It’s been an unusual week for astronomers, with telescopes swivelled off course to observe GRB221009A, the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded. Gamma ray bursts aren’t unusual, the by-product of some supernovae are recorded weekly. Whilst the afterglow of these bursts usually lasts hours or days, the aftermath of, what has been dubbed ‘BOAT’, brightest of all time, is expected to linger for years to come. Harvard University’s Edo Berger and Yvette Cendas believe there’s lots to be learnt in the coming months.

Back in the primordial oceans, tiny, wriggling worms and shimmering jellyfish invented ever better ways to strip resources from their environment deep in the murky depths. The ability to efficiently take up oxygen from a marine environment acted as a gateway for a dramatic explosion in species diversity. But according to Michael Sackville, Postdoctoral Fellow University of Cambridge and Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, when the gills first appeared they may have carried out a rather different function.

Plastics litter our oceans, and after time return to the shores. In order to predict and better understand where these plastic hotspots are, Professor Bhavani Narayanaswamy, Benthic Ecologist for Scottish Association for Marine Science, travels all over the globe to gather data and model these plastic hotspots.

In the future, this plastic waste could be broken down by a biological organisms. Chemical biologist Dr Federica Bertocchini at the University of Cantabria has identified enzymes responsible for munching through resilient polymers in waxworms.

It’s a question that's been bothering CrowdScience listener Monica who, despite 45 years of living in the US, is still answering questions about where her accent is from. Presenter Marnie Chesterton sets off to discover why learning a new language is possible but perfecting the accent is so much harder.

Marnie speaks to a linguist about how we learn language and develop our first accent, and what we can - and can't change - about our accents. A phonetician explains to Marnie the difficulty of even hearing sounds that are not from our mother tongue, let alone replicating them. And Marnie enlists some expert help to learn some of the pitch sounds of Japanese – with mixed success.

Finally Marnie asks why people so dearly want to change their accents when doing so is such hard work. She hears from a sociolinguist about stereotypes and the impact of accent bias, and Shalu Yadav reports from the front line of Delhi call centres where workers experience prejudice about their accents regularly.

(Image: Gamma Rays in Galactic Nuclei. Credit: Getty Images)

Sergiu Pasca, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University has left the petri dish in the drawer and grown human neurons inside the brains of juvenile rats. Successful connectivity and brain function may allow for more rigorous testing and understanding of neurological conditions, that have until now remained difficult to localise and treat.

It’s been a few weeks since NASA’s DART mission smashed into an asteroid in an attempt to budge it off course, kickstarting Earth’s first planetary defence system. Scientists are starting to pour through the data to determine whether or not it worked. Dr Toney Minter, Head of Operations at Green Bank Observatory has been using Green Bank’s radio telescope to keep us updated and track the celestial system.

John Ryan, a Senior Research Specialist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has spent the last three years studying the distinct vocal calls of blue whales. It’s part of a body of work that is unlocking the secretive existence of this endangered species, understanding how they react to the wind and search for food by navigating upwelling currents in the ocean.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live at the poles? Well, now you don’t have to imagine. Celas Marie-Sainte and Moreno Baricevic share their winterover experience, gathering data at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Hear what their work entails and ruminate on reflections of 6 months immersed in darkness.

And, One in every eight people live with a mental health disorder, so if that’s not you, it’s likely to be a close friend or family member. Despite there being a variety of known treatments, globally the majority of people suffering do not receive any medical support.

To see how the discussion around mental health is playing out across the African continent, CrowdScience visits Nairobi, Kenya. Presenter Marnie Chesterton is joined by a live audience and panel of experts - psychiatrist David Ndetei, psychotherapist Reson Sindiyo and mental health journalist Dannish Odongo - to get to the heart of what’s going on in our heads.

They discuss issues from taboo and superstition around mental health, to the treatment methods being used in Kenya that the rest of the world should know about.

(Image: Axial view of rat brain connectivity. Credit: Getty Images)

Presenter: Roland Pease

For the scientific community, the Nobel Prize announcements are an important part of the yearly science calendar. The award is one of the most widely celebrated and gives us a moment to reflect on some of the leading scientific work taking place around the world.

This year’s winners include Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their work on quantum entanglement. Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and K. Barry Sharpless for their work on click chemistry. And Svante Pääbo for his work on sequencing Neanderthal DNA.

