Lagrange Point

How have microbes changed the course of life on our planet? How has our atmosphere changed as a result of bacteria and archaea? Assimilation can help enhance single cellular life. Archaea can collect long strings of extra genes just in case. Finding the right gene at the right moment can help Archaea make the most of available food. Basem Al-Shayeb, Marie C. Schoelmerich, Jacob West-Roberts, Luis...

Ocean currents can have global impacts shaping our climate and life in the seas and onshore. How do the ocean currents circulate and vary not just on the surface but beneath the waves? It's easy to picture different layers of clouds, but the same is true for our oceans. Large circulating patterns of currents called Gyres govern the oceans. Tiny phytoplankton keep our oceans alive but how do they g...

A big prize like the Nobel for Chemistry doesn't appear out of nowhere. To win a Nobel Prize, a lot of team work in laboratories and across the world has to come together. We find out about the research that led towards the Nobel Prize for chemistry and how it grew. How does Click Chemistry solve the problem of messy and complicated reactions? How do you look inside a cell when it's working withou...

We celebrate the Ignobel prizes for 2022 with science that makes you laugh and then think. What connects a Fish, ducks and slipstream racing? How do mother ducks manage to keep all their ducklings in tow? Does swimming in formation help the ducks save energy? What's the best spot in the slipstream to be? We all know following in the slipstream is good, but if you're 3 or more back you can literall...

Mandarin oranges are very closely related but also incredibly diverse. A quirk of cloning means we can accurately trace the journey of all mandarins back to their origins in Hunan province. Mandarins come in so many shapes and sizes and are used to celebrate by many cultures, but they all share a lot in common. Oregano and Thyme both produce some great smells, but these chemicals can carry a usefu...

Plants harness the energy from the sun for so much more than photosynthesis. You have a beating hart to pump around your blood, but what do plants. Plants' vascular systems aren't pressurized so how do they power their circulation? Just how much energy do plants use globally each year to pump water out of the ground and into their leaves? Plants use incredible amounts of energy each year just to p...

CO2 gets a lot of bad press on earth, but in space, it could actually be incredibly helpful. On Mars, the Perseverance mission turned CO2 into Oxygen just like a tree. Making air on Mars requires a bit of Moxie and Perseverance. Mar's atmosphere may be thin, highly variable and full of CO2 but it can be harnessed to produce Oxygen. Could future mission to Mars make their own oxygen on the surface...

How can we develop new treatments to tackle antibiotic resistance and tumors. Antibiotics were the miracle of public health in the 20th century, but how can we establish new treatments into the 21st. Find the right protein and you can stop bacteria in its tracks by splitting it in two. New treatments can tackle antibiotic resistant bacteria by using proteins to break them in two. Cancer vaccines a...

Wearable medical devices inside and outside of your body. Understanding what's happening inside your body can be tricky. Lugging around a scanning device with you all day isn't practical, but how can doctors tell what's happening in your daily life? Want to know what your organs are doing when you go for a jog or live your daily life? Wearable ultrasonic patches can give precise and long term ultr...

Dwarf planets are strange objects in our solar systems, but Ceres is unusual amongst that group. Why is Ceres' surface so strange and how could it have formed without a hot core? Ceres is too small to really have a molten core or large molten surfaces. How did Ceres end up with odd plateaus and continent like features without an active core? How could radiation cause Ceres to form in such an odd w...

How can we take ideas from nature and turn them upside down like growing plants without sunlight. There are some plants that thrive in 'low light' but what if they needed no light? Is it possible to change photosynthesis to work even without sunlight? Photosynthesis is great and all, but it's only around 1% efficient, so can it be improved? IF you were to make artificial photosynthesis can it outp...

What happens when most life in the ocean just dies off? Our oceans have seen many mass extinctions in the past, how long does it take to recover? What happened at the end of the Permian that caused massive extinctions in the ocean? What creatures were best able to survive when 80% of the rest of life in the ocean died? Burrowing and feeding on mud at the ocean depths helped soft bodied creatures s...

