Science in 2025

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Welcome to the podcast of BBC Inside Science first broadcast on the 9th of January, 2025.

I'm Marnie Chesterton.

Hello, and if it isn't a little too late to say it, a very happy new year from Inside Science.

This show is the space for new and breaking science on Radio 4 and in the fresh new days of 2025 I thought it would be fun to look at what to expect from Science World, what science is going to do for us in the coming year.

Now crystal ball gazing isn't easy, so I'm joined here in the studio by a bunch of science watchers to help me out.

We have Tom Whipple, Science Editor of the Times.

Hello.

Freelance science writer and editor Shawnee Bhattacharya.

Hello.

And Penny Sachet, Managing Editor at New Scientist.

Hello.

Welcome everyone.

Before we dive into big themes and small secret science, and we've also got a fingers on buzzers round, I want to check if any of you had New Year's resolutions to share.

Shall we?

I don't usually do resolutions because, well, the evidence is kind of mixed on whether they work or not.

But I have intentions

actually to read more books, but more fiction.

Good idea, Penny.

I'm sort of trying to strengthen my resolve with gardening.

Last year was such a bad year everything got eaten i i can barely bear to plant any more seeds and see them all go but i'm making myself do it

tom i am trying dry january i've done this every other year and i'm not a raging alcoholic but i've always reached sort of the first weekend and me and my wife have thought well actually i'd quite fancy a drink and i'm not sure this is a good thing and now i sort of realize that's probably the point um so i'm lashing myself to the mast of actually doing it this year by saying on national radio that i'm going to to do dry January.

So apparently 75% of us fail on our resolutions and the second Friday of January, which is tomorrow, is sometimes referred to as Quitters Day as so many people will have given up by then.

So if you do, if you are tempted to have a drink Tom, you are in the majority.

Now, Shalny, Penny and Tom, to find out if you are all really ready for the next 12 months, I have a little test for you in the form of a quiz.

You all have a buzzer.

I'm going to make you press them in turn.

Penny, you first.

Hello.

Shelmy.

Okay, Tom.

It's basically fingers on the buzzers for some questions about science in the year to come.

Are you ready?

I'm going to say no, but let's do it anyway.

That's good.

Right, let's start with an easy one.

The annual climate jamboree, COP, turns 30 this year.

In which city?

Bellham in Brazil.

Hey,

I'm keeping score.

That's one for you, Penny.

Is anyone going to go?

No, this is thankfully what we have environment correspondent.

I've been to a few and you sort of lose your faith in everything and you don't see sunlight for a week and you learn a lot of acronyms.

So I'm very happy that the wonderful Adam Vaughan is going to be going in my stead.

Fair enough.

But Brazil.

I mean, yeah.

Question two.

After more than a decade of construction, the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden should begin operations this year.

But what will they be doing at the new facility?

Spallating.

I'm tempted to give you that.

They are, if by spallating you mean smashing protons at almost the speed of light into heavy metal targets to probe the structure of materials.

And that's implicit, yes.

Points to Tom.

So, next question.

Last year, SpaceX broke records with the launches of their Falcon rockets.

How many do they estimate will be launched in 2025?

Everyone gets a guess.

Tom, you go first, you buzzed.

I think

the number 25 comes to me, but Shelmy?

Yeah, I feel.

Oh, I should know this 30.

I'm going to go the other way and say 20.

You're all way off.

It's between 170 and 180 and they've already done two.

Wow.

So Shelmy, you get that for closest.

It doesn't matter.

Next question.

Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is trialling weight loss drug Azempic as a treatment for Alzheimer's with results coming out later this year.

Now the drug has been described as a Swiss army knife.

Can you name two things other than weight loss for which it has

potential, Tom?

Addiction and heart disease.

Yes.

Also, in the, it's been as yet unconfirmed benefits for sleep apnea, kidney disease.

Fascinating.

I mean, this might be a drug that we're all put on.

I mean, it feels

like it's like it's the beginning of some dystopia where we haven't noticed this one flaw in this amazing mono drug.

But of course, we've been using it for 10 years in diabetes.

So we're pretty good on the long-term risks of it.

So, yeah, it

keeps on doing stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

Final question.

Literally nothing to play for here.

This year, we can expect the release of OpenAI's new large language model.

What is it called?

GPT-5?

Yes!

Of course.

I mean, if you'd said that more confidently,

I can announce that the winner is Tom Whipple.

Well done.

There is no budget for prizes, but surely the glory of winning a quiz on Radio 4's, you know.

