BBC Inside Science

How hard is it to get to Mercury and why are we going? Also, do science festivals work? And why did mammals survive when dinosaurs died? Marnie Chesterton and guests dissect.

As this programme went out, scientists and engineers eagerly wait for new images of the planet Mercury to arrive, snapped from a speeding probe passing just 200km from the surface, as it desperately tries to shed some velocity on its seven-year braking journey. ESA/JAXA's BepiColombo mission to Mercury is using gravitational swing-shots (just four more to go) to lose enough energy to eventually, in Dec 2025, enter orbit around the planet closest to our sun.

Dr Suzie Imber of Leicester University has skin in the game, being co-investigator on one of the instruments that will eventually be able to teach us more than we've ever known about this bizarre world.

Suzie is also last year's winner of the Royal Society's Rosalind Franklyn Award, and works hard doing science outreach talks and events to help inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Thurs 23rd June is International Women in Engineering Day, celebrating remarkable engineering as a career option. Report Emily Bird goes along to the Great Exhibition Road Festival to see how science festivals such as this one can help raise the profile of engineering and scientific endeavours in the society of tomorrow.

One thing most kids like is Space. The other is dinosaurs. But what about long-dead Mammals? Prof Steve Brusatte of Edinburgh university is a palaeontologist and author whose last book on dinosaurs even led to him being consulted for the latest film in the Jurassic Park franchise. Why then does his new book focus on furrier beings in The Rise and Reign of The Mammals? He tells Marnie of the exciting millions of years of evolution that led to us, after the dinosaurs croaked their last,.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Reporting by Emily Bird Produced by Alex Mansfield

Since 2018, Nasa's InSight Mars lander has been sitting on the surface listening to the seismic rumbles of the red planet's deep interior. But this week, plans were announced to finally phase down its activity, as martian dust obscures too much of its solar panels to power it through the forthcoming winter. Jon Amos tells Vic Gill of some of its many successes, and quite why it didn't fly with a duster on board.

50 years of observations across Australia's northern tropical forests suggest yet more bad news for the climate. Trees’ mortality has, it seems, doubled since the 1980s. As Oxford University's David Bauman tells Vic, it seems to be linked to a drying of the air as temperatures rise, and if the trend is also true across the world's other moist tropical forests, they could rapidly slip from being carbon sinks, to carbon sources.

Conservationists say we’re losing animal species faster today than at any point in the last 10 million years of Earth’s history. And one approach aims to save as many of those lost animals as possible – after they’ve died. Biobanking – saving frozen tissue from dead animals for future cloning or other reproductive technologies could buy us time to prevent extinction - or even reverse it. Vic visits Nature's Safe, where technology used in pedigree breeding is being deployed to preserve the cells and tissue of endangered species when individuals die or are euthanised, for possible research in the future, or even cloning.

Meanwhile, 2.5 miles off the coast of Jersey, archaeologists are holing up in a medieval fortress waiting for the few lowest tides of the year to give them access to the Violet Bank - an area of reef thought once to have been home to Neanderthal populations, but which now is for most of the year submerged by the sea. Marnie Chesterton has been talking to UCL’s Matt Pope between the ebbs and flows.

Presented by Victoria Gill

Reporters: Marnie Chesterton and Jonathan Amos

Produced by Alex Mansfield

From the very start of the COVID pandemic, test and trace has been the mantra. But here in the UK it was started, then abandoned as the number of cases rose too high to manage. It’s now been reintroduced and we’re all being encouraged to download the ‘NHS COVID-19’ phone app which can detect whether you’ve been near an infected person using Bluetooth technology. How have other countries around the world been managing to find, test, trace, isolate and support (FTTIS) their COVID patients? And what lessons can we learn from them? Professor Michael Hopkins at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex Business School is part of an international team of experts in science policy, social science, medicine, epidemiology and global health that has analysed and compared national testing systems in 6 countries: Spain, South Korea, South Africa, Ireland, Germany and us, in June, July and August. Michael Hopkins told Marnie Chesterton that we all have something to learn.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been stealing a glimpse into this year’s shortlisted contenders for the annual Royal Society’s Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Linda Scott is an Emeritus Professor from the University of Oxford and a consultant to the World Bank Group on gender economics. Her book, The ‘Double X Economy - The Epic Potential of Empowering Women ’ analyses the economics of gender inequality and the hidden economics which is foundational to the more recognised and acknowledged global economics, that is, the work - much of it unpaid - done by women.

