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BBC World Service


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


Science In Action

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

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. 
 
Also this week, satellite data shows that large parts of the Earth are running dangerously low on ground water. 

And although people often believe scientific fraud is committed by a few bad actors, a new paper uncovers networks of journals, editors, and authors who are allegedly cooperating to publish fraudulent papers. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Ella Hubber and Alex Mansfield 
Assistant producer: Minnie Harrop 
Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
 
(Photo: Allergy testing. Credit: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)

An end to allergic reactions?

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 foreshock. As she says, it’s these subduction zones between tectonic plates that give out the most energy, produce the biggest quakes, leading to the worst tsunamis. 
 
The Tsunami alarms were based on modelling developed by Vasily Titov of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. Having studied these phenomena for many decades, he describes the fine balance between the potential accuracy of a prediction, and the practical actionable advice authorities need to give out to save as many lives as possible. 

Finally, how can a short-lived African freshwater fish help scientists studying senescence? Stanford’s Judith Frydman and colleagues publish this week a study in Science that finds Killifish’s brain cells’ ability to encode proteins degrades with age, in keeping with similar patterns of older human brains. Because Killifish have such brief life cycles, yet seem to follow the brain cycles of most vertebrates, they provide an ideal model species from which to find out more, as she explains. 

Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Imaan Moin and Alex Mansfield 
Production Coordinator: Jana Holesworth

(Image Credit: Vasily Titov PMEL/NOAA)

Getting ahead of tsunamis

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 programmes. 

Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by the parasite plasmodium that kills more than half a million people each year. George Dimopoulos of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute is using gene editing and gene drive technology to target the parasites as they develop in the guts of mosquito. Can this new method disrupt the malaria parasite life cycle safely and sustainably? 

Our gut microbiomes are linked to our brains, but how can the bacteria in our colon communicate with our nervous system? M. Maya Kaelberer of the University of Arizona explains this neurobiotic sense, suggesting that the microbes in our large intestine communicate with specialised sensory cells in the gut. These cells send signals up to our brain and regulate our appetite. So, who really decides when you're hungry? Is it you, or is it your microbiome? 

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

(Image: Betelgeuse and Its Stellar Companion in Orion. Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Image Processing: M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab))

Discovering Betelgeuse’s Betelbuddy

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 fixation, or the process of organic compounds accessing nitrogen from the atmosphere via microorganisms, plays a key role in climate modelling. But prior estimations have long been missing key data to make accurate analysis. Carla Reis Ely of Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education shares the updated facts and figures on global nitrogen fixation. 

How intelligent is artificial intelligence? Can AI start discovering new scientific laws in the year? Keyon Vafa of Harvard University put several AI models to the test to see if they could discover Newton’s law of gravity and understand the world around us. 
 
Presenter: Roland Pease 
Producer: Imaan Moin 
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennet-Holesworth 

(Image: Black Hole, digital illustration. Credit: Aaron Horowitz via Getty Images)

How Fear Spreads

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