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Science In Action

Science In Action

BBC World Service

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

480 - Faster, wetter, worse tropical storms
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  • 480 - Faster, wetter, worse tropical storms

    It is hard not to have noticed the intensity of storms around the world this year, not least the Atlantic storms that battered the eastern US. A new study, using a new technique, confirms their attribution to climate change, and goes further, finding that many of them were actually raised in intensity category compared to how strong they might have been in a world without anthropogenic climate change. The costs are already extraordinary, according to Daniel Gilford of Climate Central in Princeton.

    When it comes to wildlife conservation, one of the underestimated parameters is the “old and wise” individuals in a population. According to a review paper in the journal Science, not only are earth’s old animals in decline, in many species they are vital to recovery and resilience when outside factors endanger numbers. As co-author Lauren Brent of Exeter University points out, these sorts of nuance are not always looked out for in conservation estimates.

    Chimps have culture, but is their culture cumulative and transmissible or innate and intuitive? Comparing a large database of observed chimpanzee behaviours, together with genetic lineages, Cassandra Gunasekaram and Andrea Migliano, of the University of Zurich, found that types of more complex tool usage can be correlated with reproductive overlaps between different chimp communities. The wandering females maybe carry tech knowledge with them when they travel to find new mates. Is this something both chimps and humans inherited from a common ancestor?

    And finally, as the harvesting of deep ocean polymetallic nodules gets nearer to commercial reality, the French research ship L’Atalante sets sail this week to study the animals that live on and around these strange chemical balls scattered across the abyssal plains of the mid pacific ocean. As lead scientist aboard, Pierre-Antoine Dessandier tells us, it is essential to understand how these animals live in the dark, 5km down, before the habitats are disturbed. The Eden mission will be searching the Clarion-Clipperton zone until January 2025.

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

    (Photo: Hurricane Milton seen from the International Space Station. Credit: Nasa/Getty Images)

    Thu, 21 Nov 2024
  • 479 - Drastic plastic reductions

    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)

    Thu, 14 Nov 2024
  • 478 - New ways to study coronaviruses

    Many coronaviruses exist in nature that we don’t know much about. We don’t even know how and whether most of them might bind to human cells. Research published in Nature, by scientists at Wuhan and Washington Universities, describes a new way of designing novel receptor sites on cell cultures so that many types of coronavirus may now be cultured and studied to ascertain their risk to humans. Cambridge virologist Ravindra Gupta, who is not one of the authors, gives Science in Action his take on the risks versus the reward.

    Dotted around the remains of Pompeii, visitors are often struck by the plaster casts of some of the victims’ dying moments. During recent restoration of several of these casts, scientists were able to extract DNA samples from bones which had previously been enveloped by plaster since their initial discovery. As Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology describes, some of the findings confound our previous narratives about their lives, relationships, and even their genders.

    Rozenn Pineau, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has been investigating the unique evolutionary history of the world's oldest (and biggest) tree - "Pando".

    And finally, the oldest known tadpole is described from a 160 million year old Argentinian fossil by biologist Mariana Chuliver.

    Presented by Roland Pease Produced by Alex Mansfield, with Eliane Glaser Production Coordination by Jana Bennett-Holesworth

    (Image: Illustration of Covid-19 coronavirus binding to human cell. Credit: Kateryna Kon via Getty Images)

    Thu, 07 Nov 2024
  • 477 - Global warming strikes again

    This week at least 150 people have been killed due to devastating flash flooding sweeping through areas of Valencia in Spain. Ana Camarasa Belmonte, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Valencia, has been studying the flood patterns and hydrology of the area for years. Even she was astounded by the magnitude of the inundation. And, as Jess Neumann of Reading University in the UK tells Roland, part of the tragedy is that the effective communication of risk somehow relies on citizens being able to adequately imagine the almost unimaginable.

    Ten years ago this week, Friederike Otto and colleagues founded the World Weather Attribution network. The network aims to provide quick analysis of climate change's impact on on extreme weather events. They have already found that the Spanish flooding was made more intense, and more likely, by our warming world. Earlier in the week they published a different analysis of the 10 most deadly, extreme-weather events of this century. They concluded that all 10 events were made more extreme or more likely by climate change, and that these 10 events alone account for some 570,000 deaths.

    In the US, Scientists have tested the strain of H5N1 bird flu swabbed from the eye of an infected Texan farm worker. They found it to be both lethal and transmissible via the respiratory tract of mice and ferrets. It contains a mutation PB2-627K, common in avian viruses in mammalian cells, as Amie Eisfeld of the Universoity of Wisconsin-Madison explains.

    Presented by Roland Pease Produced by Alex Mansfield Production Coordination by Jana Bennett-Holesworth

    (Image: Aftermath of catastrophic floods in Spain's Valencia. Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images)

    Thu, 31 Oct 2024
  • 476 - Betelbuddy and Silk Road Cities

    Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and most famous stars in the northern night sky, has varied in brightness with an elusive pattern ever since observations began. Many theories exist as to why it ebbs and flows with apparently two distinct rhythms – one shorter and another around 2000 days long.

    But just recently two independent astronomical teams have unveiled papers suggesting the existence of an orbital companion circling the red giant. About the size of our own sun, the “Betelbuddy” may whizz round Betelgeuse, almost skimming its surface, every 2000 days. And why haven’t we seen the Betelbuddy before? Because, from here, it would be a million times fainter than Betelgeuse itself, as one of the authors, and long-time Betelgeuse watcher, Andrea Dupree of Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics explains.

    Back here on earth, Omar Yaghi of Berkeley, University of California and colleagues have been designing a new material that can scrub carbon dioxide out of the air in minutes. They have patented this type of Covalent Organic Framework (COF) and are hoping to scale up production such that a few hundred tonnes deployed around our biggest cities could solve our CO2 crisis.

    But then what do you do with all those gigatonnes of CO2? Maybe one thing would be to use solar power to convert it into plant food. Robert Jinkerson and colleagues describe in the journal Joule a proposal to transform global food production into “Electro-Agriculture”, growing plants, fungi and algae on acetate made from solar energy. Their proposal would also shrink the global footprint of farming to allow more natural habitat.

    And finally, Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St Louis has published an archaeological survey of two lost conurbations in the mountains of southern Uzbekistan that he and colleagues rediscovered in the last few years. He argues that the scale and complexity of these dwelling, and their location over 2000m, way above normal agricultural altitude mean we need to reconsider these stops on what would have been the Silk Road, around 600-1000 CE, perhaps even pointing at a very early industrial economy.

    Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield with Andrew Lewis

    (Image: Orion sink to Kashimayarigadake. Credit: Getty)

    Thu, 24 Oct 2024
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