Presenter – Adam Rutherford

Producer – Fiona Roberts

Produced in collaboration with the Open University

Why are non-African monkeypox cases causing concern? Also, the first complete human genome from a Pompeiian cadaver, and how YouTube is aiding animal behaviourists.

As cases of monkeypox appear strangely dispersed around Europe and elsewhere in the world outside of Africa, BBC health and science correspondent James Gallagher outlines to Vic the symptoms and some of the mysterious elements of this outbreak.

In Pompeii, scientists have for the first time managed to sequence the whole genome of an individual killed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD. Serena Viva of the University of Salento describes the site of two individual's tragic demise all that time ago, one female aged around 50 years, and a younger male, both leaning on a couch in a dining room. Geneticist Gabriele Scorrano describes how the ancient DNA (aDNA) was preserved and extracted, and how the male individual's genome was so well preserved it could be sequenced in full. As they suggest this week in Nature, there weren’t too many surprises in what they found, but the ability to do this sort of science opens up a new era of Pompeiian archaeological treasure.

Faced with covid lockdowns and unable to observe in the wild, elephant conservationists Nachiketha Sharma and Sanjeeta Sharma Pocharel decided to see if videos uploaded to YouTube could enlighten science on rare behaviours of Asian elephants. African Elephants are known to have a strange fascination, even respect, for the death of other elephant individuals, especially those near to their families such as calves and parents. Asian elephants’ thanatological (death related) behaviour is less well observed however. But the researchers turned to videos of strange grieving-like behaviour to begin a catalogue of the different reactions such as carrying dead calves, standing guard, or vocalizing. They dedicate their work, published by the Royal Society, to the elephants involved.

This sort of research, using video observations captured and shared by members of the public are proving rather useful to zoologists and animal behaviourists. Ximena Nelson of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand was one of the first scientists to suggest the usefulness of trawling the internet for odd video of animals and explains a bit more to Vic.

Presented by Victoria Gill Produced by Alex Mansfield

ESA announce that Shaun The Sheep will fly around the moon this month aboard Artemis-1 mission. Philippe Deloo tells Gaia Vince what's in store for the woolly astronaut this month. Philippe is the team lead on the European Service Module, the part of NASA's Orion spacecraft which will be the workhorse of the new moon missions, ferrying four astronauts at a time to the moon and perhaps even beyond one day. This first Artemis mission, slated for launch 29th August, will check all the engineering bravado of the new launch and orbital systems ready for subsequent human passengers in a couple of years.

Christiana Scheib, of the Universities of Cambridge and Tartu, is part of a team who seem to have pinpointed in time the moment the Herpes virus that causes cold sores first spread across human populations. By obtaining genomes of HSV1 from four individuals who died between the iron age and medieval times, their analysis suggests an initial emergence sometime in the Bronze age. The intriguing hypothesis that accompanies the discovery is that the variant's emergence was facilitated by a new trend among bronze age folk of romantic kissing. But as she describes, it's hard to be certain for "there is no gene for kissing".

One way of restricting the spread of many viruses is of course various forms of PPE. The last few years have seen billions more items of PPE used on our planet, often without a clear plan for their disposal, and they get accidentally dropped and even deliberately dumped all over the world. Alex Bond of the Natural History Museum at Tring observes and catalogues rubbish affecting wildlife. He took the BBC's Victoria Gill on a walk down a canal in Salford to discuss the issues with the tissues.

Presented by Gaia Vince Produced by Alex Mansfield