People who could be struggling to pay their bills that is the $5.00 Live news with the spoiler is James let's returns of Pyong Chang for the Winter Olympics where Team g.b. Amy Fuller is in action in the women's slopestyle snowboarder he's this morning she's been delayed starting to inclement weather there Rob. Certainly as and it's been delayed a little longer now a quarter past 2 local time which isn't about just under 50 minutes times the earliest possible start Amy Full Of course now alone in the slopestyle after that horrible injury to Katie on the eve of the games in training I can say that is the windiest and most bitterly cold wind chill day we've had so far so you can understand the decision that's been taken for the moment for the safety of the athletes stay warm Robin in the men's final 17 year old red Gerald took the gold medal will bring you all the medal moments from the Winter Olympics right here on 5 Live England run out them 126 Biggs's over Wales in the 6 Nations at Twickenham England a 2 from today with a match to Ireland who beat Italy 5619 and also have had a perfect start later today Scotland's men say conference at Murrayfield commentry on 5 Live from 3 o'clock this afternoon Manchester City extended their lead at the top of the Premier League to 16 points after a steamroller in Leicester 51 said Joe Guerra netted 4 times in that 11 these one will win over barely mean there are now 2 points clear of the drop zone West Ham habits and Tottenham all recorded wins too and then tennis Yana concer and Heather Watson both won as Brits and be hungry to reach the Fed Cup World Group to play off this is b.b.c. 5 live on digital on the smartphone and tablet on the weather Sunday stars I see across parts of the north and west in a cold blustery day the sunshine and snow showers will be most frequent in little from the West with some of the movie I think twice today of tonight and 7 from London the best I saw c.b.c. Radio 5. Because you see 144 Lysimachus later this afternoon I was. In Mary's sounds in against Liverpool this is your station and 5 extra. Thanks Sir Frank 1st with Chris warbling where McDonnell from 6 right now about here's Chris Smith And then I could scientists in 5 signs it's a pretty record programs at least call or text. Hello welcome to 5 Live Science I'm Chris Smith from The Naked scientists team and in this week's program the most powerful rocket ever built takes to the skies we wonder whether cockroaches could survive a nuclear war and evidence that vi ping could give you a chest infection Plus you get the same thing with plastics and so so what that really means is actually quite difficult to separate them out in order to recycle them in a way that for instance I mean you're more metal isn't quite as difficult plastic not so fantastic how science might nonetheless help us to solve the plastic problems that we've created for ourselves that make it sign 6 or 5 why. The emergence of Zico virus in Brazil in recent years has led to millions of people becoming infected the majority of them had no symptoms at all but some individuals were pregnant and the infection led to devastating damage to their babies' brains and it caused a condition called micro carefully but this only affected a very small number of infected infants most of them were born with normally proportioned heads so does this mean that they escaped being harmed a new paper published this week suggests not obstetrician Christina Adams ward off says that Zeek of ours infection can still do lasting damage to the nervous system without causing obvious micro carefully early 2016 I was reading a newspaper and it showed an infant with a very small head in Brazil and the question was on the front page could this be related to the seek a virus and I knew immediately that my life would change and we began to study intensively whether to seek a virus could in fact be causing small heads in infants that were exposed to seek a virus in utero butt. How was it a virus actually infecting the fetus and what was the spectrum of injury and could we actually detect some of the early signs of this injury in the fetus for the study we actually used a non-human primate model a pigtail McCarrick which we could use to model as a virus infection in pregnancy by inoculating a virus under the skin of the mother and then we could follow what happened with ultrasound and then see what happened at the time of delivery in the fetal brain did the virus get into the fetuses in these monkeys. It did and we found that Sikh a virus did indeed cause significant damage to the fetal brain even when the head size was normal and the regions in the brain that were hardest hit areas that generated new brain cells one very important injured part of the fetal brain was something called the hippocampus and cells in this part are very important for memory and learning and they contribute to brain health through at least adolescence so loss of these brain cells is expected to cause problems with learning memory behavior and may not show until the child might be even one or 2 years old so are you saying then there might be a sort of clinical iceberg here where we know that there's the dramatic effect micro carefully a small had small brain we know that happens in you know 5 percent of cases where there's been an infection but there may be this enormous burden of disease out there that we don't know about where there has been some subtle injury to the brain during development and that may not manifest until the individual starts to miss developmental milestones or starts to show deficits once they grow up a bit exactly we think that this is a kin to an iceberg type of phenomenon and what it also means is that our current clinical criteria that we use such as head size to diagnosis seek a virus related brain injury really fails to capture this more subtle but very significant brain damage does this mean then that we urgently need to be going in appraising cases where there was an overt obvious micro carefully but there was evidence of infection having occurred to follow up those kids and see if they do end up with some kind of deficit along the lines that you'll suggesting. Absolutely and not only do we need to follow children where we know that they had a seek a virus infection but also in cases where we weren't so sure and we need to look for neurocognitive delays in learning and neurological disorders that develop over time and so I think that a broader segment of the population that are exposed in that risk for a virus should ideally be screened in this way over a longer period of time so what should parents look out