Have scientists created a bionic eye?

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 4 You read lips, right?

Speaker 2 And Linley, based on the best-selling mystery series.

Speaker 5 See I Lindley.

Speaker 2 Take it from here. And don't miss the new season of Karen Pirry coming this October.

Speaker 6 You don't look like police. I'll take that as a compliment.

Speaker 2 See it differently when you stream the best of British TV with Britbox. Watch with a free trial today.

Speaker 5 I've got to fax training updates, post seven job ads, and edit a 700-page manual today.

Speaker 3 There's a better way.

Speaker 7 Cornerstone Galaxy AI agents boost productivity by turning static content into smart conversations, personalizing learning, and handling admin tasks all in your workflow. Don't work like it's 1989.

Speaker 7 Work like it's now. Visit cornerstoneondemand.com to see how AI can help.
Cornerstone's workforce development platform lets humans do what they do best, and AI do the rest.

Speaker 7 Visit Cornerstoneondemand.com.

Speaker 6 Hello, and well done for downloading BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on the 23rd of October, 2025. I'm Marnie Chesterton.

Speaker 6 Coming up, a new pregnancy test for skeletons, and is the Met Office running out of human weather monitors? I'll be meeting one of their volunteers and asking why this isn't all automated.

Speaker 6 Plus, science broadcaster Caroline Steele joins me to pick through the latest science discoveries of the week. What can we expect, Caroline?

Speaker 8 So volcanoes could be responsible for ice on Mars. Scientists might be able to make mice have periods.
And a sonic surprise for bat scientists.

Speaker 6 Exciting. Okay, stay tuned for all that.
But I wanted to start with a story that earlier this week brought a tear to my eye and some words to the eye of 70 year old Sheila Irvine.

Speaker 6 Take a listen to this.

Speaker 5 Did you ever imagine that you'd be able to read a book again?

Speaker 9 Never.

Speaker 6 Never on your knelling.

Speaker 5 Very impressive. Very good.

Speaker 6 Joyous TV there as implant patient Sheila described herself as one happy bunny to the BBC's medical editor Fergus Walsh. Sheila is registered blind.

Speaker 6 She lost her sight to an age-related condition and yet there she was punching the air as she successfully read words for the first time in years, all thanks to her eye implant.

Speaker 6 She was one of five people in the UK to get one, which when coupled with some special glasses has opened Sheila's eyes to a world of reading and Sudokus.

Speaker 6 Joining me to explain the science of the so-called bionic eye is Professor Francesca Cordero, an ophthalmologist at Imperial College London. Francesca, a bionic eye, does that that go too far?

Speaker 4 In terms of progress, I don't think it does go too far. It is a huge improvement on anything that has been put forward before.

Speaker 4 It is allowing people who really have lost their central vision to see again.

Speaker 6 Can you give me a recap on how this eye implant, this Prima, works?

Speaker 4 Yes, of course. So

Speaker 4 the centre of it is an implant that actually is implanted under the retina. So it's very close to the anatomical way the eye works.
Person puts on a pair of glasses which has a camera.

Speaker 4 That camera actually records the image.

Speaker 4 That image is then converted and actually sharpened by a type of little transducer box which sits near the patient but is wireless, so this is the other big advance.

Speaker 4 And then infrared light is projected onto the implant which produces a high contrast image.

Speaker 6 Okay and the retina is the bit at the back?

Speaker 4 The retinas yes so if you think about the eye being like a pinhole camera the very back of that pinhole camera is where the retinal or the film of the eye is but the lights have to come through your pupil actually to focus

Speaker 4 on the macula which is the sharpest point of vision. Now in in geographic atrophy that's the point that is atrophied, and that's why people cannot see because that central vision is lost.

Speaker 6 This sounds sci-fi, bionic eye.

Speaker 3 How did we get here?

Speaker 4 So, actually, it's been a concept that's been around forever. And I cannot remember the name of the guy in Star Trek.

Speaker 6 Oh,

Speaker 6 LaForge.

Speaker 3 Ah, okay. You're obviously a fan.

Speaker 4 He had the band,

Speaker 3 the band, the goldish. Yeah, yeah.
That's definitely a hairclip.

Speaker 4 No, I think it was uh an insight into the future because it was literally he was he was blind, and that was his way of seeing. So, it's the concept's been around.

Speaker 4 There have been different types of sort of versions. There is one already approved, but it's not as good as this one in terms of the resolution of the image.

