Episodes
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New insights into how our skin learns to tolerate and co-exist with bacteria on its surface show great potential for the development of simpler and less invasive vaccines. Stanford University’s Djenet Bousbaine has published two papers in Nature detailing the microbiological research and mouse vaccination experiments that could change the future of immunisation. The Sun is the hardest place in the Solar System to reach. But by the time the next edition of Science in Action is on air, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will have swooped through the scorching corona layer of the Sun, re-emerged, and be readying itself to relay the details of magnetic fields and particle storms to the team. NASA Helioscience deputy manager, Nicky Rayl, reveals all about the mission and explains why the Parker Probe’s future looks bright. And a trip half a billion years back - and then some - to the dawn of complex life here on Earth. Microfossil hunter Shuhai Xiao, from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, has been compiling a single statistical database to better understand evolution during the so-called ‘boring billion’, why subsequent changes on the planet triggered a new diversity of species to emerge, and how the interplay between biology and geology has paved the way for modern life as we know it.
Presenter: Roland PeaseProducer: Alex MansfieldAssistant Producer: William HornbrookProduction Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Solar Activity Captured in H-Alpha Filter. Credit: Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images.)
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Heatwaves in the pacific ocean have had a devastating effect on seabird populations in the north eastern US. Julia Parrish and colleagues publish this week 4 million deaths of Alaskan common murres attributable to rising water temperatures during 2014-16, representing half the population. One idea is that the fish on which the birds feed swim at deeper depths to find cooler temperatures, taking them below the depth the birds can dive. Worse, the reduced population numbers have endured almost ten years later.
Pre-eclampsia affects up to 5 percent of pregnancies across the world. It reduces blood flow through the placenta, endangering mother, and even hindering the development of the foetus. But a promising approach to a possible therapy is described by Kelsey Swingle and colleagues this week. Much like some covid vaccines, by using a sort of lipid nanoparticles to deliver mRNA directly to the placenta in pregnant mice has resulted in healthier outcomes by widening the placental capillaries, allowing blood to flow more normally.
Angie Rasmussen updates Roland on some of the work reported at a conference in Japan this week, pointing more directly to the covid-19 pandemic originating from wild animals at the Wuhan market.
And in two coordinated papers published in the journals Science and Nature this week, scientists have narrowed down the period of time in history that modern humans and neanderthals interbred, leading to nearly everyone outside of sub-Saharan Africa sharing up to 2% of European Neanderthal DNA today. The question remains as to whether it was a benefit or not to the resulting hybrid population. Co-author Manjusha Chintalapati and colleagues describe how not all the neanderthal crossovers went on to survive pre-history to count as our direct ancestors. But one period of time, around 47,000 years ago is stamped on (nearly) all of us.
Presenter: Roland PeaseProducer: Alex MansfieldProduction Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth and Josie Hardy
(Image: Group of common murres on a breeding colony in Alaska. Credit: Sarah Schoen/USGS)
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Missing episodes?
