Science In Action

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The first solar polar pictures Jun 12, 2025

Show notes

ESA’s Solar Orbiter camera probe begins raising its orbit towards the sun’s poles, whilst Betelgeuse’s elusive buddy continues to sneak past our best telescopes.

Earlier this year, Solar Orbiter started to stretch its orbit over greater latitudes – effectively standing on cosmic tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the Sun’s poles. This week, we have seen the first ever pictures of them, and as solar scientist Steph Yardley tells us, the views will only get better.

Meanwhile, Andrea Dupree of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues have had time to study new Hubble and Chandra telescope observations of the iconic star Betelgeuse searching for signs of its hypothesised binary companion – dubbed “Betelbuddy”. The papers that appeared on the Arxiv pre-print server have not yet been fully peer-reviewed, but it seems astronomers will have to keep looking.

Humans use machines to read gene sequences as best they can, but it takes time and is not perfect because we do not know what all of it means. Of course nature has its own genome reader – the ribosome. It is this that interprets the genetic instructions contained in our DNA and translates them into actual proteins. Viruses, of course, use it too when a cell gets infected. Shira Weingarten-Gabbay has this week demonstrated how scientists can make use of ribosomes too. Working somewhat in reverse, her team have identified many thousands of proteins previously unknown, that could for example provide targets for future vaccines or antivirals should the need arise.

Finally, Nanshu Lu and team in the University of Texas at Austin have been working for some years on two-dimensional wearable electronic “E-Tattoos” to monitor health non-invasively through our skin. Their latest work, describes “A wireless forehead e-tattoo for mental workload estimation”.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George

Photo Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SPICE Team, M. Janvier (ESA) & J. Plowman (SwRI)

Potential fungal 'Agroterror'? Jun 05, 2025

Show notes

What is Fusarium graminearum and why were scientists allegedly smuggling it into the US? Also, Alpine Glacier collapse and an HIV capitulation.

The FBI has accused two Chinese scientists of trying to smuggle a dangerous crop fungus into the US, calling it a potential agro-terrorist threat. But the fungus has long been widespread across US farms, and elsewhere, and is treatable. So what’s going on? Frédéric Suffert, Senior researcher in plant disease epidemiology at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, gives us some insight.

Last week, a glacier above the swiss village of Blatten collapsed and up to 12 million tonnes of ice and rock buried the idyllic, yet thankfully all-but evacuated, hamlet below. Daniel Farinotti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology explains how it was monitored more than any such event before, and maybe, despite the tragedy, could help inform the science of such events in a warming world.

Amongst the latest cuts to scientific funding by the US government, two consortia working at advanced stages of a potential HIV vaccine have been told their funding will not continue. Dennis Burton of Scripps Research describes finding out.

The recipient of the Royal Society Faraday Prize 2024 gave his prize lecture last week. Titled Science Under Threat: The Politics of Institutionalised Disinformation, Salim Abdul Karim’s lecture is available on YouTube. Afterwards, he was kindly able to have a chat with Science in Action about his theme.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George

(Photo: A hand holding an ear of wheat. Credit: Heather Schlitz/Reuters)

Thirteen months to a chip off the moon May 29, 2025

Show notes

China is aiming to join the small club of nations who have successfully returned scientific samples of asteroids for analysis on earth, teaching us more about how our and potentially other solar systems formed. Tianwen-2 launched successfully this week, bound for an asteroid known as Kamo‘oalewa, which sits in a very strange orbit of both the earth and the sun, making it a “quasi-satellite”.

Last year, scientists including Patrick Michel of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, published an intriguing suggestion that Kamo‘oalewa might in fact not be a conventional asteroid, but instead be a small piece of our moon that was ejected when the Giordano Bruno crater formed. In a little over a year from now, we might find out if that is right.

Do you have to hold text at arm’s length to read properly? Qiang Zhang, professor of physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, whose team recently published their demonstration of using a technique from radio astronomy but using optical light. Active Optical Interferometry involves using laser beams to achieve resolutions at distances far in excess of conventional imaging with lenses. As his team showed, and as Miles Paggett of Glasgow University admires, they managed to read newsprint sized letters at a distance of over 1.3km.

Finally, how did the Inca Empire write things down, and who did the writing? It has been thought that ornate threads of strings and baubles known as khipu are how records were made for business and administration, probably by a decimal code of knots in strings. But the exact purpose, nature and any meaning encoded therein, has eluded scholars for decades. Sabine Hyland, an anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, has been studying them for years, and recently was granted access to the records of a village, only the fourth known, to have continued a form of the khipu tradition after the Spanish conquest to this day. She believes that they could even provide us in the modern world with valuable climate data.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jazz George

(A Long March-3B Y110 carrier rocket carrying China's Tianwen-2 probe blasts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on 29 May, 2025 in Sichuan Province of China. Credit: VCG/Getty Images)

WHO Pandemic Agreement reached May 22, 2025

Show notes

This week, 124 countries agreed at the World Health Assembly in Geneva on measures aimed at preventing a future pandemic. The agreement very strongly favours a “One Health” approach, appreciating how so many potential pathogens originate in human-animal interactions. Still to agree on the terms of how to share pathogens and information with global science and vaccine researchers, eventually the treaty will need to be signed by at least 60 countries. But can the inequity between countries of the global south and north, and issues of intellectual property, be bridged?

