The Year in Science

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Hello and seasons greetings, wonderful, curious-minded listeners.

Welcome to a festive edition of Inside Science.

I'm Victoria Gill.

Today we are going to be talking about the science that made 2024 and what a year it was.

From billionaires walking in space to record-breaking heat here on Earth and the meteoric rise of new weight loss drugs.

So, we have an entire buffet of this year's tastiest breakthroughs, so we can relax with a belly full of scientific knowledge and sound very clever at all of our Christmas parties.

And I am joined for our own audio party by the loveliest bunch of nerds that anyone has ever shared a mince pie with.

Here in the Inside Science studio, we have Livby Jackson, who is head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency.

Hi, Livy.

Hi, Merry Christmas.

Oh, Merry Christmas to you.

You don't like mince pies?

I don't like mince pies.

I feel like an imposter here at this the case is not working out for you.

And we have materials scientist Mark Miyadovnik from University College London.

Hello.

Happy winter solstice.

Indeed, indeed.

Happy winter solstice to you.

And we have Penny Sachet, managing editor at The New Scientist.

Helen Penny.

Hi, happy Yule, I guess.

That one's left.

Welcome.

Have you got your science chat ready?

Yes.

Definitely, definitely.

Excellent.

But listeners, we are going to mull, pun intended, over the science of the year.

And what were the the biggest stories, the unsung gems and the most fascinatingly fun.

And there'll be a quiz and some predictions for 2025 too.

So yes, cheers festivals.

Cheers.

Cheers.

We're going to kick off with a quick fire question to warm us all up if the mulled wine isn't doing a good enough job of that.

So if you could each sum up 2024 in science in one word, what word would you use?

I'm going to start with you, Mark.

Noodle-y.

Okay, I'm going to need some more explanation.

Yeah, it's because, you know,

a bowl of noodles is delicious, nourishing, but it wasn't one of those years that was like a Michelin star year for science.

Okay, okay.

Great, but, you know.

Tasty, but you're going to need a sack in an hour.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Penny.

Hot.

It was just a hot year.

We won't know for sure until January, but probably the hottest on record.

Yeah.

And Libby.

Tantalizing.

Oh, okay.

Possibly for similar reasons.

I feel like there's been lots of stories that might say this and might say that and maybe this.

Science is always going to give us a load more questions with everyone that we answer, but it does feel like this year has just been a lot of unanswered questions just out around the corner.

Yeah.

Well, we'll come to some of those unanswered questions.

So we're going to start off with some gifts that you've brought for me.

I'm not expecting you to pull anything out of your Santa Sachs there.

No, but you've brought me your favourite story of the year.

Enthusiastic nods.

This is audio.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Excellent.

I'm going to start with Penny, your story of the year, please.

Well, one that really stuck with me is did you see this study in August I think it was in America where they looked at aging and they found that it comes in these two accelerated bursts so right you know we tend to think of aging as being this sort of slow steady decline into decreptitude but instead when they were looking at all these molecules and microbes they found that actually there are these kind of accelerated fast dramatic bursts one was mid 40s the other was early 60s and I know that sounds kind of depressing but it also raises the the prospect.

I hope anyway, tantalizing, like you say, that potentially if we come up with good drugs or even are sort of better at doing all the things we know we're supposed to do, like exercise and good diet, maybe if we focus on those time periods, that could actually be really useful for you.

It made me feel better because I'm in my mid-40s, and I thought, well, there's a scientific explanation for what's happening.

Libby, picking one was hard, but the one I've gone for is what's happening over on Mars, where the Perseverance rover is busy trundling around collecting rocks that tantalizingly we hope to bring back to Earth one day to study.

Back in July it found some rocks that have leopard spots on them.

Now no one or everyone who knows about this is not getting too far ahead of themselves but we're looking for signs of life.

The big question is is there life on Mars?

And around the spots there are black rings that have got iron and phosphate in them.

It looks like there's water there and everyone's looking oh these are really really interesting.

Possibly the oldest rocks we've ever seen in the solar system.

Four billion years old.

Yeah, not just the oldest rocks on Mars, the oldest rocks in the solar system.

That we've ever seen.

