What science is the UK government funding?

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello and welcome, delightful, curious-minded people, to the BBC Inside Science Podcast, a program that was first broadcast on the 12th of June, 2025.

I'm Victoria Gill.

Today, we're bringing you the latest from the UN Ocean Summit in Nice, where just a few more countries' signatures are needed to bring into effect a treaty that would protect international waters.

And we'll be carrying out an audio examination of an ancient fossil of a dragon prince, a dinosaur discovery that could transform our understanding of the mighty tyrannosaurs.

And Caroline Steele is here to bring us the scientific discoveries you might have missed this week, but definitely need to know.

Hello, Caroline.

Hello.

How are you doing?

I'm good, thank you.

What do you have for us this week?

So I've got a new theory about the formation of Mystery Planet 9, a pen which could diagnose Parkinson's, and the result of a study which has looked into who is more attractive, men or women.

An eclectic mix as always.

We will be back with you in a bit.

Now though, how do we fund scientific advances that we don't yet know are possible?

Well, in the spending review yesterday, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced plans for record spending on R ⁇ D, or research and development.

More than £22 billion a year by 2030.

It's been described as a boost for science, but it's actually pretty much in line with projected inflation.

The Chancellor also earmarked £2 billion to boost artificial intelligence research and up to £750 million for a supercomputer at Edinburgh University.

So, what other research will the government fund with this money?

And does that figure make the UK a leader when it comes to investing in science?

Here to shed some light is Robin Bisson, the UK News Editor for Research Professional News, and Alicia Grated, Executive Director at the charity Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK.

Hello, both of you.

Hi, Vic, great to be here.

Hi, Victoria, it's lovely to be here.

Alicia, can I start with you?

There's a lot that is paid for within that 22 billion a year.

That's correct.

The fundamental research, the discovery-led research, is really important, but also the applied and the creation of companies, the innovation.

I think some of your listeners will already know that Peter Kyle, who's the Secretary of State, he's been super interested in artificial intelligence and technology, and we saw some really exciting announcements around that.

One of those was the supercomputer that you mentioned at Edinburgh.

This type of large-scale computing facility is a really critical tool for research right across the UK and covering the remit from climate change, health, energy, all sorts of big challenges that are facing our community.

And Robin, presumably, the government's idea is that it wants to fund science that will in turn drive economic growth.

That's really why it's quite a good settlement for the research sector but some of the detail within that is quite interesting about where the money is being directed and it is clearly towards some of the government's priorities.

What are those priorities?

I won't go through all of them but they include advanced manufacturing, clean energy,

AI, creative industries and there was some detail in the spending review about those.

Advanced manufacturing for instance, that's going to get 3 billion billion, which is, you know, that's a big number.

AI is going to get 2 billion.

You know, are there winners and losers there?

Are we driving investment in certain areas at the expense of others, Robin?

It's kind of difficult to say at this point because there's still a lot of detail to kind of be hammered out, and that'll happen over weeks and months to come, to be honest.

But I think we can have some idea about how it might play out, partly because we've already got the budget for this current financial year.

That was decided last autumn.

Budgets are pretty tight at the moment.

There are some areas where cuts are already kind of having to be made.

One example that we've reported on quite a bit is what's happening at the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

So that supports both these big national physics facilities, things like the UK's particle accelerator and laser sources, but it also supports the UK's astronomy community and gives the kind of basic university grants for astronomy and space science.

And some of those grant schemes have been delayed or even suspended this year just because the money is really tight there.

Plus, also, those big facilities, they're very energy hungry, as you might imagine.

Energy prices have gone up a lot, and so

there's also a bit of pressure on how they can run as well this year.

And it looks like that's probably going to continue into next year.

I just think it's a really important question and point that you've raised because that underpinning research does feed into those big breakthroughs breakthroughs and those big impacts and that the example that's always given is around COVID vaccines so we must never forget that discovery-led research.

Just finally can I ask each of you quickly you know based on the decisions that have been made in this spending review what science stories do you think that the government would like a programme like this to be talking about in the next five or ten years?

It's a great question.

We would like to have highly innovative UK companies that have grown in the UK that are in the UK, rather than going overseas and have made an impact on our economy and society.

And in the spending review, there was an investment announced into the British Business Bank that should be helping with that.

And then I think the other ones around

the government and all of us wanting to see really ambitious scientific breakthroughs.

