Lagrange Point

Hayabusa2 had an exciting voyage across our solar system, getting into dust ups and even coming back home again with data to share. We've been tracking the long journey of Hayabusa2 over the 10 years of this podcast, and we're now getting interesting data from the returned samples. The Hayabusa2 probe shot at the asteroid Ryugu and brought back proof for JAXA to study and it tells tales of a very early time in our solar system. Ryugu is much much older than we thought, born only 1.8 million years after the formation of our solar system. How does a planetary system form and why are some planets in a flat line and others really odd. Our Nepture is an anomaly not just in our solar system but also compared to others. What happened to all the other 'Hot Neptune' exoplanets? Did they get burnt off or flung away?

1. Kaitlyn A. McCain, Nozomi Matsuda, Ming-Chang Liu, Kevin D. McKeegan, Akira Yamaguchi, Makoto Kimura, Naotaka Tomioka, Motoo Ito, Naoya Imae, Masayuki Uesugi, Naoki Shirai, Takuji Ohigashi, Richard C. Greenwood, Kentaro Uesugi, Aiko Nakato, Kasumi Yogata, Hayato Yuzawa, Yu Kodama, Kaori Hirahara, Ikuya Sakurai, Ikuo Okada, Yuzuru Karouji, Satoru Nakazawa, Tatsuaki Okada, Takanao Saiki, Satoshi Tanaka, Fuyuto Terui, Makoto Yoshikawa, Akiko Miyazaki, Masahiro Nishimura, Toru Yada, Masanao Abe, Tomohiro Usui, Sei-ichiro Watanabe, Yuichi Tsuda. Early fluid activity on Ryugu inferred by isotopic analyses of carbonates and magnetite. Nature Astronomy, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01863-0.
2. V. Bourrier, O. Attia, M. Mallonn, A. Marret, M. Lendl, P.-C. Konig, A. Krenn, M. Cretignier, R. Allart, G. Henry, E. Bryant, A. Leleu, L. Nielsen, G. Hebrard, N. Hara, D. Ehrenreich, J. Seidel, L. dos Santos, C. Lovis, D. Bayliss, H. M. Cegla, X. Dumusque, I. Boisse, A. Boucher, F. Bouchy, F. Pepe, B. Lavie, J. Rey Cerda, D. Ségransan, S. Udry, T. Vrignaud. DREAM. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2023; 669: A63 DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202245004

How did birds end up with their trademark beaks? You can broadly group birds into two categories, ancient and modern jaws or beaks. We thought mobile beaks were a modern invention but new fossils overturn this idea. Just when did birds first develop their modern mobile beaks? Wild jungle fowl were domesticated to become the chickens we love today. But wild chickens are not isolated completely from modern ones. Gene transfers between wild and domesticated chickens are eroding the genetic diversity of the species.

1. Benjamin A. Tonelli, Casey Youngflesh, Morgan W. Tingley. Geomagnetic disturbance associated with increased vagrancy in migratory landbirds. Scientific Reports, 2023; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-26586-0
2. Meng Yue Wu, Giovanni Forcina, Gabriel Weijie Low, Keren R. Sadanandan, Chyi Yin Gwee, Hein van Grouw, Shaoyuan Wu, Scott V. Edwards, Maude W. Baldwin, Frank E. Rheindt. Historic samples reveal loss of wild genotype through domestic chicken introgression during the Anthropocene. PLOS Genetics, 2023; 19 (1): e1010551 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1010551

Aurora are stellar examples of high energy physics. You need to be at the right spot to find Aurora on earth, but its not quite the same on Jupiter. What governs where and how an aurora will form? Earth and Jupiter are very different in size and speed, but why are our Auroras so different? How does Jupiter's magnetosphere bring all it's moons into line? What happens when an small independent moon brushes up against a super sized neighbour? Ganymede has it's own indepedent magnetic field. So what would happen if it got gobbled up by Jupiter?