Speaker 4 I think where this is different is firstly, it's wireless, secondly, the implant goes underneath the retina.

Speaker 3 The previous one went above it.

Speaker 4 And third, this is really quite high contrast. So it's like, I think it's 368 from memory impulses that can be stimulated on the chip.
And the previous one was probably about a six of that, around 60.

Speaker 6 I mean, why is the eye such a good part of the body to use this technology on?

Speaker 4 Well, the very simplistic way of putting it is it's the only transparent part of the body.

Speaker 4 So just as you know, we use our eyes to look out, it also allows us to project the image going in.

Speaker 4 And that ability to produce an electrical impulse, which can then go along the optic nerve to the brain, is preserved in some of these diseases because that nerve is still active.

Speaker 4 In fact, the peripheral retina is still functioning.

Speaker 4 So, another big improvement with this implant is that it allows people to still use their peripheral retina, but only really augments that central vision.

Speaker 4 And that's one of the reasons actually why they have the infrared light. It's to allow natural light to still stimulate the periphery.

Speaker 6 I'm thinking of some sort of analogy. It's like if you've got a touch screen and sort of part of it is broken, then

Speaker 6 this implant can go behind the broken bit, but still allow the rest of the touch screen to function as well.

Speaker 4 Yes, and if you think of your touch screen and reading,

Speaker 4 if you had a touch screen and the central bit wasn't working, we would naturally go around the edges, yes, but it would mean that the sharpest definition of vision had not been preserved because you know as I said earlier, if you think of the pinhole camera effect, our eye is designed so the sharpest point of vision is this area called the macula or the fovea to be precise.

Speaker 4 So you would still need on your touch screen some way of ensuring that sharpest vision is intact and that's really what this implant allows.

Speaker 6 Is there going to be a Star Trek future where someone who has no vision at all

Speaker 6 has an entirely bionic eye fitted in and just sort of clips into place, you know, has you've got the glasses,

Speaker 4 you've got the got the implant. So, so there are so there are different things

Speaker 4 that are going towards this goal. There is an audacious goal that is being done at the moment.
In fact, we're part of this technology, this program,

Speaker 4 which is the whole eye transplantation.

Speaker 4 Going back to the Star Trek guy, it could well be that it's going to be very acceptable for people who have lost their central vision to actually go around with the glasses like this.

Speaker 6 Well, it's really great to hear about all sorts of transformations, but thank you so much for coming onto Inside Science and telling us about the bionic eye.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much.

Speaker 6 At the start of this programme, I promised you a new pregnancy test for skeletons, which may have left you scratching your head. Wonder no longer.

Speaker 6 Scientists from the University of Sheffield have come up with a way of extracting hormones from human remains dating as far back as as the first century AD.

Speaker 6 And yes, that can work as a kind of pregnancy test for ancient bones.

Speaker 6 Joining me now to discuss what this can tell us about our past beyond the obvious is bio-archaeologist at the University of Lancashire, Brenna Hassett. Welcome Brenna.

Speaker 10 Hi!

Speaker 6 Let's start with the obvious. Why do you need something like this? Isn't it obvious if a woman died with a child inside her, wouldn't you find a second body?

Speaker 10 Well, that's putting a lot of faith in archaeologists, which generally I would. However, that's not actually the only bit of information about pregnancy you might want.

Speaker 10 There are a lot of cases where, for instance, a woman might die shortly after delivering a baby from complications, from infections, and you'd want to know has that woman been recently pregnant?

Speaker 10 And that would help us understand what kinds of conditions killed women in the past.

Speaker 6 Okay, so how has this research actually tested the pregnancy?

Speaker 10 So this is actually pretty clever.

Speaker 10 Part of that scientific experiment that this paper is talking about is we don't really know how to look for hormones, but this is one of the steps into figuring out how do we get hormones.

Speaker 10 So this is taking an enzyme analysis method. So it's basically like a home pregnancy test, a little bit souped up.

Speaker 10 What they do is they actually take the little bits of bone and teeth and they powder them. They grind them up.

Speaker 10 They drill them with a micro mill, pop them out and sticking them essentially in a test that much like a pregnancy test looks for three of the major sex steroid hormones.

Speaker 10 So estrogen or estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.

Speaker 6 And those are the markers of if someone's pregnant or not, are they?

Speaker 10 Yeah, so those hormones appear in different levels depending on biological sex and whether or not you are pregnant.

Speaker 10 So progesterone particularly is the one that's really important, that pregnant women have lots of progesterone.