And in the spending review, the government announced an investment into something called ARIA.

That's the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency.

And their remit is all about funding R ⁇ D breakthroughs, really big breakthroughs that are super risky and creative.

Great.

And Robin?

Yeah, I mean, I just agree with everything that Alicia said.

We have this incredibly strong science base and, you know, world-leading universities.

But then often the companies that spin out from the research that happens here don't stay in the UK.

They have to go to the US or

find money from elsewhere.

I think if you'd look to the US, you'd find a lot more household names of kind of science-based companies.

And even some that are in the UK, like

Google DeepMind, which is a

really significant AI company, it's owned by Google and they're an American company.

Well, thank you, both of you.

Robin Bisson and Alicia Grated, thank you so much for being on Inside Science.

Thank you so much.

Now, how do we come to a global consensus on protecting the world's oceans?

Last week, Inside Science was in Nice for the One Ocean Science Congress, where marine scientists from around the world gathered to present their latest research.

This week, it's the turn of the policymakers at the UN Oceans Conference.

One major aim is to get enough countries to sign up to the so-called High Seas Treaty, an agreement that could protect marine biodiversity in international waters.

BBC climate and science correspondent Esme Stalard is at the conference in Nice and sent us this voice note.

So we're coming to the end of what has been a very hectic week here at the UN Oceans Conference.

Lots of topics on the table.

I've stepped out, I'm on the harbor side.

What we're hearing is that 50 countries have now ratified.

That's not quite the 60 needed for it to come into force, but the French and Costa Rican presidency are saying they've got promises from 10 more countries that they will ratify by the end of the year.

That includes the UK.

So that means by as early as 2026, the High Seas Treaty will come into force.

Now, I say as early because this is actually lightning speed for a UN agreement.

Typically they take five to ten years and I think actually delegates I've been speaking to of all persuasions from civil society through to governments have said they've been really impressed by the French and Costa Rican governments.

You know coming into this we only had 27 countries that are ratified so that's only doubled over the last few days.

I think there was real concern before this week that whether multilateralism was working.

A number of negotiations last year on plastics, biodiversity broke down.

But I think what people are saying is that because of the election of Donald Trump and his quite anti-climate agenda, not overly supportive of international environmental negotiations, that actually has galvanised countries to work together on this issue.

Thank you, Esme.

And if you heard our programme from Nice last week on BBC Sounds, now if you missed it, you'll know that the impact of bottom trawling on marine life was high on the agenda.

And off the Sussex coast right now, there's a pilot project that's restricted trawling.

And as a result, underwater forests of kelp that used to be common around our shores are re-growing.

Scientists hope that these beds of giant seaweed could help lock away planet warming carbon.

Grea Jackson, host of the BBC's Climate Question podcast, has been for a scientific swim in the English channel to find out more.

We're just sitting over some rocks at the moment on a boat.

So if we jump off the boat now, what will we be seeing beneath the waves?

Well we could see some some cat sharks, we could see some ray, we'll definitely see some wrasse, and we might see some bass and possibly some bream in this area.

And presumably, kelp.

Most importantly, definitely, we'll see some kelp.

Yeah, we'll see.

All right, what's the temperature today, do you know?

I think it's going to be about 14 degrees centigrade, so not that warm, but we should be okay and wet.

We've got a wetsuit already on, yeah.

So I'm prepared.

Shall we go?

Yeah, ready.

What was really astounding is that there are so many different varieties of kelp and seaweed down there all clinging to the rocks.

It's red, it's orange, it's green, it's like browny yellow in colour.

And they're all different shapes as well.

So what I wasn't anticipating, I was expecting sort of wavy fronds.

and actually, there were like lots of little fingers waving at me below.

Ray really bravely swam to the bottom to show me.

I just stuck to the surface.

What was the kelp that you were pointing out?

Is that the brown kelp you were talking about?

Yeah, that was a Laminaria digitata, which is the most common kind of kelp species that we've got in this particular patch of Sussex, as well as some sea oak and then loads of fish, obviously.

The UK is exceptionally blessed in its species of seaweeds, and this is a great location to see that.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to remove some carbon dioxide to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

So, why can't we go totally carbon-free?

Here's Dr.

Steve Smith, the Arnold Associate Professor of Greenhouse Gas Removal at Oxford University.