1. Binzheng Zhang, Peter A. Delamere, Zhonghua Yao, Bertrand Bonfond, D. Lin, Kareem A. Sorathia, Oliver J. Brambles, William Lotko, Jeff S. Garretson, Viacheslav G. Merkin, Denis Grodent, William R. Dunn, John G. Lyon. How Jupiter’s unusual magnetospheric topology structures its aurora. Science Advances, 2021; 7 (15): eabd1204 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1204
2. R. W. Ebert, S. A. Fuselier, F. Allegrini, F. Bagenal, S. J. Bolton, G. Clark, J. E. P. Connerney, G. A. DiBraccio, W. S. Kurth, S. Levin, D. J. McComas, J. Montgomery, N. Romanelli, A. H. Sulaiman, J. R. Szalay, P. Valek, R. J. Wilson. Evidence for Magnetic Reconnection at Ganymede's Upstream Magnetopause During the PJ34 Juno Flyby. Geophysical Research Letters, 2022; 49 (23) DOI: 10.1029/2022GL099775

In the northern reaches of Japan in a idyllic lake, cute green balls of algae are battling for survival. It sounds like an anime, but cute green algae balls, Marimo, are battling stellar forces. Too much sunlight can endanger the cute green algae balls, the Marimo. Having too much sunlight can be just as bad for algae as too little. How can brown algae help fight back against climate change? Algae have changed the climate once before, so can they do it again? If you were to quantify the carbon sequestration of algae, would it really make an impact globally?

1. Akina Obara, Mari Ogawa, Yoichi Oyama, Yoshihiro Suzuki, Masaru Kono. Effects of High Irradiance and Low Water Temperature on Photoinhibition and Repair of Photosystems in Marimo (Aegagropila linnaei) in Lake Akan, Japan. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2022; 24 (1): 60 DOI: 10.3390/ijms24010060
2. Hagen Buck-Wiese, Mona A. Andskog, Nguyen P. Nguyen, Margot Bligh, Eero Asmala, Silvia Vidal-Melgosa, Manuel Liebeke, Camilla Gustafsson, Jan-Hendrik Hehemann. Fucoid brown algae inject fucoidan carbon into the ocean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 120 (1) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2210561119

Understanding how our body senses and interacts with the world. Scientists are only now beginning to understand how our body senses the world, hence the '21 Nobel Prizes. This Nobel prize wining research helped others find a connection between the gut and our sense of touch. Internal organ pain can be crippling and require side effect laden treatments. How do organs like the gut detect and transmit pain signals? The same mechanism to detect soft touch is used by your organs to send pain signals. How does our body precisely control temperature? What region of the brain measures and control what temperature to set itself to?

1. Zili Xie, Jing Feng, Timothy J. Hibberd, Bao Nan Chen, Yonghui Zhao, Kaikai Zang, Xueming Hu, Xingliang Yang, Lvyi Chen, Simon J. Brookes, Nick J. Spencer, Hongzhen Hu. Piezo2 channels expressed by colon-innervating TRPV1-lineage neurons mediate visceral mechanical hypersensitivity. Neuron, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.11.015
2. Yoshiko Nakamura, Takaki Yahiro, Akihiro Fukushima, Naoya Kataoka, Hiroyuki Hioki, Kazuhiro Nakamura. Prostaglandin EP3 receptor–expressing preoptic neurons bidirectionally control body temperature via tonic GABAergic signaling. Science Advances, 2022; 8 (51) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add5463

Too much or too little light can cause serious problems for plants. Light levels are not simply a feast or famine equation when it comes to photosynthesis. Plants must carefully manage the amount of light coming in to ensure smooth photosynthesis. The way genes in leaves responding to rapidly changing light conditions help them make the most of photosynthesis.  Your eyes have to rapidly respond to opening curtains in a dark room, just like leaves of a plant. What about plants that have abandoned the need for light at all? Can a plant survive or thrive without light or photosynthesis? 

1. Thekla von Bismarck, Kübra Korkmaz, Jeremy Ruß, Kira Skurk, Elias Kaiser, Viviana Correa Galvis, Jeffrey A. Cruz, Deserah D. Strand, Karin Köhl, Jürgen Eirich, Iris Finkemeier, Peter Jahns, David M. Kramer, Ute Armbruster. Light acclimation interacts with thylakoid ion transport to govern the dynamics of photosynthesis in Arabidopsis. New Phytologist, 2022; 237 (1): 160 DOI: 10.1111/nph.18534
2. Kenji Suetsugu, Shun K. Hirota, Tian-Chuan Hsu, Shuichi Kurogi, Akio Imamura, Yoshihisa Suyama. Monotropastrum kirishimense (Ericaceae), a new mycoheterotrophic plant from Japan based on multifaceted evidence. Journal of Plant Research, 2022; DOI: 10.1007/s10265-022-01422-8

How does chemistry change when you travel to another planet? When it comes to scientific experiments often we can be hampered by our own experience. Just because something is abundant on earth does not meant that it's a universal constant.  Out of this world chemistry is hard to get your head around and it requires thinking outside the box. Is it possible to have oxidize minerals without oxygen?