Speaker 10 So if you're looking at, as this study does, some skeletons that were found with fetal remains, some skeletons that were male, some skeletons that were found that were female but not with fetal remains, they've gone through and tested which ones of these show signs of elevated progesterone or estrogen to figure out can we use this skeleton pregnancy test.

Speaker 6 I mean, that's really cool science, but I'm just wondering why this kind of research looking into pregnancy in ancient humans, why is that important from an anthropological perspective?

Speaker 10 Well for one thing we actually don't know much about women, women's lives and kind of our species reproductive history. As a discipline anthropology has a real problem asking questions

Speaker 10 about certain aspects of the life cycle, particularly those experienced by women. So our species is the weirdest one on the planet.

Speaker 10 We do crazy things like shut off reproduction halfway through our life cycles. And we also have very, very rapid pregnancies for the kind of primate we are.
We basically reproduce really fast.

Speaker 10 You may have noticed we are the most numerous ape on the planet. All of these things are evolutionary sort of choices that we've made along the way.

Speaker 10 So being able to tell whether a skeleton was pregnant or not may seem a little bit, you know, by the by, but it's actually really, really important for how we understand how people lived in the past and how we got to be this weird species that we are.

Speaker 10 And quite frankly, a lot of these questions have not been asked because people have not been that interested in them. So this is actually a really exciting paper.

Speaker 6 And what about the hormone aspect of things? I mean, I mentioned you're a bioarchaeologist. Is hormone testing in human remains something that you normally do?

Speaker 6 Is this a new way of looking at our past?

Speaker 10 This is pretty new. So, only a handful of people have had a go.
It just takes us a while to see if we can make fancy new technologies work on really old bones.

Speaker 10 You can think about, for instance, the work of Svante Pabo,

Speaker 10 who, you know, only a short while ago gave us ancient DNA that allowed us to discover entire new species from, you know, a single fingerbone.

Speaker 10 We're now doing that with proteomics, which is ancient protein studies. All of these are kind of technical skills people are suddenly applying to older and older questions.

Speaker 6 My favourite is all of the weird and wonderful stuff that you can tell by scraping plaque off ancient teeth.

Speaker 10 This is the best possible study because dental calculus, I mean, you are what you eat, but even if you don't eat it, your dental plaque, if you skip your dentist visit, will tell a future archaeologist all about the pathogens you encountered, the foods you ate, the recreational substances you may have consumed.

Speaker 10 There's a lot in dental calculus.

Speaker 6 And a big mystery for humans is why we go through the menopause. Is this hormone information going to kind of help unpick that mystery?

Speaker 10 Well, this is one of the big hopes. So my personal interest, I'd love to know more about how humans got their life cycle.

Speaker 10 For a long time, we thought only humans ever went through a chemical menopause.

Speaker 10 And, you know, elephants were off there reproducing at 70 here we are shutting things off by 50 and then we found out that the toothed whales the sort of danger dolphins so your narwhals and your orcas they also go through a chemical menopause suddenly chimps do it so we have no idea how our evolutionary history got us to this point but if we can start tracking the actual hormonal signatures that tell us when humans turn off reproduction all the way back down to, say, you know, our fossil relatives.

Speaker 10 That would be an incredible thing.

Speaker 6 Brenna Hassett, thank you so much for coming onto Inside Science and telling us about some intriguing new research.

Speaker 10 Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 6 The email to get in touch is insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

Speaker 11 Tired of headphones that flatten your music? Meet heavies, the world's first headphones built for metalheads. Eight drivers, bone-shaking bass, and crystal clear eyes.

Speaker 11 Designed and engineered by an audio industry legend to unleash every riff, scream, and solo. Exactly how it was meant to be heard.
Plus, awesome interchangeable shells to match your style.

Speaker 3 Go heavies or go home.

Speaker 11 Order at heavies.com and feel what you've been missing. That's H-E-A-V-Y-S.com.

Speaker 5 Tires matter. They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.
Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Speaker 5 Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy. Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options.

Speaker 5 Go to tirerack.com to see tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews. And be sure to check out all the special offers.
TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

Speaker 6 Now, have you ever wondered when the weather forecast comes on the radio and they tell you the wettest place in the country? How they know?

Speaker 6 Yes, the Met Office has all sorts of satellites and instrumentation, but they also have thousands of volunteers who go out every morning to check the level of rainfall and report their findings.

