caused this huge crater must have been. But it's not just the Earth that gets hit by objects from outer space - the moon is also a target, as evidenced by its heavily cratered surface. So Jonathan and Ellen have to pick a crater on the moon - any crater will do - and measure how big it is. And because they'll be doing their measurements at night, Ellen has to come up with some lights. The Meteor Crater team decide they have to split their work. Kathy and Iain head off to the crater itself to try and measure its diameter. This is the first essential step if they are to work out how big the meteor was that caused the crater. At the same time, they are hoping to find out more about the meteor in the hope this will give them clues about its size. Meanwhile Mike stays behind to try and make his own crater. He performs a series of impact experiments, dropping heavy objects into sand in an effort to work out the relationship between the size of an object and the size of crater it forms. Jonathan and Ellen have been given a high quality optical mirror, and so to find and measure a crater on the moon, they build a reflecting telescope. Their plan is to time how long it takes the whole moon to travel across a fixed point in their eyepiece, and then time how long it takes their chosen crater to travel across that same fixed point. Because they know that the moon is 3500 kilometres across, they can use this as a starting point to calculate the diameter of the crater. For her lights Ellen heads to the hills and collects pine sap. She melts it to remove some of the most volatile compounds, and then uses bark fibres as wicks, to make highly effective Rough Science candles.

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In Programme One the Rough Scientists had to make a Mars Rover which could explore strange new worlds. This week Kathy and Jonathan have to go one better and design an aerial surveyor that can explore much greater areas by floating above land. Just like the rover challenge, they've been given a tiny camera which will record whatever the aerial surveyor sees. Back on Earth, Mike has a very different challenge. Back in 1970 the crew of Apollo XIII faced certain death when an accident damaged their oxygen tanks. To survive they had to build a carbon dioxide filter - and Mike has to do the same. In 1872 California experienced one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded in the United States. Ellen and Iain have to work out where the epicentre of the quake was, and its magnitude. Kathy and Jonathan decide to make a solar balloon - heated by the power of the sun. Made by sticking black bin bags together, the idea is to hang the camera below it. (An idea, incidentally, that NASA are actively exploring for Mars.) Unfortunately the Rough Science version encounters a series of unexpected setbacks, and on Day Three it is touch and go whether it will get off the ground. For Mike to make his carbon dioxide filter he needs to make limewater. To do that he needs to find limestone, heat it up to make quicklime, and then dissolve it in water. However, making quicklime proves to be more difficult than anticipated, and on Day Three he faces a classic Rough Science test to see if he has succeeded in making a working carbon dioxide filter. Ellen and Iain take to the air to try and find the site of the 1872 earthquake. Their first task is to find the fault line which marks the location of the earthquake. They then set out to measure the amount of movement that occurred along the fault, to work out where the maximum displacement was. This should give them the epicentre of the earthquake, and also provide the information they need to calculate its magnitude. Should - but will it?

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Our final set of Rough Science space challenges are all about rockets. Mike, Jonathan and Kathy have to make three different rockets, but there's a catch; they're only allowed to use one thing as a fuel - and that's water! They've also got to design their rockets to carry a "passenger" - a (raw) egg. And Ellen and Iain have to find a way of returning the egg safely to Earth. Each of our 3 rocketeers designs a rocket that fits their science background. Jonathan's is the most ambitious - his physics background inspires him to build a steam powered rocket. Kathy - also a physicist - decides to use pressurised water, and Mike takes a chemical approach, using electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, and then recombining them to form an explosive mixture. (Hydrogen and oxygen are what NASA uses to fuel its rockets - but the difference is that NASA uses a liquid fuel which can compress far more energy into a much smaller space.) What develops is a Rough Science space race, as the scientists compete to see who can get to the launch pad first, and whose rocket will be the most effective. Meanwhile, Ellen and Iain have to find a way of putting an egg on each rocket and returning it to Earth. They opt for a parachute made out of bin bags, and design a detachable nosecone for the rockets. However, the "detachable" part proves harder to achieve than first thought...

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The Rough Scientists are sent to a nearby wreck which offers a whole new artificial habitat for plants and fish. As in every programme the team are set three challenges. Firstly, Jonathan will need to design and build a submersible, remote-controlled rover to send back pictures from the sea-bed; Kathy’s challenge is to work out how to reach the wreck at low tide, when it will be most visible; while Ellen and Mike have to figure out how to purify the team’s water supply.

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It’s a dark tropical night and Kate has fallen overboard and is in need of rescue. Mike has to build a distress flare, while Kathy and Ellen are tasked with making a life jacket or some sort of flotation device. Jonathan is given the job of producing a warning light that’s triggered by seawater.

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The waters around Zanzibar are teeming with life and they are surprisingly noisy. The team’s challenge this week is to eavesdrop on the underwater sounds of the reef to discover what is making all the noise. Jonathan and Mike will work together to construct a hydrophone – an underwater listening device. Kathy has to build a contraption that will allow them to see under the water. Meanwhile, Ellen has to fend off some of the island’s less desirable wildlife – mosquitoes.

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