The BBC brings you all the week's science news.
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, thanks to NASA’s DART mission, even a demonstrable method for doing something about it if the numbers go the other way…
But other extraterrestrial bombardments are harder to detect at all. This week scientists of the KM3NeT collaboration report in the journal Nature their detection of the most energetic neutrino ever noticed. Almost countless numbers travel through the earth – and us – every second, but this little beauty arrived from deep space, plummeting through hundreds of miles of rock and sea (via Malta) to collide with a single molecule of water in the Mediterranean sea. As Paschal Coyle of Aix Marseille University happens to run a cubic kilometre of neutrino observatory in that area explains their huge instrument was barely begun when the record breaker smashed through the area in February 2023.
Finally, years of breeding rice cultivars for higher yield may have subtly changed the plants relationship with the microbes in the paddies in which they grow, inadvertently boosting the amount of methane released into our atmosphere. New research, including 3 years of field trials in China have produced a new cultivar, breeding in some of the older stocks, with just as high yields yet up to 70 percent lower methane released. This could make a serious difference to global methane emissions, as Microbiologist Anna Schnürer of Uppsala BioCenter in Sweden describes.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Josie Hardy
(Photo: Asteroid 2024 YR4 as observed by the Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope Credit: AFP/NASA/New Mexico Institute of Technology)
The mystery swarm of small earthquakes near the island of Santorini beg for more data collection. Also, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US goes offline and whales learn song like kids learn language.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy
(Photo: Greece earthquake. Credit: AFP)
Nasa's OSIRIS-REx mission to collect a sample from an asteroid has been a great success. Asteroid Bennu's sample yields a watery pool of history, thanks to an international team of scientists including the London Natural History Museum's Sarah Russell.
Also, in a week of tumultuous changes to federal funding and programmes, we hear from some US scientists affected and concerned by Executive Orders from the White House. Betsy Southwood, formerly of the Environmental Protection Agency, is worried not just about the government employees’ careers, but the environment itself and the whole of environmental science in the US and the world. Chrystal Starbird runs a lab at the University of North Carolina and is worried about the fate of grants aimed at diversifying scientific expertise, but also that some grant schemes are getting erroneously included in the anti-DEI clampdown. And Lawrence Gostin is an eminent health lawyer, proud of the NIH and all it has achieved.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Photo: OSIRIS-REx Sample Return. Credit: Nasa/Getty Images)
Thirty per cent of the Arctic is switching from carbon sink to carbon source. But could future fertilizer be made deep underground using less resources? Also, how and perhaps why globally 2024 had the highest number of fatal landslides in over 20 years, and an unexpected sound from space prompts a re-evaluation of how the earth’s magnetic field interacts with the environment around it.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Photo: Magnificent icebergs. Credit: MB Photography/Getty Images)
New types of snake-bite anti-venoms are designed by AI. Also, how much meat did human ancestors eat? How the Baltic Nord Stream gas pipeline rupture of 2022 was the biggest single release of methane ever caused by humans, and that Pluto met Charon, not with a bang, but more of a kiss.
Using a high precision technique for spotting different isotopes of Nitrogen, Tina Lüdecke of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry has concluded that a group of early hominin Australopithecus living in South Africa were predominantly vegetarian, putting the date that human ancestors started eating meat (and thence growing bigger brains) to more recently. The technique, she thinks, can enlighten prehistoric food webs and ecologies from millions of years ago.
Last year’s Nobel prizes showed the potential new techniques of AI to design synthetic proteins. Timothy P Jenkins and colleagues decided to try designing treatments for snakebite venoms, with remarkable apparent success. It could save many thousands of lives a year.
Since the September 2022 explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic sea, many different analyses of how much methane was released have provided a variety of estimates. This week, scientists at the UNEP International Methane emissions observatory – including Stephen Harris - published a study estimating it to be a little under half a million tonnes, making it by far the single biggest human caused release of this most dangerous greenhouse gas. Yet, they say, even that is a tiny fraction of what is released overall around the world every year.
And Finally, a new analysis of the original formation of the Pluto-Charon binary Dwarf Planetary system suggests they – and possibly many other Kuiper belt pairing – were born of a gentle astronomical dance and a peck on the cheek, rather than the catastrophic collision we associate with the earth-moon’s fiery first date. And it may have lasted just a matter of days, according to author Adeene Denton of the University of Arizona.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Photo: Gorilla feeding. Credit: WLDavies/Getty Images)
H5N1 bird flu is still spreading across farms in the USA and this week claimed its first human life in North America - an elderly patient in Louisiana infected by backyard poultry. But last week, Sonja Olsen, Associate Director for Preparedness and Response in the CDC’s flu division, and her colleague Shikha Garg, published new analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine summarizing the human cases and epidemiology so far.
A lab study underscoring a suspected link between the virus responsible for cold sores, and Alzheimers, the most common form of dementia, has been published in Science Signalling this week. The study, by Dana Cairns of Tufts University, looks at whether repetitive brain trauma – another risk factor - adds to the evidence that latent herpes simplex can be involved.
