What could be the oldest figurative cave paintings in the world have been found in a cave complex in remote Borneo. A reddish orange depiction of an animal that could be a Banteng (wild cattle found in the region) is at least 40,000 years old.  Humans are now the greatest force in shaping the surface of the Earth. We now move more than 24 times as much rock, rubble and sediment than all the world’s rivers. Dr Anthony Cooper of the British Geological Society has been weighing this anthropogenic global force. Closer to home, Adam Rutherford speaks to Professor Colin Waters at the University of Leicester, about the weight of human-created rubble he’s found under the City of London.  When the new polymer £50 note is introduced in around a year’s time, it’ll have a scientist on the reverse. Industrialist Matthew Boulton and engineer James Watt will step aside for a British scientist nominated by the public. Sarah John, Chief Cashier at the Bank of England, explains the rules to Adam and science experts, Emily Grossman and Alice Bell debate the merits of some of the more popular front runners.


Oldest cave picture; the Anthropocene under London; a new scientist for the £50 note

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The world’s oldest fossilised forest was uncovered in Somerset last week. We head to palaeobotanist, Dr Christopher Berry’s, lab at Cardiff University to learn about these cladoxylopsids. They lived 390 million years ago and although they are not the ancestors of today’s trees, they reveal some extraordinary evolutionary secrets.  Also, Marnie speaks to Dr Chris Thorogood of the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens about his new book Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers. Called “Rafflesia” plants and found in the remotest parts of South East Asia, their flowers burst from the rain forest floor the size of pumpkins and are critically endangered.  Chris talks of his world of extreme fieldwork and hair-raising expeditions, braving leeches, lizards and lethal forest swamps, to discover the rarest of rare blooms.  Plus, the Wildlife Trust’s Making Friends with Molluscs campaign starts today, and I’m sure many gardeners will declare this an impossible task! We visit some allotments in Bristol to find out how people are managing slug and snail populations. And chat to Brian Eversham from the Trust of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, who explains why these garden creatures should be considered our friends, not foes.    And finally, Dr Stewart Husband from last week’s programme returns to answer more of your burning questions about your tap water.

World’s oldest forest fossils

A recent study on how to get rid of microplastics in water sparked presenter Marnie Chesterton’s curiosity. When she turns on the tap in her kitchen each day, what comes out is drinkable, clean water. But where did it come from, and what’s in it? Dr Stewart Husband from Sheffield University answers this and more, including listener questions from around the UK. Is water sterile? Should I use a filter? And why does my water smell like chlorine?  Also, new research indicates that bumblebees can show each other how to solve puzzles too complex for them to learn on their own. Professor Lars Chittka put these clever insects to the test and found that they could learn through social interaction. How exactly did the experiment work, and what does this mean for our understanding of social insects? Reporter Hannah Fisher visits the bee lab at Queen Mary University in London.   And finally, more than 20 million years ago, our branch of the tree of life lost its tail. At that point in time, apes split from another animal group, monkeys. Now, geneticist Dr Bo Xia at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard thinks he may have found the specific mutation that took our tails. Marnie speaks with evolutionary biologist Dr Tom Stubbs from the Open University about why being tail-less could be beneficial. What would a hypothetical parallel universe look like where humans roam the earth, tails intact? And what would these tails look like?  Presenter: Marnie Chesterton 
Producers: Louise Orchard, Florian Bohr, Jonathan Blackwell, Imaan Moin 
Editor: Martin Smith 
Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth   BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

How pure is the water from your tap?

