The Disappearance of Snow Crabs and Robot Chemists on Mars

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The hosts discuss the disappearance of snow crabs in the Bering Sea due to marine heat waves and warming seas, leading to food scarcity and intense competition. They also explore the development of a robot chemist that could extract oxygen from resources on Mars, discussing the challenge of creating a catalyst for the process.

In this episode:

00:46 Machine vision enables multi-material 3D printing

3D printers are capable of producing complex shapes, but making functioning objects from multiple materials in a single print-run has proved challenging. To overcome this, a team has combined inkjet printing with an error-correction system guided by machine vision, to allow them to print sophisticated multi-material objects. They used this method to make a bio-inspired robotic hand that combines soft and rigid plastics to make mechanical bones, ligaments, and tendons, as well as a pump based on a mammalian heart.

Research article: Buchner et al.

News & Views: Multi-material 3D printing guided by machine vision

Video: The 3D printer that crafts complex robotic organs in a single run

07:49 Research Highlights

Citizen-scientists help identify an astronomical object that blurs the line between asteroid and comet, and how a Seinfeld episode helped scientists to distinguish the brain regions involved in understanding and appreciating humour.

Research Highlight: Citizen scientists find a rarity: an asteroid trying to be a comet

Research Highlight: One brain area helps you to enjoy a joke — but another helps you to get it

10:31 Assessing the effectiveness of lifestyle interventions for diabetes

Type 2 diabetes affects hundreds of millions of people around the world and represents a significant burden on healthcare systems. But behaviour change programmes — also known as lifestyle interventions — could potentially play a large role in preventing people from developing type 2 diabetes. This week in Nature a new paper assesses how effective this kind of intervention might be. Looking at a huge amount of data from the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme, the paper concludes that these interventions represent a viable diabetes prevention strategy.

Research article: Lemp et al.

News & Views: Diabetes prevention programme put to the test