The Hello, Dominic. Hello, and this week why malaria is giving mosquitoes the monkeys, the chemicals which are putting

seabirds at risk, and how being selfish may have triggered the farming revolution. Plus we put meteorologists under pressure in our quest to find out how the weather is

forecasted.

If you'd like to get in touch with us here at the naked scientists, email Chris at the naked scientist.com,

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And joining Dominic and me to take a look at this week's top science news stories is Victoria Gill, who's a BBC science reporter. Hello,

But before we come to your story, Water, and scientists this week have announced they have found the oldest

samples of water on Earth. This is a water sample which is 2.64 billion years old.

Now where have they found this? Well it's down a copper and zinc mine

three kilometers down underneath the town of Timmons, Canada and this water was

collected very carefully so that there was no chance of it being

contaminated by air from the outside world and this group who have done this work which

is led by Chris Ballantyne who is a geochemist at the University of Manchester

have analysed the water, and in particular they have looked

at chemical isotopes, in other words, different forms of the same chemical, which can tell us what something's history is in terms of its contact

with the outside world.

And the picture this paints for us is of water which has been trapped underground for at

least one and a half billion years, if not two and a half

billion years. How did they date it that far back? What exactly are they looking for as

a signature of that age? Well you can look at different forms in this case they've looked

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