And so the science there is getting really exciting.

I love the photos it's taking.

It's beautiful.

Because it went up onto the ridge and then it had this, you know, like a human would do.

It's like, I've got to the top and it sends back these kind of panoramics.

And you're like, I mean, it's brilliant because, I mean, space exploration is going to be by robots.

We're so kidding ourselves.

We're going to live on Mars,

aren't we?

And we can make these robots our eyes.

They can be how we see the universe.

And it's just exciting.

It's extremely.

And it feels sci-fi.

It really does.

I mean, that is a very big, thrilling moment of the year.

Yeah.

Speaking of thrilling moments of the year, what was your top story of the year, Mark?

Well, my story is from the bottom of the ocean, which is in a way another sort of bit of the unexplored universe.

And what I found so incredible about this is that there are nodules at the bottom of the ocean.

We've known about them since the 60s.

And they seem,

you might think they're kind of bits of meteorite that have gathered there, but they're not.

They accrete over time, over thousands of of years.

And they're very high in things like lithium and cobalt and manganese.

And so there's been these big push to kind of mine the sea floor.

And then this group said, hold on a minute, we've been looking at these nodules and they seem to be off-gassing oxygen.

And this is like, if it's true,

and that's what I like about this story in a way, because it's now loads of people trying to check it out.

I've got alternative theories.

And it may not turn out to be true, but if it is true, and we'll know next year probably,

it's massive.

If there's oxygen down there, there, it kind of completely changes what we think life on the ocean floor is like in the deep sea.

And so, of course, people were immediately saying, We have to stop mining, we mustn't do it before we understand.

So, then, of course, the mining industry wasn't

so keen on that.

And we know less about the bottom of the ocean than we do about space.

It's the crested newt of the sea floor, isn't it?

Like, it will stop all development because is it crested newts that stop development?

I can't remember.

Or bats.

There's the bats of the seafloor.

Everything stops.

You must not touch them.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

Brilliant choices, all of you.

They're such great talking points.

Now, are you feeling competitive, festively competitive?

I want to try the buzzers.

I'm not good at quizzes, but I love buzzers.

So, you each have a buzzer in front of you, and that's for our Quickfire quiz of the year in Science News.

I'm going to ask each of you to test your buzzer in turn, actually, so we know which sound is for whom.

So, Penny?

I'm at the door.

Libby?

Oi, oi, oi, oi, oi.

Oiks.

And Mark?

Okay, are you ready?

Right, fingers on the buzzers.

In January, Elon Musk's startup Neuralink implanted the first microchip into the human brain.

What activity did the recipient say it helped them to do again?

Mark?

Grab a drink.

No, it was play online chess.

Online pong.

This was a patient who was paralyzed from the shoulders down, and the Neuralink implant apparently allowed this person to engage in online chess again.

Question number two, fingers on buzzes.

What did NASA report that the James Webb Space Telescope had discovered in May?

The most distant what?

Oi, oi, oi, oi oi.

Libby?

Galaxy.

Correct!

I was staring hard at you for that one, Libby.

It's discovered so many amazing things over the last year.

Which of all the fabulous discoveries is the right one?

Okay, question number number three.

Moving swiftly on, fingers on buzzes.

In September, scientists revealed a mega tsunami in Greenland.

Do you remember this story that shook the earth for nine days?

This was actually one of my favourite stories of the year, I've got to admit.

How big was this tsunami?

Libby, again?

200 million.

It was during the meeting!

That's a good question.

Storming away, Libby.

Our final question, and we're right back here on Earth in the lab.

What did a bunch of scientists very recently warn could pose an unprecedented risk to life on Earth, Penny?

Mirror life.

So this is life with an opposite chirality of its DNA and proteins.

Absolutely.

Bonus point if you can explain.

All of life shares the same sort of handedness.

So if you think about your left and your right hand.

Our genetic code is all one sort of twisted one way and all of our proteins are the other.

But now there's kind of there's been a body of research looking at, well, can we make it work the other way?

And that's sort of born of curiosity science, I think, and just trying to understand how life came to be the way that it is.

And also, can we do some cool stuff with it?

