Science In Action

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).

Alan Sealls, President-elect of the American Meteorological Society and seasoned weather broadcaster, discusses alarming funding cuts to NOAA and their potential impact on US weather forecasting. Meanwhile, neuroscientists Madeline Wood and Kaitlin Casaletto explore the intriguing link between menopause and Alzheimer’s disease, revealing how hormonal therapy might affect cognitive health. Additionally, marine biologist Autun Purser provides a glimpse into the icy depths of the Weddell Sea, detailing their research on unique icefish adaptations in an extreme environment.

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)

Marion Koopmans, a renowned virologist instrumental in the development of the COVID-19 PCR test, discusses the urgent need for a sustainable flu surveillance network in Europe to learn from U.S. models. Matthew Cobb, an author and scientist, reflects on the Asilomar conference's legacy in shaping genetic engineering guidelines, while Shobita Parthasarathy raises ethical concerns about equity in scientific self-regulation. The conversation highlights the importance of public trust and inclusive dialogue as science grapples with emerging viral threats.

This week the recently spotted asteroid 2024 YR4 had its odds of missing us “spectacularly” slashed by 1 percentage point. Still nothing to worry about maintains Patrick Michel of the International Asteroid Warning Network, and he expects that with better tracking data in the next few months (even courtesy of the JWST) that tiny chance of collision will fall further. However, as he explains, it’s very comforting to know that we now have such a sophisticated tracking network, and even better, thanks to NASA’s DART mission, even a demonstrable method for doing something about it if the numbers go the other way…But other extraterrestrial bombardments are harder to detect at all. This week scientists of the KM3NeT collaboration report in the journal Nature their detection of the most energetic neutrino ever noticed. Almost countless numbers travel through the earth – and us – every second, but this little beauty arrived from deep space, plummeting through hundreds of miles of rock and sea (via Malta) to collide with a single molecule of water in the Mediterranean sea. As Paschal Coyle of Aix Marseille University happens to run a cubic kilometre of neutrino observatory in that area explains their huge instrument was barely begun when the record breaker smashed through the area in February 2023.Finally, years of breeding rice cultivars for higher yield may have subtly changed the plants relationship with the microbes in the paddies in which they grow, inadvertently boosting the amount of methane released into our atmosphere. New research, including 3 years of field trials in China have produced a new cultivar, breeding in some of the older stocks, with just as high yields yet up to 70 percent lower methane released. This could make a serious difference to global methane emissions, as Microbiologist Anna Schnürer of Uppsala BioCenter in Sweden describes.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Josie Hardy(Photo: Asteroid 2024 YR4 as observed by the Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope Credit: AFP/NASA/New Mexico Institute of Technology)