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We shine a light on some of this year’s events and people. Dr Vassilios Spathopoulos shows a model of a 2,000-year-old gear-wheel computer, found off Antikythera. We’ll go to Stromness Museum and Orkney Fossil & Heritage Centre to view fossil fish from ancient Lake Orcadie. Then it's Kansas for Jake’s Midnight Science Club, with family science activities from Dr Steven ‘Jake’ Jacobs, former chief scientist of the Discovery Channel. “Young scientists and future wizards of all ages are welcome,” he says. “Be prepared to be challenged, laugh, be amazed, jump and duck for cover!”

How far back can we trace the origins of bere, Orkney’s six-rowed barley? A very long way, says Prof. Terry Brown of Manchester University. Using DNA sequencing and other biomolecular methods it’s possible to build a picture of bere's evolution over the centuries – revealing that it’s been grown in Orkney for more than 4000 years.

Our whole society depends on measurements, billions of them every day. The system is maintained by metrology – the science of measurement – which also aims to improve measurement accuracy over time, as Prof. Richard Brown, the Head of Metrology at the National Physical Laboratory, explains.

How the salt fish trade connected Shetland with the rest of Europe for more than two hundred years. John Goodlad, who has worked in the seafood industry all his life, describes how salt fish from Shetland became one of the staple foods of Europe and powered the economy of the islands.

Research students from three universities – Heriot-Watt, Robert Gordon, and UHI – share news of the progress of their work, hosted by Dr Mike Bell of Heriot-Watt University’s International Centre for Island Technology in the Stromness campus with its views out across the harbour to Graemsay, Hoy and Scapa Flow.

Oceanographer Dr Neil Banas looks at how a story by a master Haida mythteller, Skaay, reflects the marine ecology on the North Pacific Ocean’s edge. “He managed to capture the dynamics of ecosystems at the ‘edge of chaos’ in his mythic frame with an accuracy that mathematical modellers still struggle to duplicate.”

That’s the title of Dr Malcolm Alexander's book, looking back at a year in the life of an Orkney doctor, in Eday in the 1980s. He joins us to reflect on the work of an island GP, living in the heart of the community, coping with the medical and emotional challenges and the varied situations that can emerge with weather or wildlife.

Mary Somerville was an astronomer, a mathematician, and a gifted writer. She carried out research into light and magnetism, pioneered new applications of mathematics to astronomy, and wrote textbooks and popular science books that achieved great success. She did all this despite being mainly self-taught, at a time when education for women was not encouraged. She was born in Jedburgh in 1780, the daughter of a Vice-Admiral, she spent her early years in Burntisland, Fife, and went on to become recognised as one of the most remarkable people of the 19th century. Cartographer Ian Archibald tells her story.

The technology of the fax machine was invented and patented in 1843 by a crofter’s son from Watten in Caithness who had left school when he was 12. Alexander Bain was a clockmaker’s apprentice in Wick when he was inspired by a scientific lecture in Thurso on electricity – as John Mellis, author of Scotland’s Science, describes.

Orkney's story started with hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago. This discovery of a long-lost past is due in particular to Caroline-Wickham Jones. Prof. Richard Bates and Prof. Martin Bates from the Rising Tides project team describe her work, including investigations in the Bay of Firth and the Stenness and Harray Lochs.