But now, actually, researchers are starting to get really concerned that, like, it could run amok.

Our immune systems wouldn't recognise it.

Our enzymes couldn't break it down.

If something like this ever could escape the lab, you know, as a fully functioning organism, I don't know what we do about it.

So, yeah, there's been quite a fuss.

Yeah, so just put pause on that.

Yeah,

and that's what they're calling for.

Like, let's kind of really not do this kind of thing.

Consider this.

Yeah.

Okay, well, thank you, all of you.

And I think the winner was probably libby but i think it might have been skewed to space that that was an unfair advantage really i think i definitely lost i think it might have been a tie because you got a bonus point you all have to give your mince pies to libby now

who doesn't like mince pies

now let's talk about the biggest science of the year the story that you thought was most significant libby can i start with you penny's already trailed this a little bit for me what we're all talking about is climate change um this year we think it's very likely we haven't quite got there yet, but it seems really likely that it will be the first year where we breach the one and a half degree increase above pre industrial levels that was agreed as a preferential target back in Paris at the 2015 COP.

So that to me,

that's not good news.

But when I looked at all the climate stories and I am not a climate scientist overall, I sort of was pleased to see that it feels like maybe,

maybe there might be some

glimmers of progress, hope

something like that.

In that, as well as breaching one and a half degrees C, there are some people who are saying maybe 2024 is the year that we're going to peak with our CO2 emissions.

That's not the same as all the global emissions that we need.

In the UK, we've put an end to coal use.

Even China, one of the biggest emitters, maybe they're getting close to turning the corner.

At least we're doing something.

Earth is our spaceship, right?

Out in space,

it's really pretty horrible.

There's loads of radiation out past the radiation belts that protect us here.

It's very cold.

So I am always about, let's keep this spaceship going for humans.

Increasingly, people are saying, well, we can't actually think about climate change in isolation.

We have to link it to biodiversity.

And it's getting better, I hope.

This could be how we're starting to start drawing these threads together and thinking about it in the whole and trying not to sound too depressed about climate.

Maybe next year will be better.

That's my hope.

If we get really doom and gloom, it's really easy for everyone to think, well, there's no point.

What am I doing?

And I'm trying to hang on to the bits that all this work that everybody's doing, it's having some.

Every fraction of a degree matters.

And that's really hard now that it looks like we probably have surpassed the 1.5.

Penny, I would like to know your big story of the year, please.

Well, I mean, I concede climate is a very important one, but I was having a little bit of a competition.

Like, first it was, now it's not.

Looking back, I just thought, you know what, 2024 feels like the year of like a Zempic, Uyghur V semaglutide.

And so

these sort of appetite-suppressing drugs had been used, I think, in some form for over a decade for diabetes.

But gradually they've been brought in for weight loss, and that's just become really big this year.

But I think the thing that really caught my and a lot of other people's eyes is all of these unexpected side effects.

So, you know, sometimes there are bad ones, but it's been quite amazing some of the things that have been reported, like potentially boosted fertility,

all kinds of potentially positive effects for some people on depression, anxiety, addiction.

It's almost like unlocking a whole new way to start looking at all of these different conditions in the body.

And so that's been a really interesting sort of trend throughout the years.

Yeah, absolutely fascinating.

It feels like a watch this space.

Yeah.

We are sort of fattest society, aren't we?

We do demonize fat people and I really think that's just so objectionable.

You know, a lot of people that it's actually got nothing to do with it's their metabolism, it's what they were born with, their genetics.

You know, there is a moral judgment, and I find it just, you know,

this kind of drug could really even those scales up, and I think that'd be a great thing.

Well, it sort of suggests that there's kind of brain circuitry for motivation reward, and if you just sort of dial it up and down, it has all of these effects.

And so, where we might where people might have suggested that things like obesity were to do with like greediness or a lack of self-discipline or depression due to laziness, like there's there have been all of these moral judgments,

but actually, it could just be the hormones in your brain.

Yeah, and it's had such an impact on culture as well, hasn't it?

Now, Mark, can I get your biggest breakthrough or some significant story of the year?

Yeah, well, what I think is not a story, it's kind of the rise of citizen science to really address a lot of these things.

