Science In Action

As anti-science leaves research reeling, does evidence-based policy in a scientific society have much of a future? Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes, Angie Rasmussen and Deb Houry discuss some of the sources and motivations that perhaps belie the current state of scientific affairs. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: The End street si...

As two species of coral are killed off by the 2023 heatwave in the Florida reefs, the abilities of different plankton species to cope with rising CO2 remain crucially unknown. Also, retrospective research shows a strong suggestion that mRNA covid vaccination might serendipitously boost certain types of cancer immunotherapy. And, if you can’t identify changing agricultural crop types from satellite...

Ten years on from the Paris climate agreement, has it helped? Also, an international drought experiment, insights from 2D water, and social distancin in ants. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Photo: Small bushfire. Credit: Lea Scaddan/Getty Images)

The 2025 Nobel prizes are announced this week – how did Science in Action’s predictions fare? Science author and thinker Philip Ball judges. The Whitley Fund for Nature this week hosted a “People for Planet” summit, exploring possible solutions to save nature. Amongst the speakers was Prof Martin Wikelski, of ICARUS, who has spent many years tracking wildlife around the world using tiny radio sens...

Scientists detect for the first time an unknown source of GPS interference coming from space. Also, as AI begins to design more and more DNA sequences being manufactured synthetically, how can those manufacturers be sure that what their customers are asking for will not produce toxic proteins or lethal weapons? And… how camera traps in polish forests reveal that the big bad wolf is more scared of...

Epigenetic changes during early brain development, and the complexities of autism. Also, how bacteria learn to parry antibiotics, the subterranean burp that shook the Island of Santorini, and new guidance for sharing land between farming space and living space for the pollinators on which it depends. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (...

Gravitational waves show two black holes merge just how Hawking predicted. Plus, a space mission without a target. And a Space probe without a confirmed budget. In January 2025 the LIGO gravitational wave observatories witnessed two distant black holes spinning into each other. In the ten years of LIGO’s operations, that’s not a first. But the instruments have been improved to such an extent that...

Scientists’ latest plans for welcoming interstellar visitor 3I/Atlas next month, and arranging a rendezvous with comet Apophis in 2029, as heard this week at the EPSC-DPS international planetary science joint meeting in Helsinki. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Ella Hubber, with Alex Mansfield Production coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth Image: Artist's impression of an asteroid in space (Cre...

Despite the relatively low magnitude, earthquakes in Afghanistan this week have left more than1000 dead. Afghan researcher Zakeria Shnizai from the University of Oxford unpicks some of the main causes of the country’s vulnerability to earthquakes. Also this week, we talk to the climate scientist who led a 400+ page rebuttal to the US Department of Energy’s report on climate change. We hear about r...

What can modern epidemiological methods tell us about French Revolutionary history? Also, the origins of horse riding, solar systems, and star dust itself. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: Storming of the Bastille Paris France 1789 illustration. Credit: Grafissimo via Getty Images).

A desktop nuclear fusion reactor that uses electrochemistry to up the ante. Also, a global survey of human wildfire exposures finds Africa burning ahead, plus tiny swarming robots and record-breaking 2024 ice melts from glaciers on Svalbard. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Holesworth (Photo: The Thunderbird Reactor at the University of British Columbi...

US Health Secretary RFK Jr’s call to retract a study on childhood vaccines is resisted by the journal. Also antibiotics get designed by AI, and a new way for stars to die. A study focussing on Danish childhood vaccination data has attracted the US Secretary for Health’s anger, as RFK jr calls for the journal in which it was published, the Annals of Internal Medicine, to retract it. The Editor, Chr...

As the United States secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr., announces a $500 million cut to mRNA vaccine research in the United States, we hear a statement from the Nobel Prize winning biologist who made mRNA vaccines possible. A team of scientists from Northwestern University have uncovered the pathway believed to protect some people from allergic reactions (even when they...

After most of the population of the Pacific rim sought higher ground this week, we speak with the architect of the tsunami warning technology. Also how aging Killifish might help us probe our senior moments. This week, an M8.8 earthquake near Kamchatka in the western pacific led to tsunami evacuation alerts thousands of miles away. Seismologist Judith Hubbard was writing about the area in the days...

Have we found Betelgeuse’s ‘Betelbuddy?’ An astronomical mystery seems to be solved as the long-predicted stellar companion to the bright star Betelgeuse has been detected by a team of researchers led by Steve Howell of the NASA Ames Research Center using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. Steve discusses this breakthrough alongside astronomer Andrea Dupree of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for...

Two black holes have collided and combined in the largest merger yet observed. Mark Hannam of Cardiff University and member of the study explains how the Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatories (LIGO) detected this ‘violent’ event through spacetime. The lifestyle of ancient humans had an impact on their risk for infectious diseases. Astrid Iversen of the University of Oxford explains how t...

The European Space Agency plans to use satellite gravity data to track weakening ocean circulation systems. Rory Bingham of the University of Bristol explains how these satellites can ‘weigh’ the Earth’s water and might help resolve whether we’re approaching the climate tipping point of a shutdown of ocean circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, something we've been following for a while. Scientists ha...

There's a surge in cases and deaths from H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia - we hear what's the driver and how concerned we should be. Erik Karlsson, Head of Virology at the Pasteur Institute in Phnom Penh and director of the WHO’s H5 Reference Laboratory has been watching the uptick. An interstellar interloper has been spotted entering our solar system. Most likely a comet, and possibly visible in the sk...

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...

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...

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 sci...

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?...

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...

This week, 124 countries agreed at the World Health Assembly in Geneva on measures aimed at preventing a future pandemic. The agreement very strongly favours a “One Health” approach, appreciating how so many potential pathogens originate in human-animal interactions. Still to agree on the terms of how to share pathogens and information with global science and vaccine researchers, eventually the tr...

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 pop...