Science In Action

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 project examining the ethical side of the objectives, and possibilities.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jazz GeorgePhoto Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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 mind-bendingly huge filament of ionised gas stretching between two galactic superclusters - confirming the state of “Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium” (WHIM) as predicted for much of the universe.Of course, there is not just the cosmological standard model (lambdaCDM) that these satisfy in science today. There is also the remarkably resilient Standard Model of particle physics. A report this week from the US National Academies recommends the US begins building the world’s next particle collider to follow the work of the LHC (and FCC) at Cern. It should, as University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Tova Holmes tells us, collide not ordinary, stable, easy to manipulate particles like protons and electrons, but muons. Finally, Shana Goffredi of Occidental College in California, has found a VERY odd spider. Diving to depths in the submersible Alvin, they have found that a species of small sea-spiders, Sericosura, actually farm bacteria on their exoskeleton. Why? Because they hang around methane seeps on the ocean floor, where a specialist bacteria can metabolize methane – something the spiders themselves can’t do. Not only do the spiders then graze on the bacteria they carry around, they even pass samples of the bacteria onto their offspring by leaving bacterial lunch-boxes in their egg-sacs.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Sophie Ormiston Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George(Photo Credit: Jack Madden, IllustrisTNG, Ralf Konietzka, Liam Connor/CfA)

ESA’s Solar Orbiter camera probe begins raising its orbit towards the sun’s poles, whilst Betelgeuse’s elusive buddy continues to sneak past our best telescopes.Earlier this year, Solar Orbiter started to stretch its orbit over greater latitudes – effectively standing on cosmic tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the Sun’s poles. This week, we have seen the first ever pictures of them, and as solar scientist Steph Yardley tells us, the views will only get better.Meanwhile, Andrea Dupree of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues have had time to study new Hubble and Chandra telescope observations of the iconic star Betelgeuse searching for signs of its hypothesised binary companion – dubbed “Betelbuddy”. The papers that appeared on the Arxiv pre-print server have not yet been fully peer-reviewed, but it seems astronomers will have to keep looking.Humans use machines to read gene sequences as best they can, but it takes time and is not perfect because we do not know what all of it means. Of course nature has its own genome reader – the ribosome. It is this that interprets the genetic instructions contained in our DNA and translates them into actual proteins. Viruses, of course, use it too when a cell gets infected. Shira Weingarten-Gabbay has this week demonstrated how scientists can make use of ribosomes too. Working somewhat in reverse, her team have identified many thousands of proteins previously unknown, that could for example provide targets for future vaccines or antivirals should the need arise.Finally, Nanshu Lu and team in the University of Texas at Austin have been working for some years on two-dimensional wearable electronic “E-Tattoos” to monitor health non-invasively through our skin. Their latest work, describes “A wireless forehead e-tattoo for mental workload estimation”.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys GeorgePhoto Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SPICE Team, M. Janvier (ESA) & J. Plowman (SwRI)

What is Fusarium graminearum and why were scientists allegedly smuggling it into the US? Also, Alpine Glacier collapse and an HIV capitulation.The FBI has accused two Chinese scientists of trying to smuggle a dangerous crop fungus into the US, calling it a potential agro-terrorist threat. But the fungus has long been widespread across US farms, and elsewhere, and is treatable. So what’s going on? Frédéric Suffert, Senior researcher in plant disease epidemiology at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, gives us some insight.Last week, a glacier above the swiss village of Blatten collapsed and up to 12 million tonnes of ice and rock buried the idyllic, yet thankfully all-but evacuated, hamlet below. Daniel Farinotti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology explains how it was monitored more than any such event before, and maybe, despite the tragedy, could help inform the science of such events in a warming world.Amongst the latest cuts to scientific funding by the US government, two consortia working at advanced stages of a potential HIV vaccine have been told their funding will not continue. Dennis Burton of Scripps Research describes finding out.The recipient of the Royal Society Faraday Prize 2024 gave his prize lecture last week. Titled Science Under Threat: The Politics of Institutionalised Disinformation, Salim Abdul Karim’s lecture is available on YouTube. Afterwards, he was kindly able to have a chat with Science in Action about his theme. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George(Photo: A hand holding an ear of wheat. Credit: Heather Schlitz/Reuters)

