And the Hello, welcome to the naked scientists with me Katani and also Chris Smith.

This week we're preparing for take-off. We'll be investigating new technology to track where airplanes actually are in the sky.

There's also a new way to see inside a jet engine to monitor when it needs maintenance.

And is air travel spreading

diseases around the earth. Plus the story is making the headlines from the world

of science the technique that could see doctors growing tiny balls of cells from your cancer in a few years time,

why the planet Mercury is a mystery, and from the Beatles to Bjerk.

How has pop music evolved? The Naked Scientists Podcast is powered by UKfast.co.uk. Cancer isn't just one disease. There are hundreds of different types from breast

to brain and prostate to pancreatic. Making matters more complicated, it's also becoming increasingly clear that cancer

is as individual as each patient is, and it needs treating in a much more personalized way.

But how do doctors find out what drugs an individual cancer is most susceptible to and the

likely prognosis?

When our scientists in the Netherlands have developed a way to grow in the lab tiny balls balls, known as organoids, of a patient's cancer,

and these can be used to test treatments before they go anywhere near a patient.

Onya McCarthy, the Science Information Officer at Cancer Research UK, took Kat through the study.

At the moment, the main techniques we use to evaluate how well tumors will respond to drugs

are cell cultures and something that are called

xenographs where they transplant cells from patients into mice and watch how

they grow. And these two techniques are fundamental to all basic science research but they have

their limitations and their flaws. With cell cultures the problem is we don't

necessarily get to see the whole tumor or look at all the different types of cells within the tumor.

So it's a very almost one-dimensional look at what's going on and what's happening in the cancer

...