Spooky Science

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Speaker 10 Hello, curious-minded listeners. This week's Inside Science comes to you on a dark, dark night in a dark, dark observatory.

Speaker 10 We're bringing you a Halloween special from the glorious, if slightly drizzly, Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. And I am here with resident space watcher and professor of astrophysics, Tim O'Brien.

Speaker 10 Hiya, Tim.

Speaker 7 Hello.

Speaker 10 And the drip-drip that we can hear is actually the noise of rain on the tin roof.

Speaker 7 Exactly.

Speaker 14 It's very, very unusual to have this sort of weather here.

Speaker 10 Yeah, we can't see that much in the sky tonight, but we will get to that.

Speaker 10 In a bit, we are going to be finding out about the celestial origins of Halloween and what you might be able to see in the sky on this particularly dark night, if it's not completely obliterated by rain clouds.

Speaker 10 Also, on today's gruesome programme, Blood Sucking Leeches, The Horror of Pumpkin Waste, and Could Zombies Ever Be Real? No tricks here, just scientific treats.

Speaker 10 Now, Tim, Halloween has its roots in an ancient Celtic tradition that I'm not all that au fa with, but I understand it has some celestial origins too.

Speaker 14 No, I believe so. I think it's

Speaker 14 the Celtic festival.

Speaker 14 I think it might be pronounced Sauhon, that is at the time of Halloween, and it's one of what are called the cross-quarter days, which is sort of you know about equinoxes and solstices.

Speaker 14 Yes, so we had a September equinox, the autumnal equinox, basically when sadly for us the sun sort of passed the equator heading into the southern hemisphere, so it's our winter.

Speaker 14 But basically, between the equinoxes and solstices, you've got these cross-quarter days, and the one that's roughly between the September equinox and the December solstice is this

Speaker 14 ancient Celtic festival of Sowhan, which is now what's become Halloween in modern terms, yeah.

Speaker 10 I guess we get a lot of that association of festivals with their celestial points in time.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, people obviously, in the past, thousands of years ago, would have been very au fait with events in the sky, probably more so than modern people are because of the light pollution we have these days.

Speaker 14 So, yeah, a lot of these sorts of

Speaker 14 timings of events would have been very familiar with people and they assigned various you know traditions and things to them. So, I think that's where you know Halloween came from

Speaker 14 via a Christian sort of tradition of All Souls' Day and All Saints' Day, and eventually Halloween.

Speaker 10 Yeah, are you a Halloween fan?

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah, of course, yeah, particularly, yeah. I mean, I'm a big horror movie fan, so I love the idea of Halloween and all the things associated with it.

Speaker 10 It's a particularly spooky setting in this kind of machinery shed in Georgia Bank, it's good, it's giving us a really good Halloween soundscape.

Speaker 10 Um, now, thank you very much, Tim, and we will be back with you to talk a little bit more about what you might see if you look up tonight and if the weather's a little bit better than it is now.

Speaker 10 But as promised, we're now going to pay a visit to some blood-sucking creatures, leeches, because London Zoo and the Freshwater Habitat Trust are working together to breed these infamous parasitic worms.

Speaker 10 Why, you may ask? Well, producer Ella Hubbert visited London Zoo's leech population to find out.

Speaker 8 First box down for everyone. So this is the oldest bunch.
They're about four months old currently.

Speaker 8 I'm behind the scenes at London Zoo's Tiny Giants exhibit where aquatic species keeper Aaron Harvey has just pulled out a tub full of wriggling baby leeches.

Speaker 8 There we are.

Speaker 16 Wow, this is so great.

Speaker 8 So amazing.

Speaker 16 The last time I saw, well, the parents of these guys was two years ago.

Speaker 8 For me, this is the first time ever seeing a leech at all. But for Dr.

Speaker 8 Naomi Ewold, an ecologist with the Freshwater Habitats Trust, this is the first time seeing the babies of the parents she collected two years ago.

Speaker 16 Oh, they look so beautiful. They've got really distinctive red running stitch down there.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 So in the box we have two small moss hides just for a bit of land for our leeches to kind of wallow in the nice cool damp moss. They actually get out.
Yes.

Speaker 16 Yeah and that's true in the wild as well.

Speaker 8 And what type of leeches are these?

Speaker 16 These are Hirodi medicinalis and this is our native leech and they have jaws inside their mouths which have got three serrated teeth and that's how they feed.

