This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service.

I'm Nick Miles and in this edition uploaded on Saturday the 3rd of August,

a new blood test that could revolutionize the diagnosis of Alzheimer's.

It will affect one in five women and one in ten men, and it's a disease which is very difficult to recognize just based on clinical symptoms.

It's hoped it will lead to earlier treatment.

How Platypus Rescue HQ hopes to help the animals have more babies or pugles.

Unfortunately for the poor platypus their population in the wild is in decline.

We also have very few platypuses in zoo settings and they're such an iconic species.

And...

Pretty surreal.

I don't think that a lot of people really grasp how lucky I am.

It's just like what a long shot it was from the beginning.

The 50 year old Olympic skateboard are taking on the teenagers also in this

podcast. Both the emails were strange because they both mentioned we loved your story and it was a very good question for our exam.

How one travel blogger found fame in China and the seagard banned from a shop after a six-year crime spree. We start with a medical discovery which it's hoped could help the millions of people

around the world who develop Alzheimer's disease every year. At the moment it can only be

confirmed by expensive brain scans which can be hard to interpret or a lumber

puncture sticking a needle into a person's spine. But early results suggest a blood

test can diagnose the disease with greater accuracy than scans, and it can detect the onset of Alzheimer's 5 to 10 years before symptoms start or even 20 years for some people with genetic mutations which is crucial given current treatments can only slow the disease not cure it.

Sebastian Pownquist is an associate professor at Lund University and a consultant

neurologist at Scunya University Hospital in Sweden.

He worked on the study led by Oscar Hansen and spoke to the happy pods Holly Gips.

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