Lagrange Point

Life in a radiation exclusion zone is challenging but not impossible. We find out about tales of survival, endurance and adaption in radiation zones and in March Mammal Madness. How does life adapt to high exposure of toxic chemicals, radiation and heavy metals? Studying the DNA of differing animal populations in Chernobyl helps researchers understand how life responds to environmental disasters.  What's more stressful for wild boar - humans or a radiation disaster zone? Around Fukashima wild boar and snakes are thriving in what is classified as a radiation disaster zone. We also preview March Mammal Madness and find out about the different divisions in this year's edition.

1. March Mammal Madness resources compiled by Arizona State University https://libguides.asu.edu/marchmammalmadness

Bacteria uses a clever 1-2 punch to make it through our central nervous systems defenses. The way bacteria can get through the outer layers of the meninges relies on knowing exactly what how the brain will respond to infection. Painful headaches are a key part of meningitis, but that pain response is actually opening the door for a sneak attack. Understanding how bacterial infections get into the brain will help develop new treatment pathways for meningitis. When bacteria come under attack themselves, they use signalling pathways that we can learn from. By studying the way bacteria defend themselves we could find common tools to use to precisely regulate human cells.

1. Felipe A. Pinho-Ribeiro, Liwen Deng, Dylan V. Neel, Ozge Erdogan, Himanish Basu, Daping Yang, Samantha Choi, Alec J. Walker, Simone Carneiro-Nascimento, Kathleen He, Glendon Wu, Beth Stevens, Kelly S. Doran, Dan Levy, Isaac M. Chiu. Bacteria hijack a meningeal neuroimmune axis to facilitate brain invasion. Nature, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05753-x

Our oceans and waterways are our largest carbon sinks and they're overflowing with CO2. Too much CO2 in our waterways can cause tremendous local damage, but there may be ways to clean that up. Using a cyclic process without messy membranes you can get water to release the CO2 captured inside. Extracting excess CO2 from oceans could be possible with only some clever chemistry cells with no waste byproducts. Now that you've got CO2 out of the ocean, what are you going to do with it? Make it work for you. Carbon sequestration can be more useful than just pumping it into the ground. With the right techniques you can use excess CO2 to improve construction materials. 

1. Seoni Kim, Michael Nitzsche, Simon B Rufer, Jack R. Lake, Kripa Kiran Varanasi, T. Alan Hatton. Asymmetric chloride-mediated electrochemical process for CO2 removal from oceanwater. Energy & Environmental Science, 2023; DOI: 10.1039/D2EE03804H

​Hydrogen comes in all kinds of colours but what does that mean? Hydrogen has a role to play in a decarbonised world as long as we can produce it greenly. It's no good producing green hydrogen if you use up another valuable resource or create another kind of waste. Water water everywhere, but not a drop to electrolyse. Using seawater to make hydrogen has challenges. How can we use the abundant seawater resource to make green energy sources without producing nasty by products? 

1. Suraj Loomba, Muhammad Waqas Khan, Muhammad Haris, Seyed Mahdi Mousavi, Ali Zavabeti, Kai Xu, Anton Tadich, Lars Thomsen, Christopher F. McConville, Yongxiang Li, Sumeet Walia, Nasir Mahmood. Nitrogen‐Doped Porous Nickel Molybdenum Phosphide Sheets for Efficient Seawater Splitting. Small, 2023; 2207310 DOI: 10.1002/smll.202207310

Using the JWST to peer into the Cosmic dawn of the universe. The JWST enables researchers to peer into the earliest galaxies in our universe. 250 Million years is not a long time when it comes to a star or galaxy. With JWST researchers can see galaxies formed 250 million years after the Big Bang. To peer into the earliest universe you must use infrared to capture the faintest light. Using new instruments on the JWST researchers are able to see galaxies from 13.25 billion years ago. JWST also lets researchers investigate strange new types of spiral galaxies from the Cosmic Noon.

1. Yoshinobu Fudamoto, Akio K. Inoue, Yuma Sugahara. Red Spiral Galaxies at Cosmic Noon Unveiled in the First JWST Image. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022; 938 (2): L24 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac982b

Hayabusa2 had an exciting voyage across our solar system, getting into dust ups and even coming back home again with data to share. We've been tracking the long journey of Hayabusa2 over the 10 years of this podcast, and we're now getting interesting data from the returned samples. The Hayabusa2 probe shot at the asteroid Ryugu and brought back proof for JAXA to study and it tells tales of a very early time in our solar system. Ryugu is much much older than we thought, born only 1.8 million years after the formation of our solar system. How does a planetary system form and why are some planets in a flat line and others really odd. Our Nepture is an anomaly not just in our solar system but also compared to others. What happened to all the other 'Hot Neptune' exoplanets? Did they get burnt off or flung away?

