Science In Action

Science In Action is the BBC World Service's science programme, first broadcast in November 1964 and presented by Roland Pease, with Alex Mansfield named as producer. It describes itself as a long-running weekly digest of what is hot in science. An edition can carry several stories at once. Pease trails them at the top with short clips from the researchers, then takes them one at a time. The interviews do the work. Pease restates a result in plain terms and then tests it, asking whether the grasslands in a global drought study are representative of their regions, or whether AI tools could let someone produce something like ricin that nobody would recognise. The scientists answer at length. A drought researcher explains why tracking cumulative damage over several years mattered, and why much of the harm happens below ground, out of sight. A protein-design researcher describes a tool called paraphrase and reports that screening catches more AI-generated variants when it stops hunting for exact matches. The life sciences get plenty of room. One edition takes up infection control in ant nests, where a compartmented colony passes disease along less readily than one where everyone mixes. Another hears that experiments on wildlife, wolves included, suggest animals fear humans more than anything else. A researcher argues that plasmids are evolving organisms that move between bacteria, not merely taxis for drug resistance. An animal-tracking effort pooling billions of recorded locations, from insects to whales and bats, is compared to a natural history collection whose value is only beginning to show. Chemistry and technology get their turn as well, including the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yagi, and 'Any more for Moore’s Law?', which features the author of the 1965 Electronics Magazine article that gave Moore's Law its start. The programme also won a prize from the American Geophysical Union for its coverage of asteroid Apophis and the plans to learn from its close pass by Earth in 2029. Titles such as 'A mystery satellite has been jamming GPS in Europe', 'Paris agreement impacts and drought realities' and 'Autism and the epigenetics of early brain development' show how far the subject range runs. 'How science got here, and where next' takes the long view. Pease recalls the optimism of 1964, when the space race was under way and nuclear power promised electricity too cheap to meter, then lists the programme's reporting on the Human Genome Project, gene therapies and the Higgs boson. A guest describes finding retracted studies cited in RFK Jr.'s books and watching personal anecdotes set against randomised controlled trials on a US vaccine committee. Pease thanks the scientists who shared their stories over the decades, calls it the final edition, and signs off.