Old faces and big spaces in small places

Summary

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Science In Action (BBC World Service):

Old Faces and Big Spaces in Small Places

Air Date: October 9, 2025
Host: Roland Pease

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Episode Overview

This episode explores major breakthroughs and long-term projects in science, emphasizing how years—even decades—of persistence can lead to transformative discoveries and technologies. The program highlights recent Nobel Prizes across chemistry, physics, and medicine, showcases the evolution of animal tracking from small-scale studies to a global “Internet of Animals,” discusses the revolutionary potential of blood-based health diagnostics, and delves into new findings from legacy data on Saturn’s moon Enceladus with implications for astrobiology.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Nobel Prizes 2025: Chemistry, Physics, Medicine

[01:09 - 10:23]

Chemistry: Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs)

• Breakthrough Honoured: Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi awarded for the development of MOFs.
• What are MOFs:
  • Engineered porous materials with vast internal surface areas, akin to “molecular catacombs” or a “molecular children’s construction toy.”
  • “The materials that you produce are extremely light...some of the lightest materials known to humanity, and they’re extremely porous.” – Omar Yaghi [07:21]
• Significance:
  • Enables carbon capture, water harvesting, catalysis, and possible applications in batteries and pollution control.
  • The Nobel was described as long overdue: “Many people...have been saying for years...MOFs...are going to win the prize.” – Phil Ball [08:19]
• Application Examples:
  • Extracting pollutants, acting as catalysts, harvesting water from desert air.

Physics: Quantum Devices

• Award Context: Recognition of foundational quantum mechanics work from the 1980s that now underpins modern quantum computers (e.g., those from Google and IBM).
• Relevance: Shows how fundamental research leads to groundbreaking technology after decades.
• Quote: “It paved the way for the devices...in quantum computers.” – Phil Ball [09:42]

Medicine: Immune System Modulation

• Focus: Mechanisms that prevent the immune system attacking self-tissues—important for autoimmune disease and cancer therapy.
• Timeframe: Work started four decades ago.
• Further coverage recommended via BBC Health Check.

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Global Animal Tracking: The “Internet of Animals”

[10:59 - 17:52]

Evolution of Animal Tracking

• Speaker: Martin Wikelski (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior)
• Past: Started with tiny radio tags on migrating dragonflies (as small as 120 milligrams) [12:42].
• Now: Project Icarus aims to track animal movements globally using satellite-linked “wearables”—from insects to whales.
  • Database Scale: MoveBank hosts over 35,000 daily-updating animals, 8 billion locations, and info from 1,600 species [13:33].
  • “We're only touching the top layer of the information” – Martin Wikelski [14:24]

Data Uses & Implications

• Understanding Behaviour & Disease: Movement and biometric data (like temperature) can signal behavioral changes, disease outbreaks (notably avian influenza), and environmental threats.
  • “We can really trace a disease and make predictions where it will show up next.” – Martin Wikelski [17:03]
• Conservation & Eco-forecasting: Long-term migration data reveals climate impact on species and may eventually predict ecological changes or natural disasters.

Scaling Up

• Satellites: Plan for six satellites by early 2027 to achieve global coverage [17:29].

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The Future of Blood Diagnostics: A Molecular Atlas

[19:14 - 25:03]

Major Study on Blood Biomarkers

• Interviewee: Matthias Ulayan (SciLife Lab)
• Approach:
  • Used millions of data points from thousands of biobank volunteers, tracking thousands of proteins (“biomarkers”) to correlate with health records.
  • Machine learning identifies disease-linked profiles: “It’s not this protein which is important, but this profile of proteins...” [20:59]
• Key Findings:
  • Detects diseases like cancers (lung, colorectal, pancreatic, liver) even before symptoms emerge [23:46].
  • Tracks changes in protein profiles across a human lifespan, especially pronounced at puberty [22:29].

Realistic Hurdles & Hopes

• Challenges: Clinical translation will require rigorous trials and care to avoid over-diagnosis and false positives.
• Vision: “I am absolutely sure that there will be a blood test at home every year in the not so far future.” – Matthias Ulayan [25:03]

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New Life in Old Data: Saturn’s Moon Enceladus

[26:06 - 33:34]

Cassini’s Legacy and Fresh Insights

• Interviewee: Nazair Koir (Free University of Berlin)
• Discovery:
  • Cassini’s 2008 flybys collected ice grains from Enceladus’s plumes.
  • Advanced analysis now reveals complex organic molecules—building blocks for life—distinct from those created by solar radiation.
  • Confirms these molecules originate from the moon’s subsurface ocean [31:20].

