In June this year there was the first detected occurrence of rabies in Cape fur seals, discovered after a rabies case in a dog that had been bitten by a seal. Professor Wanda Markotter, Director of the Centre for Viral Zoonoses at University of Pretoria, has been trying to work out how the virus spread into seals and how to keep people (and their pet dogs) safe. The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a seismic “advisory” last week alerting local authorities and the public to a heightened risk of a massive, tsunami-generating earthquake on its southeast coast. Californian emergency manager and sociologist James Goltz, has been working with Japanese experts to evaluate a new dynamic alert system that they introduced after the great 2011 earthquake and tsunami which claimed up to 20,000 lives further north. We hear from Professor Alan Jamieson from the depths of the Tonga Trench. He recently dived into it to see what weird and wonderful creatures he’d find there – but when he reached the bottom, he didn’t see what he expected...! And Steven Goderis of the Free University of Brussels tells us about the Chicxulub impactor - the massive asteroid smacked into Earth off the Mexican coast causing the mass extinction event which wiped out the dinosaurs. He’s part of a paper in the journal Science, looking into the history of the impactor - revealing it was a rare carbonaceous asteroid from beyond Jupiter. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Andrew Rhys Lewis (Image: Fighting Seals. Credit: Edwin Remsberg via Getty Images)
How did the richest people on the planet make their fortunes?
Im Simon Jack.
And Im Sing Singh.
Join us for good bad, billionaire.
Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money, like the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the financier George Soros, the golf star Tiger woods.
Then Simon and I have a decision to make.
Do we think they are good, bad, or just another billionaire?
Good bad billionaire.
Listen on BBC Sounds welcome to science in action from the BBC World Service with me, Roland Pease.
And we're going deep, this edition, deep into the Tonga trench.
We're excited to be on this dive.
Today down to 10,800 meters, which will be my deepest to date.
I would say this is the deepest scientific survey we've ever done.
Also, deep into the prehistory of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, we.
Can find a very good comparison in the asteroid belt.
Define a zone where it came from, and then we can start thinking about the mechanism that led to its final delivery to the earth.
And we're going deep into the merits of Japan's warning, just cancelled, of a greatly increased risk of a massive earthquake on its southeast coast.
But we do seem to talk loads these days about viruses.
Today, it's rabies and seals.
There were news reports in June of an unprecedented outbreak of the virus among Cape first seals on the south coast of South Africa.