P.C. Finds life Alice James and John Robbins are best mates or subjects that you'll roll in all of the every scenario to see if you're all there secure states those choices don't take you then get angry nothing ever comes between them so might kill your story that's over you know I have an imagination layer. Listens at least James enjoy movings imperfect harmony even be taken care of what you call Friday from one all B.B.C. Radio 5 live streams the best chance to fix the coolest thing you can say this is B.B.C. 5 Live. On Sunday breakfast is coming up with Chris Warburton. 6 But 1st it's 5 Live Science This is a pretty recorded program so please don't text or call me. Hello welcome to 5 Live Science I'm Katie Haleigh from the Naked Scientist team and I'm is it Clark in today's program as far as they come out of the Amazon rain forest we looked at the impact it's had on the region the collision of a black hole and a possible need. I'm festival wristbands how much bacteria do they contain plus actually the body slowly works out to slowly rejects that foreign body but it doesn't do that retain a safe sort of implant and ability in the body doesn't try to somehow reject it we look at the materials that the keeping us healthy that make it scientists for 5 blocks. It's hard to turn on the radio or T.V. Without seeing that the Amazon rain forest home to people on the impressive variety of plants and animals is on fire unfortunately it's too early to work out the full extent of the damage satellites surveying the area imprecise and everyone watching will have to wait until then scars across the land amount but once burned forests hold 25 percent less. Carbon than unburned forests even after 3 decades of re growth but how did these fires start I spoke with Rachel commenter from the University of Cambridge Conservation Institute in its natural state a rainforest wouldn't there very moist places there steeped in shade there are ferns and there's a lot of water in the system but what's happened over time is frame for us have become more fragmented and they've been logged and so that means that certain trees the large valuable timber trees have been taken out when that happens big openings in the forest appear which means the sunlight can penetrate through which means that all of that tinder and all of the vegetation can be dried out and then it becomes fuel for fire and then you combine that with many more actors in the region using fire combined with you know the climatic factors of drought and changing temperatures it has created a situation in which once fire resistant rain forests and our fire prone you mention that people sometimes use fire in Amazon so why would they use fire in that case and how is this different from that for many many years and generations traditional small scale landholders including indigenous communities but also communities of mixed descent they use fire is absolutely essential to their food security because that's how they clear the land to grow their crops but they do so with different management practices to contain a fire and so this is why for all the generations which fire has been used we haven't always seen these uncontrolled fires in forests landscapes but today we have begun to C.N.N. Not just this year but since really the 1990 S. We've seen fires and mega fire events recurring throughout these landscapes not only as a result of some of those small Hoda fires which might escape from from their lands but also. Because of the types of land uses which have come to the region to practice saw and cattle production and other different types of agriculture and including industrial scale a great culture which has created a very different situation where fires are now prevalent and occur on a yearly basis what are the impact of the fires at the moment a lot of the discourse that talks about the problem of fire focuses on the environmental burden aggregate scales so for example the climate and carbon related emissions of the fires where the biodiversity impacts which are relevant to the global community and of course really do matter but what is missing perhaps is thinking about the local and the lived experience of suffering those wildfires where the state support is extremely sparse if not absent and those households are feeding their own families growing their own food hunting when they need to fishing when they need to and when fires come through they lose their agricultural plots they lose the ability to hunt both because the animals have made themselves scarce or been caught in the blaze but also because hunting is more difficult when the forest is burnt because of all of the crackle and the crunch underfoot from all of the debris left from the fires so you can no longer have silent passage through those forests is there any way that forests can recover from damage like this. More so when the fires have passed through the 1st time I think the cycle gets harder to break the more that the fires for occur because the forest gets more and more impacted from those events to the extent where some scientists talk about tipping points in the Amazon you know which are a real concern for for the global climate for biodiversity but also for all those cultural values that the forest has in its current state are we seeing more controlled fires around the world yes we are and that's predicted to increase into . A future because of extending a file where the seasons the Indonesian peat lands for example have suffered catastrophic fires 2015 was declared a humanitarian crisis this year again Indonesian peat lands of burning but Livia is also having problems with uncontrolled fires so the situation is bad and it's predicted to worsen if something doesn't change what we can hope for is that the different losses created in the burdens created 3 wildfires might be rectified by policies which can support sustainable Land Management 5 free futures through perhaps forest restoration efforts and 3 mobilizing firefighting teams but I think the biggest investment needs to be on fire prevention and making sure that there are livelihood options to different types of actors and stakeholders that will enable these 5 free futures that was Rachel comments up from the University of Cambridge Conservation Institute according to the World Health Organization there were 435000 malaria deaths worldwide in 2017 it's caused by plasmodium parasites transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito these parasites can develop and cause disease in our bloodstream and then transmit to other mosquitoes when they bites which can then infect someone else and