Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week how scientists showed that the ancient

practice of meditation can indeed change the brain.

It just completely blew our

instrumentation because we were seeing signals that we had never before seen in a human brain.

Also, the extraordinary story of Saddam Hussein's super gun.

It was a vast learning curve, the loads which are involved in this kind of artillery piece,

just mind-boggling and it's exciting.

Plus we've got the story behind the pale blue dot, the photo that really put our place in the

universe into perspective and we hear from a Nigerian artist who infuriated her government by building

a memorial bus for campaigners against the oil industry.

We've had to leave our homes, we can't feed ourselves or breathe in the night of data. There was a kind of quiet

silent genocide. That's all coming up later in the podcast. And we begin staying with environmental issues,

but this is a long way from the steamy heat of the Niger Delta.

It is, though, still about oil.

For this, we're going back to the 1980s,

and a campaign to stop oil companies being allowed to explore for oil and gas in the world's last wilderness Antarctica.

It would lead to one of the biggest victories in the history of the environmental movement.

This report is from Louis Hidalgo.

There's no other victory that put an entire continent off limits to commercial development.

Since the 50s, Antarctica had been protected by an international treaty forbidding anything except scientific research there.

Until the 1980s, when governments began talking about opening up the last untouched continent

...