Science In Action

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)

After 60 years of doubling computer complexity every two years, can Moore’s law still predict the future power of the devices we use?In 1965, electronics pioneer Gordon Moore was asked to predict the next ten years of progress with the then new-fangled silicon integrated circuits. He estimated, based on physics and manufacturing technologies then available what seemed remarkable: that every two years they would double in complexity, and halve in price, until 1975.60 years on, perhaps the even more remarkable thing is that they just kept doubling.Can Moore’s law hold into future decades? What are the next technological innovations that might keep it running? Sri Samavedam is the vice president for silicon technologies at imec in Belgium, whose job it is to think about the practicalities of manufacturing the next generations of chips years before they become real.Scott Aaronsen of the University of Texas is a thinker in the field of Quantum Computing – could quantum computing keep the rate of growth going? Or does it need to be thought of differently?One of the limitations on chip miniaturisation is the dissipation of heat from conventional electronic flow. Nick Harris of Lightmatter is looking at using photons rather than electrons to carry info and logic around a circuit with lower power losses.Stan Williams has spent much of his career thinking about new devices that could be fabricated into integrated circuits to give it all a push forward. And he tells Roland how the memristor could effectively bring the power of analogue computing to bear as we reach some of the limits of the digital age we have been living in.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield and Gareth Nelson-Davies

Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute, reveals findings of hunter-gatherers thriving in Malta 8,500 years ago, challenging views on prehistoric maritime skills. Marianne Brasil, a physiologist, discusses the evolutionary 'obstetric dilemma' linked to human pelvic anatomy and childbirth complications. Richard Binzel updates on asteroid Apophis, emphasizing international collaboration for planetary defense. Finally, Sergui Pascu shares groundbreaking research on brain assembloids that mimic pain signaling, paving the way for new pain therapies.

How Myanmar’s tragic earthquake left a 500km scar on the surface of the earth in just 90 seconds. Also, more hints of a link between shingles vaccines and reduced dementia, and how earth’s first oxygen breathers seem to have evolved way before there was enough oxygen to breath.Judith Hubbard is a seismologist and earthquake analyst who has been gleaning what scientific information we can find on the tragic quake that struck Myanmar last week. There seems to be some sort of link between the herpes virus that causes shingles and some people’s risk of Alzheimer’s dementia. At least, the latest paper appears to confirm so, according to an analysis published in Nature this week. Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University and colleagues have looked at data from public health records in NHS Wales in the UK, and have retrospectively performed a “natural experiment”, finding a clear suggestion that a vaccine against the virus that causes shingles seems to confer a lower likelihood of developing dementia over the subsequent seven years. Quite why this happens remains moot.And a long time ago, and for a long time, life on earth was nought but bacteria. The atmosphere was also nearly devoid of oxygen. These ancient bacteria leave scant fossil records, whilst the rocks show a clear time – known as the Great Oxidation Event – when earth’s atmosphere transformed to something more like the oxygen rich air we breath now. A pervading chicken-and-egg question asks whether the atmosphere changed and life adapted, or did life somehow evolve and transform the atmosphere? A team publishing in Science this week have performed an innovative analysis of bacterial genomes that suggests that the ability to use oxygen in respiration evolved some 900 million years before the atmosphere transformed. The question still stands, but as the team explain, the new analysis provides at least a clear timeline for why we breath the way we do today.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Josie Hardy(Image: People ride a scooter past the rubble of damaged Buddhist pagoda in Mandalay on April 3, 2025. Credit: Sai Aung MAIN / AFP via Getty Images)

This week, after five years of research, two newly discovered antiviral molecules have been shown to combat coronaviruses. Johan Neyts of the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Leuven outlines how he hopes the new molecule developed by his team might help us deal with emerging pandemics in the future. But as the US halts all Covid related research, will drugs like these ever hit the shelves? Among the grants terminated this week by the National Institute for Health is a programme called AViDD, AntiViral Drug Discovery, supporting 9 independent consortia. Annette von Delft of Oxford University and Ed Griffen of the drugs discovery company MedChemica spoke to us about the overnight shut down of years of work and importance of antiviral development. The longest ever carbon-based molecules have been discovered by the Mars Curiosity rover. Caroline Freissinet of the Laboratoire Atmosphères et Observations Spatiales talked us through the meticulous planning and geological chance that made this possible, and whether these long chain alkanes could be a clue to discovering life on mars. Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been delving into the genetic evolution of horses to discover the mutation that’s behind their runaway metabolic success. Gianni Castiglione explains how a mutation that should have been catastrophic instead helped horses to evolve from the size of dogs to the giant athletic animals we know today. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Emily Bird Production Coordinators: Jana Bennett-Holesworth and Josie Hardy(Photo: Two tablets of Roche Pharmaceuticals' Tamiflu. Photo by Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

There is continued upheaval in US scientific institutions under the new Trump administration. This week $400 million dollars-worth of grants have been frozen at Columbia University in response to “illegal” protests on the campus. President Trump also recently accused the Biden Administration of spending $8 million dollars on "transgender mice" experiments. We talk to two scientists, Kelton Minor and Patricia Silveyra, who have been affected in different ways. Also, as the first data from the European Space Agency's Euclid mission is released, Euclid project leader Valeria Pettorino tells us how this impressive space telescope hopes to unlock the secrets of the dark universe.And, around this time last year we heard about the H5N1 strain of bird flu finally jumping to the Antarctica Peninsula. Today, an expedition led by virologist Antonio Alcami confirms that the virus has spread to every animal species at each site they visited.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Ella Hubber Production co-ordinator: Jana Holesworth and Josie Hardy(Photo: University of Minnesota researchers, scientists and other supporters protest against President Donald Trump's proposed scientific research funding cuts. Credit: Michael Siluk/Getty Images)

Five years after the WHO pandemic announcement, an H5N1 call to arms from global health leaders. Also, the oldest western European face is found, the oldest impact crater possibly identified, and strange radio signals from space maybe explained.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth(Image: US To Boost Egg Imports As Prices Soar On Bird Flu. Credit: Bloomberg via Getty).