with concerns over parasitic resistance to current malaria treatments new drugs and needed to help tackle the disease. So says Glasgow University's Andrew Tobin who is among an international team who published a paper in Science this week they found a vital part of that protein called protein kinase P F C L K 3 which they've managed to target with a new drug candidate and by doing so have cured myself of malaria and halted transmission between musky toes in lab experiments while the world does have very effective treatments and those treatments together with insecticide impregnated bed nets have seen a reduction in the amount of malaria in the world however the parasite is able to adapt and we're seeing evidence of resistance to the current front line treatments we need new Madsen's with new molecular mechanisms of action Tell us about this treatment then how does it would come pad to the treatments of already go this treatment targets a very specific protein in the parasite which is essential for the parasite to survive so this protein is involved in producing other proteins actually to process the messenger molecules that make other proteins it gets in interferes with the actual molecular machinery that the parasite needs to propagate itself indeed your proteins in coded on D.N.A. But you need to transfer that code from the nucleus in order to get converted into protein and that's done using a molecule called R.N.A. But the R.N.A. Needs to be chopped up before it come effectively be used to make protein our target is involved in cutting up that R.N.A. Splicing the R.N.A. And by interfering with that process we stop essential proteins being made in the parasite we've picked protein kinase P F C OK 3 because we suspected it to have this essential role in protein synthesis in the parasite and we also suspect. It did that this protein kinase needed to be active in multiple stages of the parasite life cycle in the liver stage in the blood stage and in the stages that infect mosquitoes so by inhibiting our protein kind eyes we prevent essential production of proteins in these 3 stages and have therefore a very effective medicine for malaria how do you know that this would well what tests to be done Firstly you need to make sure that it works in the test tube against your target we know it inhibits the C OK 3 protein Now we need to say does it kill real malaria parasites which we culture in the lab here in Glasgow it kills the parasite now you've got to know whether or not the different stages of the parasite life cycle are killed and then you've got to ask the question can you actually cure an animal this infected with malaria and we go to a mouse model that to see if our compound can prevent the infection of the parasite in the mouse model and finally we asked the question whether or not our inhibitor can stop insects from being infected and therefore be a transmission blocker as well as a cure and it does treat in the mouse with our compound prevented the mice from contracting mouse malaria and remarkably And these are extraordinary experiments because you have to feed mosquitoes with human red blood cells been infected with the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and we find by treating the blood before the insect feeds on the blood we've come prevent the insect from becoming infected with malaria and not stop transmitting that did indeed and so that's a really critical experiment because if you want to eradicate malaria you need to prevent the transmission through the insect largely other anti-malarials a target in the blood stage of the parasite and that's the stage which gives you the disease. These And so they curative What is harder is to develop drugs and the current front line treatments don't really do this prevent transmission and soap having this 3 pronged attack if you can prevent liver stage development you have what they call a prophylactic drug by hitting the blood stage you have curative but by hitting the stages that go into male and female they can infect them musky to your inhibiting transmission to have a 3 hit drug like that is very unusual you need to get into humans that I magine next so how do you envision that happening the way that you do that is to now take your current drugs and develop them so that they become more effective but importantly they become safe for human use as a we have a pipeline of experiments now involving all the major players in the drug discovery area the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation medicines for malaria venture malaria drugs celebrator these organizations will help us refine this drug optimize this drug and develop it for human use the problem is that the new drug then the micro genetically changes to counter that drug on you going to run into the same problem with this I don't think there's any question that the parasite will become resistant to our new drug this is why antimalarial is a given in combination but even then resistance still develops and we would just need a new drug after a while early days but it sounds like promising luck and you type in that speaking with Katie Haleigh and the study was published in the journal Science You're listening to 5 our science with me is a clock and with Katie Haleigh still to come if you're wearing a festival wristband how hygienic is it and we look at the materials that help keep us healthy. Looking to Maz now and this being done for getting between us and the ravers collecting data on the motion surface but what could it be dramatic. As the details Nasa's Curiosity rover has been trundling around Mars for nearly 8 years now usually sending back data giving us brand new information about the red planet but from the 28th of August until the 7th of September NASA will stop sending signals to curiosity and all their other rovers what sort of thing could possibly get between NASA and their beloved Rovers Well it's one of the biggest things that could get in the way something is occurring solar conjunction in simple terms Mars is on the opposite side of the sun. The sun is blocking the direct line of sight that's Paul meets him lead systems engineer for the Exo Mars rover at Airbus because there is no real a system to sort of bounce a signal into side of the sun or you end up with this effectively a communication blackout period where you cannot talk to the rover and it cannot talk to you it's a bit like an eclipse but instead of something blocking out the sun the sun is quite rudely getting in the way of Mars and we've no way to bend signals around something as absolutely massive an enormous as the sun so that mean we