There are lots of sectors where we can completely decarbonise go carbon free, but we might not be perfectly successful even if we know how to do that.

And there are some sectors where it looks like it's going to be very hard to get all the way down to zero.

And for context, how much carbon dioxide do we need to pull out of the sky to avoid the worst effects of climate change and to meet our climate goals of 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times?

So we don't know for sure, but there are scientific research groups that try and model this, and they produce these scenarios, kind of what-if futures.

And several hundred of these have been looked at.

And they tend to show that if we were serious about staying close to one and a half degrees, well below two degrees, that might involve scaling up carbon dioxide removal anything from several hundred million tons per year to maybe even 10 billion tonnes per year by 2050.

For context, Steve says that the world emits around 40 billion tons of CO2 per year and growing greenery is just one way to remove it.

Back at the marina, I asked Ray how kelp actually stores carbon because with trees the leaves draw in carbon dioxide and convert it into food, which they use to grow more leaves as well as bark and roots.

When the tree dies, the carbon in the roots remains in the soil.

But kelp?

It just clings to the rocks.

There are no roots in the marine sediment itself.

So how does kelp store carbon?

It's got something that they call a holdfast and imagine that as a load of fingers gripping onto the rock and holding that in place.

but it's not transporting material into the adjacent substrate.

What it's doing is it's essentially locking away in the hold fast, in the stipend and in the blade of the algae itself.

So what can happen is that some of that can be exported into deeper water environments where you've got soft substrates and where you've got an anoxic environment, anoxic meaning there's no oxygen in the system, it can actually be stored and not broken down by bacteria for extremely long time periods.

And so, your research is really about trying to work out how much carbon is being stored by the kelp.

How are you doing that?

We're actually diving down into these deeper water areas, taking soil cores and then bringing them back into our labs to analyse to identify how much carbon is in there and where is this carbon actually from.

Ray is basically playing detective, diving up to 70 meters in the middle of the channel, taking cores and measuring the amount of carbon in the marine soil.

He's looking for clues that it was kelp that put the carbon there, traces of environmental DNA and other telltale fingerprints.

And what's the data showing you?

In some areas, we've got a lot more carbon, some areas we've got a lot less.

So it's really quite a patchwork at the moment, and we're in the initial stages of finding out what are the drivers of this carbon deposition over time.

Ray estimates this kelp forest is sequestering the equivalent of around 3,230 cars per year.

This may not sound like much, but kelp covers a quarter of the world's coastlines and experts say kelp can grow incredibly fast too, sometimes just under half a meter a day.

I was amazed to read a paper in Nature Geoscience that estimated that seaweeds around the world sequester 173 million tonnes of carbon per year.

That's more than what the Philippines emitted in 2023.

But seaweed does a lot more than fight climate change.

It dampens wave energy.

So essentially we're reducing erosion rates in certain parts of our coast.

Another one is that it will purify water.

They support a wide range of commercially important fish species.

So then we're thinking about the things that we eat.

So that's really, really important from an ecosystem service perspective.

You can eat it as well.

Have you eaten it?

I have eaten kelp cookies and someone has given me some kelp gin as well.

So I can say that both the kelp cookies and the kelp gin were quite nice.

And you can catch Grea Jackson and the Climate Question podcast every week.

Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe to BBC Inside Science too.

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Now, though, what is more than 80 million years old, about the size of a horse, and has rewritten the evolutionary story of possibly the most famous dinosaur in pre-history, the T-Rex.

I'm talking about a new species of dinosaur that's now believed to be the closest ancestor of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus.

It was uncovered in the collection of a museum in Mongolia, and I've been speaking to the person who made that discovery, PhD student Jared Voris, along with Professor Dala Zelenitski, who are both paleontologists from the University of Calgary.

I started by asking Jared, what made him suspicious that this could be a new species?

When I was in Mongolia, I was actually looking at a bunch of other trinosaur fossils, things like Tarbosaurus and Alleoramus.

And in doing that, one of the Trinosaur fossils that I began to look at was this old trinosaur that had been described back in like the 1970s.

And what was interesting about it is that once I started looking at this thing and you know looking at the features and what made it different, I started to recognize that it was something that we didn't have any record of in the entire Tyrannosaur fossil record.

