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BBC World Service


The BBC brings you all the week's science news.


Science In Action

10 years on from the Paris climate agreement, has it helped? Also, an international drought experiment, insights from 2D water, and social distancing… in ants.
 
 
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

(Image: Small bushfire. Credit: Lea Scaddan via Getty Images).

Paris agreement impacts and drought realities

The 2025 Nobel prizes are announced this week – how did Science in Action’s predictions fare? Science author and thinker Philip Ball judges.

The Whitley Fund for Nature this week hosted a “People for Planet” summit, exploring possible solutions to save nature. Amongst the speakers was Prof Martin Wikelski, of ICARUS, who has spent many years tracking wildlife around the world using tiny radio sensors. As he describes to Roland, he shortly hopes to launch a network of satellites to enable a global system to help us learn how hundreds of species are faring.

Also, a new “Human Disease Blood Atlas” gets a boost, as described by Mathias Uhlén of SciLifeLab. Could an annual blood sample become a standard primary healthcare routine, mapping key proteins and their concentrations to provide early warning of hundreds of diseases?

Meanwhile Nozair Khawaja of Free University of Berlin has been revisiting data from the Cassini mission to Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, back in 2008. His new analysis increases the prospects of habitable conditions deep on the ocean floor beneath the icy crust.

Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennet-Holesworth

(Image: Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry explains a model during a press conference. Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand via Getty Images).

Old faces and big spaces in small places

Scientists detect for the first time an unknown source of GPS interference coming from space. Also, as AI begins to design more and more DNA sequences being manufactured synthetically, how can those manufacturers be sure that what their customers are asking for will not produce toxic proteins or lethal weapons? And… how camera traps in polish forests reveal that the big bad wolf is more scared of humans than anything else. 

For that last few years instances of deliberate jamming and interference of GNSS signals has become an expected feature of the wars the world is suffering. Yet this disruption of the signals that all of us use to navigate and tell the time nearly always emanate from devices on the ground, or maybe in the air. But in ongoing research reported recently by Todd Humphreys of University of Texas at Austin and colleagues around the world is beginning to reveal that since 2019 an intermittent yet powerful signal has been causing GPS failures across Europe and the North Atlantic. The episodes have been thankfully brief so far, but all the signs suggest it comes not from soldiers or aeroplanes, but from a distantly orbiting satellite somewhere over the Baltic Sea. It may not be malevolent, it could be a fault, but the net of suspicion is tightening. 

A team of scientists including some from Microsoft report today in a paper in the journal Science an investigation to try to strengthen the vetting of synthetic DNA requests around the world. As AI-designed sequencies increase in number and application, the factories that produce the bespoke DNA are in danger of making and supplying potentially dangerous sequences to customers with malicious intents. But how do you spot the bad proteins out of the almost infinite possible DNA recipes? Tessa Alexanian of the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, and one of the authors explains some of the thinking. 

Finally, Liana Zanette of Western University in Ontario and colleagues have been hanging around in Polish forests scaring wolves. Why? Because as wolf numbers rise in protected reserves, more and more human-wolf interactions occur. And a suspicion has arisen that the legal protection they enjoy has led to them losing their fear of humans in a dangerous way. Not so, says Liana’s team, blowing away the straw arguments and setting fire to the political motivation to reduce their protection status. Wolves are still terrified of Nature’s apex predator – us. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Alex Mansfield 
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

(Image: Simulation screen showing various flights for transportation and passengers. Credit: Oundum via Getty Images).

A mystery satellite has been jamming GPS in Europe

Epigenetic changes during early brain development, and the complexities of autism. Also, how bacteria learn to parry antibiotics, the subterranean burp that shook the Island of Santorini, and new guidance for sharing land between farming space and living space for the pollinators on which it depends. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Alex Mansfield 
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

(Image: Blastocyst embryo, light micrograph. Credit: Science Photo Library via Getty Images).

Autism and the epigenetics of early brain development

Gravitational waves show two black holes merge just how Hawking predicted. Plus, a space mission without a target. And a Space probe without a confirmed budget.

In January 2025 the LIGO gravitational wave observatories witnessed two distant black holes spinning into each other. In the ten years of LIGO’s operations, that’s not a first. But the instruments have been improved to such an extent that this time some very important predictions of General Relativity and out understanding of black holes could be tested. As Birmingham University’s Alberto Vecchio says, the elegant simplicity of the mathematics of black holes has passed a test, in particular Stephen Hawking’s prediction that the surface area of merging black holes can only be increased.

Space craft have met comets before. But because spaceflight takes so long to plan and fund, we’ve only sent them to comets with human-lifetime orbital periods so far, because we know when they’re arriving. ESA wants to meet one we’ve never seen before, one that has never or seldom been in close to the sun, and never been barbecued and seared by the radiation. Colin Snodgrass of the University of Edinburgh explains the plan to launch and park a comet chaser in space to wait for one of these elusive extraterrestrial objects to come in from the cold.

That, says Meg Schwamb of Queen’s University Belfast, is going to be much easier in the next few years as the Vera Rubin Telescope begins its ten year survey cataloguing anything in the sky that changes. The type of sky survey it will provide will identify, it is hoped, many candidate first-time comets for the small fleet of spacecraft to intercept.

