Old faces and big spaces in small places

The 2025 Nobel prizes are announced this week – how did Science in Action’s predictions fare? Science author and thinker Philip Ball judges. The Whitley Fund for Nature this week hosted a “People for Planet” summit, exploring possible solutions to save nature. Amongst the speakers was Prof Martin Wikelski, of ICARUS, who has spent many years tracking wildlife around the world using tiny radio sensors. As he describes to Roland, he shortly hopes to launch a network of satellites to enable a global system to help us learn how hundreds of species are faring. Also, a new “Human Disease Blood Atlas” gets a boost, as described by Mathias Uhlén of SciLifeLab. Could an annual blood sample become a standard primary healthcare routine, mapping key proteins and their concentrations to provide early warning of hundreds of diseases? Meanwhile Nozair Khawaja of Free University of Berlin has been revisiting data from the Cassini mission to Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, back in 2008. His new analysis increases the prospects of habitable conditions deep on the ocean floor beneath the icy crust. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennet-Holesworth (Image: Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry explains a model during a press conference. Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand via Getty Images).

You can listen to Old faces and big spaces in small places online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Old faces and big spaces in small places is an episode from Science in Action by BBC.

This episode is 31:57 long.

This episode was published on Oct 9, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Science in Action when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.