Science In Action

Nasa's OSIRIS-REx mission to collect a sample from an asteroid has been a great success. Asteroid Bennu's sample yields a watery pool of history, thanks to an international team of scientists including the London Natural History Museum's Sarah Russell. Also, in a week of tumultuous changes to federal funding and programmes, we hear from some US scientists affected and concerned by Executive Orders from the White House. Betsy Southwood, formerly of the Environmental Protection Agency, is worried not just about the government employees’ careers, but the environment itself and the whole of environmental science in the US and the world. Chrystal Starbird runs a lab at the University of North Carolina and is worried about the fate of grants aimed at diversifying scientific expertise, but also that some grant schemes are getting erroneously included in the anti-DEI clampdown. And Lawrence Gostin is an eminent health lawyer, proud of the NIH and all it has achieved.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Pr

Thirty per cent of the Arctic is switching from carbon sink to carbon source. But could future fertilizer be made deep underground using less resources? Also, how and perhaps why globally 2024 had the highest number of fatal landslides in over 20 years, and an unexpected sound from space prompts a re-evaluation of how the earth’s magnetic field interacts with the environment around it.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth(Photo: Magnificent icebergs. Credit: MB Photography/Getty Images)

New types of snake-bite anti-venoms are designed by AI. Also, how much meat did human ancestors eat? How the Baltic Nord Stream gas pipeline rupture of 2022 was the biggest single release of methane ever caused by humans, and that Pluto met Charon, not with a bang, but more of a kiss.Using a high precision technique for spotting different isotopes of Nitrogen, Tina Lüdecke of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry has concluded that a group of early hominin Australopithecus living in South Africa were predominantly vegetarian, putting the date that human ancestors started eating meat (and thence growing bigger brains) to more recently. The technique, she thinks, can enlighten prehistoric food webs and ecologies from millions of years ago.Last year’s Nobel prizes showed the potential new techniques of AI to design synthetic proteins. Timothy P Jenkins and colleagues decided to try designing treatments for snakebite venoms, with remarkable apparent success. It could save many thousands of lives a year.Since the

H5N1 bird flu is still spreading across farms in the USA and this week claimed its first human life in North America - an elderly patient in Louisiana infected by backyard poultry. But last week, Sonja Olsen, Associate Director for Preparedness and Response in the CDC’s flu division, and her colleague Shikha Garg, published new analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine summarizing the human cases and epidemiology so far. A lab study underscoring a suspected link between the virus responsible for cold sores, and Alzheimers, the most common form of dementia, has been published in Science Signalling this week. The study, by Dana Cairns of Tufts University, looks at whether repetitive brain trauma – another risk factor - adds to the evidence that latent herpes simplex can be involved. Song Lin, a chemist at Cornell University who has won prizes for pioneering the use of electrical currents to drive chemical reactions rather than heat, has teamed up with Cornell micro engineer Paul McEuen to power up a new k

Sars CoV-2 has been with us for five years. In the second of a 2-part special, Science in Action asks how well was science prepared for it? And are we any better prepared for the next one? Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Debbie Kilbride Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Sars CoV-2 has been with us for five years. In the first of a 2-part special, Science in Action asks how well was science prepared for it? And are we any better prepared for the next one?Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Debbie Kilbride Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

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 co

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 f

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

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 nat

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 transm

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 colleag

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 the

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 eve

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 ty

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 aro

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 Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis(Photo: 3d rendering of RNA strands and lipid-based nanoparticles or liposome. Credit: Love Employee via Getty Images)

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 ye

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 Ba

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)