Alice Roberts

From a very young age, parents are pushing their boys to achieve in a way they don’t always do for girls."

More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.

Evolutionary biologists have long pondered the phenomenon of the changing colours of autumn leaves. It’s possible that the red pigments are manufactured in the leaf as a side-effect of something else that’s happening at this time.

Science plays a huge role in our lives. We're surrounded by technology, we depend on it.

So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.

Eighteen years later, pregnant with my first child, I started eating fish. Oily fish in particular contains plenty of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, essential for neural development.

We need to get across the excitement and creativity of science. That it isn't just a list of facts that have already been discovered - but a process, a creative project, that you are generating ideas, testing them and looking for evidence.

Choosing my career was always based on job satisfaction rather than financial security. I wanted to get a job in science; I enjoyed being a surgeon and I now enjoy being an academic and having a media career.

Lunch on the road is usually the same as breakfast and tea in remote places - packet meals. I'm veggie and generally get vegetable curry or rigatoni.

If we don’t concentrate on resurrecting science, we’re not going to be able to compete in a global economy."

While planting woodlands along rivers has been shown to work in small areas, it has been unclear whether it would be effective on a larger scale. But computer modelling indicates that restoring forests on floodplains could slow floodwaters and reduce the height of the flood downstream.

I don’t think anyone is saying that we should be treating boys and girls exactly the same and that we should try to eliminate all differences. What the psychologists who do this work are saying is we should be aware of it and careful about it, especially if we think it could be limiting choices."