Science In Action

• Thirteen months to a chip off the moon

  China is aiming to join the small club of nations who have successfully returned scientific samples of asteroids for analysis on earth, teaching us more about how our and potentially other solar systems formed. Tianwen-2 launched successfully this week, bound for an asteroid known as Kamo‘oalewa, which sits in a very strange orbit of both the earth and the sun, making it a “quasi-satellite”. Last year, scientists including Patrick Michel of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, published an intriguing suggestion that Kamo‘oalewa might in fact not be a conventional asteroid, but instead be a small piece of our moon that was ejected when the Giordano Bruno crater formed. In a little over a year from now, we might find out if that is right.Do you have to hold text at arm’s length to read properly? Qiang Zhang, professor of physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, whose team recently published their demonstration of using a technique from radio astronomy but using optical light. Active Optical Interferometry involves using laser beams to achieve resolutions at distances far in excess of conventional imaging with lenses. As his team showed, and as Miles Paggett of Glasgow University admires, they managed to read newsprint sized letters at a distance of over 1.3km.Finally, how did the Inca Empire write things down, and who did the writing? It has been thought that ornate threads of strings and baubles known as khipu are how records were made for business and administration, probably by a decimal code of knots in strings. But the exact purpose, nature and any meaning encoded therein, has eluded scholars for decades. Sabine Hyland, an anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, has been studying them for years, and recently was granted access to the records of a village, only the fourth known, to have continued a form of the khipu tradition after the Spanish conquest to this day. She believes that they could even provide us in the modern world with valuable climate data. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jazz George(A Long March-3B Y110 carrier rocket carrying China's Tianwen-2 probe blasts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on 29 May, 2025 in Sichuan Province of China. Credit: VCG/Getty Images)

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• WHO Pandemic Agreement reached

  This week, 124 countries agreed at the World Health Assembly in Geneva on measures aimed at preventing a future pandemic. The agreement very strongly favours a “One Health” approach, appreciating how so many potential pathogens originate in human-animal interactions. Still to agree on the terms of how to share pathogens and information with global science and vaccine researchers, eventually the treaty will need to be signed by at least 60 countries. But can the inequity between countries of the global south and north, and issues of intellectual property, be bridged?A new study on origins of the Nigerian mpox epidemic points strongly to zoonotic crossovers and mobility of wildlife in West Africa. Edyth Parker of Redeemer’s University in Nigeria describes their phylogenetic tree.Can the bovine form of H5N1 flu infect pigs, and could domestic pig populations then provide a crucible for further variants to develop? Jürgen Richt of Kansas State University and colleagues have been investigating. We need to keep up vigilance.Lucy van Dorp of University College London, working with a consortium including London’s Crick Institute, has been looking at a moment in the past when human activity provided an opportunity for a bacterial human pathogen to change its lifestyle. According to their phylogenetic tree, the bacterium Borrelia recurrentis (which causes louse-borne relapsing fever in humans) adapted and moved from ticks to human body lice around about the same time as humans started using woollen clothing.And Susan Lieberman, VP for International Policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, was in the trenches of the Pandemic Agreement negotiations, and shares some of her hopes for its success. Image: World Health Assembly formally adopts by consensus world's first Pandemic Agreement, Geneva, Switzerland - 20 May 2025 Image Credit: Magali Girardin via EPA-EFE/ShutterstockPresenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield

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• Vaccinating rabies’ reservoir dogs

  In 2015, the World Health Organisation set the goal of eradicating rabies deaths from dog-bites to “Zero by 2030”. A team at the University of Glasgow and colleagues in Tanzania have been assessing the efficacy of dog vaccination schemes for reducing the numbers of human infections over the last 20 years. As Prof Katie Hampson tells Science in Action, in rural areas especially, vaccinating dog populations does work, but you need to keep at it, and not leave patches untouched. It should be funded as a public health measure, rather than a veterinary issue. Last weekend, the remains of a failed 1972 Soviet mission to Venus landed harmlessly somewhere back on earth. As the BBC’s Maddie Molloy explains, the fears were that the robust lander craft would survive re-entry into earth’s atmosphere as it was originally engineered to withstand the harsh pressures and chemistry of Venus. How and why then would sketches be emerging of Chinese plans to launch a sample-return mission to Venus in the next decade? Science Journalist Andrew Jones describes some of the challenges they will face collecting droplets of the highly acidic atmosphere somewhere 60km above the surface and turning round to head back to earth. Why? William Bains of Cardiff University is one of a growing number of scientists interested in exploring some of the more exotic possibilities for complex organic biology in the otherwise destructive sulphuric, hot, dense, low pH clouds they will find. Could a different sort of information-encoding molecular chemistry enable life, though not as we know it? Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jasmine Cerys George and Josie Hardy Photo: A domestic dog receives a rabies vaccine during a mass vaccination in Bunda, Tanzania, October 8, 2012. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

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• Gain-of-Function: Loss-of-Funding

  This week, the White House posted an executive order which details the administration’s intent to stop ‘dangerous gain-of-function research’. We talk to Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and biosecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University who fears the timing and added bureaucracy could stop all sorts of important biosciences unnecessarily, and that the order is somewhat ideologically driven.Also, Nasa’s Juno mission has provided data on the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded, which took place on the planet Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Hellish Io, squeezed as it is by the immense gravity of Jupiter, has not been observed from its poles before in this manner. Last week at EGU25, Science in Action got to speak with the mission’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute.Still on Jupiter’s moons, we also ask whether there could there be life on Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa? Scientists believe their glaciated oceans may harbour conditions suitable for life. Also at the EGU meeting were Jonathan Lunine, chief scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and Athena Coustenis, director of research at the Paris Observatory in Meudon.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield with Tabby Taylor-Buck Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy(Photo: Clinical support technician extracts viruses from swab samples. Credit: Jane Barlow/Getty Images)

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• Scientists of the world unite

  Scientists from around the world have gathered together at the annual European Geosciences Union general assembly, to discuss current projects, working hypotheses and potential findings. There are nearly 18,000 in attendance this year and there is much to learn. AMOC – the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - brings warmth to the north and cooler waters to the south in huge volumes. Climate modellers have expressed concern for its collapse (and subsequent weather chaos) as temperatures rise more generally, but others have said it is more resilient. But Stefan Rhamstorf has announced that extending the models past 2100 can show a different picture. The odds have shifted from 10% to more like 50/50 if the Paris climate target is missed. Has such climate change ever occurred before? And if so, what drove it? Hana Jurikova and colleagues have been using novel techniques to detect a link between atmospheric CO2 levels and rapid climate change in the geological past, and explains how boron records in ancient brachiopods might give us a clue.What of the 6.2 magnitude earthquake near Istanbul last week? Could it have been worse? Will the next one be the big one? Expert Patricia Martínez-Garzón of GFZ in Germany doesn’t quite allay the fears.Could more lives be saved from landslides and flash floods if we could set up a warning system? Stefania Ursica hopes so, and has looked to animal behaviour to design a programme to scan networks of seismic monitoring stations’ output for the faint signals. Encoding different hunting and communication strategies – from nomadic whales to humming birds and bats, her new algorithm might be just the thing, though prediction will always be a different problem.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield with Sophie Ormiston Production co-ordinator: Josie Hardy(Image: 3D render of a Topographic Map of Western Europe with the clouds from 27 January, 2025. Credit: Frank Ramspott/Getty Images)

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