The Science Hour

By BBC World Service

Technology

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Science news and highlights of the week

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Monster microbe

06.26.2022

Researchers have discovered a species of bacteria which dwarfs all others by thousands of times. Normally you need a microscope to see single-celled bacteria, but Thiomargarita magnifica is the length and width of an eyelash. It's been found growing in ...

The Science Hour episodes:

06.26.2022 Monster microbe Researchers have discovered a species of bacteria which dwarfs all others by thousands of times. Normally you need a microscope to see single-celled bacteria, but Thiomargarita magnifica is the length and width of an eyelash. It's been found growing in ...
06.19.2022 Thirty years after the Earth Summit Thirty years ago, world leaders met at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio and appeared to commit to action to tackle two of the world's greatest environmental threats. The Earth Summit launched the UN Climate Change Convention and the ...
06.11.2022 Body scan reveals HIV's hideouts Researchers have developed a medical imaging technique which reveals where in the body HIV lies hidden, even when people have their infection well controlled by antiviral drugs. The team at the University of California, San Francisco hope this will lead ...
06.04.2022 Should we worry about the latest Omicron subvariants? Should we worry about the most recent Omicron subvariants, BA 4 and BA5? They are the subtypes of the Covid-19 virus now dominant in southern Africa and spreading elsewhere. New research suggests that they are better at evading our antibody ...
05.29.2022 Heat death by volcano and other stories This week Science in Action comes from a vast gathering of earth scientists in Vienna, at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union. Roland Pease hears the latest insights into the cataclysmic eruption of Hunga Tonga in the Pacific ...
05.21.2022 Death in the rainforest Tree mortality in tropical moist forests in Australia has been increasing since the mid 1980s. The death rate of trees appears to have doubled over that time period. According to an international team of researchers, the primary cause is drier ...
05.15.2022 Portrait of the monster black hole at our galaxy’s heart The heaviest thing in the Galaxy has now been imaged by the biggest telescope on Earth. This is Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy – a gas and star-consuming object, a 4 million times ...
05.08.2022 Mekong Delta will sink beneath the sea by 2100 The Mekong Delta is home to 17 million people and is Vietnam’s most productive agricultural region. An international group of scientists warn this week that almost all of the low lying delta will have sunk beneath the sea within 80 ...
05.01.2022 The Indian subcontinent’s record-breaking heatwave Deadly heat has been building over the Indian sub-continent for weeks and this week reached crisis levels. India experienced its hottest March on record and temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius (and in some places approaching 50 degrees) are making it ...
04.24.2022 Climate techno-fix would worsen global malaria burden As a series of UN climate reports have warned recently, drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – a halving over the next decade – are needed if we are to keep global warming down to manageable levels. No sign of ...
04.17.2022 How ‘magic mushroom’ chemical treats depression Brain scanning experiments reveal how psilocybin works to relieve severe depression. Psilocybin is the psychedelic substance in 'magic mushrooms'. The psychoactive chemical is currently in clinical trials in the UK and US as a potential treatment for depression and other ...
04.10.2022 Tsunami detective in Tonga Just over two months ago, the undersea volcano of Hunga Tonga erupted catastrophically, generating huge tsunamis and covering the islands of Tonga in ash. University of Auckland geologist Shane Cronin is now in Tonga, trying to piece together the sequence ...
04.03.2022 Radioactive Red Forest Russian forces in the forested exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear site may be receiving potentially dangerous levels of radiation. After the nuclear accident trees were felled and radioactive material was buried across the site. As the forest regrew its ...
03.20.2022 Covid in the sewers Analysis of wastewater from sewage systems has provided an early warning system for the presence of Covid19 in communities – showing up in the water samples before people test positive. It’s also possible to identify the variants and even specific ...
03.13.2022 Why are Covid19 cases rising in Hong Kong? Hong Kong had been very successful at preventing the spread of Coivd19. Testing and isolation measures were very effective. However, vaccine uptake was low amongst elderly people and that says virologist Malik Peiris has now left them vulnerable to the ...
03.06.2022 Covid -19 origins Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Market is associated with many of the first cases or Covid- 19, but data on precisely how and from where the virus might have first spread has been difficult to find. However a re-examination of the earliest ...
02.27.2022 Reforming the 'China Initiative' A scheme in the US designed to prevent industrial espionage and the theft of intellectual property, is to be refocused after it was accused of unfairly targeting Chinese American scientists. We speak to Gang Chen, a professor from MIT who ...
02.20.2022 Bone repair from Covid-19 vaccine technology Messenger RNA-based vaccines have been used successfully to kick start the antibody production needed to fight Covid-19. Now the technology has been successfully used to encourage the growth of new bones to heal severe fractures. The technique seems to work ...
02.13.2022 Inside Wuhan's coronavirus lab The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the centre of a controversy surrounding the origins of the virus which caused the Covid-19 pandemic. The work of the lab's previously obscure division looking at bat coronaviruses has been the subject ...
02.06.2022 Identifying a more infectious HIV variant We’re 40 years into the AIDS pandemic, and even with massive public health campaigns, still, 1 ½ million become infected with HIV each year; about half that number die of its ravages. And a study just out shows that this ...
01.30.2022 The roots of Long Covid There are now a number of biological indicators for the potential development of long covid. Immunologist Onur Boyman of Zurich University Hospital and Claire Steves, Clinical Senior Lecturer at King’s College London strives to tell us how pinpointing these factors ...
01.23.2022 Tonga eruption – how it happened The effects of the Tonga eruption could be felt around the world, many heard the boom of a sonic shock, and tsunami waves travelled far and wide. Volcanologist Shane Cronin from the University of Auckland in New Zealand is one ...
01.16.2022 Have we got it wrong on Omicron? Studies using swabs from coronavirus patients seem to contradict earlier findings from cell cultures which showed Omicon replicated faster than earlier variants. As Benjamin Meyer from the centre for Vaccinology at the University of Geneva, explains there may be other ...
01.09.2022 CORBEVAX – A vaccine for the world? Now being produced in India CORBEVAX is grown in yeast in a similar way to several other widely available vaccines. The technology used to make it is far simpler and much more readily available than that used to produce mRNA ...
