NASA rover heads for Mars ancient lake
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2020
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
NASA launches its new robotic mission to Mars. The rover, Perseverance, will land in a 50 kilometre wide crater which looks like it was filled by a lake about 4 billion years ago - the time when life on Earth was getting started. Mission scientist Melissa Rice explains why this is one of the most promising places on Mars to continue the search for past life on the red planet.
Japanese and US scientists have revived microbes that have been buried at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for 100 million years. Sampled from compacted mud 70 metres below the seafloor and beneath 6 kilometre of water, Yuki Morono and Steve D'Hondt admit they struggle to understand how the bacteria have survived for so long.
Science in Action celebrates the little unknown oceanographer Marie Tharp who in the late 1950s discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge which helped to launch the plate tectonics revolution in earth sciences. It would be Tharp's 100th birthday this week.
New research this week suggests that coronaviruses capable of infecting humans have been in bats for 40 to 70 years, and that there may be numerous and as yet undetected viruses like the Covid-19 virus in bat populations with the potential to cause future pandemics. Their message is that we should be sampling and testing wild bat colonies much more extensively than currently. Their findings provide further evidence against the unfounded claim that the Covid-19 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Roland Pease talks to Dr Maciej Boni at Pennsylvania State University.
Listener Avalon from Australia wants to know why people use conspiracy theories to explain shocking events. Are we more likely to believe conspiracy theories in times of adversity? What purpose do conspiracy theories serve in society?
Marnie Chesterton speaks to the scientists to explain their popularity, even in the face of seemingly irrefutable evidence.
(Image: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Credit: Illustration provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS)
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. Thanks for downloading the Science Hour from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:35.4 | I'm Roland Pease. We aim to make sure we get everything right, |
| 0:39.0 | but there is a lot of false information out there. Maybe you've sometimes felt like this. |
| 0:44.2 | There were years when I just believed that, you know, there's this shadowy cabal of people |
| 0:49.8 | who are secretly running the government and running business, and it sounded believable to me. |
| 0:57.2 | Well, later in the hour on crowd science, Marnie Chesserton has a user's guide to conspiracy theories, |
| 1:03.2 | and we're dealing with one circulating conspiracy theory before that on science and action, |
| 1:08.3 | that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab in China. Well, the latest |
| 1:13.3 | genetic evidence is it was circulating in the wild with the potential to infect us long before any |
| 1:19.5 | of us were interested in coronaviruses or aware of the danger. The virus did not evolve this ability |
| 1:25.3 | in 2019 and then immediately infect humans. |
| 1:29.1 | What's much more likely is that the virus already had this ability as a trait in the 1960s, the 1970s. |
| 1:36.3 | Lurking undetected for decades. |
| 1:38.7 | Well, that's one thing. |
| 1:40.1 | But what about lurking at the bottom of the ocean for 100 million years? |
| 1:44.2 | Yes, that is so ancient. And it is... But what about lurking at the bottom of the ocean for a hundred million years? |
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