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Scientists have found that just one mutation in the current H5N1 virus in cattle can switch its preference from avian to human receptors. Jim Paulson and colleagues at the Scripps Institute did not use the whole virus to investigate this, but proteins from one of the Texas farm workers found to be infected. It suggests the bovine H5N1 virus has already evolved subtly. Meanwhile, Richard Webby of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis helps us catch up on the latest known about the case of the Canadian teenager taken seriously ill a month ago with a different variant of avian H5N1. A debate has been rumbling this last year about the extent of ocean warming by, perhaps paradoxically, the reduction of particulate pollution from the fuel used by ships. The idea is that the small particles of sulphates and nitrates in the soot from funnels actually formed clouds over shipping lanes out at sea. This in turn sheltered the oceans to some extent from solar radiation, thus making latter decades of the 20th century seem cooler than they would have measured today. Hence, removing the particulate pollution from bunker fuel, mandated by the International Maritime Organisation a few years ago, may have contributed to the surge in ocean temperatures witnessed in the last two years. Daniele Visione, of Cornell, and colleagues have done the modelling and found that there has indeed been a noticeable effect. But earth’s oceans are certainly not as hot as Venus’ ones, if indeed such oceans ever existed. It has long been held that once upon a time our sunward neighbour might have possessed liquid water oceans, long since boiled off by runaway greenhouse effects of the atmosphere. But, breaking with science fiction visions of aliens paddling in temperate seas, Tereza Constantinou of Cambridge University has been looking at the gases coming out of the volcanos on Venus, and has concluded that the planet never had such surface water, basically because the rocks from which magma is made don’t billow steam when they boil today. Presented by Roland PeaseProduced by Alex Mansfield with Debbie KilbrideProduction Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Bird Flu in Dairy Cows; Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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November 1974 became known as the “November Revolution” in particle physics. Two teams on either side of the US discovered the same particle - the “J/psi” meson. On the "J" team, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Sau Lan Wu and colleagues were smashing protons and neutrons together and looking for electrons and positron pairs in the debris. Over at Stanford on the other side of the US, Dr Michael Riordan was in a lab with the "psi" team who, in some ways the other direction, were smashing electrons and positrons together to see what was created. They both, unbeknownst to each other, found a peak around 3.1Gev.
It was shortly after that the full significance was clear. The existence of this particle confirmed a new type of quark, theorised in what we now call the Standard Model, but never before observed - the Charm quark. And with Prof Sau Lan Wu’s team’s subsequent discovery of gluons – the things that hold it all together – a pattern appeared in what had been the chaos of high energy physics and the nature of matter. Sau Lan and Michael (author of "The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics") tell Roland the story.
Prof Matthew Genge and colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London have found evidence of a bacillus growing on samples of the asteroid Ryugu brought back from space by the Hayabusa 2 mission. Rather than evidence for alien life, as they suggest in a paper this month, the contamination shows how easily terrestrial microorganisms can colonise space rocks, even when subjected to the strictest control precautions.
And Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University and colleagues report in Science how they have taken a load of fossilised faecal matter and mapped out the evolution of dinosaur diets. First came the carnivores… then the vegetarian revolution…
(Photo: Samuel Ting (front) shown with members of his J/psi experimental team. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield
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It is hard not to have noticed the intensity of storms around the world this year, not least the Atlantic storms that battered the eastern US. A new study, using a new technique, confirms their attribution to climate change, and goes further, finding that many of them were actually raised in intensity category compared to how strong they might have been in a world without anthropogenic climate change. The costs are already extraordinary, according to Daniel Gilford of Climate Central in Princeton.
When it comes to wildlife conservation, one of the underestimated parameters is the “old and wise” individuals in a population. According to a review paper in the journal Science, not only are earth’s old animals in decline, in many species they are vital to recovery and resilience when outside factors endanger numbers. As co-author Lauren Brent of Exeter University points out, these sorts of nuance are not always looked out for in conservation estimates.
Chimps have culture, but is their culture cumulative and transmissible or innate and intuitive? Comparing a large database of observed chimpanzee behaviours, together with genetic lineages, Cassandra Gunasekaram and Andrea Migliano, of the University of Zurich, found that types of more complex tool usage can be correlated with reproductive overlaps between different chimp communities. The wandering females maybe carry tech knowledge with them when they travel to find new mates. Is this something both chimps and humans inherited from a common ancestor?
And finally, as the harvesting of deep ocean polymetallic nodules gets nearer to commercial reality, the French research ship L’Atalante sets sail this week to study the animals that live on and around these strange chemical balls scattered across the abyssal plains of the mid pacific ocean. As lead scientist aboard, Pierre-Antoine Dessandier tells us, it is essential to understand how these animals live in the dark, 5km down, before the habitats are disturbed. The Eden mission will be searching the Clarion-Clipperton zone until January 2025.