Speaker 6 I went to meet one such volunteer, Stephen Burt, and his wife Helen, at their home in Berkshire. to find out why, in a world of digital automation, we still rely on an old-fashioned rain gauge.

Speaker 3 Hello!

Speaker 3 Hello! Hello!

Speaker 3 Welcome, Marnie. Nice to meet you.
Would you like a drink?

Speaker 6 A cup of tea would be great.

Speaker 3 Lovely. Fine, I'll go with the cable on.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 6 Can you describe to listeners what we can see out the window?

Speaker 3 Well, what we have is a

Speaker 3 fully-fledged automatic weather station. The white boxes are Stevenson screens, and inside there, there's temperature monitoring equipment.
So that's how we measure the air temperature.

Speaker 3 The thermometer is enclosed in

Speaker 3 a louvid box that the air can blow through but it keeps the sunshine and the rain off the thermometers because otherwise of course you get an incorrect reading.

Speaker 3 Up at the very top we have a solar radiation sensor which measures the strength of sunshine. We have a three cup anemometer which is slowly going around.

Speaker 3 We have a wind vane on the other side telling us wind speed and direction.

Speaker 3 A little further down we have a visibility and present weather sensor and then the box at the bottom is basically all the wiring and of course at the ground level is the rain gauges which are probably the single most important point of this morning.

Speaker 3 So would you like to come out and have a look at them?

Speaker 6 Absolutely it's 10 o'clock on the dot.

Speaker 3 So if you'd like to come out.

Speaker 3 What I'm holding in my hand is a measuring cylinder. So this is what we pour the water from the rain gauge bottle into and then we just measure how many millimeters of rain we have.

Speaker 3 So you see it's very sensitive the bottom scale is only 0.1 millimeters. So a typical rain day would have between two and five millimeters.
A very wet day would have 25, 30.

Speaker 3 The wettest day I've ever recorded had 81, which caused a lot of significant flooding. But let's walk over to the rain gauge.
So this is a British standard rain gauge with a deep funnel.

Speaker 3 The deep funnel is there so that if it hails or snows it

Speaker 3 keeps the hail in.

Speaker 6 I should say it's about the size of a wine cooler.

Speaker 3 It's what's known as a five inch rain gauge because the aperture is five inches across. And so from there the rain falls into the funnel and then from there it falls into the bottle

Speaker 3 and as you can see this morning there is the grand total of zero but in a very wet day and the bottle can be almost full and so you'll you'll need to do this measurement several times but that's basically it.

Speaker 6 Joining me in Stephen's Garden was Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading Ed Hawkins who leads a citizen science project called Weather Rescue.

Speaker 1 Tell me about your project.

Speaker 1 Although we've taken these measurements across these islands for a very long time, two centuries or more, unfortunately a lot of that data was locked up still on pieces of paper stored very carefully in the Met Office archives and it was unavailable to scientists to use.

Speaker 1 And so back in 2020 when the lockdowns happened, those sheets had luckily been scanned.

Speaker 1 And so we put those images online and asked for some volunteers to help us transcribe those invaluable rainfall amounts into a computer. The next target on our list is the daily rainfall sheets.

Speaker 1 So, although we've done the monthly amounts, there are 100 million daily rainfall amounts going back to the 1870s still on paper.

Speaker 1 But that is probably a too big a project for volunteers, so we're actually going to need some AI help, I think.

Speaker 6 There's a long history of

Speaker 6 recording rainfall, right?

Speaker 1 Yes, we invented a lot of this standard technology back in the 1860s or so. The first measurements of rain in the country were in 1677, which is an extraordinarily long time ago.

Speaker 1 So, now we have 200 years of continuous monitoring of rainfall in every location across these islands.

Speaker 1 And so once we have that 200 years, we can then start looking at whether the rainfall has changed over that period. There's an overall trend for getting much wetter on these islands.

Speaker 1 And so that the wettest month of the year has got about 20% wetter.

Speaker 1 So this is why having this old data is so valuable to allow us to draw that connection between what's going on with our greenhouse gas emissions, which is warming the climate, which is causing the rainfall to increase.

Speaker 3 The director of the British Rainfall Organisation in 1910 when he was doing his annual report there were so many rainfall observers in the country, about five and a half thousand.

Speaker 3 He famously said that he could go in a balloon, bearing in mind this is before we all had cars and so on.

Speaker 3 He could go up in a balloon and come down anywhere in the British Isles and he would be within five miles of a rainfall observer that he knew.