Speaker 8 There's a clue in the name of this species of leech, Hiridomedicinalis. These are medical leeches and they have a long history in the UK.

Speaker 16 It's a fascinating history. In this country and in Europe as well there was sort of a leech craze around the 18th-19th century for using leeches to cure everything.

Speaker 16 So, leeches were collected in their hundreds of thousands, and leech collectors was a profession.

Speaker 16 Unfortunately, obviously, it was the poorest paid job because you'd go and stand for 20 minutes in a pond waiting for them to come and feed on you and then bleed afterwards.

Speaker 16 And it's that bleeding afterwards that makes them such an important use for medicine today.

Speaker 8 They are still used in medicine today, then. This isn't just some strange medieval treatment.

Speaker 16 They are very much still used in medicine today. They sort of became more popular again in the 1970s and 80s when they realised that this saliva actually had multiple benefits.

Speaker 16 So one, the anticoagulant would allow the blood to flow. Secondly, they have a sort of an antihistamine effect.
So it would bring down the swelling and it would stop you feeling when they bit.

Speaker 16 So essentially it would be numb to the pain of them biting. So this is a fantastic remedy, particularly if you're trying to reattach limbs.

Speaker 16 And that's what they're used for in modern medicine: to keep the blood flowing through those newly attached limbs, or fingers, or skin grasps.

Speaker 16 But actually, what's really interesting is the ones used in medicine today are actually not our UK leech, they're a Mediterranean medicinal leech. And our UK leech is incredibly rare.

Speaker 16 And this brings us to why we wanted to partner with London Zoo as part of the recovery programme for them.

Speaker 8 Medical leeches are on the brink of extinction, a decline which began hundreds of years ago and is intimately tied with our use of them.

Speaker 16 Back when they were collected for bloodletting, it probably helped them in some ways.

Speaker 16 Because if you're collecting leeches and you're using them and then you're dumping the adults back into a named pond, you're helping to spread that population around.

Speaker 16 But when that kind of went out of fashion and people stopped collecting them and a lot of them had been exported, that really knocked the numbers back.

Speaker 16 But to just blame collecting is a little bit misleading because, actually, around the same time, there was huge land use change in this country.

Speaker 16 We stopped farming in the way that we used to, we started to drain fields, we lost a lot of our pond habitats where these would naturally have occurred.

Speaker 16 And so, that really started the beginning of the end for them. They're also really a bit of a glorified worm, bless them.
And in modern farming, a lot of animals are treated with worming treatments.

Speaker 16 And when that passes through the system and then into the ponds, that probably knocked them back as well. So, of the 150 ponds where we know they occur, that's really only in four locations.

Speaker 8 So we might have to take a quick break because one is almost crawled completely out of the tub.

Speaker 9 It's absolutely fantastic, isn't it? He's quite right out.

Speaker 16 And I love the way they look around and they're obviously sensing because they're so sensitive to movement, chemical receptors and heat. And I imagine it's your body

Speaker 8 that you're actually heading towards, which is really cool. The way they move is incredible.
Yeah, it's kind of like dancing, wavy, and it's really elegant actually to watch them.

Speaker 8 Neo, meet and Aaron could have watched the leeches crawling around for hours, but I had a burning question. How does one breed a leech?

Speaker 16 What we do know is that medicinal leeches are hermaphrodites, so you only need two individuals to create the next generation.

Speaker 8 For breeding a leech, especially when they're coming out of the winter season and their dormancy, it's that temperature increase that starts to trigger their breeding response for the leeches to kind of come together and then produce their oofica.

Speaker 16 What's euphica?

Speaker 8 Ufika. So that is their egg sac.

Speaker 16 For the layman if you imagine an old-fashioned bath sponge like a loofah that's kind of what one of these looks like once it's hardened.

Speaker 8 But yeah so the first thing for us was to mimic that temperature increase and decrease throughout the year. Is the idea then to eventually release these back into the wild?

Speaker 16 So step number one is to try and look after the populations that we have in the wild.

Speaker 16 So these are really a backup And if they won't spread out naturally, we've got some parts of the country like Yorkshire where they've not been recorded for like 100 years.

Speaker 16 The idea would then be at the right time and once we know enough about what we're doing, we'll be able to re-release them back into the world and increase the population again.

Speaker 8 I have one more box as well. Oh, have you? I'll show you these ones.
So in the second box, we have

Speaker 8 our slightly younger ones. Oh, aren't they wonderful? Look at that.
So adorable. Aren't they just perfect?