Presenter: Roland PeaseProducer: Alex Mansfield with Eliane GlaserProduction co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Photo: Hurricane Milton seen from the International Space Station. Credit: Nasa/Getty Images)
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Before December, the United Nations aims to have a global treaty in place covering efforts to limit global plastic production and pollution. In a paper in the journal Science, a team of scientists have used machine learning to estimate what happens by 2050 if we do nothing. But they have also found that the problem is solvable, with the right political will, and as marine ecologist Neil Nathan of UCSB points out, with surprisingly little new rules, waste could be reduced by 91%.
Machine learning this week has also helped in the creation of Evo, a tool that has created a sort of chat-GPT for the language of life, DNA. Patrick Hsu, of the University of California at Berkeley is very optimistic that the power of this tool both to predict function and one day even design whole organisms is a foundational new approach.
Migratory birds navigate vast distances without GPS. It’s long been strongly suspected that they use the earth’s magnetic field to find their way, but Richard Holland of Bangor University and colleagues have found nuance in the way they do, and publish their findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B this week. Using electromagnetic cages they have fooled individual warblers into acting as if they were in Russia, whilst actually still being in Austria.
Meanwhile, Daniele Sorini, a cosmologist at Durham University has been thinking about dark energy and the possibility of our existence. In a thought experiment wondering what changing the density of dark energy would do to the likelihood of our being here to even think about it. Slightly contrary to what many reason is the fine-tuning of universal constants to allow us, as intelligent observers, to exist, Daniele and colleagues calculate that actually our observed density of dark energy is not the most likely to allow intelligent life. If there are other universes in the multiverse, most observers would think there was much more dark energy than we do. You can read up about it in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, if you are an intelligent observer yourself.
Presenter: Roland PeaseProducer: Alex Mansfield with Eliane GlaserProduction Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Plastic waste issues in Philippines. Credit: Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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Many coronaviruses exist in nature that we don’t know much about. We don’t even know how and whether most of them might bind to human cells. Research published in Nature, by scientists at Wuhan and Washington Universities, describes a new way of designing novel receptor sites on cell cultures so that many types of coronavirus may now be cultured and studied to ascertain their risk to humans. Cambridge virologist Ravindra Gupta, who is not one of the authors, gives Science in Action his take on the risks versus the reward.
Dotted around the remains of Pompeii, visitors are often struck by the plaster casts of some of the victims’ dying moments. During recent restoration of several of these casts, scientists were able to extract DNA samples from bones which had previously been enveloped by plaster since their initial discovery. As Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology describes, some of the findings confound our previous narratives about their lives, relationships, and even their genders.
Rozenn Pineau, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has been investigating the unique evolutionary history of the world's oldest (and biggest) tree - "Pando".
And finally, the oldest known tadpole is described from a 160 million year old Argentinian fossil by biologist Mariana Chuliver.
Presented by Roland PeaseProduced by Alex Mansfield, with Eliane GlaserProduction Coordination by Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Illustration of Covid-19 coronavirus binding to human cell. Credit: Kateryna Kon via Getty Images)
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This week at least 150 people have been killed due to devastating flash flooding sweeping through areas of Valencia in Spain. Ana Camarasa Belmonte, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Valencia, has been studying the flood patterns and hydrology of the area for years. Even she was astounded by the magnitude of the inundation. And, as Jess Neumann of Reading University in the UK tells Roland, part of the tragedy is that the effective communication of risk somehow relies on citizens being able to adequately imagine the almost unimaginable.
Ten years ago this week, Friederike Otto and colleagues founded the World Weather Attribution network. The network aims to provide quick analysis of climate change's impact on on extreme weather events. They have already found that the Spanish flooding was made more intense, and more likely, by our warming world. Earlier in the week they published a different analysis of the 10 most deadly, extreme-weather events of this century. They concluded that all 10 events were made more extreme or more likely by climate change, and that these 10 events alone account for some 570,000 deaths.