Importance and Next Steps

• Scientific Significance: Presence of complex organic molecules enhances the “habitability potential” of Enceladus.
  • “The synthesis of more complex organics is possible inside Enceladus and probably this is happening right now.” – Nazair Koir [32:59]
• Patience Required: Likely decades until a new mission investigates further.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Call me Nostradamus.” – Roland Pease, joking about his repeated prediction of a Nobel for MOFs [01:09]
• “The materials...have the density, 2/10 of the density of water. So they're extremely light, some of the lightest materials known to humanity, and they're extremely porous. In one gram of such material, you could have the footage of, you know, 10, 20 apartments...more than a football field.” – Omar Yaghi [07:21]
• “Giving animals a voice about their own behavior and their location is so amazing that we have to do this.” – Martin Wikelski, on animal tracking tech [12:42]
• “We can really trace a disease and make predictions where it will show up next.” – Martin Wikelski, on avian flu tracking [17:03]
• “I am absolutely sure that not that far future, we will take a blood sample at home once a year in a sort of screening procedure.” – Matthias Ulayan [25:03]
• “The synthesis of more complex organics is possible inside Enceladus and probably this is happening right now.” – Nazair Koir [32:59]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:09: Start of Nobel Prizes discussion (Chemistry focus)
• 07:21: Omar Yaghi describes MOFs’ spectacular properties
• 09:42: Physics Prize and quantum computers relevance
• 10:59: Launch of animal tracking segment (“Internet of Animals”)
• 13:33: Scope of MoveBank animal tracking database
• 17:03: Tracking diseases like avian influenza with animal data
• 19:14: Introduction to blood-based health diagnostics study
• 25:03: Vision for home blood test screening
• 26:06: Evidence of complex organics in Enceladus’s ice plumes
• 32:59: Implications for life on Enceladus

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Tone and Style

The episode embodies Roland Pease’s dry wit and curiosity (“Call me a stopped clock...”), combined with excitement and awe from contributors. It celebrates patient, collaborative science, while also underscoring how technological leaps often rest on sustained, generational effort.

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Conclusion

This rich, wide-ranging episode brings together stories of slow scientific maturation now delivering world-changing results—from Nobel-winning chemistry and quantum physics to the digital tracking of wildlife and the promise of simple blood tests for health. It ends with the tantalizing possibility of life’s chemical precursors on icy Enceladus, fitting the episode’s theme: scientific hope and wonder, rooted in decades of careful observation and analysis.

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Transcript

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[Roland Pease]

Call me Nostradamus.

[Omar Yaghi]

It is very exciting because we have found a solution to one of the largest problems facing society today.

[Roland Pease]

Omar Yaghi of the University of California in Berkeley. I confess I was half expecting expecting to talk to Omar earlier this month when the Nobels announced this year's chemistry laureates. It is surely only a matter of time before his molecular architecture gets that Swedish celebration. That was a year ago. And lo and behold, the Royal Swedish.

[Omar Yaghi]

Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Jaghi for the development of metal organic frameworks.

[Roland Pease]

That's the service we bring you on Science in Action from the BBC World Service. But then you could call me Ronan. Peace A stopped clock Because I've been predicting this particular Nobel yearly for at least a decade and I'm not alone. The decades that it can take for science to mature is actually a bit of a theme this week.

[Nazair Koir]

My colleague Martin Wikowski had done some fantastic work putting small radio transmitters on migrating thrushes and had made a number of important discoveries. And so the challenge I posed to him was could you come up with a transmitter small enough to put on a migrating dragonfly?

[Roland Pease]

That was Science in action in 2006 and Martin Wilkowski is on the program today with a global network of such tracking devices. Also, 20 year data from a NASA Saturn mission that have revealed the building blocks of life and decades of protein sampling are at a tipping point towards a bedside health monitor based on a teaspoon of blood.

[Matthias Ulayan]

I'm absolutely sure that there will be a blood test at home every year in the not so far future.

[Roland Pease]

But first, those Nobel Prizes. And as I said at the beginning of the program, we spoke actually a year ago to one of this year's winners, Omar Yan, for what are called organic framework compounds. Then he was talking to us about how this could be used to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is Nobel's best benefit to humanity in the past year, Part of it. But actually this work goes back 30 years or so. And on the line is Phil Ball, chemist and science writer, who's been following this for an awful long time. Phil, I'd like you also have been saying that this is inevitable. I'd really like to start actually not with the way it's useful, but the way these compounds that Omar and the other laureates have made are beautiful, as a chemist might conceive them.

