Episode description

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 colleagues have found nuance in the way they do, and publish their findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B this week. Using electromagnetic cages they have fooled individual warblers into acting as if they were in Russia, whilst actually still being in Austria.

Meanwhile, Daniele Sorini, a cosmologist at Durham University has been thinking about dark energy and the possibility of our existence. In a thought experiment wondering what changing the density of dark energy would do to the likelihood of our being here to even think about it. Slightly contrary to what many reason is the fine-tuning of universal constants to allow us, as intelligent observers, to exist, Daniele and colleagues calculate that actually our observed density of dark energy is not the most likely to allow intelligent life. If there are other universes in the multiverse, most observers would think there was much more dark energy than we do. You can read up about it in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, if you are an intelligent observer yourself.

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

(Image: Plastic waste issues in Philippines. Credit: Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images)