Speaker 8 Wonderful, adorable and perfect are not words I would have ever used to describe a leech before, though Naomi and Aaron's passion was certainly infectious.

Speaker 8 But the need for a recovery programme for medicinal leeches goes beyond just an appreciation for the species.

Speaker 16 So you could look at it in two ways. One, I think that every creature intrinsically has a value and that we should make sure we conserve them for future generations.

Speaker 16 The second argument would be that they are part of a food chain, so things eat them and they eat things, but also they're a really good sign of a healthy habitat.

Speaker 16 Wherever you've got medicinal leeches, you know that you've got a lot of other wildlife as well. So they're almost like a canary of the pond world.

Speaker 16 If we can get it right for them, then we can get it right for everything else.

Speaker 8 To keep our native wildlife happy, we have to keep our leeches happy. It's understandable if you're still wary of leeches at the end of this.

Speaker 8 I have to admit that I still am, but their long history in medicine, their role in our freshwater ecosystems, and their fascinating little lives are undeniable.

Speaker 8 So thank you to Aaron Harvey and Naomi Ewold for giving me a glimpse into that wonderful world.

Speaker 10 Thank you to our very own, very brave Ella Hubber there.

Speaker 10 You are listening to a particularly spooky and slightly soggy Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

Speaker 10 And if you have a fiendishly curious science question for us, please do send it in by Raven if possible, or just by email, to insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

Speaker 10 Now, Tim, are you going to be going trick-or-treating this year?

Speaker 14 I think not this year, I'm afraid. I'm a bit of a, yeah, but we're sort of well away from the neighbours, really, so it's a bit hard to do that, yeah.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's difficult if you've not got people's doors to actually knock on. So at the moment, what are you studying at Jodrell? Because Jodrell is much more about listening.

Speaker 10 We just walk by the beautiful Mark II telescope, this gorgeous dish that's pointed at a particular angle. What are you listening for at the moment?

Speaker 14 We're actually, right at this minute, we're collecting radio waves from a stellar explosion that happened about 2.4 billion years ago. So it's 2.4 billion light years away.

Speaker 14 It's called the gamma-ray burst, an incredibly bright one, the brightest one we've ever seen, and for that reason, rather unusually goes by the name of the BOAT, as in, you know, GOT, greatest of all time.

Speaker 14 This is BOT, brightest of all time.

Speaker 7 Oh,

Speaker 13 and so

Speaker 10 how are you studying that?

Speaker 14 We're actually linking this telescope up, which is part of the e-Merlin network, so I can't offer you a witch, but I can offer you a wizard.

Speaker 14 So, Merlin is a network of telescopes around the UK, but we're linking those up with telescopes right the way across Europe, and also a whole network that's spread across the USA, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, and another network that's in Australia.

Speaker 14 And with that, we're creating a radio telescope that's effectively the size of the whole planet.

Speaker 10 So, almost like an enormous dish that's just that's like taking in all of that data,

Speaker 10 the kind of the most intense signal that you could get.

Speaker 14 Yeah yeah and the real power of it is that by spreading these telescopes far apart or you know as far apart as the diameter of the planet then you actually get a sort of zoom lens effect.

Speaker 14 You see the fine detail when you make the images of these radio objects in the sky you see very fine detail and we really need to do that with an object like this because it's so far away it's going to be very very small on the sky.

Speaker 10 And the wonderful thing is you you can actually see through the clouds with radio waves. So you don't need the weather to clear up.

Speaker 14 That is the great. We probably wouldn't be here in lovely sunny Cheshire

Speaker 14 if we couldn't do that. Yeah, radio telescopes, that's the power

Speaker 14 we can observe through the clouds. We can observe during the day as well as at night.
And so it's really a

Speaker 14 24-hour operation here.

Speaker 10 Ah, working through the nights, even on Halloween. Thanks, Tim.

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Speaker 10 Now, here's a disturbing question. Could zombies walk amongst us? Frank Swain has been looking into the science of the undead.

Speaker 18 When the folklorist Lafcadio Hearn went searching for zombies in the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1889, he found them curiously difficult to pin down.

Speaker 18 A zombie, one young woman told him, was an uncanny and unsettling event. A three-legged horse passing in the road, or a great fire at night that recedes into the distance as you approach it.

Speaker 18 It was only when US troops occupied Haiti in 1915, bringing with them the return of forced labor, that the zombie coalesced from an unsettling idea into a tangible calamity.