It actually had features that we don't see in some of our large apex predatory tyrannosaurs and showed us that it was actually this kind of ancestral type Tyrannosauid that basically had preceded when these Tyrannosaur animals had actually gotten to be those giant apex predators.

And Darla, when Jared flagged his conclusions to you, what was your reaction?

So obviously I was really excited, you know, a student thinking that they found a new dinosaur species.

But at the same time, I'm very cautious.

So, you know, I wanted him to take his time and make sure he was comparing it to other species and ensure that it was indeed a new species.

And so what sort of gap

are you trying to kind of fill?

Where are we missing a piece in the puzzle in terms of tyrannosoid evolution and the ancestors of the big tyrannosaurus like T-Rex that, you know, were really famous?

This new species, conculu, turned out to be the immediate ancestor of Tyrannosaurus.

So when I say tyrannosaurs, I mean the large meat-eating dinosaurs that had walked on two legs, had puny arms and massive skulls.

So what Conculu

ended up being was it was this kind of missing link between smaller and earlier tyrannosaurid species and these large apex predatory tyrannosaurs like Halbertosaurus and T-rex.

And Jared, talk about that name, Konkulu.

What does that mean?

Where does it come from?

So, with this being the ancestors to Tyrannosaurus themselves, and Tyrannosaurus being generally regarded as these kind of kings or this almost royalty kind of dinosaurs, like Tranosaurus Rex means the tyrant, lizard, king, we wanted to convey something that was like preceding to a kingship, right?

So we thought that a name that is like a prince, which is what Konku translates as, we thought that would be like kind of a good play on words in a way.

So we named it Konkulu, which literally translates to the dragon prince or the prince of dragons.

And then the species name Mongolian.

So it translates to the dragon prince of Mongolia or the Mongolian dragon prince.

And of course, it was named like in collaboration with our Mongolian colleagues.

They helped us put the name together as to what, you know, sort of sounded best and what roots we could use in the name.

Lovely.

Konkulu, it's got a lovely ring to it.

When in the story of tyrannosaur evolution are we looking at?

How old is this fossil and what picture does it build about the sort of family tree and the evolutionary story of tyrannosaurs?

So this is actually like an early form in the family tree of tyrannosaurus, as it's the ancestor to tyranny.

But in a way it was an important fossil because it gave us

more information of what these ancestral tyrannosaurs looked like and it has cleaned up some of the messiness of the tyrannosaur family tree.

So what we had really started with was the discovery of this new species conculu and we ended up sort of rewriting the family history of tyrannosaurs.

For me the the big significance of this study is that this is kind of start to finish history of tyranny evolution.

So we with conculu, we have kind of the anchor point of where did tyrannosaurs start?

How did they get to be that apex predator?

And then we kind of walk through the patterns of evolution that eventually led to things like T.

rex and Aleoramus and Albertosaurus and talk about: well, we have patterns of dispersal between Asia and North America and what those might mean for how these animals actually evolved and diversified during the last, you know, roughly 20 million years or so of the reign of dinosaurs before the asteroid hit and everything changed.

Thank you very much to Jared Voris and Dala Zelenitsky from the University of Calgary there.

And Caroline Steele is here with me in the studio.

Are you a Tyrannosaur fan, Caroline?

I am indeed.

I actually drank my coffee this morning out of a T-Rex mug.

That's very on-brand.

Now you've brought us a whole array of other stories that we should know about this week.

What do you have for us first?

It's in your wheelhouse of astronomy, I believe.

Yes, so Vic, have you heard of Planet 9?

Well, that's not Pluto, is it?

No, not Pluto.

So it's a ninth planet that may exist out out there in the solar system.

It would be rocky and Earth-like.

It could be 10 times as big as Earth, 800 times further from the Sun, and it would take 20,000 years to complete an orbit.

So like quite a significant planet.

And its existence was proposed back in 2016 by some scientists at Caltech who basically made some observations in the outer solar system and were like, hmm, there's evidence for a large planet there.

But we still haven't found it.

And if it is there, we don't know how it got there.

Because Because the planets that we know to exist, like Earth and Mars and Saturn, formed from a disk of dust and gas that forms around early stars, whereas Planet 9 is so far out that it can't have formed from this disk.

But scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas have just published a paper in Nature Astronomy with a solution.

So, in the early solar system, the giant planets like Neptune and Saturn kind of jostled.