Speaker 6 What happens to the daily measurements that Stephen records?

Speaker 1 So they get collected from all across the country, from the hundreds and thousands of people who are doing this at the same time time every day, and they get sent to the Met Office and the Environment Agency.

Speaker 1 And within a few hours, the Met Office can make a map about how much rain had fallen yesterday. At the moment, there's around about 2,500 rain gauges which report every day.

Speaker 1 They may only send the observations in once a month, but that's the data that we have to reconstruct the rainfall across the country.

Speaker 1 It used to be much more, and our network is unfortunately declining.

Speaker 1 It's partly because many of the people taking the observations are volunteers, and sadly, many of them are passing away or no longer able to take those measurements.

Speaker 6 Can't Can't you just digitise it all? Do you need people like Stephen?

Speaker 1 Having that manual connection with the same technology is what gives us great confidence. You can't take these measurements with this copper rain gauge in an automatic way.

Speaker 3 And instruments fail, power fails, get a big storm, and

Speaker 3 you might lose power for a whole area, you might lose all the records. A big snowstorm, the rain gauges can be buried.
Even bird droppings in the funnel can stop the records.

Speaker 3 On an automatic gauge, you won't necessarily notice until somebody thinks, Oh, it's only rain for 10 days.

Speaker 3 But if you're measuring it daily and you pick the funnel out, you can immediately see the funnel's blocked.

Speaker 6 Can you tell me what it means to be part of this network?

Speaker 3 I think it's contributing something to society and to science and to the meteorological record. After I've gone, my records will still be part of the Met Office archive forevermore.

Speaker 3 And it's important to know it might only be a very small part in one individual station, but nonetheless, you're contributing to a larger body of science as a whole. and that's important to me.

Speaker 6 And that's a great legacy. Thanks to Professor Ed Hawkins and Stephen, whose garden really does look like a mini meteorological station.

Speaker 6 And if any of the younger generations with enough outside space for a rain gauge fancy trying this, we're going to put details on the website. Check out the website for links to sign up.

Speaker 6 Caroline Steele is with me in the studio eager to share the latest science discoveries. So first off, you're taking us to Mars.

Speaker 8 Yes. So, Mars's equator has thick sheets of ice sort of hiding underneath the surface, which is quite odd.

Speaker 8 And scientists for a long time have thought that's quite odd because the equator, like here on Earth, is the warmest part of Mars. So, why is there ice there?

Speaker 6 Okay, and new science has solved the mystery? Yes.

Speaker 8 So, according to a recent paper in Nature Communications, basically, by simulating volcanic eruptions on Mars scientists have found that over the course of millions of years these eruptions could have blasted water from the interior of the planet up into the atmosphere 65 kilometers up into the atmosphere because there's not much gravity on Mars so eruptions look huge I really wish I'd seen that yeah and then the water would freeze and snow down to form layers of ice and then it would get covered in volcanic ash which kind of provides an insulating layer helping preserve it until now.

Speaker 6 Now, we've known that there's water on Mars for a while now, right? Under the surface.

Speaker 8 Yes, and there being water at the poles sort of makes more sense.

Speaker 8 This kind of patch of water around the equator has been more confusing, but it's important to understand it better because if we do terraform Mars, if we do try and live on this planet, we'd probably want to live at the equator because it's...

Speaker 8 definitely the mildest, it's still pretty cold, and we'd need to get water from somewhere and this could be a potential water source in the future.

Speaker 6 Okay, location, location, location. Science says the equator has the water and it's got the best climate.
Sounds good. Back on earth and menstruating mice.

Speaker 8 Yes. So this is actually sort of similar to what you were talking about with our reproductive history.
We don't know much about female biology.

Speaker 8 We don't know much about periods because historically scientists have been men and there's a lot of stigma around periods and menstruating.

Speaker 8 so it hasn't really been prioritized but there's another reason why periods are really hard to study. Any guesses why?

Speaker 6 Is it to do with mice?

Speaker 6 Yes. Which we normally use as a lab animal.

Speaker 8 Yes. And what don't they do?

Speaker 6 They don't menstruate.

Speaker 8 Yeah. So humans are kind of weird in the fact that we have periods.
So it's hard to study periods when our sort of classic lab mouse and most other species don't have them.

Speaker 8 But according to a preprint, so a paper that hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, scientists have engineered lab mice to get a period in response to certain drugs.

Speaker 6 Oh, lucky mice. Yeah.