Speaker 18 A zombie was henceforth a pitiful creature, one raised from the dead, and enslaved by a malign authority.

Speaker 18 But if Hearn had instead turned his attention to the natural world, he would have found endless examples of real-life zombies, every bit as terrifying as one of his ghost stories.

Speaker 18 The beautiful emerald wasp, for example, stupefies a cockroach with a sting to its brain, turning it into a docile living larder for the wasp's hungry young.

Speaker 18 Crickets laden with aquatic horsehair worms find themselves compelled to leap into ponds of water, where they drown, releasing the worms inside.

Speaker 18 And mosquitoes infected by malaria are induced to starve themselves until the protozoan inside is fully developed. Why risk your host being swatted before you're ready to be passed on?

Speaker 18 There is no evidence that we are immune from this kind of microbial meddling. Meet Toxo.

Speaker 18 The single-celled Toxopalasma gondii is common in mice but can only complete its life cycle inside a cat.

Speaker 18 To get from one to the other, Toxo will rewire the mouse's brain, turning it into a thrill-seeking, if slow-witted, rodent.

Speaker 18 The host's new live-fast-die-young attitude soon delivers it into the belly of a passing cat.

Speaker 18 Toxo can also live inside humans and seems to treat us as an especially large mouse.

Speaker 18 Czech researcher Jaroslav Fleger found that people carrying the microbe have slower reaction times, and a study at a Prague hospital found those responsible for car accidents were two and a half times more likely to test positive for toxo than the general population.

Speaker 18 Around half of Brits show evidence of toxo infection by age 50.

Speaker 18 Just as well there are no big cats stalking the streets of London or we might be in real trouble.

Speaker 18 Benjamin Franklin famously said that nothing in life was certain except death and taxes. And so far there's no sign that nature has found a way to raise the dead.

Speaker 18 Yet in 1929, reports surfaced that Soviet scientist Sergei Bryokenko had used his autojector, a kind of primitive heart-lung machine, to do just that.

Speaker 18 Films shot in his laboratory shows dogs, or rather just their heads, kept alive by a whirring contraption of glass vials and rubber tubes.

Speaker 18 The film culminates in the death and then minutes later resurrection of a small brown dog. Bryokarenko even claimed his machine had successfully revived a human test subject.

Speaker 18 While his results were no doubt sensationalized, such work helped build the foundation of emergency medicine that today has returned millions of patients from the brink of death.

Speaker 18 And while we can't raise the decidedly dead, Some still choose to have their remains cryogenically frozen in the hopes that one day reanimation science will succeed.

Speaker 18 Be warned though, some early patients were unceremoniously thawed out and disposed of when they fell behind on maintenance payments to the cryonics firm.

Speaker 18 Proof that even if death isn't certain, there will always be taxes.

Speaker 10 Thank you very much to science writer and author of How to Make a Zombie Frank Swain.

Speaker 10 Finally, to this celebration's iconic fruit, the humble pumpkin. You may have visited a pumpkin patch to pick your own this year, or perhaps you're carving and decorating one as I speak.

Speaker 12 But what happens after Halloween?

Speaker 10 I spoke to Dr. Alice Brock, who's been looking into the environmental horrors of pumpkin waste.
I started by asking her just how many pumpkins are thrown away each year.

Speaker 9 So it's about 18,000 tons of pumpkins. Maybe around about 13 million pumpkin are going to landfill.
They think it could be kind of 27 million pumpkins are being purchased.

Speaker 9 It's kind of hard to estimate because every pumpkin weighs slightly differently, but it is about 18,000 tons of pumpkins going into waste.

Speaker 11 And how much of a problem is that?

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 15 they'll just biodegrade away, won't they?

Speaker 9 So the problem is actually that. What happens is when food waste goes into landfill, it will biodegrade, but it degrades anaerobically.
So it's not using oxygen.

Speaker 9 It's trapped in plastic bags under other rubbish. And that produces methane.
Methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide in terms of its global warming potential.

Speaker 9 So a ton of carbon dioxide compared to a ton of methane, that methane is 25 times as bad for the planet in terms of warming.

Speaker 19 So why is it going into landfill rather than compost?

Speaker 12 Do we have a good measure on just how much?

Speaker 15 Because it sounds like the problem is landfill rather than the degradation process.

Speaker 12 Or is it what happens when these pumpkins go into a compost heap?

