BBC Inside Science Folgen

Whilst energy prices are shooting up due to gas demand, in the UK the plans for the next generation nuclear reactors are moving ahead. The costs of eventually decommissioning these, and the spent fuel products they will create is all part of the new contract. But what is to be done, and how far have we got with the 70 years of legacy waste piling up in the UK? Claire Corkhill of Sheffield university helps advise the government about nuclear waste disposal. As she tells Marnie, it's a long-term problem that must be dealt with some day, and even future nuclear fusion plants will have radioactive parts when they need replacing.You may feel that spring seems to come earlier each year. Ulf Buntgen and colleagues at the University of Cambridge have been using data from "Nature's Catalogue", a database of observations going back as far as the c18 to determine the dates each year that certain species of UK native plants first flower. And they have found a clear signal that plants are indeed flowering earlier due to climate change, some as much as a month earlier, on average, since the pre-1986 average. Aaron Rice of Cornell University speaks fish. But not fluently. His field of marine bioacoustics is growing fast. The oceans are, it seems, babbling with fish and other animal chatter. But does everything down there make a noise? In a paper published recently his team have traced evolutionary patterns in the ray-finned fish (which means nearly all the things most people would think of as a fish) and found that the ability to produce fishy sounds, be it bone vibrations, swim bladder vibrations or various other techniques, has likely emerged 33 times in this clade alone. Such convergent evolutionary history clearly suggests a strong selective pressure to do so. Aaron describes how much work there is to be done listening to fish, and how it can be used to help find out how life works, and how it may help us preserve it. Presented by Marnie Chesterton Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily BirdMade in association with The Open University

Prof Onur Boyman, Director of department of Immunology at University Hospital, Zurich, this week published a paper in the journal Nature Communications that presents a way of quantifying the risk of a Covid patient going on to develop Long Covid (or PACS as some call it) based on certain symptoms, but crucially also two key biomarkers in the blood. As he explains to Gaia, combining the levels in the blood of two key immunoglobulins (IgM and IgG3) with other pointers, first identified last year, allowed him and his team to make successful predictions as to the relative likelihood his sample group of patients might go on to still be exhibiting symptoms beyond four weeks after infection. Asthma is of particular interest to these researchers, partly because it can share this blood signal of Ig markers. Might it even also shed any light on things such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?Dr Claire Steves, of Kings College London, whose previous work on symptom gathering Onur's team have built upon, agrees this is a promising bit of work, and also discusses some other potential clues to the Long Covid mystery.But Covid of course is not the the only major cause of death in the world today. A major paper in the Lancet recently is one of the first deep estimates of the global health burden of Antibiotic Microbial Resistance. And it suggests that 1.25 million people died in the world in 2019 because many bacteria are evolving a resistance to our favourite antibiotics. As Prof Chris Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington who led the massive collaboration explains. The surprisingly huge number points to a massive and growing problem that political and health leaders around the world must address.And finally, the genetics of fingerprints might be a bit better understood thanks to work published in Cell recently. Dr Denis Headon of the Roslyn Institute at the University of Edinburgh talks to Gaia about a huge survey he and colleagues have done looking at the hints certain genes can give as to the types of fingerprints you grow. The genes that seem to govern the general form of your prints are the ones that shape your limb development, rather than skin patterns as perhaps might be expected. And a pro-tip if you want to search the literature for more info on this: use the word "dermatoglyph" rather than the overused and progressively meaningless word "fingerprint".Presented by Gaia Vince Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily BirdMade in Association with The Open University.

Why was the blast from the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano so explosive? Where are we on the global climatic thermostat? And how you can get involved in the Big Repair Project.Gaia Vince speaks with Auckland University volcanologist Prof Shane Cronin, one of the few human beings to have visited the now-disappeared volcanic land bridge that stretched until last week between the islands of Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha'apai. It was destroyed in the disastrous eruption of the volcano beneath it last week that has wrought such devastation to the nation of Tonga, and whose effects were felt in the Americas and detectable all around the world. Why was this submarine eruption quite so explosive, given that the eruption itself was not one of the biggest or longest in living memory?Previous eruptions - notably Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 - released huge amounts of particles and sulphates into the stratosphere such that they had a cooling effect on the atmosphere globally, lasting 2-3 years. Prof Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the UKs Met Office tells Gaia how current estimates of the recent eruption's emissions suggest it will not have such an affect, their being around ten times less than the 1991 event.Richard was one of the contributors to the UK Government’s Climate Risk Assessment 2022 which was published this week. He describes to Gaia some of the modelling that went into it, and the urgency of cutting CO2 and similar emissions it describes.Last year Prof Mark Miodownik, head of the Institute of Making at UCL made a series for Radio 4 called Dare to Repair, looking at the vanishing art and practice of repairing our old and malfunctioning consumer devices, rather than binning them and buying new ones as most of us do these days.At the end of 2021 Mark, together with representatives from manufacturers, consumers, and other groups, took part in a round-table meeting to discuss possible challenges and measures to increase the so-called Right to Repair, towards building a circular economy in the UK for recycling plastic and metals. In this week's show he launches a new citizen science project aimed at gathering granular data on UK citizens views and practices when it comes to "disposable" electronic devices. To take part in The Big Repair Project, to record successes and failures, even to share how impossible it can be sometimes to change a battery, follow the link on the BBC Inside Science homepage.Presenter Gaia Vince Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily BirdMade in Association with The Open University