China is aiming to join the small club of nations who have successfully returned scientific samples of asteroids for analysis on earth, teaching us more about how our and potentially other solar systems formed. Tianwen-2 launched successfully this week, bound for an asteroid known as Kamo‘oalewa, which sits in a very strange orbit of both the earth and the sun, making it a “quasi-satellite”. Last year, scientists including Patrick Michel of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, published an intriguing suggestion that Kamo‘oalewa might in fact not be a conventional asteroid, but instead be a small piece of our moon that was ejected when the Giordano Bruno crater formed. In a little over a year from now, we might find out if that is right.Do you have to hold text at arm’s length to read properly? Qiang Zhang, professor of physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, whose team recently published their demonstration of using a technique from radio astronomy but using optical light. Active Optical Interferometry involves using laser beams to achieve resolutions at distances far in excess of conventional imaging with lenses. As his team showed, and as Miles Paggett of Glasgow University admires, they managed to read newsprint sized letters at a distance of over 1.3km.Finally, how did the Inca Empire write things down, and who did the writing? It has been thought that ornate threads of strings and baubles known as khipu are how records were made for business and administration, probably by a decimal code of knots in strings. But the exact purpose, nature and any meaning encoded therein, has eluded scholars for decades. Sabine Hyland, an anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, has been studying them for years, and recently was granted access to the records of a village, only the fourth known, to have continued a form of the khipu tradition after the Spanish conquest to this day. She believes that they could even provide us in the modern world with valuable climate data. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jazz George(A Long March-3B Y110 carrier rocket carrying China's Tianwen-2 probe blasts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on 29 May, 2025 in Sichuan Province of China. Credit: VCG/Getty Images)

Edyth Parker, a researcher from Nigeria, discusses the origins of the mpox epidemic, highlighting zoonotic spillover and the need for improved genomic surveillance. Jürgen Richt, a veterinary virologist, explores the risks of H5N1 flu potentially infecting pigs, raising concerns about new viral variants. Lucy van Dorp, a geneticist, delves into ancient bacteria evolution, revealing how human activities influenced pathogen lifestyles. Together, they emphasize the urgent need for equitable global health strategies to prevent future pandemics.

In 2015, the World Health Organisation set the goal of eradicating rabies deaths from dog-bites to “Zero by 2030”. A team at the University of Glasgow and colleagues in Tanzania have been assessing the efficacy of dog vaccination schemes for reducing the numbers of human infections over the last 20 years. As Prof Katie Hampson tells Science in Action, in rural areas especially, vaccinating dog populations does work, but you need to keep at it, and not leave patches untouched. It should be funded as a public health measure, rather than a veterinary issue. Last weekend, the remains of a failed 1972 Soviet mission to Venus landed harmlessly somewhere back on earth. As the BBC’s Maddie Molloy explains, the fears were that the robust lander craft would survive re-entry into earth’s atmosphere as it was originally engineered to withstand the harsh pressures and chemistry of Venus. How and why then would sketches be emerging of Chinese plans to launch a sample-return mission to Venus in the next decade? Science Journalist Andrew Jones describes some of the challenges they will face collecting droplets of the highly acidic atmosphere somewhere 60km above the surface and turning round to head back to earth. Why? William Bains of Cardiff University is one of a growing number of scientists interested in exploring some of the more exotic possibilities for complex organic biology in the otherwise destructive sulphuric, hot, dense, low pH clouds they will find. Could a different sort of information-encoding molecular chemistry enable life, though not as we know it? Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jasmine Cerys George and Josie Hardy Photo: A domestic dog receives a rabies vaccine during a mass vaccination in Bunda, Tanzania, October 8, 2012. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