Speaker 8 So, yeah, I do feel quite bad for the mice, so this is what happens.

Speaker 8 So the researchers trick them into sort of a pregnant state by raising their progesterone levels, which is a hormone that increases during pregnancy.

Speaker 8 They then inject a fluid that sort of pushes against the inside of the uterus, which mimics an implanting embryo.

Speaker 8 And then when they stop this progesterone treatment the uterine cells are shed which is a period it lasts for three to four days and it is early days but according to this paper it looks similar to human menstruation and there's hope it could help understand conditions like endometriosis but yes there are obviously some real differences between an induced mouse period and a human period but it might be better than what we've got so far, which is not a lot of data.

Speaker 6 And finally, you promised me a surprise and bats.

Speaker 8 A sonic surprise to do with bats, yes. So I want to talk about the greater nocturial bat, one of Europe's largest and most endangered bats, and they usually eat insects.

Speaker 8 But in the past, DNA analysis of their poo has basically shown traces of songbirds, suggesting that they might sometimes eat larger prey.

Speaker 8 But a paper was published in Science a couple of weeks ago where researchers have been studying these bats by basically fixing a sort of tag, a sort of backpack to their backs which records their position and the sounds that they make.

Speaker 8 And bats are quite noisy because they hunt using echolocation where they basically send out sounds, it bounces off stuff and they use that to locate things.

Speaker 8 And so recently an amazing recording was made of a three-year-old female bat out hunting one night in Spain. And when listening back to this overnight audio, scientists heard an unfamiliar noise.

Speaker 8 So I want to play you a a clip of this audio and the credit goes to Laura Stidschult.

Speaker 8 You look quite stressed.

Speaker 8 Basically using this recording and altitude data, the researchers are able to kind of construct the story of what happened with this bat overnight. So she flew to an altitude of nearly a mile.

Speaker 8 and then suddenly dived to cross paths with a robin.

Speaker 8 And then the bat and this poor robin engaged in a kind of tussle.

Speaker 8 And then, for 23 minutes, the bat's echolocation squeaks were broken up by chewing and crunching as the bat kept flying while eating this robin, sort of like the equivalent of talking with your mouth full.

Speaker 6 Okay, that's enough.

Speaker 8 That's enough of that.

Speaker 8 So basically, the reason why this seems to be happening at this time of year is robins migrate in spring and autumn, and during that migration time, they fly at night, which they don't normally do.

Speaker 8 So they suddenly sort of become on the menu for these bats, which shows how adaptable they are.

Speaker 8 They can suddenly go to eating prey much, much larger than what they're used to when the environment allows. So yes, I'm sad for the robin, impressed by the bat.

Speaker 6 Caroline Steele, thank you very much.

Speaker 8 Thanks so much for having me on.

Speaker 6 And that's us out of time, although there is just enough of it to say that this is my last time as a regular presenter on Inside Science.

Speaker 6 I've been doing this for five years now, and it's been a blast and a privilege. Thank you so much to all the scientists and producers that I've bothered over the years, but for now, farewell.

Speaker 6 The science rolls on as ever, don't worry, and Victoria Gill will be here next week.

Speaker 8 Bye for now.

Speaker 6 You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton. The producers were Ella Hubber, Tim Dodd, Jonathan Jonathan Blackwell and Claire Salisbury.

Speaker 6 Technical production was by Searle Whitney.

Speaker 6 The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West and 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 9 Make your space smell like you with a free Pura Plus diffuser. For a limited time, get a free set when you subscribe to two cents monthly for a a year and transform every space with premium fragrance.

Speaker 9 Customize your experience with our easy-to-use app and a stylish diffuser that suits every aesthetic. Don't miss out.
This exclusive deal won't last. Shop now before it's gone only at Pura.com.

Speaker 5 Tires matter. They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road, and they're responsible for so much.
Acceleration, braking, steering, and handling.

Speaker 5 Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack. Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Speaker 5 You'll get fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options. Try mobile installation.
They'll bring your new tires to your home or office and install them on site.

Speaker 5 Tire Rack has the best selection of tires from world-class brands, and they don't just sell tires, they test them on the road and on their test track.

Speaker 5 Learn how the tires you want tackle evasive maneuvers, drive and stop in the rain, or just handle your everyday commute.

Speaker 5 Go to tirerack.com to see their tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews. And be sure to check out all the current special offers.
That's tirerack.com. TireRack.com.

Speaker 5 The way tire buying should be.