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Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
A spectacular new 10-year telescopic survey of the universe gets underway in Chile. Also, a project to create human chromosomes completely synthetically.Almost three decades ago Tony Tyson (now of UC Davis) and colleagues were standing in the control room of the world’s biggest (at the time) digital astronomical camera. It was 3am when he suggested astronomers could do better. This week, the Vera C Rubin Observatory unveiled first images from the telescope he envisioned. Unprecedented in so many ways, expect many discoveries to come from this unique machine.Another ambitious project known as SynHG kicks off this week, on the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first draft of the human genome, with a plan to develop the technology to potentially create a whole synthetic version. Jason Chin of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Laboratory in Cambridge and colleagues will be extending their previous work in synthetic biology to human DNA, whilst Joy Zheng of the University of Kent will be running a parallel project examining the ethical side of the objectives, and possibilities.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jazz GeorgePhoto Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
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Half a universe once lost now found
The universe is thought to consist of 70% Dark Energy, 25% Dark Matter, and just 5% Baryonic matter which is the atoms that make up you and me. At least, that’s what the models suggest. But a well-kept secret between astronomers and cosmologists for all these years has been that they have not actually ever seen almost half of that 5% normal matter because it is thinly dispersed as gas between the galaxies and galactic clusters. This week, two studies have been published putting that right.Satisfactory model-match #1: Liam Connor of Harvard University with colleagues from Caltech have been using a mysterious phenomenon called Fast Radio Bursts (FBRs) to infer what the intergalactic medium is in between, and how much of it there is. Satisfactory model-match #2: Konstanios Migkas of Leiden University and colleagues have been looking at the very faint x-ray signal from the intergalactic medium, removing the incidental x-ray sources such as black holes, and have managed to identify some structure - in this case a mind-bendingly huge filament of ionised gas stretching between two galactic superclusters - confirming the state of “Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium” (WHIM) as predicted for much of the universe.Of course, there is not just the cosmological standard model (lambdaCDM) that these satisfy in science today. There is also the remarkably resilient Standard Model of particle physics. A report this week from the US National Academies recommends the US begins building the world’s next particle collider to follow the work of the LHC (and FCC) at Cern. It should, as University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Tova Holmes tells us, collide not ordinary, stable, easy to manipulate particles like protons and electrons, but muons. Finally, Shana Goffredi of Occidental College in California, has found a VERY odd spider. Diving to depths in the submersible Alvin, they have found that a species of small sea-spiders, Sericosura, actually farm bacteria on their exoskeleton. Why? Because they hang around methane seeps on the ocean floor, where a specialist bacteria can metabolize methane – something the spiders themselves can’t do. Not only do the spiders then graze on the bacteria they carry around, they even pass samples of the bacteria onto their offspring by leaving bacterial lunch-boxes in their egg-sacs.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Sophie Ormiston Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George(Photo Credit: Jack Madden, IllustrisTNG, Ralf Konietzka, Liam Connor/CfA)
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The first solar polar pictures
ESA’s Solar Orbiter camera probe begins raising its orbit towards the sun’s poles, whilst Betelgeuse’s elusive buddy continues to sneak past our best telescopes.Earlier this year, Solar Orbiter started to stretch its orbit over greater latitudes – effectively standing on cosmic tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the Sun’s poles. This week, we have seen the first ever pictures of them, and as solar scientist Steph Yardley tells us, the views will only get better.Meanwhile, Andrea Dupree of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues have had time to study new Hubble and Chandra telescope observations of the iconic star Betelgeuse searching for signs of its hypothesised binary companion – dubbed “Betelbuddy”. The papers that appeared on the Arxiv pre-print server have not yet been fully peer-reviewed, but it seems astronomers will have to keep looking.Humans use machines to read gene sequences as best they can, but it takes time and is not perfect because we do not know what all of it means. Of course nature has its own genome reader – the ribosome. It is this that interprets the genetic instructions contained in our DNA and translates them into actual proteins. Viruses, of course, use it too when a cell gets infected. Shira Weingarten-Gabbay has this week demonstrated how scientists can make use of ribosomes too. Working somewhat in reverse, her team have identified many thousands of proteins previously unknown, that could for example provide targets for future vaccines or antivirals should the need arise.Finally, Nanshu Lu and team in the University of Texas at Austin have been working for some years on two-dimensional wearable electronic “E-Tattoos” to monitor health non-invasively through our skin. Their latest work, describes “A wireless forehead e-tattoo for mental workload estimation”.Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys GeorgePhoto Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SPICE Team, M. Janvier (ESA) & J. Plowman (SwRI)
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Potential fungal 'Agroterror'?
What is Fusarium graminearum and why were scientists allegedly smuggling it into the US? Also, Alpine Glacier collapse and an HIV capitulation.The FBI has accused two Chinese scientists of trying to smuggle a dangerous crop fungus into the US, calling it a potential agro-terrorist threat. But the fungus has long been widespread across US farms, and elsewhere, and is treatable. So what’s going on? Frédéric Suffert, Senior researcher in plant disease epidemiology at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, gives us some insight.Last week, a glacier above the swiss village of Blatten collapsed and up to 12 million tonnes of ice and rock buried the idyllic, yet thankfully all-but evacuated, hamlet below. Daniel Farinotti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology explains how it was monitored more than any such event before, and maybe, despite the tragedy, could help inform the science of such events in a warming world.Amongst the latest cuts to scientific funding by the US government, two consortia working at advanced stages of a potential HIV vaccine have been told their funding will not continue. Dennis Burton of Scripps Research describes finding out.The recipient of the Royal Society Faraday Prize 2024 gave his prize lecture last week. Titled Science Under Threat: The Politics of Institutionalised Disinformation, Salim Abdul Karim’s lecture is available on YouTube. Afterwards, he was kindly able to have a chat with Science in Action about his theme. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George(Photo: A hand holding an ear of wheat. Credit: Heather Schlitz/Reuters)
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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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