In the US, Scientists have tested the strain of H5N1 bird flu swabbed from the eye of an infected Texan farm worker. They found it to be both lethal and transmissible via the respiratory tract of mice and ferrets. It contains a mutation PB2-627K, common in avian viruses in mammalian cells, as Amie Eisfeld of the Universoity of Wisconsin-Madison explains.
Presented by Roland PeaseProduced by Alex MansfieldProduction Coordination by Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Aftermath of catastrophic floods in Spain's Valencia. Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images)
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Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and most famous stars in the northern night sky, has varied in brightness with an elusive pattern ever since observations began. Many theories exist as to why it ebbs and flows with apparently two distinct rhythms – one shorter and another around 2000 days long.
But just recently two independent astronomical teams have unveiled papers suggesting the existence of an orbital companion circling the red giant. About the size of our own sun, the “Betelbuddy” may whizz round Betelgeuse, almost skimming its surface, every 2000 days. And why haven’t we seen the Betelbuddy before? Because, from here, it would be a million times fainter than Betelgeuse itself, as one of the authors, and long-time Betelgeuse watcher, Andrea Dupree of Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics explains.
Back here on earth, Omar Yaghi of Berkeley, University of California and colleagues have been designing a new material that can scrub carbon dioxide out of the air in minutes. They have patented this type of Covalent Organic Framework (COF) and are hoping to scale up production such that a few hundred tonnes deployed around our biggest cities could solve our CO2 crisis.
But then what do you do with all those gigatonnes of CO2? Maybe one thing would be to use solar power to convert it into plant food. Robert Jinkerson and colleagues describe in the journal Joule a proposal to transform global food production into “Electro-Agriculture”, growing plants, fungi and algae on acetate made from solar energy. Their proposal would also shrink the global footprint of farming to allow more natural habitat.
And finally, Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St Louis has published an archaeological survey of two lost conurbations in the mountains of southern Uzbekistan that he and colleagues rediscovered in the last few years. He argues that the scale and complexity of these dwelling, and their location over 2000m, way above normal agricultural altitude mean we need to reconsider these stops on what would have been the Silk Road, around 600-1000 CE, perhaps even pointing at a very early industrial economy.
Presenter: Roland PeaseProducer: Alex Mansfield with Andrew Lewis
(Image: Orion sink to Kashimayarigadake. Credit: Getty)
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The “dewilding” effects of fish farming and mariculture are in the spotlight this week. Farmed fish can impact marine ecosystems in several ways, and surprisingly one of those is the effect it has on consumer perceptions of the impact of eating farmed fish, as researchers Becca Franks of NYU and Laurie Sellars at Yale suggest.
Meanwhile, Manu Prakesh and colleagues at Stanford University in the US have found a remarkable plankton that can traverse the depths of the oceans by ballooning to five times its size, giving clues as to how an important carbon sink actually works. And Monika Bright at the University of Vienna has found animals and tubeworms living in the very rock below volcanic hydrothermal vents. Life finds a way…
…But not always. 445 million years ago the second worst mass extinction event wiped out countless species of life on earth. But why? This week astronomer Chrysa Avdellidou of Leicester University and colleagues say they have found the origin for a famous meteor event that also happened around that time.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex MansfieldProduction co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Image: Aerial view of seagulls following a fishing trawler. Credit: Felix Cesare via Getty Images)
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In the week the Nobel prizes for science are announced, Roland Pease takes a look at the stories behind the breakthroughs being recognized, and the themes that connect them. From the discovery of the tiny fragments of RNA that regulate our cells’ behaviour, via computer structures that resemble our brains, and harnessing those sorts of computers to design drugs and medicines, it has been one of the most interdisciplinary years for the prize panellists.
We hear from old students, recent colleagues, laureates and lab (and life) partners, including Rosalind “Candy” Lee and her husband Victor Ambros, of UMass Chan Medical School, US, Erika DeBenedictus of the Crick Institute, UK, and Dmitri Krotov of IBM Research.
