What can modern epidemiological methods tell us about French Revolutionary history? Also, the origins of horse riding, solar systems, and star dust itself.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

(Image: Storming of the Bastille Paris France 1789 illustration. Credit: Grafissimo via Getty Images).

A desktop nuclear fusion reactor that uses electrochemistry to up the ante. Also, a global survey of human wildfire exposures finds Africa burning ahead, plus tiny swarming robots and record-breaking 2024 ice melts from glaciers on Svalbard.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jana Holesworth

(Photo: The Thunderbird Reactor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Credit: Berlinguette Group/UBC)

US Health Secretary RFK Jr’s call to retract a study on childhood vaccines is resisted by the journal. Also antibiotics get designed by AI, and a new way for stars to die.

A study focussing on Danish childhood vaccination data has attracted the US Secretary for Health’s anger, as RFK jr calls for the journal in which it was published, the Annals of Internal Medicine, to retract it. The Editor, Christine Laine, talk to Science in Action about the strengths and challenges of observational studies.

The cuts to prestigious US federal science funded research continue, as last week it was announced that $500 million funding for future mRNA vaccines would be withdrawn. Barney Graham, one of the pioneers in the field and prominent during the Covid vaccines, argues that the research will still happen, though maybe not in the US, as mRNA has become a fundamental area of global research.

Meanwhile, strides are being made in the field of synthetic biology as Jim Collins and colleagues at MIT and Harvard have used AI to design potentially viable antibiotics for two important drug-resistant superbugs. Previously, AI has been used to comb through libraries of known antibiotics. This study has gone a step further, and used generative AI to design new ones, that can then be synthesised using real chemicals. Though a long way from being prescribable drugs, the team think this could herald a new golden age of antibiotic development – something which has been lacking in recent decades.

Finally, it seems astronomers may have discovered a new way for a star to die, sort of. Supernova 2023zkd was seen to explode back in 2023, found by a team looking for odd events. It didn’t seem quite like normal supernovae, in that it took a bit longer to die down. Then the team looked back, and noticed that it had also been getting slowly brighter for almost a year. At 730 million light years away, in a galaxy far, far away, it also seemed to have been stripped of all its hydrogen and even stranger yet, appeared to have exploded twice. As Ashley Villar of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explains, the almost unique observation fits with a model of the huge star getting closer to a black hole, the gravity of which may have disrupted the star enough to cause it to explode.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Ella Hubber with Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

(Image: Child getting a vaccine. Credit: Luis Alvarez via Getty Images)

As the United States secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr., announces a $500 million cut to mRNA vaccine research in the United States, we hear a statement from the Nobel Prize winning biologist who made mRNA vaccines possible.

A team of scientists from Northwestern University have uncovered the pathway believed to protect some people from allergic reactions (even when they are sensitive to an allergen) and have tested a drug which could protect the most severely allergic. Also this week, satellite data shows that large parts of the Earth are running dangerously low on ground water.

And although people often believe scientific fraud is committed by a few bad actors, a new paper uncovers networks of journals, editors, and authors who are allegedly cooperating to publish fraudulent papers.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Ella Hubber and Alex Mansfield Assistant producer: Minnie Harrop Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Photo: Allergy testing. Credit: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)