Song Lin, a chemist at Cornell University who has won prizes for pioneering the use of electrical currents to drive chemical reactions rather than heat, has teamed up with Cornell micro engineer Paul McEuen to power up a new kind of chemistry and invent another kind of SPECS – an acronym for Small Photoelectronics for Electrochemical Synthesis. They outlined their first generation device and the promises it brings in Nature this week.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Photo: Chickens eating feed. Credit: San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images)
Sars CoV-2 has been with us for five years. In the second of a 2-part special, Science in Action asks how well was science prepared for it? And are we any better prepared for the next one?
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Debbie Kilbride Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
Sars CoV-2 has been with us for five years. In the first of a two-part special, Science in Action asks how well was science prepared for it? And are we any better prepared for the next one?
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Debbie Kilbride Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
New insights into how our skin learns to tolerate and co-exist with bacteria on its surface show great potential for the development of simpler and less invasive vaccines. Stanford University’s Djenet Bousbaine has published two papers in Nature detailing the microbiological research and mouse vaccination experiments that could change the future of immunisation. The Sun is the hardest place in the Solar System to reach. But by the time the next edition of Science in Action is on air, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will have swooped through the scorching corona layer of the Sun, re-emerged, and be readying itself to relay the details of magnetic fields and particle storms to the team. NASA Helioscience deputy manager, Nicky Rayl, reveals all about the mission and explains why the Parker Probe’s future looks bright. And a trip half a billion years back - and then some - to the dawn of complex life here on Earth. Microfossil hunter Shuhai Xiao, from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, has been compiling a single statistical database to better understand evolution during the so-called ‘boring billion’, why subsequent changes on the planet triggered a new diversity of species to emerge, and how the interplay between biology and geology has paved the way for modern life as we know it.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer: William Hornbrook Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Solar Activity Captured in H-Alpha Filter. Credit: Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images.)
Heatwaves in the pacific ocean have had a devastating effect on seabird populations in the north eastern US. Julia Parrish and colleagues publish this week 4 million deaths of Alaskan common murres attributable to rising water temperatures during 2014-16, representing half the population. One idea is that the fish on which the birds feed swim at deeper depths to find cooler temperatures, taking them below the depth the birds can dive. Worse, the reduced population numbers have endured almost ten years later.
Pre-eclampsia affects up to 5 percent of pregnancies across the world. It reduces blood flow through the placenta, endangering mother, and even hindering the development of the foetus. But a promising approach to a possible therapy is described by Kelsey Swingle and colleagues this week. Much like some covid vaccines, by using a sort of lipid nanoparticles to deliver mRNA directly to the placenta in pregnant mice has resulted in healthier outcomes by widening the placental capillaries, allowing blood to flow more normally.
Angie Rasmussen updates Roland on some of the work reported at a conference in Japan this week, pointing more directly to the covid-19 pandemic originating from wild animals at the Wuhan market.
And in two coordinated papers published in the journals Science and Nature this week, scientists have narrowed down the period of time in history that modern humans and neanderthals interbred, leading to nearly everyone outside of sub-Saharan Africa sharing up to 2% of European Neanderthal DNA today. The question remains as to whether it was a benefit or not to the resulting hybrid population. Co-author Manjusha Chintalapati and colleagues describe how not all the neanderthal crossovers went on to survive pre-history to count as our direct ancestors. But one period of time, around 47,000 years ago is stamped on (nearly) all of us.
Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth and Josie Hardy
(Image: Group of common murres on a breeding colony in Alaska. Credit: Sarah Schoen/USGS)
Scientists have found that just one mutation in the current H5N1 virus in cattle can switch its preference from avian to human receptors. Jim Paulson and colleagues at the Scripps Institute did not use the whole virus to investigate this, but proteins from one of the Texas farm workers found to be infected. It suggests the bovine H5N1 virus has already evolved subtly. Meanwhile, Richard Webby of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis helps us catch up on the latest known about the case of the Canadian teenager taken seriously ill a month ago with a different variant of avian H5N1. A debate has been rumbling this last year about the extent of ocean warming by, perhaps paradoxically, the reduction of particulate pollution from the fuel used by ships. The idea is that the small particles of sulphates and nitrates in the soot from funnels actually formed clouds over shipping lanes out at sea. This in turn sheltered the oceans to some extent from solar radiation, thus making latter decades of the 20th century seem cooler than they would have measured today. Hence, removing the particulate pollution from bunker fuel, mandated by the International Maritime Organisation a few years ago, may have contributed to the surge in ocean temperatures witnessed in the last two years. Daniele Visione, of Cornell, and colleagues have done the modelling and found that there has indeed been a noticeable effect. But earth’s oceans are certainly not as hot as Venus’ ones, if indeed such oceans ever existed. It has long been held that once upon a time our sunward neighbour might have possessed liquid water oceans, long since boiled off by runaway greenhouse effects of the atmosphere. But, breaking with science fiction visions of aliens paddling in temperate seas, Tereza Constantinou of Cambridge University has been looking at the gases coming out of the volcanos on Venus, and has concluded that the planet never had such surface water, basically because the rocks from which magma is made don’t billow steam when they boil today. Presented by Roland Pease Produced by Alex Mansfield with Debbie Kilbride Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Bird Flu in Dairy Cows; Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images)