1. Kaushik Mitra, Eleanor L. Moreland, Greg J. Ledingham, Jeffrey G. Catalano. Formation of manganese oxides on early Mars due to active halogen cycling. Nature Geoscience, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-01094-y

What happens when you push water to the limits on earth and in Space? Water has really weird properties especially when it gets really cold. How can we understand and model the behaviour when it moves to fast for us to capture? How do droplets form and why do you need the ISS to study it? What can microgravity tell us about the way droplets form?

1. Thomas E. Gartner, Pablo M. Piaggi, Roberto Car, Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos, Pablo G. Debenedetti. Liquid-Liquid Transition in Water from First Principles. Physical Review Letters, 2022; 129 (25) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.255702
2. J. McCraney, J. Ludwicki, J. Bostwick, S. Daniel, P. Steen. Coalescence-induced droplet spreading: Experiments aboard the International Space Station. Physics of Fluids, 2022; 34 (12): 122110 DOI: 10.1063/5.0125279

How do you measure the solar system and the universe whilst being inside of it? Too much light is a problem for astronomers and our solar system has it's own glow. If you take away all known light sources form the solar system, there is still a faint glow. We know about background radiation, but what about the solar systems background lighting? How can you test the curvature of the universe? To answer universal scale questions you need to start small. Really small. Using Bose Einstein condensates and getting really cold we can simulate curved universes in a molecule scale. 

1. Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rosalia O’Brien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Darby Kramer, Ci’mone Rogers, Andi Swirbul. SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements: II. First Limits on Diffuse Light at 1.25, 1.4, and 1.6 μm. The Astronomical Journal, 2022; 164 (5): 170 DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac8d02
2. Celia Viermann, Marius Sparn, Nikolas Liebster, Maurus Hans, Elinor Kath, Álvaro Parra-López, Mireia Tolosa-Simeón, Natalia Sánchez-Kuntz, Tobias Haas, Helmut Strobel, Stefan Floerchinger, Markus K. Oberthaler. Quantum field simulator for dynamics in curved spacetime. Nature, 2022; 611 (7935): 260 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05313-9

Forecasting an earthquake is serious business, but it's not like the weather. Why are earthquakes so hard to predict? Knowing when an earthquake will occur is hard enough, but what about predicting aftershocks? Aftershocks can create huge stress and compound damage after a quake so what can be done to predict them? Building huge scale models out of granite can help researchers better understand aftershocks. Sliding slabs of granite, plastic blocks and quartz dust help researchers understand aftershocks. When an earthquake combines with another disaster, the compound effect is devastating. How good are modern risk assessment tools at managing compound disasters? 

1. Sara Beth L. Cebry, Chun-Yu Ke, Srisharan Shreedharan, Chris Marone, David S. Kammer, Gregory C. McLaskey. Creep fronts and complexity in laboratory earthquake sequences illuminate delayed earthquake triggering. Nature Communications, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34397-0
2. Misato Uehara, Kuei-Hsien Liao, Yuki Arai, Yuta Masakane. Could the magnitude of the 3/11 disaster have been reduced by ecological planning? A retrospective multi-hazard risk assessment through map overlay. Landscape and Urban Planning, 2022; 227: 104541 DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2022.104541

Peering into the history of brains with some amazing tiny fossils. How did the earliest brains develop? Is a head just an extension of a segmented body or something else entirely? How did the first brains and nervous systems evolve in arthropods. How does your body process the sense of touch? The faintest sensations of touch are handled by specialist cells in your spinal cord. How do your  brain stem and spinal cord help your body process the senses?