A new study on origins of the Nigerian mpox epidemic points strongly to zoonotic crossovers and mobility of wildlife in West Africa. Edyth Parker of Redeemer’s University in Nigeria describes their phylogenetic tree.

Can the bovine form of H5N1 flu infect pigs, and could domestic pig populations then provide a crucible for further variants to develop? Jürgen Richt of Kansas State University and colleagues have been investigating. We need to keep up vigilance.

Lucy van Dorp of University College London, working with a consortium including London’s Crick Institute, has been looking at a moment in the past when human activity provided an opportunity for a bacterial human pathogen to change its lifestyle. According to their phylogenetic tree, the bacterium Borrelia recurrentis (which causes louse-borne relapsing fever in humans) adapted and moved from ticks to human body lice around about the same time as humans started using woollen clothing.

And Susan Lieberman, VP for International Policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, was in the trenches of the Pandemic Agreement negotiations, and shares some of her hopes for its success.

Image: World Health Assembly formally adopts by consensus world's first Pandemic Agreement, Geneva, Switzerland - 20 May 2025 Image Credit: Magali Girardin via EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield

Vaccinating rabies’ reservoir dogs May 15, 2025

Show notes

In 2015, the World Health Organisation set the goal of eradicating rabies deaths from dog-bites to “Zero by 2030”. A team at the University of Glasgow and colleagues in Tanzania have been assessing the efficacy of dog vaccination schemes for reducing the numbers of human infections over the last 20 years. As Prof Katie Hampson tells Science in Action, in rural areas especially, vaccinating dog populations does work, but you need to keep at it, and not leave patches untouched. It should be funded as a public health measure, rather than a veterinary issue.

Last weekend, the remains of a failed 1972 Soviet mission to Venus landed harmlessly somewhere back on earth. As the BBC’s Maddie Molloy explains, the fears were that the robust lander craft would survive re-entry into earth’s atmosphere as it was originally engineered to withstand the harsh pressures and chemistry of Venus.

How and why then would sketches be emerging of Chinese plans to launch a sample-return mission to Venus in the next decade? Science Journalist Andrew Jones describes some of the challenges they will face collecting droplets of the highly acidic atmosphere somewhere 60km above the surface and turning round to head back to earth.

Why? William Bains of Cardiff University is one of a growing number of scientists interested in exploring some of the more exotic possibilities for complex organic biology in the otherwise destructive sulphuric, hot, dense, low pH clouds they will find. Could a different sort of information-encoding molecular chemistry enable life, though not as we know it?

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jasmine Cerys George and Josie Hardy

Photo: A domestic dog receives a rabies vaccine during a mass vaccination in Bunda, Tanzania, October 8, 2012. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Gain-of-Function: Loss-of-Funding May 08, 2025

Show notes

This week, the White House posted an executive order which details the administration’s intent to stop ‘dangerous gain-of-function research’. We talk to Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and biosecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University who fears the timing and added bureaucracy could stop all sorts of important biosciences unnecessarily, and that the order is somewhat ideologically driven.

Also, Nasa’s Juno mission has provided data on the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded, which took place on the planet Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Hellish Io, squeezed as it is by the immense gravity of Jupiter, has not been observed from its poles before in this manner. Last week at EGU25, Science in Action got to speak with the mission’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute.

Still on Jupiter’s moons, we also ask whether there could there be life on Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa? Scientists believe their glaciated oceans may harbour conditions suitable for life. Also at the EGU meeting were Jonathan Lunine, chief scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and Athena Coustenis, director of research at the Paris Observatory in Meudon.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield with Tabby Taylor-Buck Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy

(Photo: Clinical support technician extracts viruses from swab samples. Credit: Jane Barlow/Getty Images)

Scientists of the world unite May 01, 2025

Show notes

Scientists from around the world have gathered together at the annual European Geosciences Union general assembly, to discuss current projects, working hypotheses and potential findings. There are nearly 18,000 in attendance this year and there is much to learn.

AMOC – the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - brings warmth to the north and cooler waters to the south in huge volumes. Climate modellers have expressed concern for its collapse (and subsequent weather chaos) as temperatures rise more generally, but others have said it is more resilient. But Stefan Rhamstorf has announced that extending the models past 2100 can show a different picture. The odds have shifted from 10% to more like 50/50 if the Paris climate target is missed.

Has such climate change ever occurred before? And if so, what drove it? Hana Jurikova and colleagues have been using novel techniques to detect a link between atmospheric CO2 levels and rapid climate change in the geological past, and explains how boron records in ancient brachiopods might give us a clue.

What of the 6.2 magnitude earthquake near Istanbul last week? Could it have been worse? Will the next one be the big one? Expert Patricia Martínez-Garzón of GFZ in Germany doesn’t quite allay the fears.