Switzerland has submitted a proposal to create a United Nations expert group on solar geoengineering to inform governments and stakeholders. The idea was discussed at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, this week. Professor Aarti Gupta shares how, after tense negotiations, the different member states could not agree, and the proposal was withdrawn. Why is solar geoengineering a controversial issue? How would dimming the sun even work? And should we consider it a genuine option in our fight against climate change? Dr Pete Irvine and Professor Joanna Haigh join presenter Marnie Chesterton in the studio to discuss.   Animal welfare charities have been celebrating a ban on donkey skin trade, agreed to this month by 55 African countries. This will make it illegal to slaughter donkeys for their skin across the continent, where around two thirds of the world’s 53 million donkeys live. Victoria Gill tells Marnie that the demand for the animals' skins is fuelled by the popularity of an ancient Chinese medicine called Ejiao, believed to have health-enhancing and youth-preserving properties and traditionally made from donkey hides.  Lastly, Dr Jess Wade, physicist and science communicator at Imperial College London, discusses Breaking Through: My Life in Science. It’s the memoir of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Dr Katalin Karikó, whose passion and dedication to mRNA research led to the development of the life-changing COVID mRNA vaccines.  Presenter: Marnie Chesterton 
Producers: Florian Bohr, Louise Orchard 
Assistant Producer: Imaan Moin 
Editor: Martin Smith 
Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Dimming the Sun

Professor Ben Garrod guest presents.  As a new 'meaty rice' is created and Fortnum & Mason launch a scotch egg made with cultivated meat that they hope to have on sale as early as next year, we investigate the world of laboratory-grown meat.   Mark Post made the first ever synthetic meat in 2012 to the tune of £200,000. He tells us how these lab-grown meats are made and how, he thinks, they could play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and feeding a growing population. Jenny Kleeman, author of Sex, Robots and Vegan Meat, is more sceptical, citing concerns over food security and if the public really want to eat this stuff.   A stingray called Charlotte has become pregnant, despite there being no other stingrays in her tank at the Aquarium & Shark Lab in North Carolina. Marine biologist Dr Helen Scales considers how this may have happened.  And cosmic minerologist Sara Russell from the Natural History Museum tells us how astronomers tracked and found a particularly unusual asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere and what we might learn from it.   Presenter: Professor Ben Garrod 
Producers: Hannah Robins, Florian Bohr, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Jonathan Blackwell 
Editor: Martin Smith 
Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth   BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Laboratory-Grown Meat

The Gulf Stream, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), is essential to stable global climate, and the reason we have moderate temperatures in Northern Europe. Now, a new modelling study suggests that this circulation could, at some point, be at a tipping point and collapse. We hear from one of the minds behind the model, post-doctoral researcher René van Westen from Utrecht University. But how likely is it that this will actually happen in the real world? Presenter Victoria Gill speaks to Jonathan Bamber who cautions that a gulf stream collapse is not imminent, and that it may just weaken slowly over time.  
 
Every summer in the Hudson Bay, on the Eastern side of Arctic Canada, the sea ice melts and the region’s polar bears head inland. But that ice-free season is getting longer, depriving the bears of that frozen platform that they use to pounce on their favourite prey – seals. So what do the bears do all summer? Research Wildlife Biologist Karyn Rode shares how she and her colleagues put a collar with video cameras on 20 polar bears, and what it revealed about their lives.  Is CERN finally going to get a gigantic new particle accelerator? Almost exactly one decade ago, Roland Pease reported from Switzerland about the very first meeting about the successor of the Large Hadron Collider which was used to discover the Higgs Boson. Now there’s an update to the story. Roland is back to tell Vic how far along CERN is with their plans, and how much more time and money it will take to build the Future Circular Collider.   Lovers of certain famous, creamy French cheeses could be in for a bit of a shock. Camembert and Brie are facing extinction as we know them! The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris has stated that, over the last 100 years, the food and farming industry has placed too much pressure on the production of these types of cheeses. Now, the fungus traditionally used to grow the famous, fluffy white rinds has been cloned to a point where the lack of diversity in its genetic makeup means it can no longer be reproduced. Turophiles must learn to appreciate more diversity of tastes, colours and textures to protect the cheeses’ future.   Presenter: Victoria Gill 
Producers: Florian Bohr, Louise Orchard, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell  
Editor: Martin Smith 
Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth   BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

Oldest cave picture; the Anthropocene under London; a new scientist for the £50 note

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