That's what all of us want.

Okay, you're warmed up now.

It's prediction time.

What big things is science going to serve up in 2025?

Penny.

A bit of a hopeful one this one, but I'd like to boldly boldly suggest that maybe this could be the beginning of the end for organ transplant waiting lists.

We've seen such cool stuff in the past few years about pig organs and getting them ready for, you know, first initial transplants.

I'd love to see a breakthrough this year that sees it actually become more viable.

There's also loads of other really cool stem cell stuff going on.

What kind of cool stuff in stem cells?

Oh, I saw something recently about was it growing lymph nodes in a liver or vice versa?

We're getting really good at understanding how to sort of grow these tissues and organs.

And it was last year, wasn't it, that there was the pig transplant?

Yeah, the kidneys and a heart a year or two before that.

And I think very often these are sort of demonstration projects where they're doing it in people who probably aren't going to live very long anyway.

But I would love to see it start being in people who do actually survive months afterwards and see where it goes from there.

Shalni, what about you?

Yeah, I mean, not so much a breakthrough for this year, but something that could really set the scene for breakthroughs in the future.

So at CERN they're currently doing a feasibility study on a new particle collider called the Future Circular Collider, which will go deeper into the science following on from the LHC.

So they're looking at you know different aspects of whether it's feasible and they're reporting back this year.

So that's important because you know if they build this it will start operating about 2040

and should give us more insights into the early universe.

It's way way bigger isn't it?

You look at the sort of images from above and yeah, I've got some friends who are particle physicists there and they're like, will we do it?

This is almost like they don't want to jinx it.

The Large Hadron Collider's, what, 23

kilometres.

And this is going to be like 100.

And I mean, I guess the big thing is with the Large Hadron Collider, I feel they could sort of guarantee some sort of results.

With this,

they basically don't know.

So it's going to be a tough ask and and it's going to be interesting to see whether the funders really go for it.

We shall see.

It's fascinating.

Tom, moving on, what's your prediction time for the big thing in science?

My prediction for this year is:

I think we're going to finally realise that autonomous cars are with us.

I have been, for the whole time I've been covering science, autonomous cars have been just round the corner.

I remember thinking, you know, years before I had my son, he will never need to learn to drive because clearly this is coming.

And then we've gone through that classic hype cycle.

And I was very much in the slough of despond last year.

I thought, you know, we'll never solve the plastic bag problem.

What happens if a plastic bag goes in front of you?

And then quietly, you notice that there are all of these projects all over the world where it's actually happening.

You know, in Sweden, there's autonomous trucks going about.

There's cities in the US where there are autonomous taxis.

And it feels like almost

without the rasmataz of all of the failed predictions,

we're reaching a point where

this is nearly there, at which point I suspect it'll start to become quite a big thing quite rapidly.

Is that really going to happen this year?

I mean, you said it's already with us.

I don't know,

but you put a metaphorical venture in my head on inside science and said, you've got to come up with something.

And I just think, so I've been talking, you know, I've been writing about this for so long.

And there's all sorts of stuff that it would change.

And obviously, at the moment, it's being done in quite specialist environments.

And it might be that you always have a version of the plastic bag problem.

I heard someone talk about the pogo sticking toddler problem where suddenly this sort of one-legged jumping thing that a human can intuit but a car has never seen.

And the problem is a car will see something a car has never seen on every single trip.

So, you know, it's interesting, but I am going to be, for the purposes at least of this show, hopeful.

Oh, thank you, Tom.

Okay, moving on.

2024 was a big year for space.

But in our festive edition of Inside Science, which you can listen to on BBC Sounds, one of our panellists, Libby Jackson, former head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, said she reckoned this year was going to be even bigger and better.

So, Shalni, can you give us a rundown of what's in store?

I totally agree with Libby.

There's lots and lots happening.

So, I think what Libby mentioned was the Artemis programme, the really big one.

That's the one where NASA's going to put a human on the moon.

Absolutely.

So, I sort of think of it as if you think of of the Apollo programme for the 20th century.

Artemis, could it be like the Apollo programme for this century?

The mission where they put someone on the moon, that's not going to be, that's delayed for a moment.

It's delayed.

So it's a program.

So they had Artemis 1, which was just a

test flight to see whether they could go up back to the moon, and that was successful.

Artemis 2 will take a crew of four, so four humans, into orbit around the moon.

Now that's been delayed because of, I think, heat shield problems actually, on Artemis 1.

So that was going to happen this year.

Now it's been pushed to 2026.