Presented: Roland Pease Produced: Alex MansfieldProduction co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Photo: 3d rendering of RNA strands and lipid-based nanoparticles or liposome. Credit: Love Employee via Getty Images)
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As we were putting the finishing touches to last week’s Science in Action, the US National Weather Service was warning of Hurricane Helene’s fast approach to the Florida coast – alerting people to ‘unsurvivable’ storm surges of up to 6 metres. But the category 4 storm powered, as forecast, far past the coast and into the rugged interior of Tennessee and the Carolinas. 150 billion tonnes of rainfall are estimated to have been dumped there, with devastating consequences for the towns and villages snuggled into the deep-cut valleys of the region. Bloomberg says the event could cost $160 billion. Extreme warmth in the Gulf of Mexico helped fuel the hurricane, and within a few days Berkeley climatologist Michael Wehner had computed the fingerprint of climate change on the event.
The journal Nature published this week a study estimating the true number of casualties of hurricanes like Helene – not just those registered in the immediate aftermath, deaths caused by the instant trauma, but those in the months, even years, that follow, because of the disruption to lives and infrastructure. Rachel Young of Stanford University was herself surprised by the scale of harm her calculations revealed.
At least the dams held in North Carolina during Helene, although the sight of torrents of water gushing down the protective spillways at the peak was fearsome to see. A year ago, the two dams upstream of the Libyan port Derna both failed during Storm Daniel – ripping out the heart of the city and claiming at least 6000 lives. We reported what we could at the time here on Science in Action. But a World Bank study on the disaster reported back to an international dam conference in India this week a more detailed investigation – though the fractious politics of Libya put constraints on their work. Climate change was a massive part – normal monthly September rain in the area is 1.5 mm – but over 200 mm, maybe 400, fell on the hills behind Derna the night of the 10th. But it was the report of independent engineer Ahmed Chraibi that interested Science in Action – on the condition of the two dams, one just on the edge of the city, the other larger one 15 km upstream. He confirmed these had been built, in the 70s, for flood protection not to store water, but were in a shocking state long before last year’s cataclysm.
You’ve not been paying attention here in the past 5 years if you haven’t learned how clever our immune system is in recognising viruses that invade our bodies. Different arms of the system like antibodies and white blood cells can take on the viruses directly, or kill infected cells to stop the infection spreading further. But it’s slow to respond to new infections, which is why our pharmacies also stock antivirals, small molecules which also lock onto components of viruses to stop them replicating. Too often though, they’re not as effective as we’d like. Flu antivirals for example work only if you catch the infection very early. So I was intrigued to read in the Proceedings of the National Academy this week of a new kind of drug that is like an antiviral, but gets the immune system to do the hard work. Imrul Shahria reckoned there are all kinds of antibodies and immune cells floating through our tissues not doing much, but that could be tricked into tackling flu infections – with a little molecular deception. He's effectively hacked the flu antiviral zanamivir which locks onto the neuraminidase protein – the N – of flu viruses, and given it immune superpowers.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex MansfieldProduction co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Photo: Hurricane Helene causes massive flooding across swaths of western North Carolina. Credit: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
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Valerie Trouet of the University of Arizona tells us how tree-ring data has been used to show how the jet stream has shaped extreme weather in Europe for centuries, influencing harvests, wildfires and epidemics.
Monash University’s Andy Tomkins discusses how, around 460 million years ago, the Earth was briefly encircled by a ring of dust – like Saturn is today, and that the resulting temporary astronomical shade may have cooled the planet. Andy proposes that this dust came from an asteroid which had a close encounter with our planet.
And the cell biology of choking on your drink with Laura Seeholzer from the University of California, San Francisco. Laura has won the 2024 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology recognising her work on the discovery of how neuroendocrine cells protect our airways.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Photo: Members of the research team collected tree ring samples at various locations in Europe, including the Balkan region. Credit: Courtesy of Valerie Trouet)
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The Sahara Desert has been experiencing unusually heavy rainfall due to an extratropical cyclone, causing flash floods in Morocco. We hear from Moshe Armon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
A 485-million-year temperature record of Earth reveals Phanerozoic climate variability. Brian Huber of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC tells us more.
