Science In Action
Breakthrough antivirals and fresh US grant cancellations
This week, after five years of research, two newly discovered antiviral molecules have been shown to combat coronaviruses. Johan Neyts of the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Leuven outlines how he hopes the new molecule developed by his team might help us deal with emerging pandemics in the future. But as the US halts all Covid related research, will drugs like these ever hit the shelves? Among the grants terminated this week by the National Institute for Health is a programme called AViDD, AntiViral Drug Discovery, supporting 9 independent consortia. Annette von Delft of Oxford University and Ed Griffen of the drugs discovery company MedChemica spoke to us about the overnight shut down of years of work and importance of antiviral development. The longest ever carbon-based molecules have been discovered by the Mars Curiosity rover. Caroline Freissinet of the Laboratoire Atmosphères et Observations Spatiales talked us through the meticulous planning and geological chance that made this possible, and whether these long chain alkanes could be a clue to discovering life on mars. Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been delving into the genetic evolution of horses to discover the mutation that’s behind their runaway metabolic success. Gianni Castiglione explains how a mutation that should have been catastrophic instead helped horses to evolve from the size of dogs to the giant athletic animals we know today. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Emily Bird Production Coordinators: Jana Bennett-Holesworth and Josie Hardy (Photo: Two tablets of Roche Pharmaceuticals' Tamiflu. Photo by Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
27 Mar 2025 - 30 分 22 秒
Columbia cuts and "transgender mice"
There is continued upheaval in US scientific institutions under the new Trump administration. This week $400 million dollars-worth of grants have been frozen at Columbia University in response to “illegal” protests on the campus. President Trump also recently accused the Biden Administration of spending $8 million dollars on "transgender mice" experiments. We talk to two scientists, Kelton Minor and Patricia Silveyra, who have been affected in different ways. Also, as the first data from the European Space Agency's Euclid mission is released, Euclid project leader Valeria Pettorino tells us how this impressive space telescope hopes to unlock the secrets of the dark universe. And, around this time last year we heard about the H5N1 strain of bird flu finally jumping to the Antarctica Peninsula. Today, an expedition led by virologist Antonio Alcami confirms that the virus has spread to every animal species at each site they visited. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Ella Hubber Production co-ordinator: Jana Holesworth and Josie Hardy (Photo: University of Minnesota researchers, scientists and other supporters protest against President Donald Trump's proposed scientific research funding cuts. Credit: Michael Siluk/Getty Images)
20 Mar 2025 - 30 分 28 秒
New warnings, familiar faces, and radio pulses
Five years after the WHO pandemic announcement, an H5N1 call to arms from global health leaders. Also, the oldest western European face is found, the oldest impact crater possibly identified, and strange radio signals from space maybe explained. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: US To Boost Egg Imports As Prices Soar On Bird Flu. Credit: Bloomberg via Getty).
13 Mar 2025 - 46 分 43 秒
An uncertain forecast for meteorology
As the new administration in the US continues to make cuts to government agencies and scientific funding, NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been particularly trimmed. This week the professional organisation for weather forecasters – the American Meteorological Society has published a statement pleading for clemency, arguing that the whole US Weather Enterprise is at risk. It’s current president elect, veteran weather broadcaster Alan Sealls describes how it’s not just US weather forecasts that appear bleak. As the journal Science Advances publishes a special edition highlighting areas of women’s health research, we speak with two researchers who may have found a link between menopause – or perhaps hormonal changes – and the age it occurs, with Altzeimer’s Disease. Madeline Wood or the University of Toronto and Kaitlin Casaletto of UCSF describe how synaptic health – the fitness of the brain - at death seems even to be less attenuated in women who used hormonal therapy during their menopause. It is not however, yet suggested they are causally connected. But we do connect research vessel Polarstern to have an update from Autun Purser and Nottingham University’s molecular biologist Liz Chakrabarti on their nearly completed voyage to the Weddel Sea, in the challengingly chilly Antarctic. They are gathering data and surveying the fauna on the sea floor below what is mostly covered in 3-4 meters of ice. The Icefish they see there are some of the only vertebrates not to have haemoglobin – nor even red blood cells – in their blood. So how, we wonder, do they actually move oxygen around their bodies? Maybe when the team publish their findings – which they are racing to do - we’ll find out. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: National Hurricane Center Monitors Hurricane Beryl's Activity In The Caribbean. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
6 Mar 2025 - 44 分 19 秒
Asteroid 2024 YR4 crisis averted?