There are plenty of tales of music soothing wild beasts, but is there actually a link between music and pain relief? How did researchers quantitatively study the soothing powers of music? What's better for blocking out pain ; Classical music, discordant arrangements or white noise? How does sound dull the effect of pain in mice? Just how good is a bat's auditory long term memory? can you train a b...

How can you find objects that are hard to see in the depths of space? There is plenty of gas in a galaxy, but trying to see a cloud amongst all those starts is not easy. The further back in time you look in the history of the universe, the colder and darker it gets. How do you figure out the structure of the earliest galaxies and their cold gas? A black hole roaming across a galaxy sounds like bad...

The early history of our solar system can be deciphered by studying impact craters and meteorites. Craters on the Moon tell us a lot about the violent history of our solar system. Just how many impacts have there been on the Moon? We can study the porosity of the Moon to better estimate just how many impacts have occurred on it. How did Mars get it's atmosphere and from where? A Martian meteorite...

The history of fire on earth from the first wildfires to the first use to cook. We all know you need fuel and oxygen for fire, but when did the first fires occur on Earth. When did the first wild fires occur on earth? What was there to burn on early Earth if there weren't any large trees or plants? Giant mushrooms and large fields of moss, early Earth was very different but it could still have wil...

Where is the cleanest air on the planet? How do oceans help capture carbon from forest fires? Where does all that carbon go after a forest fire? How do you find the cleanest air, by measuring microbes. The southern ocean air is not polluted by aerosols or ice forming particles. The air above the Southern Ocean is clean and crisp with not much microbes in side it. How can you turn a paper into a si...

From cosmic rays in Antarctica, to chasing Eclipses to learn about stellar weather. Neutrinos are hard to track and detect, as are cosmic rays. Neutrinos suddenly coming out of Antarctica baffled scientists hunting for cosmic rays.  Underground glacial lakes, compacted snow, cosmic can help explain mysterious neutrino emissions. Tracking eclipses and gathering data over 20 years can help us unders...

​As our climate changes, feeding the planet without making things worse is a big challenge. How do plants work together to survive extreme weather events? When there is a large drought or extreme weather event what works better, single species or mixed? Plant diversity can help plants weather the storm of climate change and come out stronger. How do cover crops help 'fix' nitrogen in the soil and...

The brain is incredibly important and needs to be protected by your body but this also makes it hard to treat. Brain tumours can be stubborn to root out because many treatments are blocked by the blood brain barrier. The blood brain barrier blocks many cancer treatments, but with the right disguise and nano coating cancer treatments can sneak past. Brain tumours can block the immune system from fu...

How can plants adapt to a changing climate and strange volcanic soils. By tracking the divergent evolution of Thale Cress, scientists can track the genetic changes needed to thrive in weird soil. Volcanic soil can have benefits along with risks, but how can plants adapt quickly to odd soil types? How did plants learn to thrive on a volcanic island, Pico de Fogo. What can a long running study tell...

How do seismic waves travel through our planet? Is it possible to 'slow down' a seismic wave? What causes 'hotspot volcanoes'? What strange things happen at the boundary between the core and the mantle? The mantle is a dynamic place, and pockets of 'dense' rock can slow and shape heat flow from deep below to the surface. Dense iron rich pockets of rock at the edge of the Core could influence where...

Jupiter's moons may be way more dynamic than we previously thought. Europa has the most potential to harbor life outside of Earth, but it's ice sheets may be more Earth like than we imagined. Europa's spectacular double ridges are similar to those found in Greenland. The ice sheets on Europa may not be static and still, but churning. Melting and refreezing could drive exchange between the surface...

Supernova get all the press, but Nova and Micronova are still pretty powerful. White dwarf stars are normally pretty inactive, unless some hydrogen ends up kickstarting them again. Enough helium leeched from a nearby star can ignite the entire surface of a white dwarf. Nova may not destroy the star, but they can create immensely powerful explosions and particles. The right combination of White Dwa...