And Mary Lewis of Reading University discusses new research looking into what puberty was like for our ancestors towards the end of the last ice age. Teenagers from 25,000 years ago went through similar puberty stages as modern-day adolescents.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Photo: Moroccan municipal workers and members of Auxiliary Forces help drain a road in a flooded neighbourhood in the city of Ouarzazate. Credit: Abderahim Elbcir/AFP/Getty Images)
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Nearly a year ago, the top of a mountain on the Greenland coast broke off and slid a thousand metres down into the Dickson Fjord. The impact created a tsunami that started two-hundred-metres-high and sloshed between the cliffs for nine days, producing a global seismic signal. But it was so remote, only now are the details becoming clear. We hear from Paula Koelemeijer, Wieter Boone and Søren Rysgaard.
The decline of the ancient inhabitants of Rapa Nui was unlikely to have been caused by a self-inflicted population collapse, thereby rejecting a contentious theory of ‘ecological suicide’. Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas of the University of Lausanne discusses her team’s findings which shed light on the population history of the island formerly known as Easter Island - one of the most remote inhabited places in the world, around 3,700 km west of South America and over 1,900 km east of the closest inhabited island.
A newly identified species of wasp that attacks and lays eggs inside an adult fly has been discovered by Logan Moore and colleagues from Mississippi State University. Around 200 species of parasitoid wasps that target the fruit fly have been discovered to date - they lay their eggs in living creatures - all of which have been shown to target their hosts during vulnerable stages, such as when larvae or pupae. Until now, no wasp that attacks and develops inside the adult stage of a fruit fly host has been described.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Image: Copernicus Sentinel Data (2023). Credit: European Space Agency)
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A Chinese survey of diseased animals farmed for their fur – such as mink, foxes and raccoon dogs - has revealed high levels of concerning viruses, including coronaviruses and flu viruses, many of which appear to jump easily from species to species. John Pettersson of Uppsala University discusses the threat to us humans.
We learnt early on in the Covid-19 pandemic how important the genetic details of the virus were in tracking the spread and spotting new variants. The vaccines were designed from gene sequences shared electronically long before any biological samples became available. Virologist Emma Hodcroft has teamed up with researchers around the world to develop a new virus database, Pathoplexus, to speed up the sharing of gene sequences.
Mpox outbreaks are causing concerns in Central and West Africa - particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A smallpox vaccine has started arriving, giving some protection against mpox. But there’s good news this week in an experimental vaccine developed especially for mpox by Moderna – one of the companies that brought us the mRNA vaccines against Covid-19. Galit Alter, vice president of immunology research at Moderna, tells us animal tests show that it appears to be highly effective.
And we discuss embryonic eavesdropping with Francisco Ruiz-Raya of Glasgow University. In the yellow-legged-gull, baby bird embryos that have chattier parents tend to come out chattier themselves – and likely receive better care because of their enhanced communication.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Image: A mink in a mink farm in the hands of a man. Credit: Neznam/Getty Images)
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In 1977 astronomers recorded a brief and strange radio transmission that looked like it perhaps had even come from an alien civilization. It was named the Wow! signal – because that’s what astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote on the computer printout upon its discovery. But now a team including Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo have come up with an astrophysical hypothesis.
An oil tanker which was attacked by Yemen's Houthi rebels in the Red Sea last week is still on fire and may be leaking oil, the US Pentagon says. The talk now is of an agreement to salvage the tanker so a crisis may be avoided, but marine ecologist Carlos Duarte of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia explains how precious ecosystems are at risk.
