First images from the James Webb Space Telescope
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2022
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Roland Pease talks to two astronomers who began working on the James Webb Space Telescope more than two decades ago and have now seen the first spectacular results of their labours. Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona and JWST's senior project scientist John Mather discuss the highlights of the first four images.
Also in the programme, geologists discover precisely where on the Red Planet the most ancient Martian meteorite came from - we speak to Anthony Lagain whose detective work identified the crater from which the rock was ejected into space. And what causes vast areas of the Indian Ocean to glow with strange light - a rare and mysterious phenomenon known as 'milky seas'? The world is a step closer to understanding this centuries' old maritime enigma thanks to the crew of a yacht sailing south of Java, atmospheric scientist Steven Miller and marine microbiologist Kenneth Nealson.
We are running out of ammunition against certain infections, as bacteria increasingly evade the antibiotics we’ve relied on for nearly a century. Could bacteriophages – viruses that hunt and kill bacteria – be part of the solution?
In 2019, CrowdScience travelled to Georgia where bacteriophages, also known as phages, have been used for nearly a hundred years to treat illnesses ranging from a sore throat to cholera. Here we met the scientists who have kept rare phages safe for decades, and are constantly on the look-out for new ones. Phages are fussy eaters: a specific phage will happily chew on one bacteria but ignore another, so hunting down the right one for each infection is vital.
Since then, we’ve lived through a pandemic, the medical landscape has been transformed, and interest in bacteriophages as a treatment option is growing throughout the world. We turn to microbiologist Professor Martha Clokie for updates, including the answer to listener Garry’s question: could phages help in the fight against Covid-19?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 2019, we began investigating the disappearance of Dr. Ruzha Ignatva. |
| 0:08.0 | I believe we are a very special network. |
| 0:10.0 | A scammer who stole billions from investors around the world. |
| 0:15.0 | She's on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. |
| 0:18.0 | And now, we have some unmissable updates. She has money and when you have |
| 0:23.0 | money you have power. Join me, Jamie Bartlett, as the hunt for the missing crypto queen continues. |
| 0:29.5 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. Thank you for downloading the science hour from the BBC World |
| 0:34.6 | Service with me, Roland Pease, and in half an hour, |
| 0:42.3 | crowd starts learnt about an alternative to antibiotics, which they call phages. |
| 0:48.2 | They are a virus that specifically infect bacteria, and they do it in a highly specific way. |
| 0:56.2 | What we can do in a treatment context is find phages that target and kill bacteria that we want to treat. |
| 1:01.5 | They've been talked about for decades, but are phages the treatments for the future? |
| 1:05.4 | That's what they're going to be asking on crowd science later in the podcast. |
| 1:12.5 | Before that, on science and action, we'll be taking a deep dive into those first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. We'll hear about possibly the oldest sample of a planet anywhere in the solar |
| 1:18.1 | system, a meteorite, a piece of Martian crust that formed almost 4.5 billion years ago. |
| 1:24.9 | But we'll also have scientifically reassuring news that if the sea starts to |
| 1:29.9 | glow all around you, you're not losing your mind. It gave an idea, you know, visually, that the boat |
| 1:36.3 | was floating higher than it used to do, and it looked like you're on a snowfield that wide. |
| 1:43.6 | A snowfield with a moonshining on it. |
| 1:46.4 | Talking of amazing visions, there's no doubt the big scientific news this week was the release |
| 1:52.5 | of those first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. First conceived in the 1990s |
| 1:58.4 | to see the heavens in infrared light, launched last December and now |
... |
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