Artemis III is the big one where the intention is to land humans on the moon.

The intention is to have the first woman on the moon and the first person of colour.

But I mean beyond Artemis, I think they're building also a gateway, which is an orbital station in the moon's orbit.

And I think the longer-term intention is to use it as a sort of staging post to go to Mars.

And I think there's something like 12 landers going up to the moon this year with a view to sort of making that.

Other things as well.

There's all sorts of things happening.

The thing that makes me feel positive, it's kind of grubby, but it's the fact that there seems to be money to be made.

If you think about, you know, 1969, it was wonderful.

They went there.

It was this thing for the glory of humanity, but it hasn't happened since.

Whereas they flew in a space that had almost no satellites, but now we've got tens of thousands because they actually have a point.

And I think the point of going to the moon, if I mean, the whole thing is water, obviously.

If we can get the water used as rocket fuel, start refueling satellites, you start getting this economy in space and it starts not requiring the US government to talk about the glory of humanity and going here to, you know, in these noble purposes and actually going in their own shareholder purposes is how we end up having stuff actually happen.

But we do have some sort of noble purpose science.

There's lots of flybys this year.

We should get some amazing views of Mercury, Mars, Venus.

So

if you kind of cringe a bit at the idea of economy on the moon, there's still all the lovely science discovery stuff happening as well.

I mean, I am definitely going to cry when I watch a person landing on the moon.

Even if there's no scientific advancement to be made from that, it just, oh, it really gets you.

Can I bring in the incoming President Trump?

Because I'm just wondering, I mean, he's very pro-putting a person on the moon.

Elon Musk is very excited about space.

Between the two of them, how is that going to steer what happens off this planet?

I mean I think if he can concentrate on the moon he might forget to annex

Greenland, which might be a positive, I don't know.

I think clearly there's a lot of push for it.

I mean I'm a definite Mars sceptic, but in the process of trying to get to Mars I'd imagine a lot of stuff will happen.

And it'll probably happen because of Musk's rockets, which whatever you think about him, are so many times cheaper than the sort of thing that the US government's producing.

I think there's a lot of speculation as well, isn't there?

Because Musk and Trump seem to have this relationship.

What does that mean for the future of NASA versus private?

But it's all speculation at this point.

The thing that I keep thinking is: well, these are two of the most unpredictable people in the world, and what their relationship has in store and what that means is almost anyone's guess at this point.

It's really unpredictable.

You would have thought logically that, yes, it's all going to happen because also Trump, it started under Trump, right?

The Artemis program.

So, logically, you would think, yes, absolutely.

And Musk has got a vested interest.

The lander that will take the humans from the craft to the moon's surface is SpaceX One.

So, you would have thought that Musk has just been put in charge of this cost-cutting department.

And what are they going to cut?

There's lots of speculation, so we shall see.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hosted!

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

You're listening to Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

I'm here with Tom Whipple of The Times, science writer and journalist Shaolini Bhattacharya and Penny Sasha from New Scientist to chew over what might be in store for 2025.

But this is your show, listener, and we'd love to hear from you.

What stories do you want us to cover this year?

You can email us at insidescience at bbc.co.uk and we'll read every one.

We've talked about the big science of the year, but what about the small stuff?

Those happenings in science that fly under the radar but are either really important or just plain cool?

Penny.

I'm really excited that right now there are multiple teams around the world trying to make chemical elements that have never existed before.

And so it's a bit of a race.

It's really hard to do, smashing together things to make really heavy elements.

But hopefully this year we could have element 119 or 120 made for the first time.

And if they do manage that, we'll need a whole new row on the bottom of the periodic table, which I think is delightful.

This is like the old space race, isn't it?

Because

there is a team in Russia doing this, and there's a team in California.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And yeah, it would be lovely to see them both manage.

But I'm hoping at least one does.

How long will they last?

That's the thing, it's always momentary.

It's fractions of a second.

But there is an island of stability.

They're going, as I understand, they're gunning for the island of stability.

Yeah, they might last minutes rather than...

Wouldn't that be nice?

Why don't they last that long?

Do you know?

I think they're very unstable, aren't they?

So they're using californium as the sort of the larger part of it,

and that is very radioactive.

So I think these things are just so unstable that they decay almost instantaneously.

Are they is this just for fun or like you know

it doesn't seem like they're as much in the way of a practical purpose?

I never say never with fundamental sort of foundational science, do you?

But it definitely is fun as well.

Tom, what's your small but cool story?

So my story that I've been following for a while is what the hell are the killer whales up to.