1. Nicholas J. Strausfeld, Xianguang Hou, Marcel E. Sayre, Frank Hirth. The lower Cambrian lobopodian Cardiodictyon resolves the origin of euarthropod brains. Science, 2022; 378 (6622): 905 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn6264
2. Turecek, J., Lehnert, B.P. & Ginty, D.D. The encoding of touch by somatotopically aligned dorsal column subdivisions. Nature, 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05470-x
3. Anda M. Chirila, Genelle Rankin, Shih-Yi Tseng, Alan J. Emanuel, Carmine L. Chavez-Martinez, Dawei Zhang, Christopher D. Harvey, David D. Ginty. Mechanoreceptor signal convergence and transformation in the dorsal horn flexibly shape a diversity of outputs to the brain. Cell, 2022; 185 (24): 4541 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.10.012

Fungi have an amazing ability to spread across continents but stay linked as a family lineage. Fungi can adapt to specific geographic niches in the same way as grapes. Different families of highly specialized mushrooms grow side by side across continents. How can fungi protect the plants it's attached to? Fungi often get a bad rap in farming, but they can be used to detoxify soils. Removing mercury and boosting crops; is there anything fungi can't do?

1. Keaton Tremble, J. I. Hoffman, Bryn T. M. Dentinger. Contrasting continental patterns of adaptive population divergence in the holarctic ectomycorrhizal fungus Boletus edulis. New Phytologist, 2022; DOI: 10.1111/nph.18521
2. Congcong Wu, Dan Tang, Jin Dai, Xingyuan Tang, Yuting Bao, Jiali Ning, Qing Zhen, Hui Song, Raymond J. St. Leger, Weiguo Fang. Bioremediation of mercury-polluted soil and water by the plant symbiotic fungus Metarhizium robertsii. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (47) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2214513119

How is your gut connected to the rest of your body? How does your nervous system connect to your gut? How can you sense pain inside of your gut? The bacteria that live inside your gut can call for help when under pressure. With the wrong balance of bacteria or signalling proteins our guts can be more prone for inflammation and damage. How can bad bacteria escape from the gut and evade detection? What enables some bacteria to sneak out of the intestine and wreck havoc.

1. Wen Zhang, Mengze Lyu, Nicholas J. Bessman, Zili Xie, Mohammad Arifuzzaman, Hiroshi Yano, Christopher N. Parkhurst, Coco Chu, Lei Zhou, Gregory G. Putzel, Ting-Ting Li, Wen-Bing Jin, Jordan Zhou, Hongzhen Hu, Amy M. Tsou, Chun-Jun Guo, David Artis. Gut-innervating nociceptors regulate the intestinal microbiota to promote tissue protection. Cell, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.09.008
2. Yusibeska Ramos, Stephanie Sansone, Sung-Min Hwang, Tito A. Sandoval, Mengmeng Zhu, Guoan Zhang, Juan R. Cubillos-Ruiz, Diana K. Morales. Remodeling of the Enterococcal Cell Envelope during Surface Penetration Promotes Intrinsic Resistance to Stress. mBio, 2022; DOI: 10.1128/mbio.02294-22

How can fish keep themselves stable in a fast flowing river? What's the best way to stay on track as a fish? To swim straight ahead fish often end up staring downwards. The riverbed is way easier to track than a fast flowing current. How did fish manage to make their way into the deepest parts of the ocean? What climatic factors drove fish to explore deeper and deeper? What changed in Earth's history to encourage fish to thrive in the deepest parts of oceans?

1. Emma Alexander, Lanya T. Cai, Sabrina Fuchs, Tim C. Hladnik, Yue Zhang, Venkatesh Subramanian, Nicholas C. Guilbeault, Chinnian Vijayakumar, Muthukumarasamy Arunachalam, Scott A. Juntti, Tod R. Thiele, Aristides B. Arrenberg, Emily A. Cooper. Optic flow in the natural habitats of zebrafish supports spatial biases in visual self-motion estimation. Current Biology, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.009
2. Elizabeth Christina Miller, Christopher M. Martinez, Sarah T. Friedman, Peter C. Wainwright, Samantha A. Price, Luke Tornabene. Alternating regimes of shallow and deep-sea diversification explain a species-richness paradox in marine fishes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (43) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2123544119

How does a single sensor help change your outlook on a planet? A single small seismometer on Mars can help understand Mars' past, present and future. What do an ultrasound and Mars have in common? Both can use a single sensor to peer deep inside. Listening to the echoes of marsquakes helps researchers understand what's in Mars' core. Modelling the inside of Mars' core helps researchers understand its past and future. Mars is often thought to be volcanically dead, but there are signs of some activity. A cluster of marsquakes can help researchers find evidence of vulcanism on Mars.