Just two weeks ago the world learned of an asteroid that had an almost 3% chance of striking earth in less than a decade. Astronomers kept looking, and a team including Olivier Hainaut at ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Palanar, in Chile, have managed to narrow down the uncertainty such that we now know it will definitely not hit the earth. The secret of making such observations after most telescopes could no longer see it was down to the exceptionally dark skies there. But these may be under threat. A plan has been made to build a large power plant, including sustainable hydrogen production around 11km away from the otherwise isolated site, and astronomers around the world are rallying to call for the plant to be built further away so that its construction will not spoil the otherwise unique observation conditions. One of the signatories of a petition to that effect is Julia Siedel, also of ESO, who just last week published the first 3D atmospheric analysis of an exoplanet’s climate. As she explains, future similar observations using the forthcoming, co-sited Extremely Large Telescope could be thwarted before the telescope is even finished. Back on earth, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) continues to bring warmer air and nutrients north towards the Arctic, and colder, denser water south in the global ocean overturn. But are reports of its collapse under climate change justified? A new paper this week suggests that for the next century at least it is stable though it might slow down. Jonathan Baker of the UK Met office explains how the winds in the south mean the cycle will keep turning, though it may slow down. Talking of the Arctic, Yoel Fink of MIT has dressed a couple of royal marines in wearable computer fibres for their current icy patrol in the north of Canada. Far from going commando, their underwear is measuring temperature and calorific burn to help them avoid frostbite and the dangers of the extreme environment. Yoel’s paper this week describes the new device and the principle that in the future much of all of our healthcare will be provided by these sorts of wearable, stretchy, computing textiles monitoring our activities. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth and Josie Hardy (Photo: Celestial conjunction at Paranal. Credit: Y.Beletsky/ESO)
27 Feb 2025 - 36 分 30 秒
Who runs science?
The Lancet this week features a paper calling for a financially sustainable network of influenza labs and experts across Europe. Marion Koopmans was one of the 32 expert signatures, and she describes how Europe needs to learn some lessons from the model developed previously in the US. The ongoing worries around avian H5N1 would be a great example of why funding for that sort of frontline strategic science needs not to be reliant on ad-hoc, potentially political, funding grants. This weekend, a conference is taking place in Asilomar, CA, to mark 50 years since the 1975 conference there at which scientists developed some rules and guidelines around the future practice of genetic science. The historic Asilomar conference is celebrated by many as the moment scientists first demonstrated that they could spot risks, and self-regulate their activities, around novel and disruptive technologies. Author and scientist Matthew Cobb of the University of Manchester, and Shobita Parthasarathy of the University of Michigan discuss how perhaps other perspectives on the Asilomar legacy should be considered. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: Herbert Boyer (UCSF) and Paul Berg (Stanford) at a conference at Asilomar, February 26, 1975. Credit: Peter Breining/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
20 Feb 2025 - 36 分 28 秒
Hits from space
This week the recently spotted asteroid 2024 YR4 had its odds of missing us “spectacularly” slashed by 1 percentage point. Still nothing to worry about maintains Patrick Michel of the International Asteroid Warning Network, and he expects that with better tracking data in the next few months (even courtesy of the JWST) that tiny chance of collision will fall further. However, as he explains, it’s very comforting to know that we now have such a sophisticated tracking network, and even better, thanks to NASA’s DART mission, even a demonstrable method for doing something about it if the numbers go the other way… But other extraterrestrial bombardments are harder to detect at all. This week scientists of the KM3NeT collaboration report in the journal Nature their detection of the most energetic neutrino ever noticed. Almost countless numbers travel through the earth – and us – every second, but this little beauty arrived from deep space, plummeting through hundreds of miles of rock and sea (via Malta) to collide with a single molecule of water in the Mediterranean sea. As Paschal Coyle of Aix Marseille University happens to run a cubic kilometre of neutrino observatory in that area explains their huge instrument was barely begun when the record breaker smashed through the area in February 2023. Finally, years of breeding rice cultivars for higher yield may have subtly changed the plants relationship with the microbes in the paddies in which they grow, inadvertently boosting the amount of methane released into our atmosphere. New research, including 3 years of field trials in China have produced a new cultivar, breeding in some of the older stocks, with just as high yields yet up to 70 percent lower methane released. This could make a serious difference to global methane emissions, as Microbiologist Anna Schnürer of Uppsala BioCenter in Sweden describes. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Josie Hardy (Photo: Asteroid 2024 YR4 as observed by the Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope Credit: AFP/NASA/New Mexico Institute of Technology)
13 Feb 2025 - 40 分 54 秒
Earthquakes swarms and whale chart toppers
The mystery swarm of small earthquakes near the island of Santorini beg for more data collection. Also, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US goes offline and whales learn song like kids learn language. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy (Photo: Greece earthquake. Credit: AFP)
6 Feb 2025 - 36 分 58 秒
Make science great again
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 Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Photo: OSIRIS-REx Sample Return. Credit: Nasa/Getty Images)
30 Jan 2025 - 44 分 25 秒
Arctic carbon starting to flip
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)
23 Jan 2025 - 31 分 07 秒