Speaker 9 So, composting will release a little bit of kind of greenhouse gases, but it's not as bad. There have been studies that have kind of compared these things.

Speaker 9 Composting doesn't have as high a kind of global warming potential because it's a different kind of process.

Speaker 9 So, when it goes into landfill, it's particularly problematic because of the environment it's in. It's also contributing to landfill gas, which is mostly methane, about 60%.

Speaker 12 So, all of those pumpkins going into landfill, do we have a measure on how much greenhouse gas comes from that?

Speaker 9 Yeah, so I can give you the numbers on food waste, but I don't have exact pumpkin figures because it turns out there aren't that.

Speaker 9 I was like, this is a whole area of research. I'm now going to know and nag my colleagues that we should go and do.

Speaker 9 But a ton of food waste, according to DEFRA, is about 627 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent. So, carbon dioxide equivalent is the unit we use for all kinds of greenhouse gases.

Speaker 9 So, if we consider our 18,000 18,000 tons of pumpkins, that's about 11,200 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Speaker 9 So if you look at your pumpkin, around about 60% of that is then going to become a greenhouse gas when it goes into landfill, essentially.

Speaker 12 Right. More than half of your pumpkin is going to be transformed into planet warming gases if it goes into landfill.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, essentially.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 15 And what about the resources that it takes to grow each of those pumpkins?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, a pumpkin itself actually isn't that bad. You know, most vegetables compared to say meat, fairly low carbon.
It's the fact that it's then going to landfill.

Speaker 9 It's that kind of waste aspect that's the real problem when it comes to pumpkins. And they're not necessarily going into food waste.
Now, some local councils don't collect food waste.

Speaker 9 In my city, they don't currently. That is going to change by 2026.
But at the moment, it might be that people can't put it into a food waste bin.

Speaker 9 I kind of think it might just do because pumpkins are really big. So you might kind of go, oh, I guess I've got to just put this in general waste.
It might be something as straightforward as that.

Speaker 9 It might be that you're just thinking of it differently because it was kind of a decoration.

Speaker 12 Yeah, you're not eating it, so you're not thinking of it as food. I know, my food waste bin is probably not big enough for our pumpkin.

Speaker 5 It's really quite small.

Speaker 15 So what about just, are there other ways to dispose of it?

Speaker 9 The best thing to do with a pumpkin is to just eat it.

Speaker 15 Right.

Speaker 5 It's food.

Speaker 9 You could could just cook it and then we don't have any of this problem at all because suddenly it's not actually in that waste stream anymore at all.

Speaker 11 Okay, so is it does that change how we should be treating pumpkins then?

Speaker 15 So you wouldn't necessarily suggest that we just just we should stop picking and carving pumpkins decoratively for Halloween, but that we should treat them as food as well as decorations?

Speaker 9 Oh, definitely. I mean, if you're kind of looking at this from a sustainability perspective, the social side of pumpkins at Halloween is massively important.

Speaker 9 You can still do all of the messy fun bit. You can still carve it.
You can still decorate it. And then you could just roast it or you can turn it into my colleague makes really good pumpkin blondies.

Speaker 9 You know, it is food. It's still something that we can get nutrition from.

Speaker 12 Okay, so talk me through a more sustainable and still fun Halloween journey with your pumpkin.

Speaker 9 So, I mean, some people don't even cut up the pumpkins. You could just leave it as a nice decorative pumpkin.
That's not very fun.

Speaker 9 you might want to kind of just not cut it so you've not got like exposed bits to the air and you know maybe do something like edible paints i've seen people do that it can look really really cool you might want to still carve it but then only have it out very briefly sort of in the evening um and then put it in the oven which i think would probably be quite a horrifying halloween experience if you've given it a face

Speaker 9 um sounds quite fun a sort of a carved halloween feast yeah so once you've roasted your pumpkin you can either eat it roasted or pumpkins can be used in all sorts of recipes.

Speaker 9 As I said you can make pumpkin blondies. There's always things like pumpkin pie.
There's a ton of different foods once you start looking into it.

Speaker 9 So it's just sort of rethinking a little bit like what you're doing with this thing.

Speaker 9 And yeah, if you don't put a candle in it, because that's not going to be good for human consumption if you've burn a candle in it and don't put it outside, you can still do sort of something with it and then eat it.

Speaker 10 Thank you very very much to Alice Brock there, who's from the Sustainability and Resilience Institute at the University of Southampton.

