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Home > Science in Action > The First Solar Polar Pictures


	Podcast:		Science in Action
	Episode:		The First Solar Polar Pictures
	Category:		Religion & Spirituality
	Duration:		00:34:56
	Publish Date:		2025-06-12 20:00:00
	Description:		ESA’s Solar Orbiter camera probe begins raising its orbit towards the sun’s poles, whilst Betelgeuse’s elusive buddy continues to sneak past our best telescopes. Earlier this year, Solar Orbiter started to stretch its orbit over greater latitudes – effectively standing on cosmic tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the Sun’s poles. This week, we have seen the first ever pictures of them, and as solar scientist Steph Yardley tells us, the views will only get better. Meanwhile, Andrea Dupree of the Harvard Smithsonian centre for Astrophysics and colleagues have had time to study new Hubble and Chandra telescope observations of the iconic star Betelgeuse searching for signs of its hypothesized binary companion – dubbed “Betelbuddy”. The papers that appeared on the Arxiv pre-print server have not yet been fully peer-reviewed, but it seems astronomers will have to keep looking. Humans use machines to read gene sequences as best they can, but it takes time and isn’t perfect because we don’t know what all of it means. Of course nature has its own genome reader – the ribosome. It is this that interprets the genetic instructions contains in our DNA and translates them into actual proteins. Viruses, of course, use it too when a cell gets infected. Shira Weingarten-Gabbay has this week demonstrated how scientists can make use of ribosomes too. Working somewhat in reverse, her team have identified many thousands of proteins previously unknown, that could for example provide targets for future vaccines or antivirals should the need arise. And finally, Nanshu Lu and team in the University of Texas at Austin have been working for some years on 2-dimensional wearable electronic “E-Tattoos” to monitor health non-invasively through our skin. Their latest work, describes “A wireless forehead e-tattoo for mental workload estimation”. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jasmine Cerys George
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