for that if you're someone who has been exposed because they didn't have the benefit of knowing what you're showing in this study beforehand the probably quite worried there are no cognitive specialists that have testing that can be performed in young children to assess for delays in learning changes in behavior and things that we can actually pick up in this way unfortunately these specials don't exist in large parts of the world where the virus is locally transmitted but to the best that we can we should try to make some of these tools available and I think that we need to also be sure to let pediatricians know that the infant's head size at birth should not be the main criteria for determining if a child had a brain injury related to seek a many children might not then benefit from these developmental and neural cognitive tests to identify deficits that was a Christina Adams would off from Washington University in Seattle and her paper describing measure cells has just come out in night medicine. Now there was a very uplifting engineering achievement this week in Georgia males has more. T. Minus 30 seconds was Falcon Heavy the world's most powerful rocket launch this week from NASA as Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral Florida was for 3. Was space x. That by Ilan Musk live broadcast the event to millions both the launch of the rocket and then a life stream of the rather bizarre payload a bright red car with a national suited driver David Bowie Starman blaring from the speakers and the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy references all added into the mix. So what was the purpose of this stunt or dayshift showmanship or a scientific game changer Well it looks like it's a bit of both a couple of things make Falcon Heavy special Firstly it can carry about double the cargo of its nearest operational competitor that's 64 tons that can be blasted into space roughly equivalent to 10 elephants Luckily instead of elephants they used a Tesla car one of even masks other creations along with a dummy driver called Star man at the wheel. Am. I. Made chief this great left partly because Falcon Heavy is actually 3 Falcon 9 rocket stuck together they blasted off into low Earth orbit and then the upper capsule containing the payload detached and fired into space and here comes the unusual part the rockets can then be reused my space ships have rockets crush land which means each new launch has to practically be built from scratch but a Falcon Heavy can reuse the rockets this would cut the price significantly most claims his method will reduce the cost of launch by $2.00 thirds. But it didn't go perfectly to plan 2 of the rockets did make it back with a beautifully controlled synchronized descent which wild people around the world 3 . Unfortunately day the middle rocket which was supposed to land on a separate platform in the sea overshot and smashed into the ocean and nearly 500 kilometers an hour. And Starman and is maybe looking fabulous but they overshot their target of Mars and are now on their way to the asteroid belt where it's quite possible they will be smashed to smithereens. Despite the setbacks people lauding the event as the start of the new space race it was a spectacle amends by future generations to go into science galvanized competition from businesses and further funding from governments and the new developments means we can send much bigger things into space such as satellites telescopes all right but on missions to Mars but one of Space X.'s biggest ideas is the tourism industry in fact they want to take to tourists around the moon later this year so this could all lead to a brave new world or should that be worlds of space tourism and planetary exploration but there are concerns should the new space race really be in the hands of private companies and some have raised issues with the environmental cost of repeated launches the increased chance of space debris littering this planet and others and also contamination of microbes across our solar system which has implications in our hunt for life but either way they certainly know how to put on the shades. And. If you haven't seen the food from Star man's car in space on You Tube Do check it out that was George Mills reporting on the 4 can have a launch from space x. This week you're listening to 5 Live Science with me Chris Smith still to come why vi ping might be an infection risk and how we can solve the world's plastic problem . But before that is time for this week's myth conception and Lewis Thompson has been working out who or perhaps even what might survive a nuclear war cockroaches these creepy crawlies for incredibly hardy creatures able to survive what would kill most of us you can squeeze a cockroach to a quarter of its normal height and it will crawl away unharmed it's even said that if there was a nuclear war cockroaches would be the only thing left to life but is that actually true well well cockroaches are able to tolerate high temperatures nothing on earth could survive the heat produced by a nuclear bomb exploding. The temperature within a 10 metre radius of the explosion becomes hotter than the surface of the sun. If the cockroaches were far enough away they could survive the initial blast but what about the nuclear fallout when a nuclear bomb explodes it releases I Nies ing radiation and this kind of radiation contains enough energy to break apart chemical bonds including those holding our d.n.a. Together this means our cells stop working properly and can die causing vomiting haemorrhages seizures and in many cases death so our cockroach is somehow immune to these problems well it's true the cockroaches are able to tolerate much higher levels of radiation than we can in a rather unpleasant experiment the animals are subjected to high radiation levels for a month of radiation is measured in a unit called Green 10 great would kill a human in a few days and some of the cockroaches survive a months exposure to $100.00 degree so why are cockroaches better than humans when it comes to surviving radiation well d.n.a. Is most vulnerable to radiation damage when it's dividing this happens any time your body is making new cells which in us is happening all the time. But cockroaches like most insects produce new cells at a much slower rate and so the proportion of cells in their body that will be vulnerable to radiation damage is much lower than in humans but would this be enough to save them from nuclear war the nuclear bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 is estimated to have a method to between $4.12 Gray of radiation in a one kilometer radius