A meta-analysis of Mediterranean Sea marine species reveals the profound impact of the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Konstantina Agiadi of the University of Vienna tells us how this drastic environmental event resulted in the almost complete evaporation of the Mediterranean Sea roughly 5.5 million years ago and how the resulting changes still influence ecosystems today.
Wildfires that swept across Canada last year are still burning in some parts. A new study has confirmed that they put into the atmosphere a vast amount of burned carbon, over half a billion tonnes. Only China, India and the USA emitted more fossil-fuel based carbon in that period. Brendan Byrne of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been using satellite-based observations to track the carbon release.
Presenter: Roland PeaseProducer: Jonathan BlackwellProduction Coordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Image: The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". Credit: NAAPO)
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Fishery assessment models – the “backbone” of fisheries management – overestimate the sustainability of the world’s fisheries, according to a study of 230 fisheries worldwide, and populations of many overfished species are in far worse condition than has been reported. We hear from Rainer Froese of GEOMAR - Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel.
The lunar south pole contains evidence of ancient magma ocean. An analysis of lunar soil in the Moon’s southern high-latitude regions, performed using data from India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, suggests the presence of remnants of a former ocean of magma. Roland speaks to Santosh Vadawale of India’s Physical Research Laboratory.
Stefanie Haustein of the School of Information Studies at Ottawa University discusses the article processing costs for open access of the journal publishing giants in science.
The risk of a banana apocalypse could be near, but biologists, including Li-Jun Ma of the University of Massachusetts, might have found a key to their survival. Bananas are facing functional extinction due to the disease Fusarium wilt of banana caused by a fungal pathogen. Discovery of molecular mechanisms used by the banana-destroying microbe brings hope.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Image: Fisherman emptying net full of fish into hold on trawler. Credit: Monty Rakusen via Getty Images)
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In June this year there was the first detected occurrence of rabies in Cape fur seals, discovered after a rabies case in a dog that had been bitten by a seal. Professor Wanda Markotter, Director of the Centre for Viral Zoonoses at University of Pretoria, has been trying to work out how the virus spread into seals and how to keep people (and their pet dogs) safe.
The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a seismic “advisory” last week alerting local authorities and the public to a heightened risk of a massive, tsunami-generating earthquake on its southeast coast. Californian emergency manager and sociologist James Goltz, has been working with Japanese experts to evaluate a new dynamic alert system that they introduced after the great 2011 earthquake and tsunami which claimed up to 20,000 lives further north.
We hear from Professor Alan Jamieson from the depths of the Tonga Trench. He recently dived into it to see what weird and wonderful creatures he’d find there – but when he reached the bottom, he didn’t see what he expected...!
And Steven Goderis of the Free University of Brussels tells us about the Chicxulub impactor - the massive asteroid smacked into Earth off the Mexican coast causing the mass extinction event which wiped out the dinosaurs. He’s part of a paper in the journal Science, looking into the history of the impactor - revealing it was a rare carbonaceous asteroid from beyond Jupiter.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis
(Image: Fighting Seals. Credit: Edwin Remsberg via Getty Images)
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Cases of bird flu in farm workers in the US may be going underreported, due to supposed poor surveillance and lack of testing. We hear from Amy Maxmen of KFF Health News who has been reporting on a study in Texas.
We hear from Bradley Moore, Professor of Marine Chemical Biology at University of California, San Diego about marine algae using massive enzymes, dubbed PKZILLAs to biosynthesize fish-killing toxins.
BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos gives us the latest on the two American astronauts who blasted off on a test mission to the International Space Station on 5 June, expecting to be back home in a matter of days. But the pair are still there, floating high above the Earth two months later - stuck indefinitely - now facing the sudden prospect of missing the summer entirely and even spending Christmas and New Year in space.
And sea lion camera crews are helping researchers explore previously unmapped ocean habitats in southern Australia. Nathan Angelakis of the University of Adelaide tells us about working with the animal camera operators and what we can learn from viewing their movements.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Young Farmer and Cows on Dairy Farm. Credit: EyeJoy via Getty Images)
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