Episode description

Messenger RNA-based vaccines have been used successfully to kick start the antibody production needed to fight Covid-19. Now the technology has been successfully used to encourage the growth of new bones to heal severe fractures. The technique seems to work far better than the current alternatives says Maastricht University’s Elizabeth Rosado Balmayor.

Ivory smuggling continues to be a lucrative business for international criminal gangs, however, DNA techniques to trace where ivory seized by law enforcement authorities originates are now so accurate that individual animals can be pinpointed to within a few hundred miles. This says Samuel Wasser at the University of Washington, can be used as evidence against those ivory trafficking gangs.

And we look at development in attempts to detect and weigh neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles essential to our understanding of the makeup of the universe. Physicist Diana Parno from Carnegie Mellon University takes us through the latest findings.

Philologists have borrowed a statistical method from ecology to try and work out how much medieval romantic literature has been lost. The results seem to depend on which languages were involved, and like ecological systems, whether they were shared in isolated communities says Oxford University’s Katarzyna Kapitan

(Photo: A doctor points to a x-ray of a woman's hand broken small metacarpal bone. Credit: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Julian Siddle