To understand the science behind the award winners better, we’ve invited a variety of speakers to help us understand their work better. Award winner, Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, explains the basics behind click chemistry, a practice that has helped us to study molecules and their interactions in living things without interfering with natural biological processes.

Mateja Hajdinjak, Postdoctoral Training Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, celebrated alongside her former PhD. tutor, Svante Paabo in Germany this week. We talk to her about his significance in the development of DNA sequencing in ancient humans.

And Professor Shohini Ghose of the Institute of Quantum Computing at Waterloo University in Canada joins us to explain the complicated world of quantum entanglement.

Also this week, we meet Jessica Thompson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, who’s been considering how new parents manage the tricky job of childcare while out on fieldwork. She’s behind a new survey encouraging fellow scientists to consider how to approach the challenge of parental duties differently in the future.

Human sexuality comes in many forms, from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. But seeing as homosexuality creates apparent reproductive and evolutionary disadvantages, listener Ahmed from Oslo wants to know: why are some people gay?

CrowdScience presenter Caroline Steel examines what science can - and can't - tell us about the role of nature, nurture and evolution in human sexual attraction. She asks a geneticist what we know of the oft-debated 'gay gene', as well as looking into why homosexual men on average have more older brothers than heterosexual men.

Caroline looks into the role of nurture with a developmental psychologist to answer a question from a CrowdScience listener from Myanmar. He wonders if the distant relationship he has with his own father has impacted his own feelings of attraction.

She also learns about research into a group of people in Samoa who may shed light on the benefits of traditionally non-reproductive relationships for communities as a whole.

(Photo: A monument to Nobel Prize founder Alfred Nobel. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

NASA’s latest mission, DART hit the headlines this week after the space agency’s satellite successfully collided with a far off asteroid. The mission acts as a demonstration of Earth’s first planetary defence system. Jon Amos, one of BBC’s Science correspondents, talks Roland through the final moments of the DART satellite. Although the collision was a success, we may have to wait a little longer before we know if the asteroid’s trajectory has been altered…

Simone Pirrotta, project manager at the Italian Space Agency, has more to add. His nifty camera system broke away 10 days before DART’s collision, ensuring its own survival. This celestial drive by is guaranteed to provide scientific data to get excited about.

Also this week, we visit the China Kadoorie Biobank. Twenty years in the making, it houses a collection of over half a million genetic samples, which might help identify links between our own genetic compositions and illness. Roland Pease visited them in Oxford to find out more.

Finally, a new review describes the use of mercury by ancient Mayans. The metal is famous for its use across a plethora of civilizations throughout history. Andrea Sella from University College London, tells Roland how his favourite element underpins industrialisation across the ages and the globe.

There are over 30,000 species of fish – that’s more than all the species of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals combined. But despite the sheer diversity of life on Earth, we still tend to think of all fish in roughly the same way: with an oblong scaly body, a tail and pairs of fins. Why? And is that really the case? Crowdscience listener and pet fish-owner Lauria asked us to dive into the depths of this aquatic world to investigate why fish are shaped the way they are. Featuring fossils, flippers and plenty of fish, presenter Anand Jagatia makes a splash exploring the fascinating story of fish evolution, how they came to be such a different shape from mammals and even how some mammals have evolved to be more like fish.

Image: An illustration of the DART spacecraft headed toward its target

The first license of its kind has been granted for deep-sea mining. It will be used to run early tests to see whether the seabed could be good place to harvest rare earth materials in the future. These earth minerals are what powers much of our modern technology, and the demand is growing year on year.

The license raises ethical questions about whether anyone has ownership over the seabed, and whether we could be disrupting ecosystems under the sea in doing so. We have two experts joining us to discuss the scientific implications. They are marine biologist, Dr Helen Scales and Bramley Murton from the National Oceanographic Centre, Southampton University.

Also on the programme, we build on last week’s discussion about growing opportunities for researchers on the African continent. We look at how programmes of genomic sequencing are offering opportunities for Africa-based researchers, that haven’t been available before.

We talk to Thilo Kreuger, a PhD student at Curtin University, Western Australia, who’s behind the discovery of a whole new species of carnivorous plants. We discuss what it’s like fulfilling a lifelong dream to discover more about these spectacular plant species.

Why don’t some things burn? Alex Lathbridge travels to the Fire Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh to (safely) set various things ablaze. He learns about the fundamentals of fire and why things react differently to heat. He then heads to archives of the Royal Institution of London, to see an invention from the 19th century that can stop a fireball in its tracks: the miner’s safety lamp, which saved countless lives. And he speaks to a chemist about the science of flame retardants, and how even though they can make products less flammable, they may also have unintended consequences.

