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 l...
Sep 04, 2025•28 min
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).
Aug 28, 2025•37 min
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)
Aug 21, 2025•30 min
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....
Aug 14, 2025•31 min
As the United States secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr., announces a $500 million cut to mRNA vaccine research in the United States, we hear a statement from the Nobel Prize winning biologist who made mRNA vaccines possible. A team of scientists from Northwestern University have uncovered the pathway believed to protect some people from allergic reactions (even when they are sensitive to an allergen) and have tested a drug which could protect the most severely allergic....
Aug 07, 2025•30 min
After most of the population of the Pacific rim sought higher ground this week, we speak with the architect of the tsunami warning technology. Also how aging Killifish might help us probe our senior moments. This week, an M8.8 earthquake near Kamchatka in the western pacific led to tsunami evacuation alerts thousands of miles away. Seismologist Judith Hubbard was writing about the area in the days leading up to it, following a M7.4 event 9 days before, which we now know to categorize as a foresh...
Jul 31, 2025•30 min
Have we found Betelgeuse’s ‘Betelbuddy?’ An astronomical mystery seems to be solved as the long-predicted stellar companion to the bright star Betelgeuse has been detected by a team of researchers led by Steve Howell of the NASA Ames Research Center using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. Steve discusses this breakthrough alongside astronomer Andrea Dupree of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has discussed the predictions of this star on previous Science in Action programm...
Jul 24, 2025•30 min
Two black holes have collided and combined in the largest merger yet observed. Mark Hannam of Cardiff University and member of the study explains how the Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatories (LIGO) detected this ‘violent’ event through spacetime. The lifestyle of ancient humans had an impact on their risk for infectious diseases. Astrid Iversen of the University of Oxford explains how the shift away from being hunter-gatherers played a role in the origins of human pathogens. Nitrogen ...
Jul 17, 2025•28 min
The European Space Agency plans to use satellite gravity data to track weakening ocean circulation systems. Rory Bingham of the University of Bristol explains how these satellites can ‘weigh’ the Earth’s water and might help resolve whether we’re approaching the climate tipping point of a shutdown of ocean circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, something we've been following for a while. Scientists have been able to retrieve ancient proteins from fossilized tooth enamel in the Canadian High Arctic. ...
Jul 10, 2025•34 min
There's a surge in cases and deaths from H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia - we hear what's the driver and how concerned we should be. Erik Karlsson, Head of Virology at the Pasteur Institute in Phnom Penh and director of the WHO’s H5 Reference Laboratory has been watching the uptick. An interstellar interloper has been spotted entering our solar system. Most likely a comet, and possibly visible in the sky, it’s just the third such visitor we’ve ever seen. Josep Trigo of Spain’s Institute of Space Scien...
Jul 03, 2025•36 min
A spectacular new 10-year telescopic survey of the universe gets underway in Chile. Also, a project to create human chromosomes completely synthetically. Almost three decades ago Tony Tyson (now of UC Davis) and colleagues were standing in the control room of the world’s biggest (at the time) digital astronomical camera. It was 3am when he suggested astronomers could do better. This week, the Vera C Rubin Observatory unveiled first images from the telescope he envisioned. Unprecedented in so man...
Jun 26, 2025•38 min
The universe is thought to consist of 70% Dark Energy, 25% Dark Matter, and just 5% Baryonic matter which is the atoms that make up you and me. At least, that’s what the models suggest. But a well-kept secret between astronomers and cosmologists for all these years has been that they have not actually ever seen almost half of that 5% normal matter because it is thinly dispersed as gas between the galaxies and galactic clusters. This week, two studies have been published putting that right. Satis...
Jun 19, 2025•42 min
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 Harva...
Jun 12, 2025•35 min
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 Ins...
Jun 05, 2025•44 min
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 int...
May 29, 2025•36 min
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 ...
May 22, 2025•40 min
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...
May 15, 2025•39 min
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 pl...
May 08, 2025•27 min
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 ...
May 01, 2025•29 min
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 ...
Apr 24, 2025•35 min
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 ...
Apr 17, 2025•29 min
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 ...
Apr 10, 2025•43 min
How Myanmar’s tragic earthquake left a 500km scar on the surface of the earth in just 90 seconds. Also, more hints of a link between shingles vaccines and reduced dementia, and how earth’s first oxygen breathers seem to have evolved way before there was enough oxygen to breath. Judith Hubbard is a seismologist and earthquake analyst who has been gleaning what scientific information we can find on the tragic quake that struck Myanmar last week. There seems to be some sort of link between the herp...
Apr 03, 2025•32 min
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 AViD...
Mar 27, 2025•29 min
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 Eur...
Mar 20, 2025•29 min
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).
Mar 13, 2025•45 min
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 jus...
Mar 06, 2025•44 min
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 thre...
Feb 27, 2025•37 min
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 c...
Feb 20, 2025•36 min
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, tha...
Feb 13, 2025•37 min
