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Hi, Benjamin from the Nature podcast here.

Something a little bit different this week.

We are going to take a bit of a dive into some of the stories that have appeared in the nature briefing over the past few days and weeks.

And joining me to do so in this episode of the podcast are Noah Baker. Noah, how you doing?

I'm very well. Thank you. Happy New Year to you all. Happy New Year indeed. And the one and only Flora Graham, who is of course editor of the Nature Briefing. Flora, how are you doing? I am great. Happy

New Year. Great to be here. Fantastic. Well, listen, we're going to talk about a few stories, as I say, that have been covered in the briefing. Noah, would you like to go first

this week? What have you got to talk about? Sure. So we've talked about this a few times before on the

podcast, but it's continuing to develop and it's exciting, and that is the James Webb Space

Telescope, which was launched on Christmas Day. Yes, I must confess I was refreshing the news feeds

on Christmas Day while trying to sort of

simultaneously cook three different dishes to see whether it successfully launched. Because of course,

I think everyone was biting their fingernails a little bit. Yeah, this is a project that has been

plagued by endless delays. And I couldn't work out whether or not it was just a coincidence

or some kind of big PR move that they ended up launching it on Christmas Day itself. But it was very exciting. And anyway, it has now launched. This is the

biggest and most sophisticated space telescope ever. It's Hubble successor. And after the launch,

which was exciting in and of itself, there's been many, many days of kind of very tense,

unfurling and releasing that's happened

...