I'm really encouraged by the fact that citizen science is coming of age and has done in this year.

And you've seen it, I think, most demonstrably with the kind of pushback about the sewage and the water in the UK.

And the reason that there's a new law being passed because of that, to make the Environmental Agency give them more power so they can insist on the discharges being stopped.

And the reason that law was passed is not because governments had it in their mind, and it's not because the companies had it in their mind, it was because citizens rose up, got the data, and started campaigning.

And that's just the water bit.

That's just the discharge bit.

And it is amazing.

It is really amazing.

And I think this is a change in the way that science is going to be viewed in society as an agency for change, not just

these boffins so-called in universities like maybe myself.

If everyone rises up and changes and demands change, it will happen.

Yeah.

Fantastic stories, all of you.

Thank you so much.

Can I raise a glass to that and can we have another festive change?

Cheers.

Cheers.

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Cheers, everyone.

And you are listening to Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill, with Libby Jackson from the UK Space Agency, materials scientist Mark Miadovnik and Penny Sachet from the New Scientist and we're talking all about a year in science and we'd love to hear from you.

What were your biggest science moments of 2024 and what do you want us to talk about on the show in the coming year?

Please email insidescience at bbc.co.uk with your suggestions.

Now, I've also asked all of you on our lovely nerdy panel to bring us a bit of festive cheer.

The science story that made you smile, that made you chuckle.

And I actually, our wonderful producer, Jerry, has made some crackers that have a little joke in that relates to some of the funny science stories.

So,

Mark, do you want to go first?

Your cracker looks like it's in good shape.

Joke coming out.

Okay.

Oh, AI can detect sarcasm now.

Great.

Nice.

Actually, I think this might have been your story, wasn't it, Mark?

Which is that a bunch of linguists and scientists got together to sort of understand whether you could train AI to detect sarcasm and then respond to it appropriately.

And they trained it on the TV show Friends and on the Big Bang Theory, scientists will be very happy to know.

And

it got sort of 75% of the kind of sarcasm that was tested on.

Yeah, is it a good thing if your computer in the end becomes more like Marvin, the paranoid android?

I think it's inevitable.

I feel like we've heard less about AI this year, about progress in AI, than we have in previous years.

I think the advances this year were just a bit more incremental, not quite the leaps that we saw the year before.

But I was wondering, is it sarcasm that's supposedly the lowest form of humour?

So what comes next?

Is it puns, Christmas crackers, or not?

It might be the jokes in these crackers.

Speaking of, would you like to attempt to pull your cracker with Libby?

Hey!

Perfect, right?

What have I got?

Oh, I think this is probably yours, Libby.

Why did the satellite cross the planet?

To get to the other side.

Indeed, it really did.

And we don't know why.

This was a great story that John Amos brought us.

Oh, friend of the show.

Friend of the show.

One of the UK's first satellites, it was called Skynet 1A.

It launched way back in 1969.

It's a communications satellite.

It was a military communication satellite and it lasted for a few years and it did its thing.

And back then, we didn't care about cleaning up space,

just got left alone.

Everyone was expecting it to be basically where we last left it, high above Africa.

And Orbital Dynamics Physics should have dragged it out to somewhere across India.

It's been found wandering above the Americas.

And no one knows why.

We think it must have been commanded, but there seems to be no record of the commander thruster firings.

And so it's just got there.

People have done research on this.

No one has uncovered how this satellite moved.

That's extraordinary.

It's like a James Bond plot, isn't it?

Evil genius and a volcano to be using it now to beam something down.

Is it planning something bad?

Maybe it has got a life of its own, and Skynet is real after all.

Uh-oh.

We have one cracker left, don't we?

Is that your cracker, maybe?

Okay.

Wave!

Right, what have I got in here?

So, why did the orca whale wear a salmon hat?

Because an ice cap wasn't an option.

I think I know this story.

Is this your story, Penny?

Yeah, this is the recent story about orcas are wearing salmon hats again, which was a trend 40 years ago off the coast, western coast of North America, and was kind of iconic.

It's like, oh, this is a cool thing that we don't know why they're doing.

And then everybody got really excited again to see it recently.