Speaker 10 I am definitely going to be looking at my pumpkin in a different and hopefully delicious way, although I've got to admit I am not a very good cook.

Speaker 10 But if you have any recipe suggestions for your Halloween leftovers, please do get in touch at insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

Speaker 10 I'm still here with Professor Tim O'Brien at Jodrell Bank, hunkered under the tin roof of a machinery shed. But we can see a little bit of sky, but it's looking pretty cloudy.

Speaker 10 You're not going to be able to see very much tonight. But at this time of year, are there astronomical events that we could be looking out for?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, you know, it's very appropriate actually that this is what we call dark time in astronomy at the moment.

Speaker 14 It's very sought after by visual astronomers. So, astronomers who use optical telescopes because it's when the moon's quite close to the sun.

Speaker 14 So, as the moon orbits the earth, it's sort of sometimes it's very near the sun at the time of new moon, and then at other times it's on the other side, so full moon.

Speaker 14 So now we're near new moon, which means that the moon's not up during the night and therefore the dark, the very dark skies.

Speaker 14 So anybody who wants to study faint objects would be interested in using a telescope around the time of

Speaker 14 dark time. Yeah.

Speaker 14 But yeah, if we have clear skies,

Speaker 14 it's a great time of year. If you look straight up, you'll see Cassiopeia.
It's a classic W-shaped constellation or M-shaped.

Speaker 10 You need to know your Greek mythology, don't you?

Speaker 10 So yeah, actually, my Greek mythology is a little bit pitiful, probably a lot less good than yours, but yeah, I'm vaguely aware of who's related to who. What's the story of Cassiopeia?

Speaker 14 Yeah, she was the mother of Andromeda, the princess that they decided to sacrifice to a sea monster called Cetus. Brutal.

Speaker 14 Yes, and these are all constellations. And she was saved by Perseus, who had gone and sliced off the head of Medusa, you know, the snake-headed gorgon.
Yeah. And he then

Speaker 14 flew in on the winged horse,

Speaker 14 Pegasus, and he flew in and sort of saved Andromeda. But all these constellations are basically up in the night sky this time of year.

Speaker 14 And one of my favourite sort of Halloween-y things about those constellations is that in Medusa's head, which Perseus is holding

Speaker 14 in the night sky, in that sort of Greek constellation picture,

Speaker 14 the eye of Medusa is a star called Algol, which is an Arabic word for al-ghul, as in ghoul, the demon, the sort of demon star.

Speaker 14 And this eye winks, So every 2.8 days or so, it goes down in brightness by a factor three or something, because it's actually a star that has a binary system in it, where one star goes in front of the other and it blocks out the bright star.

Speaker 14 And so it very noticeably, even just to the unaided eye, it dips in brightness significantly. So

Speaker 14 the eye of the Gorgon Medusa winks the algol, the demon star, and that's overhead at the moment.

Speaker 10 That's amazing. So whereabouts in the night sky should we look for the eye of the Gorgon?

Speaker 14 Yeah, what I would, I mean, mean, if you can find the W of Cassiopeia, it's a classic sort of W shape, then below that you see Perseus.

Speaker 14 And to the right of that, if you like, if you're looking at that, is the head of Medusa. I mean, I would recommend getting hold of one of these.

Speaker 14 I'm a fan of free apps. I'm not saying I'm tight or anything, but there's a very good one called Stellarium, which I would recommend downloading.

Speaker 10 I'll give you a guide of what you're doing.

Speaker 14 of exactly where you are. They're really handy for that sort of thing if you want to find the exact position of this star.

Speaker 10 Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming out on this slightly gloomy evening. We didn't get much of a night sky, did we? But I will be looking out for the Gorgon's blinking eye.

Speaker 10 Thank you so much, Tim O'Brien.

Speaker 14 No problem.

Speaker 10 You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, the ghoulish Victoria Gill. The producers were the haunting Ella Hubber, the sinister Sophie Ormiston, and the horrifying Gerry Holt.

Speaker 10 Technical production was by the menacing Cath McGee, and the show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

Speaker 10 And away from the overworked Halloween adjectives, if you want to discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

Speaker 10 Until next time, from the rainy gloom of darkest Cheshire, thanks for listening and

Speaker 2 at Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

Speaker 3 But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

Speaker 4 Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bucks.

Speaker 2 Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

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Speaker 2 Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of What We Think We Know, wherever you get your podcasts.

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