(Image: The Metals Company plans to mine the seafloor for these nodules containing nickel, cobalt, and manganese in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

A new report by the World Weather Attribution consortium demonstrates the impact of global warming on flooding in Pakistan. The consortium are helping to assess the link between humanitarian disasters and global change, faster than ever before.

The work, conducted by a team of statisticians, climate experts, and local weather experts, is part of an emerging field in science called Extreme Event Attribution, and can reliably provide assessments in the immediate aftermath of an extreme weather event

The report follows widescale flooding in Pakistan that has disrupted the lives of over 33 million people. Dr. Friederike Otto from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change explains some of the network’s conclusions as to the causes behind this devastating flood. Can it all be down to climate change?

Also this week, we speak to Prof Oyewale Tomori of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases, who writes in this week’s journal Science about what he believes African countries’ role should be in response to the Monkeypox pandemic, and how future academic work in the area should be more homegrown.

Finally, psychologist Lynda Boothroyd talks us through a new study about how the arrival of television in people’s lives can help shape unhealthy and negative perceptions of body image. The study, conducted in Nicaragua, amongst communities only recently connected to electricity supplies, is helping to show how the media could play a part in contributing to conditions like eating disorders.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, or so you might think. But watch any good comedian on TV by yourself and chances are you’ll laugh a lot less than if you were sitting in a lively comedy crowd watching the same comedian in the flesh. But why is that? Is there such a thing as herd laughter? And do people from different cultures and corners of the world all laugh at the same things and in the same way? These are questions raised by CrowdScience listener Samuel in Ghana who wonders why he’s always cracking up more easily than those around him. Presenter Caroline Steel digs into whether it’s our personality, the people around us, or the atmosphere of the room that determines how much we giggle, following neuroscience and ergonomics on a global trail in search of a good laugh.

(Image: Pakistani people move to a safer place due to flooding. Credit: Jan Ali Laghari/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Early humans and Neanderthals had similar-sized brains but around 6 million years ago something happened that gave us the intellectual edge. The answer may lie in a tiny mutation in a single gene that meant more neurons could develop in a crucial part of the brain. Post-doctoral research scientist at the Max Plank Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Anneline Pinson, did the heavy lifting on the research under the supervision of Wieland Huttner. They discuss with Roland how this finding offers a major development in our understanding of the evolutionary expansion of the all-important neocortex area of the brain.

A central aspect of what it is to be human and how we use our intelligence is to care for one another. A burial site in Borneo from tens of thousands of years ago gives us fresh insights into how advanced our capacity to care was, millennia before the establishment of stable communities and agricultural life. Remains uncovered by a team of archaeologists from Australia have found one of the first examples of complex medical surgery.

Finally, moving to a carbon-neutral society will involve developing huge battery potential, but that comes with its own environmental and social problems. Could a solution be found in the exoskeleton of crabs?

Mathematics and our ability to describe the world in terms of number, shape and measurement may feel like a uniquely human ability. But is it really? Listener Mamadu from Sierra Leone wants to know: can animals count too?

(Image: Getty Images)

Hot on the tail of China’s heatwave comes the other side of the extreme coin – tragic flooding. Also, a coming global shortage of sulfur, while scientists produce useful oxygen on Mars in the MOXIE experiment.

Prof Chunzai Wang is the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography in Guangzhou, China. He tells Roland about the surprising nature of the extreme temperatures and droughts much of China has been experiencing, and how they are connected to so many of the record-breaking weather events around the northern hemisphere this summer, including the tragic flooding in Pakistan.

Some people of course saw this coming. Richard Betts of the UK Met Office talks of a paper by one of his predecessors published 50 years ago exactly that pretty much predicted the greenhouse gas-induced climate change more or less exactly.

Clearly, the world needs to cut carbon emissions, and oil and coal would be sensible places to start. But as Prof Mark Maslin points out, this will come with its own consequences in terms of pressure on the industrial supply of sulfur and sulfuric acid, essential to so many other devices and processes. Can a shortage be averted?