This week, the White House posted an executive order which details the administration’s intent to stop ‘dangerous gain-of-function research’. We talk to Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and biosecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University who fears the timing and added bureaucracy could stop all sorts of important biosciences unnecessarily, and that the order is somewhat ideologically driven.Also, Nasa’s Juno mission has provided data on the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded, which took place on the planet Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Hellish Io, squeezed as it is by the immense gravity of Jupiter, has not been observed from its poles before in this manner. Last week at EGU25, Science in Action got to speak with the mission’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute.Still on Jupiter’s moons, we also ask whether there could there be life on Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa? Scientists believe their glaciated oceans may harbour conditions suitable for life. Also at the EGU meeting were Jonathan Lunine, chief scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and Athena Coustenis, director of research at the Paris Observatory in Meudon.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield with Tabby Taylor-Buck Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy(Photo: Clinical support technician extracts viruses from swab samples. Credit: Jane Barlow/Getty Images)

Scientists from around the world have gathered together at the annual European Geosciences Union general assembly, to discuss current projects, working hypotheses and potential findings. There are nearly 18,000 in attendance this year and there is much to learn. AMOC – the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - brings warmth to the north and cooler waters to the south in huge volumes. Climate modellers have expressed concern for its collapse (and subsequent weather chaos) as temperatures rise more generally, but others have said it is more resilient. But Stefan Rhamstorf has announced that extending the models past 2100 can show a different picture. The odds have shifted from 10% to more like 50/50 if the Paris climate target is missed. Has such climate change ever occurred before? And if so, what drove it? Hana Jurikova and colleagues have been using novel techniques to detect a link between atmospheric CO2 levels and rapid climate change in the geological past, and explains how boron records in ancient brachiopods might give us a clue.What of the 6.2 magnitude earthquake near Istanbul last week? Could it have been worse? Will the next one be the big one? Expert Patricia Martínez-Garzón of GFZ in Germany doesn’t quite allay the fears.Could more lives be saved from landslides and flash floods if we could set up a warning system? Stefania Ursica hopes so, and has looked to animal behaviour to design a programme to scan networks of seismic monitoring stations’ output for the faint signals. Encoding different hunting and communication strategies – from nomadic whales to humming birds and bats, her new algorithm might be just the thing, though prediction will always be a different problem.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield with Sophie Ormiston Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy(Image: 3D render of a Topographic Map of Western Europe with the clouds from 27 January, 2025. Credit: Frank Ramspott/Getty Images)

Last week, the website covid.gov looked very different, containing information on coping with covid and US research. This week it leads you to a White House webpage outlining the lab-leak hypothesis – that the pandemic was the result of dodgy lab work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The scientific consensus however continues to suggest a zoonotic crossover event. And a preprint recently published by Zach Hensel of ITQB NOVA (NOVA University Lisbon) and Florence Débarre of the Sorbonne, adds new early sequences to the evidence base. As they suggest, it doesn’t seal the debate, but it certainly doesn’t surprise the scientists.As the Trump administration continues to rattle swords with US science, we speak with Lisa Fazio of Vanderbuilt University who found out abruptly her funding from the National Science Foundation is ending, and Don Ingber, founding director of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute about the impacts they are feeling from the federal belt tightening.Finally we learn this week of an eerie species of Hawai’ian caterpillar moth. Not only is it carnivorous, but it ties small pieces of the indigestible remains of insects and bugs found in spider webs to its case, like a gruesome, camouflaged suit of armour. Why? As Dan Rubinoff of Hawai’i describes, it protects it from the hungry host spider, making it appear as the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner, or perhaps the shed exoskeleton of the spider itself.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Josie Hardy(Image: The view of Huanan seafood market on February 9, 2021 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Credit: Getty Images)