This week Alok Jha meets psychologist Elaine Fox from the University of Essex to explore optimism and pessimism. Professor Fox reveals in her book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain how having one personality type or the other can affect your health and prospects.

Alok also interviewed physicist and science writer Alex Stone about his passion for magic. Stone has penned Fooling Houdini: Adventures in the World of Magic, a book about what the craft of the magician can tell us about the mind, perception and what it means to be human.

Alok gets an update from Liberal Democrat peer Lord Sharkey on his campaign to win a posthumous pardon for one of Britain's greatest mathematicians, Alan Turing, who was convicted in 1952 of "gross indecency" with another man. Alok is joined by Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample to discuss the legal and ethical dilemmas posed by such a pardon.

Ian also reveals why synthetic biologists are turning mice cells into simple jellyfish.

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