Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 14th of December 2017

I'm Adam Rutherford today the long awaited unveiling of Littlefoot a new species of upright ape, more than 3 million years old, and it's

taken 20 years to excavate and put her on show.

Good things come to those who wait.

And we go beyond the infinite and into the mysterious world of Arthur

C. Clark on his 100th anniversary, scientist, science fiction writer, and profit of technologies

that we now use every day.

But we start with coral, these complex beautiful animals are globally in decline.

They're bellwethers for the changing climates, the warming and acidifying oceans,

and various reefs around the world in recent years have been

subject to severe bleaching, where vast swaths of corals expel algae that live inside them, and in doing

so stifle their main supply of sustenance.

Bleaching events are not always lethal, coral can recover, but they are certainly not a sign of

rude health. The Great Barrier Reef off the Australian coast is one of the best

studied coral masses on earth and underwent two recent consecutive bleaching events which

profoundly limited any potential recovery time. The outlook is not good.

The European Coral Reef Symposium is happening this week at Oxford University,

a massive gathering of the world's experts to assess the global status of reefs and try to work out what can be done.

I spoke to Morgan Pratchett from James Cook University in Australia and asked him how bad the bleaching

has been in the Great Barrier Reef.

We've had two very severe bleaching events.

One in the summer of 2015-16,

...