Having a spacecraft ready in position rather than having to launch a new one anytime you want to do some science is a good place to be, one would think.

NASA’s Juno mission has been delivering science from Jupiter since its launch, and is still functioning and able to deliver more. Yet NASA funds are under considerable threat, and as Scott Bolton tells Roland, at the end of this month Juno could be left slowly spiralling into the gas giant, silently collecting data but with no budget to keep the science going.

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Stephen Hawking gets it right again

Scientists’ latest plans for welcoming interstellar visitor 3I/Atlas next month, and arranging a rendezvous with comet Apophis in 2029, as heard this week at the EPSC-DPS international planetary science joint meeting in Helsinki. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Ella Hubber, with Alex Mansfield 
Production coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

Image: Artist's impression of an asteroid in space (Credit: European Space Agency/ESA Science Office)

Asteroids, comets and where to find them

Despite the relatively low magnitude, earthquakes in Afghanistan this week have left more than1000 dead. Afghan researcher Zakeria Shnizai from the University of Oxford unpicks some of the main causes of the country’s vulnerability to earthquakes. 

Also this week, we talk to the climate scientist who led a 400+ page rebuttal to the US Department of Energy’s report on climate change. 

We hear about research which has mapped the activity of over 600,000 neurons in 279 regions of the mouse brain to learn more about how decisions are made. 

And we get the latest updates on 3I/ATLAS, the latest interstellar comet streaking its way across our solar system, just before it disappears behind the sun. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Ella Hubber 
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

(Image: Magnitude 6.0 earthquake strikes eastern Afghanistan. Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images).

Why is Afghanistan so vulnerable to earthquakes?

What can modern epidemiological methods tell us about French Revolutionary history? Also, the origins of horse riding, solar systems, and star dust itself. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Alex Mansfield 
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

(Image: Storming of the Bastille Paris France 1789 illustration. Credit: Grafissimo via Getty Images).

How Fear Spreads

A desktop nuclear fusion reactor that uses electrochemistry to up the ante. Also, a global survey of human wildfire exposures finds Africa burning ahead, plus tiny swarming robots and record-breaking 2024 ice melts from glaciers on Svalbard. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Alex Mansfield 
Production co-ordinator: Jana Holesworth 

(Photo: The Thunderbird Reactor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Credit: Berlinguette Group/UBC)

Not cold fusion all over again

US Health Secretary RFK Jr’s call to retract a study on childhood vaccines is resisted by the journal. Also antibiotics get designed by AI, and a new way for stars to die. 

A study focussing on Danish childhood vaccination data has attracted the US Secretary for Health’s anger, as RFK jr calls for the journal in which it was published, the Annals of Internal Medicine, to retract it. The Editor, Christine Laine, talk to Science in Action about the strengths and challenges of observational studies. 

The cuts to prestigious US federal science funded research continue, as last week it was announced that $500 million funding for future mRNA vaccines would be withdrawn. Barney Graham, one of the pioneers in the field and prominent during the Covid vaccines, argues that the research will still happen, though maybe not in the US, as mRNA has become a fundamental area of global research. 

Meanwhile, strides are being made in the field of synthetic biology as Jim Collins and colleagues at MIT and Harvard have used AI to design potentially viable antibiotics for two important drug-resistant superbugs. Previously, AI has been used to comb through libraries of known antibiotics. This study has gone a step further, and used generative AI to design new ones, that can then be synthesised using real chemicals. Though a long way from being prescribable drugs, the team think this could herald a new golden age of antibiotic development – something which has been lacking in recent decades. 

Finally, it seems astronomers may have discovered a new way for a star to die, sort of. Supernova 2023zkd was seen to explode back in 2023, found by a team looking for odd events. It didn’t seem quite like normal supernovae, in that it took a bit longer to die down. Then the team looked back, and noticed that it had also been getting slowly brighter for almost a year. At 730 million light years away, in a galaxy far, far away, it also seemed to have been stripped of all its hydrogen and even stranger yet, appeared to have exploded twice. As Ashley Villar of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explains, the almost unique observation fits with a model of the huge star getting closer to a black hole, the gravity of which may have disrupted the star enough to cause it to explode. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Ella Hubber with Alex Mansfield 
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth 

(Image: Child getting a vaccine. Credit: Luis Alvarez via Getty Images)

Vaccine study retraction request rejected

Friday, April 13th 2029 – mark it in your calendar. That’s the day an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will fly past Earth, closer than some satellites. Don’t worry – it will miss, but it’ll will pass so close to Earth that it will be visible to the naked eye of 2 billion people, particularly in North Africa and Western Europe.

Roland Pease this week attended the Apophis T-5 Years conference at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, meeting astronomers scrambling to get missions up to the object to learn what kind of threats such asteroids might pose to us in the future and to discuss the science of planetary defence. 

NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX, a follow-on to OSIRIS-REx, will study the physical changes due to the gravitational forces from the Earth as it closely passes us by. But will there be an armada of spacecraft sent to monitor Apophis? The European Space Agency hope to gather support for their own mission, RAMSES.

Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Jonathan Blackwell

Image Credit: JPL/Caltech

An armada for asteroid Apophis?

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