Basically, their gravitational pull interacted with each other and sort of of flung all the giant planets in different directions.

And the research shows that planet 9 could potentially have formed alongside these other giant planets and then have been flung out in this kind of jostling process, which sounds kind of unlikely, was my first reaction when I read it.

But actually these scientists have calculated that the chance of this happening could be as high as 40%.

Huh, so this is basically working out the probability that these processes could have taken place, that that planet was within that disk for formation and then was flung out by this jostling of the large planets during their formation.

Yeah, exactly.

And if planet 9 does exist, scientists are basically saying this is probably how it got there.

But the search to find it still continues.

So you'll bring us more of the search, but Pluto's still not a planet.

Still not a planet, no.

But maybe we've got a bigger, better one even further out.

Better, I'm not sure.

Keep us posted on that one, Caroline.

And what do you have for us next?

So a 3D printed pen could help identify people with Parkinson's disease, according to a small pilot study in Nature Chemical Engineering.

Hmm.

How does this work?

So the pen's tip, an ink, is basically full of tiny little magnetic particles.

And when someone uses the pen, either on a surface or actually in the air, the magnetic properties of the pen change, which makes a small current, which is then recorded.

And the researchers then trained and used AI to analyse the handwriting of 16 people using this pen, three of which have Parkinson's.

And the AI model was able to detect the Parkinson's patients with 96% accuracy.

That's remarkable.

What is it picking up?

What shifts is that is that about the resting tremor,

subtle movement differences?

Exactly.

tremors and subtle movement differences.

And basically you can train AI using data from people that we know to have Parkinson's and people we don't know to have Parkinson's, so that in the future, you could take someone who is unknown, ask them to use the pen, and the AI can predict whether they have Parkinson's or not.

And the sort of the exciting thing about this pen is it's very hard to diagnose Parkinson's using observations alone, although it does happen.

And there are biomarker tests, but they're really expensive and they're not available to everyone.

Whereas this pen is comparatively cheap and maybe could be more objective than sort of humans looking at people and deciding whether or not they have Parkinson's.

So it might be a valuable sort of puzzle piece in the diagnosis process.

Yeah, for something that is relatively difficult to diagnose, isn't it?

That's really interesting.

And for this third story that you have brought us, you have sent me a picture of some sort of model mug shots.

Why am I looking at these, Caroline?

So yeah, I've given you a lineup of model mug shots is a good description.

So there's six people and I'd like you to rank them in terms of attractiveness.

Just sort of a general who do you find more attractive?

Okay, I'm gonna go

all of the female faces possibly more attractive than the male.

So I think number two,

the woman that's number two is probably my most attractive than number four.

Number

six, then number five, then number three, then number one.

Okay, interesting.

So you've sort of broadly put the women towards the top there, which agrees with the results of a new preprint paper, which is called the Gender Attractiveness Gap.

And basically,

the papers found that female faces are regarded as more attractive than male faces to both men and women.

And in fact, women are actually even more likely than men to find female faces more attractive.

Oh, I'm fitting this research well then.

So, what's the reasoning for this?

Why has this research been carried out?

Well, it's kind of interesting that humans sort of regard women as kind of the fairer sex, because if you look at most mammals and birds, it's the males that have the sort of fancy displays to attract the opposite sex, right?

So we've got lion's manes or peacock displays and that kind of thing.

And it's something that biologists have talked about, but until now it hasn't been empirically studied.

So this study is a huge meta-analysis involving 12,000 people who ranked male and female faces.

And both male and female rankers ranked the female faces as more attractive.

And it includes both straight and queer people.

So it's a real huge sort of representation of the population.

And it basically robustly confirms the existence of a gender attractiveness gap.

Interesting.

So, and how did you fare in this test, Caroline?

Did you rank these faces as well?

I did.

And I also ranked the women at the top as well.

All and well in line.

We're just big supporters of women here on Inside Science.

And we are a big supporter of yours, Caroline.

It is always very illuminating chatting to you.

Do come back soon.

Perfect.

Thank you so much for having me on, Vic.

Always a pleasure.

And that, sadly, is all we have time for this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Dan Welsh and Claire Salisbury.

Technical production was by Searle Whitney and Giles Aspen.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

Monnie Chesterton will be in the Inside Science presenting hot seat next week, and I will be back in July.

Until then, thanks for listening.

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