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Unexpected Elements

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The news you know, the science you don’t. Unexpected Elements looks beyond everyday narratives to discover a goldmine of scientific stories and connections from around the globe. From Afronauts, to why we argue, to a deep dive on animal lifespans: see the world in a new way.

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Unexpected Elements: A shooting star parked on your driveway

Discussion & Talk

Meteorite of carbonaceous chondrite found in Gloucestershire, England, UK

13/03/2021 GMT

A shooting star parked on your driveway

BBC World Service - Unexpected Elements, A shooting star parked on your driveway

A rare type of meteorite lands next to a rural UK house, and is now in professional hands

A shooting star parked on your driveway, spotting tsunamis in the ionosphere, hacked EMA emails and mRNA vaccine stability, 
and the information superhighway of the body

Last week a fireball lit up the sky of western England. Locals and professionals scoured the countryside for any surviving precious fragments of meteorite, and thanks to them some bits of the earliest solar system are now in London’s Natural History Museum. And as an excited Sara Russell, Merit Researcher in Cosmic Mineralogy tells us, examples of carbonaceous chondrite – the soft, loamy type that fell in Winchcombe – such as this, are a rare and special chunk of luck. 

Spotting tsunamis in the ionosphere
Exactly a decade ago the disastrous huge wave caused by an earthquake at sea struck the coast of Japan, causing death and devastating consequences. But could new ways of spotting tsunamis beyond the horizon be, well, just over the horizon? Giovanni Occhipinti of the Paris Geophysics Institute tells Roland Pease about his technique of looking at disruptions in the highest levels of the atmosphere - using the slight twinkle in a beam from a GPS or GNS satellite - to infer that a massive wave may be on its way. 

Hacked EMA emails and mRNA vaccine stability 
This week a piece in the British Medical Journal provides some insight into how the medical regulatory bodies scrutinised the novel RNA vaccines that were the science marvels of 2020. Investigative journalist Serena Tinari was one of the people who received anonymously a large, though selective, bundle of hacked emails and documents dating back to November copied from the servers of the European Medicines Agency. They make mention of concerns the Agency had over the levels of effective RNA contained in some batches of the industrially produced Pfizer Biontech Covid vaccine compared to the laboratory produced doses. The EMA did subsequently licence the vaccine - the problem having presumably been solved. However, as Serena describes, she was then surprised that the companies and agencies she and the BMJ approached would not tell her what the threshold was for adjudging acceptable levels, given as is well known, the fragility of mRNA and the need to store it carefully. They said it was commercially sensitive. But as RNA researcher Prof Anna Blakney tells Science in Action, there are fascinating reasons why that might simply not be known, and also why precise accuracy likely doesn’t matter too much compared to the better-known clinical efficacy these vaccines continue to demonstrate.

The information superhighway of the body
The Vagus nerve is part of our parasympathetic nervous system, delivering information from all our major organs to the brain stem, and stimulating it can help us switch off our fight or flight response and calm us down. But listener Mags wants to know what science says about its impact on our general wellbeing? Marnie Chesterton learns some deep breathing techniques and discovers how the length of our exhale is closely linked to our heart rate, all of which is important for developing something called vagal tone. Cold water immersion also said to stimulate the Vagus, so Marnie braves a freezing shower, only to discover she needs to get her face wet but keep the rest of her body dry, to avoid what scientists called autonomic conflict, which is when your stress response and calming response are both switched on by the same event. Activating both arms of the nervous system in this way can lead to serious heart problems in some people. New research into the gut-brain axis has shown that the Vagus nerve may be responsible for transporting the so-called happy hormone serotonin, which could have important implications for the treatment of depression. And innovations in electrical stimulation of this nerve means implanted devices may soon be used to treat inflammatory conditions like arthritis.

Image: Meteorite of carbonaceous chondrite found in Gloucestershire, England, UK
Credit: Anonymous

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