What's generally around the world?

Generally around the world.

I mean last year in your Christmas edition you covered the important news of the salmon hat killer whales that were back putting salmon on their heads.

But there's been this undertow of something perhaps more sinister.

I mean I don't know the salmon might be sinister enough.

The great killer whale revolt they started off a couple of years ago off the coast of Gibraltar.

There were ships that were reporting having their rudders torn off, and that the killer whales would turn up and sort of bite off the rudders and then swim around happily and then go.

This has been continuing.

It is one pod of killer whales.

Confusing, they're all called Gladys.

There's this thing about how they're categorised, and they're the Gladyses.

But to the extent we...

It's like the mods and the rockets, the Gladyses are causing problems in Gibraltar.

There's all these theories.

Is it revenge for getting snared

in a net, or is it actually they've just got this?

I think they're actually just having fun.

This is a trend, they enjoy doing it.

But there's now, there is a Facebook page for people who yacht through the Straits of Gibraltar where people are being urged not only to record attacks, but to record successful passages that haven't been attacked.

Because it is at a stage where, you know, it's slightly old news for us, but this is continuing.

Are they going to spread it to other groups of orcas?

Will the salmon hat ones start molesting boats as well?

And could we end up with this grand orcu uprising?

And I'm torn torn as to whose side I'm on.

Obviously, the BBC doesn't take sides.

I saw Orca off the coast of Japan years ago.

It was really lucky, amazing.

But the women on the boat who was showing us them, she said once a year, hundreds of Orca all gather there.

No one knows why.

And no one knows when it's going to be either.

So there's so much about Orca culture that we don't know, and it's fascinating.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Shallny, what's your important or just plain cool story?

It's quite a sort of big science, but it's little in the sense that I think people don't think about it very much.

But quietly, all over the world, scientists are finding new species every day.

And I'm talking particularly about plants and fungi.

And I've been following some work by Kew Gardens, but actually involves sort of international teams.

And last year, they published a study on what they call biodiversity dark spots.

So these are areas in the world that are, they think, are teeming with life, teeming with biodiversity, but we know very, very little about them.

Things are going extinct almost as quickly as we're finding them.

So I guess if you know what you've got, you can work towards protecting them.

So there's work quietly going on everywhere.

And I mean, I thought it was fascinating.

I interviewed their director of science a while ago, Alexander Antonelli, and he said, apparently scientists discover globally 20 new species of plants a day.

So yeah.

Wow, lots still out there.

Lots still out there.

Moving on, great science needs great people.

And team, I'm going to ask you all to nominate your hero of the year for 2025 when it comes to science.

Penny.

I'm going to be a bit cheeky and go for a whole field of science instead.

Because I think we're going to be hearing so much about quantum this year.

It's the UN year of quantum science and technology.

And that's because it's 100 years really since quantum mechanics began.

And I think a lot of the celebration is going to be about the degree to which quantum technology now

is underneath a lot of the stuff that we use and a lot of innovation.

But what I love is that there's still at the heart of quantum, we don't really understand what it means or what it tells us.

And the fact that there's still this huge mystery and like, what even is this really anyway?

That's sort of my hero of the year.

You pre-empted my next question, which is, what is quantum?

Oh, do you have half an hour?

Well, it's an entire different way of viewing reality beyond Newtonian physics.

That sounds legit, right?

And that's the really smart part.

Yeah,

it's the moving away from what we observe as waves and thinking in terms of packets, literally what a quantum is.

That's how it began.

And we're still trying to understand, we can describe things in a quantum way, and they still, in some respects, bear no relation to what we actually observe.

What I love is they're having, to sort of celebrate the centenary, they're having a big conference on Helgoland because it was where I think Heisenberg

had some of his big ideas.

But it also, no offence to Germans, probably one of the worst places in the world.

It's got almost no trees, it's in the middle of the North Sea, it's very unpleasant.

But now they're trying to organise a conference and get all these big names there.

And I don't think there's enough accommodation.

No one's quite sure how they're going to transport them all there.

And there's going to be a heck of a lot of physicists wondering why they're somewhere quite so windswept.

It does mean

I need all of you to report on this.

I need you to go and report back.

Because this apparently is why Heisenberg went there to escape as a hay fever.

It's so windy that you don't get hay fever there.

And nothing gross.

That sounds delightful, doesn't it?

Wow.

Shelny Battacharia, who do you nominate?

I'm quite taken with the story of the two astronauts, Sonny Williams and I think Butch Wilmore, who have been stuck on the ISS for, I think by the time they leave, it will be nine or ten months, but they went up in June on a Boeing style liner.