And I love it because you know, like suddenly, wide-leg, high-waisted trousers are back in again for G-Mens.

Salmon Salmon hats are back in for all.

What is it?

So they're literally dead salmon just on their heads.

A whole salmon on their head.

Yeah and we don't know why.

And there's all kinds of theories.

I think the one that made the most sense to me was

like at times of plenty you might just store a snack on your head if there's loads of salmon going.

Do they stay there?

Yes, they swim around.

There's so many questions.

But there are so many questions, but what's really cool is back when this was last trendy in the 80s, they didn't have drones, whereas we have them now.

So now they're all trying to get as much footage as possible.

Maybe we'll know why this is suddenly all the rage again.

I've got to admit, I loved this story.

So funny.

Walker millenery.

Now, science person of the year, we're moving swiftly on to because great science is nothing without great people like your good selves.

Donald Trump was named Times Person of the Year this year.

And I'm going to put each of you on the spot and ask who is your science person of 2024 and why.

Can I start with you, Penny?

Yeah, I wanted to talk about Kelly Wienersmith and also her husband, Zach the the cartoonist because they brought out this book at the end of last year, A City on Mars.

It won the big Royal Society Book Prize this year and it just gave a, I mean Libby, you already said, living in space is horrible, right?

And I think they really sort of have done us a real service to change the narrative about this kind of inevitable, we're going to settle and colonize the moon and Mars

for various reasons and it'll be great.

And they've kind of, Kelly is a biologist.

She's kind of injected that pragmatism about what it would really be like.

It's very funny.

And cartoons as well.

But like, we'd have to live underground.

We'd have to eat insects for lunch.

And I mean, the thing that really sticks with me is we talk about self-sustaining settlements.

How on earth are we going to manage things like conception, pregnancy, childbirth, with all the problems that come with radiation, low gravity, all the rest of it?

Yeah, really good suggestion there.

Mark, who is your science person of the year, please?

Mine is Cordelia Barr, a Swiss woman who works, she's a lawyer actually, and she worked out, again, looking at the data, that hotter temperatures and especially heat waves kill more elderly women than elderly men.

So she took them to court.

She gathered loads of people in Switzerland together.

They took them, took the Swiss government to court and they won, saying that you haven't been doing enough about climate change.

We women are in danger.

Do something.

Made possible by scientific evidence as well.

I know it's all about the data.

And Libby, your person of the year.

Yes, there's so many, but I thought I'd go outside space.

And actually actually the person I picked is Carlos Monteiro from Sao Paulo.

And he was the person, it was way back in 2010, but he was the person who coined ultra-processed food.

And it feels like to me in 2024 that that as a topic has had a lot more airtime, a lot more debate, and people are starting to look more closely at things we eat that perhaps shouldn't be called food and are just industrially produced edible things and what that is doing to our microbiome, to our bodies.

It's amazing how these themes kind of come through in the science of 2024.

And while you've been singing the praise of scientific heroes, I want to talk about unsung heroes, the science stories that you think should have got way more headlines than they actually did.

So, Penny, can I start with you?

Oh, well, now, this is a really trivial story.

I just really like it, so I'm going to talk about it.

This is your platform.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.

This was a study in Japan about some really polite birds.

They were looking at Japanese tits, which are very like blue tits or great tits that we have in the UK.

And they found that

if a male and a female return to the nest at the same time, quite often the female will sort of flap her wings in a certain way to say, after you, which is really charming.

And I loved it.

We think that in humans, language began with gestures.

So it starts kind of thinking, oh, right, okay, so what is going on with birds and what even is communication?

How does it arise?

Absolutely fascinating.

Yeah, yeah, great story.

And yeah, the politeness, just so charming.

Libby, your unsung heroic story of 2024.

Oh, this was one that really captured my attention.

And I thought, why is not everybody talking about this?

As an example of the great coincidences in science, which might just lead to amazing things for all of us.

And it was going back to Professor Richard Scolier, who

was diagnosed with cancer.

The cancer that he was diagnosed with was a brain tumor.

And he teamed up with his colleague, Georgia Long, to take what they'd been doing with melanoma treatment using immunotherapy and they tried it out on his brain cancer.

