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Science In Action: 05/11/2010

05/11/2010

BBC World Service - Science In Action, 05/11/2010

New research shows cells can destroy viruses; this could lead to cures for the common cold

Scientists find that cells can fight off viruses; How a snake gave birth to a new sex – without a father; Recreating the time before the Big Bang; Orange healthy maize; 10 years of living in space

Cure for the common cold
Up until now it was thought that antibodies only worked outside cells, trying to catch and destroy viruses before they invaded, but new work shows that they can actually help cells get rid of viruses.  Could this discovery help us develop new cures for the common cold?  Dr Leo James from the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in the UK, leads the team behind the work.


New snake sex
A female boa constrictor snake has given birth to 22 rather special babies.  They have no father. They seem to be half clones of their mother, with a genetic makeup that has never been seen before.  BBC science reporter Victoria Gill explains more on the programme.


ALICE
The Large Hadron Collider, buried some 100 meters below the Swiss/French border, is the world's largest and most expensive particle accelerator.  A 27km loop speeds particles to nearly the speed of light, which means they complete that 27km 11,000 times a second.  Next week things are due to step up a level.  The LHC will start a series of experiments dubbed ALICE that will take us closer to the Big Bang than we have ever been before.  Science in Action's Bruce Thorson tells us more. 


Orange Maize
Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children, and puts them at risk of disease and death.  It is a major problem in poorer countries, especially in Africa and South East Asia.  One way of overcoming this is to breed a crop that is high in beta-carotene which the body converts to vitamin A.  So it is   potentially great news that scientists have discovered a type of maize – a very common and readily available crop – that is much higher in beta-carotene than usual.  Howarth Bouis the Director of HarvestPlus – a programme which aims to breed vitamin and mineral rich staple food crops for the developing world – joins us on Science in Action to inform us of their progress.


ISS
The International Space Station has now been inhabited continuously for a decade. It has been well used – around 200 people have visited, including astronauts, cosmonauts, and space tourists.  The exact cost of constructing it is not easy to work out, but it seems to be somewhere around 100 billion dollars.   But what has the ISS done for us?  Former NASA astronaut, Jeff Hoffman, who is now professor of aerospace engineering at MIT in the US, shares his thoughts on the ISS.

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