Science In Action

BBC World Service

The BBC brings you all the week's science news.

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335 episodes
Updated Oct 30, 2025

Episodes335

Newest first

Jan 23, 2025 · 26 min
Arctic carbon starting to flip
Thirty per cent of the Arctic is switching from carbon sink to carbon source.
Jan 16, 2025 · 34 min
AI antivenoms and vegetarian hominids
New types of snake-bite anti-venoms are designed by AI.
Jan 9, 2025 · 30 min
First US avian flu fatality
H5N1 bird flu is still spreading across farms in the US and claims its first human life
Jan 2, 2025 · 27 min
Five years of Covid: Part two
Five years on from the emergence of Sars CoV-2, what have we learned?
Dec 26, 2024 · 28 min
Five years of Covid: Part one
Five years on from the emergence of Sars CoV-2, what have we learned?
Dec 19, 2024 · 26 min
Sun Grazing
The future of vaccinations, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, and the dawn of complex life.
Dec 12, 2024 · 33 min
Warming oceans kill millions of birds
4 million sea birds died in Alaska as a result of a warming pacific.
Dec 5, 2024 · 33 min
Bovine H5N1 gets a sniff of humans
How a single mutation in bovine H5N1 flu can make it prefer human cells.
Nov 28, 2024 · 39 min
Fifty years of Charm
Why November 1974 became known as the “November Revolution” in particle physics
Nov 21, 2024 · 34 min
Faster, wetter, worse tropical storms
Every 2024 Atlantic hurricane was intensified by warming climate, with categories raised.
Nov 14, 2024 · 31 min
Drastic plastic reductions
Machine learning models suggest pathways to reduce global plastic waste by 91% by 2050.
Nov 7, 2024 · 29 min
New ways to study coronaviruses
Scientists in Wuhan and the US unveil a new way to design virus receptors on human cells.
Oct 31, 2024 · 33 min
Global warming strikes again
The devastating floods around Valencia are easily attributable to climate change.
Oct 24, 2024 · 35 min
Betelbuddy and Silk Road Cities
Does the famous Betelgeuse have an orbiting companion, hidden in plain sight?
Oct 17, 2024 · 36 min
Marvels of life and death
As fish farming impacts grow, a look at some clever life-hacks at the extremes.
Oct 10, 2024 · 38 min
Nobel convergence
A look at the stories behind the Nobel science prizes announced this week.
Oct 3, 2024 · 34 min
Excesses of rain
How much did climate change drive storm Helene?
Sep 26, 2024 · 26 min
Historic weather extremes revealed using tree-rings
The jet stream has shaped extreme weather, influencing harvests, wildfires and epidemics
Sep 19, 2024 · 26 min
Flash floods in the Sahara
The Sahara has been experiencing unusually heavy rainfall due to an extratropical cyclone
Sep 12, 2024 · 29 min
A landslide-induced megatsunami in Greenland
The 200-metre-high tsunami sloshed between the cliffs of Dickson Fjord for nine days