Science in Action

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 certain chick-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 exists, but 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 Coordinator: Jana Holesworth and Josie Hardy

(Image: University of Minnesota researchers, scientists and other supporters protested against President Donald Trump's proposed scientific research funding cuts. Credit: Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)