Nearly two years later, he's fine.

That's fine.

He's

alive.

And nobody would ever have given permission for that research to happen.

It had to be that weird set of coincidence of events.

It's great that he's still alive and he's enjoying, of course, time with his family.

And he's the first to say, I'm not cured yet.

But again, how tantalizing is that for possible future cancer treatments?

It was a fantastic story.

I loved it.

Yeah, that's a really inspiring story.

It sort of reminds me, did you see a few months ago there was a woman who I think scanned her brain, her own brain, 75 times as she went on the pill, hormonal contraception.

So she studies this, she just thought, I'm gonna do my and so again, it's almost like citizen science, but scientists experimenting on themselves.

But that that offered sort of unprecedented insight into what happens when women...

What did she find?

I didn't know that story.

So I think she saw some sort of shrinking of certain areas.

But shrinking doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, it could mean remodelling, so we don't really know what it means.

But for a long time, women have been saying we think there is the side effects of the person, and we don't really know what's happening with the brain.

To see scientists actually take it into our own hands was quite exciting.

Yeah, and Mark, your unsung story of the year, yeah.

Well, this is a story, a study by some linguists who studied politicians and what they say and the language they use,

and they correlated it with lots of different variables, but one of them was temperature, and they found that when it was hot, they used simpler language.

And this goes across all countries.

It could actually be very significant, couldn't it?

And I think we all sort of appreciate that.

As it gets hotter, it does seem that it's harder to think.

As our MPs, I think aren't they due to overhaul and refurbish the House of Commons.

Does it need to be hotter or colder?

Well, if you want longer speeches, more eloquent, then you need to air conditioning, which I think they are planning, but they can't afford.

Well, it's getting slightly warmer in this studio as well as we sit here with our mulled wine and mince pies.

So we're going to bring our science party to a close fairly soon, but I want to get some predictions from you guys.

Penny, what's your big prediction for 2025?

Going back to the word tantalizing again, I just thought this year was a really interesting year for Alzheimer's research and drugs.

You know, we've got drugs now that are the first to slow the progression of the disease and not just alleviate symptoms.

But there's some really cool research going on like into potentially say vaccines where you make your own antibodies and then they would hopefully be even more effective.

It's clear that those drugs are going to be making huge waves.

They have already.

So it's going to be a real space to watch, I think.

Mark?

Well, I am really looking forward next year to alien life being discovered.

And I'd say this because I want to have predicted it.

Because it's going to happen soon.

It's going to happen soon.

Absolutely.

It's going to happen soon.

Like we keep, the techniques just keep getting better and better.

And what we're looking for gets more specific in terms of gas composition on distant planets.

So it's going to happen.

And I think it might happen.

And the day it happens, everything will change.

We will go from be, as far as we know, the only life form in the universe to not the only life form.

And that will only happen once in our evolution as a species.

And it's going to happen next year.

So every time you come on inside science, you're going to predict

alien life.

Let me move to our space expert and ask you for your big prediction for next year.

Well, I will say that all of that will happen absolutely because of the missions we've got out in space, which are hunting for exoplanets looking at their atmospheres.

We've got the Roslyn Franklin rover which is going to go and drill for under the surface of Mars looking for signs of life.

It's coming.

But in general, I think we will be talking a lot more about space next year.

The Artemis program, NASA's programme to return humans to the moon, that is

happening and in development.

I really think that with Trump coming back to the White House next year, we'll see a push to get that human landing before he leaves.

He was the person who set up that Artemis programme.

Lots and lots to look forward to.

You heard it all here first.

But on that note, we are actually out of time for our science Christmas party.

Thank you so much for joining us, all of you.

Mark Miadovnik, Livby Jackson, Penny Sasha.

You have been wonderful, very festive guests.

And the marvellous Marnie Chesterton has a real feast for you all over the coming festive period with shows on the science of board games and the science of laughter.

I will be back in 2025.

And until then, I wish wish you all a very happy Christmas and a happy new year.

Cheers!

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

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

Technical production was by Steve Greenwood.

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.

I will be back in 2025, and until then, wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a Happy New Year.

year.

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