So cockroaches would have been Ok but today's nuclear weapons are estimated to be several 1000 times more deadly so a global nuclear war today would almost certainly way cockroaches However there are some organisms on Earth that might survive thermal caucus gamma tolerance is a species of archaea a group similar to bacteria which lives in boiling hot hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor it can tolerate 30000 grey that's over 3000 times what humans can cope with and one species of fungus has been found growing inside the melted reactor of the tree noble nuclear power plant finding a way to convert the radiation into energy for itself so well cockroaches have a better chance than us at surviving nuclear war they probably wouldn't the only things we're pretty sure would survive are a few species of our killer bacteria and fungus so let's hope humanity has the sense to not hit that big red button Well thank you Lois for that cheery thought Meanwhile if you have some suspicious sounding science that you'd like us to scrutinize do send an e-mail to 5 Live Science or b.b.c. Doco dot u.k. And we'll take a look. Public Health England suggest it should be available on prescription some people are taking it up as a means of recreation others are using it to help them quit smoking in all cases there's a very strong belief that vaporing is a healthier alternative to cigarettes but a study out this week suggests that the inhaled vapor from the cigarettes can make the cells that line our airways much stickier and therefore increase the odds that bacteria like the pneumococcal us that can cause chest and other infections can gain a toehold Jonathan Greig is a respected tree consultant at Queen Mary University of London Beijing is increasingly popular as a smoking cessation aid and youngsters are taking up vaporing itself so it's important we understand the facts on the on the line and what we're looking at is the risk of developing a serious infection that's with a bug called a pneumococcus And of course pneumonia and we know that if you cigarette smoke you're at significantly increased risk of pneumonia and the mechanism is that bugs just stick more to the airways and they can get a little Nisha and they can get a foothold in the airway and cause infection so what we did was put a point to airway cells human airway cells we sort of expected not to see very much but in fact the cigarette paper significantly increased the stickiness of the bugs to the cells in the same way as cigarette smoke and you know how it makes them stick in the mechanism is really interesting what the bug does is it hijacks a normal substance that's expressed on the cells as a receptor it uses it as a Trojan horse it sort of sticks to that receptor and then as the receptor normally gets into the cell the bug just moves across into the cell so it's a real sort of it's like a hijack literally and so what we saw was that a ping increased the amount of receptor on the cell and more bugs stuck to that receptor that's in cells in the dish but how confident are you that that represents what's going on in one of your patients you know. Address that what we took was a group of vapors we took a little scrapes of the cells from the nose before they fate doing their normal vaporing session and one hour after that and we look for the expression of this receptor that the box can hijack and we 4 found that the receptor was significantly increased at least 2 or 3 fold increase after they ping and does that end up reflecting an increased risk of infection obviously you can't do that in humans it would be unethical because at the moment or you can say is that it appears the cells get stickier it appears that this is secondary to the vague thing but can you put the whole puzzle together and say a ping causes more infections we're quite right we haven't translated that into risk I mean it really needs large scale what we call epidemiological surveys to be able to do that it's same way as smoking but what we did do is in an animal model we put exposed animals to date and infected them with the pneumococcus and we found increased amount of new a caucus in those they pick s'posed animals so at least in that situation we saw an effect. What about you know I've classically heard it said if you go and wander around in London you might as well have smoked tobacco cigarettes if you walk down some streets because the traffic pollution is so significant How do you quantify it qualify and standardize what you call by paying and the infection risk arising from it and compare it to say just occupational exposure or or day to day exposure to pollution I think that's a very very important point and we've looked at various 6 other exposures enamelled all which are known to be increased risk of pneumococcal infection and you actually say diesel exhaust particles increase the risk especially in young children of pneumonia but you're in ammonia welding it's not your patient exposure that increases that and in our model we see those those effects so I think yes just walking around a polluted environment is increasing your risk as we know but that doesn't cause mean that they ping can be dismissed this will be an additional risk to what is an unacceptable level of pollution we have in our cities I think it makes a difference what the composition of the vite fluid is because they come in lots of different flavors don't they it potentially does and what we can do now with our model is to play around if you like with the composition we can make our own bait we can look at effect of just a major component which is propylene glycol which is like a food additive on its own we can add in the flavorings and that's to say the many hundreds of thousands of flavorings so we can start doing this sort of these experiments to to scale and really now down what are the components which are causing it as yet we think nicotine isn't the major player out there it has some effect but what it is in that they could seem for a very it's unclear what was Jonathan Greg and his study was published in the European respected regional. Will we ever find life outside our solar system if we're going to a good prospect would be an Earth like planet last year astronomers came across a planetary system that was called Trappist one which is in the constellation Aquarius it's 40 light years away which is about 370 trillion kilometers so it's not really nearby but what's got them excited is that the star at the center of the system which is only about 10 percent of the size of our sun has a clutch of 7 planets in orbit around it and these planets are very similar