12.26.2021 Omicron – mild or monster? Studies from South Africa and the UK suggest Omicron may be a mild infection for the majority of people. Hospital admissions are down when compared with other variants. However, the virus is replicating at a much faster rate than earlier ...
12.19.2021 Omicron’s rapid replication rate A study from Hong Kong university shows Omicron replicates 70 times faster than two earlier variants of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Virologist Malik Peiris, explains how tests using cells from the wind pipe showed the dramatic difference, which supports observations of ...
12.12.2021 Can the weather trigger a volcano? Which came first the volcano or the rain? Volcanic eruptions are known to influence global climate systems, even leading to the cooling of the planet. However local weather conditions can also influence the timing and ferocity of volcanic eruptions. As ...
12.05.2021 Omicron, racism and trust South Africa announced their discovery of the Omicron variant to the world as quickly as they could. The response from many nations was panic and the closure of transport links with southern Africa. Tulio de Oliveira who made the initial ...
11.28.2021 Deliberately doomed dart d dart Science in Action DART is a space mission designed to hit a distant asteroid and knock it slightly out of orbit. It’s a test mission, a pilot project for a way of potentially protecting the earth from a ...
11.21.2021 The end for coal power? The political message from the COP meeting was a fudge over coal, but what does the science say? Surprisingly India seems to be on track to switch away from coal to renewables. We explore the apparent contradiction with Lauri Myllyvirta ...
11.14.2021 Bambi got Covid Up to 8 percent of deer sampled in studies in the US were found to be infected with the SARS-Cov-2 Virus. Suresh Kuchipudi from the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at Penn State University in the US says what ...
11.07.2021 Jet fuel from thin air Scientists in Switzerland have developed a system which uses solar energy to extract gases such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide from the air and turns them into fuels for transport. So far they have only made small quantities in experimental ...
10.31.2021 Can we still avoid climate catastrophe? Just a few days before COP26 opens in Glasgow, the World Meteorological Organisation reported record greenhouse gas levels, despite a fall in CO2 due to pandemic restrictions. The UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report also revealed that current country pledges ...
10.24.2021 Red blood cells’ surprising immune function We’ve talked a huge amount the past 18 months, for obvious reasons, about the way that white blood cells protect us from infection. But red blood cells – it’s probably among the earliest things I learned in human biology that ...
10.15.2021 Wetlands under attack Since its introduction four decades ago, Spartina alterniflora, a salt-water cordgrass from the USA, has been spreading along China’s coasts. Today, it covers nearly half of the country’s salt marshes. As the UN Biodiversity Conference COP 15 kicks off in ...
10.10.2021 Youngest rock samples from the moon n December 2020, China's Chang'e-5 mission returned to earth carrying rock samples collected from the moon – the first lunar samples to be collected since the American Apollo and Luna missions to the moon in the 1970s. Laboratory analysis has ...
10.03.2021 Drug resistant malaria found in East Africa Since their discovery in the 1970s, artemisinin-based drugs have become the mainstay of treatment for malaria caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. Researchers have identified artemisinin-resistant malaria parasites in Southeast Asia since the early 2000s, but now, there is evidence ...
09.26.2021 New evidence for SARS-CoV-2’s origin in bats Researchers studying bats in Northern Laos have found evidence that brings us closer than ever to understanding the origin of Covid-19. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic scientists have tried to pin-point the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2. But recent ...
09.19.2021 Ebola can remain dormant for five years An international team of researchers has discovered that an outbreak of Ebola in Guinea in February this year was the result of re-activated Ebola virus in someone who’d been infected at least five years ago during the earlier large Ebola ...
09.12.2021 Keep most fossil fuel in ground to meet 1.5 degree goal For the world to have a decent chance of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, 90 per cent of remaining coal reserves and 60% of unexploited oil and gas have to stay in the ground. These are the stark ...
08.15.2021 Methane - a climate solution? The latest IPCC assessment raised alarm about the rate at which manmade emissions are contributing to climate change. Much of the focus for action is on reducing levels of carbon dioxide, however there is a more potent greenhouse gas, methane, ...
08.08.2021 Record-shattering weather July 2021 saw temperatures in the western US and Canada smash previous records by 5 degrees. And that’s what we should expect, according to a study prepared much earlier but published, coincidentally, just a few days later. A hallmark of ...
07.04.2021 Insects in incredible detail The Natural History Museum in London holds a massive collection of insects. It asked researchers at the Diamond light source, a facility near Oxford, to develop a high throughput X-ray microscope to take 3D scans of them all. Roland Pease ...
05.29.2021 Nyiragongo Eruption The latest Nyiragongo eruption was not entirely unexpected, the volcano’s lava lake inside the crater had been building up for years. Local volcanologists say it was only a matter of time before an eruption occurred. The big concern was where ...
05.23.2021 Robot revolution A brain-computer interface allows a severely paralysed patient not only to move and use a robotic arm, but also to feel the sensations as the mechanical hand clasps objects . We hear from Jennifer Collinger at Pittsburgh University’s Rehab Neural ...
05.16.2021 Covid and clean air We wouldn’t drink dirty water so why do we put up with polluted air? Researchers are calling for a major rethink on our attitude to air quality. Professor Lidia Morawska, from the Queensland University of Technology, says attention to air ...
05.09.2021 Africa’s oldest burial Analysis of the 78,0000-year-old fossil of a Kenyan boy reveals he was likely buried with care and attention, the body wrapped and laid to rest supported on a pillow. Maria Martinon-Torres, of the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in ...
03.07.2021 Uncovering history with Little Foot's skull One of our most complete ancient ancestor’s fossils has been transported to the UK from South Africa in order to be scanned at the Diamond Light Source. Roland Pease investigates what these scans could reveal about the human story. Professor ...
02.28.2021 Waste not, want not Although vaccines will go a long way to reducing the number of cases of Covid, there’s still a need for other approaches. One of these could be an engineered biomolecule, designed by virologists Anne Moscona and Matteo Porotto, that blocks ...
02.21.2021 Weird weather A paper in the BMJ shows that deaths from Covid 9 are being massively overlooked in Zambia. The new data come from post-mortem tests at the University Hospital mortuary in Lusaka, showing that at least 1 in 6 deaths there ...

