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BBC Inside Science

Shaun The Sheep Jumps Over The Moon, Bronze Age Kissing and PPE Rubbish

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.51.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

ESA announce that Shaun The Sheep will fly around the moon this month aboard Artemis-1 mission. Philippe Deloo tells Gaia Vince what's in store for the woolly astronaut this month. Philippe is the team lead on the European Service Module, the part of NASA's Orion spacecraft which will be the workhorse of the new moon missions, ferrying four astronauts at a time to the moon and perhaps even beyond one day. This first Artemis mission, slated for launch 29th August, will check all the engineering bravado of the new launch and orbital systems ready for subsequent human passengers in a couple of years. Christiana Scheib, of the Universities of Cambridge and Tartu, is part of a team who seem to have pinpointed in time the moment the Herpes virus that causes cold sores first spread across human populations. By obtaining genomes of HSV1 from four individuals who died between the iron age and medieval times, their analysis suggests an initial emergence sometime in the Bronze age. The intriguing hypothesis that accompanies the discovery is that the variant's emergence was facilitated by a new trend among bronze age folk of romantic kissing. But as she describes, it's hard to be certain for "there is no gene for kissing". One way of restricting the spread of many viruses is of course various forms of PPE. The last few years have seen billions more items of PPE used on our planet, often without a clear plan for their disposal, and they get accidentally dropped and even deliberately dumped all over the world. Alex Bond of the Natural History Museum at Tring observes and catalogues rubbish affecting wildlife. He took the BBC's Victoria Gill on a walk down a canal in Salford to discuss the issues with the tissues. Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield

Transcript

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0:00.0

Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich?

0:05.5

Our podcast Good Bad Billionaire takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly how they made their money.

0:11.9

And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy.

0:15.5

So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad guy as she claims,

0:19.2

or what Jeff Bezos really did to become the first person in history to pocket a hundred billion dollars,

0:24.6

listen to Good Bad Billionaire with me, Simon Jack, and me, Zingsing.

0:28.5

Listen on BBC Sounds.

0:32.4

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

0:35.9

Hello, you're listening to BBC Inside Science,

0:39.6

first broadcast on the 4th of August 2022.

0:43.2

We're travelling back in time to the Bronze Age this week

0:46.9

to the emergence of new societies, new behaviours, and new diseases.

0:53.4

Could the origins of our cold sores be linked to a new fashion

0:57.8

for romantic kissing?

1:00.5

And the Covid pandemic has produced an environmental scourge,

1:04.7

a plastic pandemic as face masks and other PPE ends up polluting ecosystems.

1:10.8

We'll take a look at the global problem from one canal system.

1:15.1

But first, huge news from the European Space Agency

1:19.2

as the first astronaut aboard the Artemis space mission to the Moon

1:23.5

is named as Shaun the Sheep, an astronaut for all lamb kind,

1:28.7

and he'll be travelling with three NASA mannequins or other municons.

1:33.6

The launch of Artemis-1's Orion rocket is slated for the end of this month,

...

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