Author: BBC Radio 4

There is nothing new for chemistry to discover, says Bernie Bulkin. In Solving Chemistry: A Scientist's Journey, the former Head of Science at BP argues that an unprecedented event has happened: a branch of science has made all the major discoveries it is likely to make. He tells Tom Sutcliffe what this means for chemistry - and for science more broadly.

Medicine is in the midst of 'a biomedical revolution' says Professor Sir Robert Lechler. His own field of kidney transplants has been transformed by our new understanding of the immune system. He has helped to curate Spare Parts, an exhibition at the Science Gallery that poses the question: how many transplants could we have before we were no longer ourselves?

Elizabeth Pisani has watched interest in different diseases rise and fall. As an epidemiologist she charts the impact that press attention and public grants have on medical research, with some becoming fashionable while in others treatments lag behind. And she warns that scientists too often fail to take account of the human context when delivering medicines.

Astrophysicist Jo Dunkley assesses our understanding of the universe in a concise new guide. But the universe is 85% dark matter - and we still know very little about this. She draws attention to the brilliant female scientists who contributed to breakthroughs in physics, but whose contributions have been forgotten along the way.

Picture: Big Heart Data by Gareth McKee, part of Spare Parts at the Science Gallery

Producer: Hannah Sander

Andrew Marr on beauty and politics in art. Our idea of beauty was shaped by the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin. He thought all people deserved to see beauty every day, and compared, and founded a gallery in Sheffield for local industrial workers. To mark Ruskin's bicentenary, curator Louise Pullen has put together a new exhibition showing how his ideas about art, science, truth and beauty shaped the politics of the day.

"All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists," declared WEB Du Bois. The civil rights campaigner, philosopher and social thinker argued that it was an artist's duty to shape a better world. Academic Liam Bright explains why Du Bois thought both artists and scientists had a duty to tell the truth.

In poet Fiona Benson's new volume Vertigo and Ghost, beauty, violence and power are never far apart. Benson's poems depict Zeus as a serial rapist, and capture the claustrophobia of modern domestic life.

And design guru Stephen Bayley considers what creativity is - and what it is for - in his new book How To Steal Fire. As a leading cultural critic, he asks what place beauty and imagination have in modern life.

Producer: Hannah Sander

The prize-winning writer John Lanchester considers the political endgame of a fractious world in his new novel, The Wall. He tells Amol Rajan why he has written a dystopian fable in which the young distrust the old, and the world appears broken.

But just how violent are we as a species? The primatologist Richard Wrangham believes there is a 'goodness paradox': at an individual level we have evolved to become a more peaceful animal, especially compared to our closest relatives, the chimpanzee; but our ability to organise and plan an attack has made us lethal.

The ancient Assyrians celebrated every detail of cruelty, massacre and torture, including skinning prisoners alive, as they built their empire and conquered their enemies. The academic Eleanor Robson looks back at the reign of the King Ashurbanipal from the 7th century BC, immortalised in an exhibition at the British Museum.

Shortly after the King’s death the Empire fell. Dr Patricia Lewis is an expert on international security and studies the ebb and flow of wars across the world from chemical warfare to cyber-attacks. She looks ahead to the major conflicts to watch in the coming year.

The above image is from the British Museum’s exhibition I Am Ashurbanipal: King of the World, King of Assyria

Producer: Katy Hickman