Older episodes

The Science Hour

What's The Science Hour about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Science Hour episodes:

Monster microbe

Thirty years after the Earth Summit

Body scan reveals HIV's hideouts

Should we worry about the latest Omicron subvariants?

Heat death by volcano and other stories

Death in the rainforest

Portrait of the monster black hole at our galaxy’s heart

Mekong Delta will sink beneath the sea by 2100

The Indian subcontinent’s record-breaking heatwave

Climate techno-fix would worsen global malaria burden

How ‘magic mushroom’ chemical treats depression

Tsunami detective in Tonga

Radioactive Red Forest

Covid in the sewers

Why are Covid19 cases rising in Hong Kong?

Covid -19 origins

Reforming the 'China Initiative'

Bone repair from Covid-19 vaccine technology

Inside Wuhan's coronavirus lab

Identifying a more infectious HIV variant

The roots of Long Covid

Tonga eruption – how it happened

Have we got it wrong on Omicron?

CORBEVAX – A vaccine for the world?

Omicron – mild or monster?

Omicron’s rapid replication rate

Can the weather trigger a volcano?

Omicron, racism and trust

Deliberately doomed dart

The end for coal power?

Bambi got Covid

Jet fuel from thin air

Can we still avoid climate catastrophe?

Red blood cells’ surprising immune function

Wetlands under attack

Youngest rock samples from the moon

Drug resistant malaria found in East Africa

New evidence for SARS-CoV-2’s origin in bats

Ebola can remain dormant for five years

Keep most fossil fuel in ground to meet 1.5 degree goal

Methane - a climate solution?

Record-shattering weather

Insects in incredible detail

Nyiragongo Eruption

Robot revolution

Covid and clean air

Africa’s oldest burial

Uncovering history with Little Foot's skull

Waste not, want not

Weird weather