1. Sheng Wang, Hrvoje Tkalčić. Scanning for planetary cores with single-receiver intersource correlations. Nature Astronomy, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01796-8
2. Simon C. Stähler, Anna Mittelholz, Cleément Perrin, Taichi Kawamura, Doyeon Kim, Martin Knapmeyer, Géraldine Zenhäusern, John Clinton, Domenico Giardini, Philippe Lognonné, W. Bruce Banerdt. Tectonics of Cerberus Fossae unveiled by marsquakes. Nature Astronomy, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01803-y

How have microbes changed the course of life on our planet? How has our atmosphere changed as a result of bacteria and archaea? Assimilation can help enhance single cellular life. Archaea can collect long strings of extra genes just in case. Finding the right gene at the right moment can help Archaea make the most of available food.

1. Basem Al-Shayeb, Marie C. Schoelmerich, Jacob West-Roberts, Luis E. Valentin-Alvarado, Rohan Sachdeva, Susan Mullen, Alexander Crits-Christoph, Michael J. Wilkins, Kenneth H. Williams, Jennifer A. Doudna, Jillian F. Banfield. Borgs are giant genetic elements with potential to expand metabolic capacity. Nature, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05256-1

Ocean currents can have global impacts shaping our climate and life in the seas and onshore. How do the ocean currents circulate and vary not just on the surface but beneath the waves? It's easy to picture different layers of clouds, but the same is true for our oceans. Large circulating patterns of currents called Gyres govern the oceans. Tiny phytoplankton keep our oceans alive but how do they get enough food themselves? The middle of a gyre gets baked in sun and seems to lack nutrient sources, so how do microbes survive there? When phytoplankton die they rain down nutrients and carbon to lower layers of the ocean as marine snow.

1. Mukund Gupta, Richard G. Williams, Jonathan M. Lauderdale, Oliver Jahn, Christopher Hill, Stephanie Dutkiewicz, Michael J. Follows. A nutrient relay sustains subtropical ocean productivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (41) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2206504119

A big prize like the Nobel for Chemistry doesn't appear out of nowhere. To win a Nobel Prize, a lot of team work in laboratories and across the world has to come together. We find out about the research that led towards the Nobel Prize for chemistry and how it grew. How does Click Chemistry solve the problem of messy and complicated reactions? How do you look inside a cell when it's working without destroying it? How can you get precise tracking of cells behavior using Bioorthogonal chemistry.

1. Castelvecchi, D. and Ledford, H., 2022. Chemists who invented revolutionary ‘click’ reactions win Nobel. [online] Nature.com. Available at: [Accessed 8 October 2022].
2. Ramström, O., 2022. CLICK CHEMISTRY A N D BIOORTHOGONAL CHEMISTRY. [online] Nobelprize.org. Available at: [Accessed 8 October 2022].
3. Zhang, H., 2022. Nobel Prize: How click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry are transforming the pharmaceutical and material industries. [online] The Conversation. Available at: [Accessed 8 October 2022].

We celebrate the Ignobel prizes for 2022 with science that makes you laugh and then think. What connects a Fish, ducks and slipstream racing? How do mother ducks manage to keep all their ducklings in tow? Does swimming in formation help the ducks save energy? What's the best spot in the slipstream to be? We all know following in the slipstream is good, but if you're 3 or more back you can literally get pulled along. Complex fluid mechanics makes swimming in a line a way for a mother duck to pull the ducklings along. What happens physically when you find someone who is a good match? Is eye contact or heart rate a better measure of having  a 'spark' with someone new?

1. Wave-Riding and Wave-Passing by Ducklings in Formation Swimming,” Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji, and Atilla Incecik, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 928, no. R2, 2021.
2. “Energy Conservation by Formation Swimming: Metabolic Evidence from Ducklings,” Frank E. Fish, in the book Mechanics and Physiology of Animal Swimming, 1994, pp. 193-204.
3. Physiological Synchrony is Associated with Attraction in a Blind Date Setting,” Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, and Mariska E. Kret, Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 6, no. 2, 2022, pp. 269-278.