The 2024 north Atlantic hurricane season has started with a bang, with Hurricane Beryl traversing the whole ocean, and leaving a trail of destruction across the Caribbean, into Mexico and Texas. Presenter Roland Pease speaks to climate expert Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University about this hurricane season and the role of climate change. And Roland speaks to Amie Eisfeld of the Influenza Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been looking at the infection and transmission of bovine H5N1 influenza (bird flu). The virus is shown to be transmitted through the milk of cows with bovine flu to mice and by intranasal exposure to mice and ferrets. The findings are published in Nature this week. Ancient genomics: Neolithic farmers hit hard by the plague. Repeated outbreaks of plague may have contributed to the decline in Neolithic populations in Scandinavia, a Nature paper suggests. The analysis of ancient DNA from more than 100 individuals sheds light on the fate of these farmers around 5000 years ago. Roland speaks to geneticist Frederik Seersholm of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre in Copenhagen. And a cheap coating that can be painted easily onto the glass of greenhouses converts part of the sunlight spectrum into red light that should boost the rate at which plants grow. Roland joins the chemists and crop scientists to see if there really is a difference with tomatoes and strawberries. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: Hurricane Beryl batters northern Jamaica after killing 7 people in southeast Caribbean. Credit: Anadolu/Getty Images)
I'm Rory Stewart, and I want to talk about ignorance.
I will die without having read everything that was written in classical Latin, because ignorance isn't simply the opposite of knowledge, it's part of what it means to be human.
Just about every game I can think of involves ignorance.
There's no adventure without ignorance.
There's no narrative.
The long history of ignorance from Confucius to QAnon.
With me, Rory Stewart.
Listen on BBC Sounds welcome to science in action from the BBC World Service.
With me, Roland Pease.
Later in the program, an ancient plague that reshaped the face of northern Europe.
If it was the plague that killed the neolithic farmers, that would mean that a disease changed history completely.
Like if the plague hadn't been there, then it would have been completely different.
People living in Europe today, we would look completely different and have completely different genes.
The current bird flu virus that keeps spreading in us dairy herds and a smart paint that might give us better crops.
If you look in this one, for example, especially on the cordon tomatoes there, I think there's more leaf growth a little bit in the coated one, which.
Is not surprising because you get more red light.
It tends to tell the plant to actually grow more.
The 2024 North Atlantic hurricane season has started with a bang, with Hurricane beryl traversing the whole ocean and leaving a trail of destruction across the Caribbean and into Mexico and Texas.
The first named hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic season is here and making history.
Beryl is now an extremely dangerous category four hurricane as it churns toward the caribbean tonight.