And scientists working on Nasa’s Mars Perseverance team report more results this week. Alongside all the sensitive instrumentation aboard, an experiment known as MOXIE was somehow squeezed in to demonstrate the principle of electrolyzing Martian carbon dioxide to produce usable oxygen gas. As Michael Hecht explains, the tech is scalable and would be more or less essential to any viable human trip to Mars in the future.

(Image: The Jialing River bed at the confluence with the Yangtze River is exposed due to drought in August 2022 in Chongqing, China. The water level of the Jialing River, one of the tributaries of the Yangtze River, has dropped due to high temperature and drought. Credit: Zhong Guilin/VCG via Getty Images)

Presenter: Roland Pease

The Jezero Crater on Mars was targeted by Nasa’s Perseverence rover because from orbit, there was strong evidence it had at some point contained a lake. When the Mars 2020 mission landed, it didn’t take long to spot rocks protruding from the bottom that looked for all the world like sedimentary rocks – implying they were laid down from the liquid water and maybe perhaps even contain signs of past life. This week, the science team have published some of their analysis from the first 9 months of the mission. And, as Principal Scientist Kenneth Farley of Caltech tells Science In Action, the geology is clearly more complex, as it turns out they are igneous, perhaps resulting from subsequent volcanic activity.

Back on earth, Shane Cronin of the University of Auckland has been digging into the legend of the Kuwea volcano in Vanuatu. Folk tales have long talked of an inhabited island that once disappeared beneath the sea. Over the years some have linked these and the submarine caldera with an eruption that occurred in 1452, yet the evidence has been debated. But the Hunga-Tonga eruption earlier this year has shifted Shane’s perception of the evidence. As he describes, he now suspects the 1452 eruption was as much as 5-7 times bigger in magnitude, and likely preceded by smaller eruptions that could fit with some of the legends surrounding the story.

This type of evidence, interpreted from the testimony of those who live there, is increasingly being employed in conservation studies. Heidi Ma of ZSL in London and colleagues this week declared in Royal Society Open Science, the Dugong – a relative of the manatee - is now functionally extinct in Chinese waters, but they reached this conclusion from interviewing hundreds of individuals in fishing communities along that coast. And very few of them had ever seen one.

When CrowdScience listener Eric spotted a few gnats flying around on a milder day in mid-winter, he was really surprised - as surely insects die off in the cold? It got him wondering where the gnats had come from and how they'd survived the previous cold snap. So he asked CrowdScience to do some bug investigation.

Presenter Marnie Chesterton takes up the challenge and heads out into the British countryside – currently teeming with buzzes and tiny beasties - to learn about the quite amazing array of tactics these small creatures use to survive the arduous days of cold.

She hears how some insects change their chemical structure to enhance their frost resistance whist others hunker down in warmer microclimates or rely on their community and food stocks to keep them warm. Marnie also asks how climate change might be affecting insect over-wintering behaviour - and its implications for the lives of these crucially important organisms.

(Image: Jezero Crater. Credit: Getty Images)

East Africa has endured more than two years on continuous drought. The latest predictions suggest the drought is not likely to end any time soon. We look at why climate change and weather patterns in the Pacific and Indian oceans are largely to blame.

Andrea Taschetto, chief investigator at the Centre on Climate Extremes at the University of New South Wales discusses the latest predictions Drought has also been an issue in Europe, comparable with events nearly 500 years ago.

Chantal Camenisch at the Institute of History at Bern University in Switzerland has been delving into European drought history and says despite the vast differences in living conditions there are many parallels with today. When a dinosaur killing asteroid hit the earth did it have company? A suspected impact crater discovered off the coast of West Africa may have been caused at around the same time . Heriot Watt University geostratigrapher Uisdean Nicholson and University of Texas geologist Sean Gulick have been investigating. And we have some of the answers to why T Rex had such small eyes for the size of its skull, Stephan Lautenschlager at the University of Birmingham has the gruesome answer.

Also, Have you ever wondered why waterfalls appear white when still water is transparent? Why clouds, or snow, appear white when they too are essentially just water molecules in different states? What makes something white, opaque or transparent? These are the questions CrowdScience listener Gerardo has been pondering ever since taking in the beauty of fallen water on a hiking trail in his home of Cantabria, Northern Spain. Presenter Marnie, sets off on a quest to find out the answers to all of those questions and more. What even is white? Is it a colour, the absence of colour or all the colours of the rainbow combined? Is black really the opposite of white? And what colours do we mix to make white or black paint?

Image: Woman carrying water in drought, Kenya Credit: Getty Images