have to completely shut down all of the rovers it depends on exactly where they are in the mission and what the particular science goals are I think they do have some sort of background scientific tasks to do whilst it is essentially blacked out so they Nasser engineers have been uploading activity plans lasting about 2 weeks to allow them to do that but certainly anything that would require some sort of oversight from the rival was doing it with honestly like not driving or some sort of scientific experiment cannot be done so it's just crunching some numbers doing the bare basics packed somewhere safe you don't want to park your very expensive rover on a Sunday Hill and hope for the best paring these rovers down isn't that dissimilar to putting. Your computer into sleep mode still ticking along doing nothing too intensive you just want the essential systems on what are the essential systems the communication system the power system and the computer all of which will be in a sort of a low power configuration and sort of waiting to almost be woken up but because the sun is a bit difficult to predict when the 1st signals will come back you have to leave the Reiver in a country where you can talk to as soon as they saw the conjunction in this case is over so primarily this is just having your essential equipment so on in a in a low power mode as possible so the Mars rovers will be getting a much deserved holiday would be back trundling around the planet very soon. That was Adam and the speaking with Paul meet Jim from Abacus and stay in space you may remember in 2015 when the lie go. Announced the 1st ever detection of gravitational waves and won the Nobel Prize gravitational waves are ripples in the very fabric of space and time that it created when heavy objects move in set in ways if you rotate your hands around each other right now you're actually producing gravitational waves that are just so tiny that they could never be detected in order to produce detectable waves the sauces need to be much much bigger but like I didn't stop after those observations in 2015 and to tell us some fascinating new conversational wave results Ben McAllister spoke to us fun Hennigan from the University of Western Australia he didn't walk on the results directly but he does walk on like a Virgo but 1st he has been. September 2015 and $2.00 laser beams are travelling down to perpendicular full kilometer long tunnels releases and making extremely precise measurements of the distances between 2 sets of mirrors one at either end of each of the tunnels why are they doing this well that's a fair question. If the gravitational wave ripple in the fabric of space and time were to travel through those tunnels it would ever so slightly change their length as it traveled by thus changing the distance between the mirror is and scientists would be able to detect it and that's exactly what happened a long time ago 1300000000 years to be precise in a galaxy far far away 2 black holes each weighing tens of times the mass of the sun were rapidly rotating around each other moving at half the speed of light then they collided and merged the resulting gravitational waves traveled at the speed of light for 1300000000 years to be detected by Lego with the tunnels and lasers help let's back up for a minute just in case you don't have a degree in astrophysics I asked your assessment Hennigan what exactly is a black hole so a black hole is the result of a collapsing star and these aren't just any collapsed style collapses these style copes is a so dense that nothing can escape the gravitational pull not even light Well nothing except gravitational waves that is since the initial observation of black holes colliding with each other the team hasn't looked back they've since observed more collisions between black holes as well as collisions between interesting astronomical structures known as Neutron stones a neutron star is also a products of a dying star and the star explodes and all matter collapses down to something that is on a very high pressure all the protons and electrons smash together into neutrons to form a neutron star one of the reasons these results interesting is because we don't really know a lot about what neutron star is a made up of and these observations may help us learn more what scientists call a neutron star equation of states is one of the holy grails in astronomy these days this equation of states basically tells you what the inside of a neutron stars made up. But it isn't old just black holes merging with black holes a neutron stars merging with neutrons does the like team recently announced that they believe they've spotted something different for the 1st time ever something which actually it could 900000000 light years away 900000000 or do years ago the 14th of August just before and midnight European time we saw a signal that maybe a neutron star black hole event it was very loud so we're pretty certain that this signal is real however we're not certain what the lights are objects is OK but to clarify it's a collision between 2 objects one that we think is a black hole and one that we think is a neutron star Yes that's correct frequently Gravitational Wave observations are accompanied by corresponding signals of light like for example when they 1st observed 2 neutron stars colliding back in 2017 but as the Lego team found with this observation that isn't always the case the August 2017 binary neutron star merger that gave flights across the spectrum so far we haven't seen any light if that turns out not to be the case when astronomers STOP LOOKING AT THEIR it could mean 2 things could mean that the neutron star was gobbled up whole little bit like a Pac-Man or it could be that the lighter object was actually also a black hole with observations like the when now entering what some scientists a calling the arrow of gravitational wave astronomy where able to use detectors like like a Virgo to detect an enormous universe shaking events like collisions of black holes and then tell traditional astronomers with regular telescopes where to point those telescopes in order to pick up the corresponding light signals we are just having our detectors in observation mouth and then it's just waiting for the signal to come there expecting many more observations in future and more results like these ones could. To help us uncover the mysterious nature of the neutron star despite the fact that these gravitational wave observations sometimes don't give off any light at all the future looks bright for like. We will continue measuring gravitational waves one thing that we still want to make