Show Notes
Just two weeks ago the world learned of an asteroid that had an almost 3% chance of striking earth in less than a decade. Astronomers kept looking, and a team including Olivier Hainaut at ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Palanar, in Chile, have managed to narrow down the uncertainty such that we now know it will definitely not hit the earth. The secret of making such observations after most telescopes could no longer see it was down to the exceptionally dark skies there. But these may be under threat. A plan has been made to build a large power plant, including sustainable hydrogen production around 11km away from the otherwise isolated site, and astronomers around the world are rallying to call for the plant to be built further away so that its construction will not spoil the otherwise unique observation conditions. One of the signatories of a petition to that effect is Julia Siedel, also of ESO, who just last week published the first 3D atmospheric analysis of an exoplanet’s climate. As she explains, future similar observations using the forthcoming, co-sited Extremely Large Telescope could be thwarted before the telescope is even finished. Back on earth, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) continues to bring warmer air and nutrients north towards the Arctic, and colder, denser water south in the global ocean overturn. But are reports of its collapse under climate change justified? A new paper this week suggests that for the next century at least it is stable though it might slow down. Jonathan Baker of the UK Met office explains how the winds in the south mean the cycle will keep turning, though it may slow down. Talking of the Arctic, Yoel Fink of MIT has dressed a couple of royal marines in wearable computer fibres for their current icy patrol in the north of Canada. Far from going commando, their underwear is measuring temperature and calorific burn to help them avoid frostbite and the dangers of the extreme environment. Yoel’s paper this week describes the new device and the principle that in the future much of all of our healthcare will be provided by these sorts of wearable, stretchy, computing textiles monitoring our activities. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth and Josie Hardy (Photo: Celestial conjunction at Paranal. Credit: Y.Beletsky/ESO)
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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 of habitable conditions deep on the ocean floor beneath the icy crust. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennet-Holesworth (Image: Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry explains a model during a press conference. Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand via Getty Images).
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 been thankfully brief so far, but all the signs suggest it comes not from soldiers or aeroplanes, but from a distantly orbiting satellite somewhere over the Baltic Sea. It may not be malevolent, it could be a fault, but the net of suspicion is tightening. A team of scientists including some from Microsoft report today in a paper in the journal Science an investigation to try to strengthen the vetting of synthetic DNA requests around the world. As AI-designed sequencies increase in number and application, the factories that produce the bespoke DNA are in danger of making and supplying potentially dangerous sequences to customers with malicious intents. But how do you spot the bad proteins out of the almost infinite possible DNA recipes? Tessa Alexanian of the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, and one of the authors explains some of the thinking. Finally, Liana Zanette of Western University in Ontario and colleagues have been hanging around in Polish forests scaring wolves. Why? Because as wolf numbers rise in protected reserves, more and more human-wolf interactions occur. And a suspicion has arisen that the legal protection they enjoy has led to them losing their fear of humans in a dangerous way. Not so, says Liana’s team, blowing away the straw arguments and setting fire to the political motivation to reduce their protection status. Wolves are still terrified of Nature’s apex predator – us. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: Simulation screen showing various flights for transportation and passengers. Credit: Oundum via Getty Images).