1. Kaitlyn A. McCain, Nozomi Matsuda, Ming-Chang Liu, Kevin D. McKeegan, Akira Yamaguchi, Makoto Kimura, Naotaka Tomioka, Motoo Ito, Naoya Imae, Masayuki Uesugi, Naoki Shirai, Takuji Ohigashi, Richard C. Greenwood, Kentaro Uesugi, Aiko Nakato, Kasumi Yogata, Hayato Yuzawa, Yu Kodama, Kaori Hirahara, Ikuya Sakurai, Ikuo Okada, Yuzuru Karouji, Satoru Nakazawa, Tatsuaki Okada, Takanao Saiki, Satoshi Tanaka, Fuyuto Terui, Makoto Yoshikawa, Akiko Miyazaki, Masahiro Nishimura, Toru Yada, Masanao Abe, Tomohiro Usui, Sei-ichiro Watanabe, Yuichi Tsuda. Early fluid activity on Ryugu inferred by isotopic analyses of carbonates and magnetite. Nature Astronomy, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01863-0.

How did birds end up with their trademark beaks? You can broadly group birds into two categories, ancient and modern jaws or beaks. We thought mobile beaks were a modern invention but new fossils overturn this idea. Just when did birds first develop their modern mobile beaks? Wild jungle fowl were domesticated to become the chickens we love today. But wild chickens are not isolated completely from modern ones. Gene transfers between wild and domesticated chickens are eroding the genetic diversity of the species.

1. Benjamin A. Tonelli, Casey Youngflesh, Morgan W. Tingley. Geomagnetic disturbance associated with increased vagrancy in migratory landbirds. Scientific Reports, 2023; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-26586-0

Aurora are stellar examples of high energy physics. You need to be at the right spot to find Aurora on earth, but its not quite the same on Jupiter. What governs where and how an aurora will form? Earth and Jupiter are very different in size and speed, but why are our Auroras so different? How does Jupiter's magnetosphere bring all it's moons into line? What happens when an small independent moon brushes up against a super sized neighbour? Ganymede has it's own indepedent magnetic field. So what would happen if it got gobbled up by Jupiter?

1. Binzheng Zhang, Peter A. Delamere, Zhonghua Yao, Bertrand Bonfond, D. Lin, Kareem A. Sorathia, Oliver J. Brambles, William Lotko, Jeff S. Garretson, Viacheslav G. Merkin, Denis Grodent, William R. Dunn, John G. Lyon. How Jupiter’s unusual magnetospheric topology structures its aurora. Science Advances, 2021; 7 (15): eabd1204 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1204

In the northern reaches of Japan in a idyllic lake, cute green balls of algae are battling for survival. It sounds like an anime, but cute green algae balls, Marimo, are battling stellar forces. Too much sunlight can endanger the cute green algae balls, the Marimo. Having too much sunlight can be just as bad for algae as too little. How can brown algae help fight back against climate change? Algae have changed the climate once before, so can they do it again? If you were to quantify the carbon sequestration of algae, would it really make an impact globally?

1. Akina Obara, Mari Ogawa, Yoichi Oyama, Yoshihiro Suzuki, Masaru Kono. Effects of High Irradiance and Low Water Temperature on Photoinhibition and Repair of Photosystems in Marimo (Aegagropila linnaei) in Lake Akan, Japan. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2022; 24 (1): 60 DOI: 10.3390/ijms24010060

Understanding how our body senses and interacts with the world. Scientists are only now beginning to understand how our body senses the world, hence the '21 Nobel Prizes. This Nobel prize wining research helped others find a connection between the gut and our sense of touch. Internal organ pain can be crippling and require side effect laden treatments. How do organs like the gut detect and transmit pain signals? The same mechanism to detect soft touch is used by your organs to send pain signals. How does our body precisely control temperature? What region of the brain measures and control what temperature to set itself to?

1. Zili Xie, Jing Feng, Timothy J. Hibberd, Bao Nan Chen, Yonghui Zhao, Kaikai Zang, Xueming Hu, Xingliang Yang, Lvyi Chen, Simon J. Brookes, Nick J. Spencer, Hongzhen Hu. Piezo2 channels expressed by colon-innervating TRPV1-lineage neurons mediate visceral mechanical hypersensitivity. Neuron, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.11.015