Science In Action

As anti-science leaves research reeling, does evidence-based policy in a scientific society have much of a future? Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes, Angie Rasmussen and Deb Houry discuss some of the sources and motivations that perhaps belie the current state of scientific affairs. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: The End street sign. Credit: Sanfel via Getty Images).

As two species of coral are killed off by the 2023 heatwave in the Florida reefs, the abilities of different plankton species to cope with rising CO2 remain crucially unknown. Also, retrospective research shows a strong suggestion that mRNA covid vaccination might serendipitously boost certain types of cancer immunotherapy. And, if you can’t identify changing agricultural crop types from satellite observations, why not just strap a camera to your bike helmet? Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Photo: Dead elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata). Credit: Rolf von Riedmatten/Getty Images)

Ten years on from the Paris climate agreement, has it helped? Also, an international drought experiment, insights from 2D water, and social distancin in ants. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth(Photo: Small bushfire. Credit: Lea Scaddan/Getty Images)

The 2025 Nobel prizes are announced this week – how did Science in Action’s predictions fare? Science author and thinker Philip Ball judges.The Whitley Fund for Nature this week hosted a “People for Planet” summit, exploring possible solutions to save nature. Amongst the speakers was Prof Martin Wikelski, of ICARUS, who has spent many years tracking wildlife around the world using tiny radio sensors. As he describes to Roland, he shortly hopes to launch a network of satellites to enable a global system to help us learn how hundreds of species are faring.Also, a new “Human Disease Blood Atlas” gets a boost, as described by Mathias Uhlén of SciLifeLab. Could an annual blood sample become a standard primary healthcare routine, mapping key proteins and their concentrations to provide early warning of hundreds of diseases?Meanwhile Nozair Khawaja of Free University of Berlin has been revisiting data from the Cassini mission to Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, back in 2008. His new analysis increases the prospects

Scientists detect for the first time an unknown source of GPS interference coming from space. Also, as AI begins to design more and more DNA sequences being manufactured synthetically, how can those manufacturers be sure that what their customers are asking for will not produce toxic proteins or lethal weapons? And… how camera traps in polish forests reveal that the big bad wolf is more scared of humans than anything else. For that last few years instances of deliberate jamming and interference of GNSS signals has become an expected feature of the wars the world is suffering. Yet this disruption of the signals that all of us use to navigate and tell the time nearly always emanate from devices on the ground, or maybe in the air. But in ongoing research reported recently by Todd Humphreys of University of Texas at Austin and colleagues around the world is beginning to reveal that since 2019 an intermittent yet powerful signal has been causing GPS failures across Europe and the North Atlantic. The episodes have

Epigenetic changes during early brain development, and the complexities of autism. Also, how bacteria learn to parry antibiotics, the subterranean burp that shook the Island of Santorini, and new guidance for sharing land between farming space and living space for the pollinators on which it depends. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: Blastocyst embryo, light micrograph. Credit: Science Photo Library via Getty Images).

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

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)

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).

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).

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)

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

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 Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: Allergy testing. Credit: Peter Daze

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. Fin

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 Kae

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 te

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. Ryan Sinclair Paterson from the University of Copenhagen tells us how he can fill in the blanks of the molecular tree of life with these proteins from over 20 million years ago. A few weeks ago, we discussed evidence of an impact of a massive crater in north-western Australia from over 3 billion years ago. However, recent independent evidence from another team of geologists indicate that the size and age of this crater’s impact may not be what some had previously thought. Alec Brenner of Yale University talks us throug

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 Sciences (CSIC) and the Catalan Institute for Space Studies is one of many astronomers keeping his eye out.DNA from an ancient Egyptian buried in cave 2,500 BCE, the oldest to date, tell a tale of travelling ancestors, according to research led by Adeline Morez of Liverpool John Moore’s University and published in Nature.Also, Corey Allard of Harvard university has been looking at a particular type of sea slug. Published in the journal Cell, the work has been trying to work out how these slugs effectively nurture and manage

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 many ways, expect many discoveries to come from this unique machine.Another ambitious project known as SynHG kicks off this week, on the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first draft of the human genome, with a plan to develop the technology to potentially create a whole synthetic version. Jason Chin of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Laboratory in Cambridge and colleagues will be extending their previous work in synthetic biology to human DNA, whilst Joy Zheng of the University of Kent will be running a parallel proj

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.Satisfactory model-match #1: Liam Connor of Harvard University with colleagues from Caltech have been using a mysterious phenomenon called Fast Radio Bursts (FBRs) to infer what the intergalactic medium is in between, and how much of it there is. Satisfactory model-match #2: Konstanios Migkas of Leiden University and colleagues have been looking at the very faint x-ray signal from the intergalactic medium, removing the incidental x-ray sources such as black holes, and have managed to identify some structure - in this case a