Could more lives be saved from landslides and flash floods if we could set up a warning system? Stefania Ursica hopes so, and has looked to animal behaviour to design a programme to scan networks of seismic monitoring stations’ output for the faint signals. Encoding different hunting and communication strategies – from nomadic whales to humming birds and bats, her new algorithm might be just the thing, though prediction will always be a different problem.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield with Sophie Ormiston Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy

(Image: 3D render of a Topographic Map of Western Europe with the clouds from 27 January, 2025. Credit: Frank Ramspott/Getty Images)

Wet market SARS CoV-2 origins revisited Apr 24, 2025

Show notes

Last week, the website covid.gov looked very different, containing information on coping with covid and US research. This week it leads you to a White House webpage outlining the lab-leak hypothesis – that the pandemic was the result of dodgy lab work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The scientific consensus however continues to suggest a zoonotic crossover event. And a preprint recently published by Zach Hensel of ITQB NOVA (NOVA University Lisbon) and Florence Débarre of the Sorbonne, adds new early sequences to the evidence base. As they suggest, it doesn’t seal the debate, but it certainly doesn’t surprise the scientists.

As the Trump administration continues to rattle swords with US science, we speak with Lisa Fazio of Vanderbuilt University who found out abruptly her funding from the National Science Foundation is ending, and Don Ingber, founding director of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute about the impacts they are feeling from the federal belt tightening.

Finally we learn this week of an eerie species of Hawai’ian caterpillar moth. Not only is it carnivorous, but it ties small pieces of the indigestible remains of insects and bugs found in spider webs to its case, like a gruesome, camouflaged suit of armour. Why? As Dan Rubinoff of Hawai’i describes, it protects it from the hungry host spider, making it appear as the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner, or perhaps the shed exoskeleton of the spider itself.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Josie Hardy

(Image: The view of Huanan seafood market on February 9, 2021 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Credit: Getty Images)

Any more for Moore’s Law? Apr 17, 2025

Show notes

After 60 years of doubling computer complexity every two years, can Moore’s law still predict the future power of the devices we use?

In 1965, electronics pioneer Gordon Moore was asked to predict the next ten years of progress with the then new-fangled silicon integrated circuits. He estimated, based on physics and manufacturing technologies then available what seemed remarkable: that every two years they would double in complexity, and halve in price, until 1975.

60 years on, perhaps the even more remarkable thing is that they just kept doubling.

Can Moore’s law hold into future decades? What are the next technological innovations that might keep it running?

Sri Samavedam is the vice president for silicon technologies at imec in Belgium, whose job it is to think about the practicalities of manufacturing the next generations of chips years before they become real.

Scott Aaronsen of the University of Texas is a thinker in the field of Quantum Computing – could quantum computing keep the rate of growth going? Or does it need to be thought of differently?

One of the limitations on chip miniaturisation is the dissipation of heat from conventional electronic flow. Nick Harris of Lightmatter is looking at using photons rather than electrons to carry info and logic around a circuit with lower power losses.

Stan Williams has spent much of his career thinking about new devices that could be fabricated into integrated circuits to give it all a push forward. And he tells Roland how the memristor could effectively bring the power of analogue computing to bear as we reach some of the limits of the digital age we have been living in.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield and Gareth Nelson-Davies

Researching pain, painlessly Apr 10, 2025

Show notes

Pain, particularly chronic pain, is hard to research. New therapeutics are hard to screen for. Patients are not all the same. Sergui Pascu and colleagues at Stanford university have been growing brain samples from stem cells. Then they began connecting different samples, specialised to represent different brain regions. This week they announce their most complex “assembloid” yet, one that even reacts to hot chilli, passing a signal from the sensory neurons through to the thinking bits. The hope is that it can provide insights on how pain, and potential painkillers, work.

Human brains are notoriously large, particularly infants. Whilst for primates the human pelvis is quite narrow, to allow us to walk and run on two legs. This notoriously makes childbirth, well, not as straightforward as most other species. This evolutionary “obstetric dilemma” has been debated for decades. Marianne Brasil, of Western Washington University, and colleagues, have published this week a huge study of contemporary human genes and anatomies available from the UK Biobank to shed some more light on this ongoing compromise.

Malta is an island in the Mediterranean no less than 80km from land. So how come Eleanor Scerri and colleagues have discovered archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherers living there from 8,500 years ago? And they didn’t just visit and leave. They stayed for perhaps a millennium before farming arrived. Maybe a rethink of what nautical capabilities our ancestors had in the deep past is needed?

A year ago, Science in Action gate-crashed a conference looking at plans for meeting the forthcoming arrival of asteroid Apophis in 2029. This year the meeting is in Tokyo, and Richard Binzel, emeritus professor of Astronomy at MIT, gives us an update on how the space agencies are hoping to collaborate to maximise the scientific value from what will be a global, visible, phenomenon in just 4 years. Is there enough time to get our collective wits together?

(Image: 3D illustration of Interconnected neurons with electrical pulses. Credit: Getty Images)

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy

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