They were supposed to be there just over a week.

And they've had their year plan really ruined.

Really ruined, yes.

Are they going to be rescued in 2025?

I think they're going to be rescued.

I think that the latest date I saw sort of late March.

Apparently, it smells, I think.

Yeah, because you know that you can't.

It's not easy to clean, right?

It's not.

Imagine going somewhere for a week and then being there for.

I think that's the bit that really gets.

Every now and then I remember and you think, oh, they're still there, aren't they?

They're still there.

Drinking recycled pee for

nine months.

Yeah, great.

Tom, I need a hero from you, please.

My hero is the healer monster.

It is a lizard from North America.

The thing about this lizard is, like many lizards, it binge eats and then needs to control its digestion.

It turns out in

its venom, it has something which may be responsible for that, but more importantly, it's very similar to something that we use to control our digestion, which became

30 years ago the inspiration for the class of drugs that we call GLP-1 agonists, which are, of course, ozempic and everything else.

Wow.

So the drug of the era

owes its origins to this lizard.

This lizard, yeah.

Okay.

Before you all go, I recently read an article in The Guardian about this amazing character called Professor Archibald Lowe, who, I don't know if you've come across him, who in 1925 made a bunch of amazing predictions for a hundred years in the future, so 2025, many of which are by today's value really on the money.

So he predicted moving stairs and pavements, home loudspeakers for the news, women would be wearing trousers as standard, and we'd be woken each day by personal radio alarms, an idea that horrified papers at the time.

So team, I want you to continue this trend.

I want you to go to 2125

with one realistic and one really out there prediction safe in the knowledge that if you get it wrong, there's absolutely no comeback.

Shawnee, you first.

So realistic, we'll have human settlements off Earth, so maybe in orbit on the Moon or even Mars.

So by 2125, we're going to have human settlements outside of Earth.

So that's your realistic.

That's

good.

I mean,

it's face is accelerating as we've discussed the exploration.

What's your out there?

So I've put, we'll actually have a longevity pill because people have been looking, well, forever for this elixir of life.

And actually, there's a lot of work being done on pills that extend life or medicines that extend life.

I think there's

studies in dogs and pets and various compounds that show perhaps a little bit of life extension.

So you might be around to tell us whether your prediction was.

We could all be back here.

It'd be fabulous.

Just keep iSkate in your diary.

Okay, Sheny, that's you.

Tom, what about you?

I think my realistic prediction for 21-25 is that AI will be able to do everything a human can do better and we will live lives of luxury but unfulfilled ennui and drift around in purposelessness.

Oh God.

And so that's the realistic one, okay.

Have you got an out there one?

My out there one, there's not much more out there from that, is AI effectively destroys us for some reason, and maybe a few of us persist in zoos for robots.

Yay, really looking forward to 21, 25.

Penny Sasha, what about you?

So assuming that we're not in zoos for robots,

I think we'll look back and think how mad it was that 100 years ago we used to like burn things in our home for heat and petrol in our car.

The fact that, you know, obviously we're going to have to stop doing this stuff for net zero anyway.

But also the health implications of combustion in our home burning gas.

It's so primitive and primal.

I think we'll occasionally get the fire out for like a barbecue maybe in 100 years' time.

So that's my realistic one.

More outlandish, I think, I would hope in 100 years' time, if we're not living in a zoo for robots, we might have chips that can just detect if anything goes wrong in our body and let us know, you know, when there's still time to do something about it.

People are already working on this kind of technology for cancer, so something that would scan biomolecules in your blood, say, and pick up like some of these really nasty cancers that you never find out about until it's too late.

So I think that could be, you know, sooner rather than later.

But wouldn't it be cool if it could also tell you if you've got the early stages of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and let you kind of avert these kinds of things?

And maybe, you know,

in combination with your longevity pill that would be pretty awesome.

Okay, so assuming that Shalny's right and the longevity pill works and that Tom is wrong and there isn't some sort of robot apocalypse, can I book you all back here for Inside Science?

London Zoo's nearby.

We'll be living forever.

We'll be broadcasting from London Zoo on the 9th of January 2125.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Penny Sachet of The New Scientist, Tom Whipple of The Times, and Shalni Bhattacharia, science writer and journalist.

Until next week, goodbye.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Jerry Holt, Sophie Ormiston, and Ella Hubber.

Technical production was by Duncan Hannant.

The show was made by BBC Wales and West.

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University.