[Phil Ball]

Yeah, I think chemists are going to be really happy with this prize for once because it's solidly, it's solid traditional chemistry and it is very beautiful. And the idea is basically making materials by design. So, you know, very often the materials we have, they're ones that we find or that we make by accident. And materials of this sort, very porous materials that are very good at absorbing other things like gases and liquids. We tended to use these materials called zeolites, which began as sort of natural materials, natural minerals you can find, that just happened to have a lot of pores in them. And people spent a long time throughout the 20th century really trying to figure out how to make different kinds of zeolites with different sizes and different shapes of pores. But this work that's got the Nobel Prize this year does that much more rationally. And it does it using a kind of assembly kit of atoms and molecules. So you use the metal atoms as the kind of joiners and then the molecules, they're usually carbon based molecules which you can shape in all sorts of ways. You can have struts, you can have little sort of star shaped structures. And the atoms, the metal atoms join them together at their edges. And so you can design on the drawing board how you want your material to look like your porous material and then assemble it.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, it's a kind of molecular children's construction toy. I sort of think that. And they're sort of building. I think of them as sort of molecular catacombs almost, as you say, they're pillars and walls and things and then vast area, vast vastnesses of empty space inside.

[Phil Ball]

Yeah, well, that's the key that you, you know, to make these sorts of materials, you want some way of making pores inside that can, that can accommodate the things you want to absorb or the things you want to transform. And that's tricky because normally materials kind of collapse into a dense state. They don't like having all this sort of empty space.

[Roland Pease]

Everything I ever did in a chemistry lab just collapsed into a sludge. So I really feel that, well, that.

[Phil Ball]

Was the problem in the early days of making these materials. So Richard Robson, who has been in this field for decades and is one of the laureates, he was the first to start making these materials with sort of these big pore spaces in them. But his weren't very stable. They did collapse or they did dissolve, so they weren't really useful for anything because they just weren't robust enough. So it was the other two, it was Susumi Kitagawa and Omiyagi who found ways to make them stable so that you could really start finding applications for them.

[Roland Pease]

And he's been working on them ever since. 1995, I think, was his first key paper on this. And so we did talk to him last year because it was a material which he could capture carbon dioxide in it. And he described himself as a kind of designer, as you say, an architect on the molecular scale.

[Omar Yaghi]

The materials that you produce are extremely light. We made back in 2007 materials that, as light as, you know, have the density, 2/10 of the density of water. So they're extremely light, some of the lightest materials known to humanity, and they're extremely porous. In one gram of such material, you could have the footage of, you know, 10, 20 apartments, or you could say more than a football field. So over the years we've learned how to fashion space, let's say architect space or sculpt space, where we're like molecular architects in terms of encompassing space with matter. So 1 kg of this material be as large as a basketball.

[Roland Pease]

So, Phil, you know, this has been, I think, a kind of inevitable Nobel Prize. It was really a question of when and not if it was.

[Phil Ball]

I mean, you know, many people, including you, Roland and me, have been saying for years, you know, sooner or later, these structures, these metal organic frameworks, or MOFs as they're called, they're going to win the prize. And Omayagi was clearly the person who was going to be rewarded for that. And it makes total sense that the other two, Kitagawa and Robson, are included as well, because as I say, Robson was there in the early days. I think it's come now because it's only sort of in more recent years that it's become clear that these things really are going to be useful. They're going to be easy enough to make and they're going to be robust enough to do things like harvesting water from, you know, the desert air, acting as catalysts, maybe acting as materials for lithium batteries, extracting toxic pollutants and gases from the environment. So it's really these applications that are now coming online that I think have sort of focused attention on the usefulness of these materials.

[Roland Pease]

Before I let you go, Phil, I think you are probably very interested in the Physics Prize as well. You wrote this book Beyond Weird on quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics was a theme of the Physics Prize. Again, actually, it's a very old piece of work back in the 1980s that Scott picked up. But you think this is still worthy of note?

[Phil Ball]

Oh, totally. I mean, in some ways now more than ever, because it is old work. I mean, that's not unusual for the Nobel Prizes, but this does go back to the 1980s. But the key thing is that these guys that work that they did in the 1980s paved the way for the devices, tiny little devices that are now used in the quantum computers that are being made by Google and by IBM. So it's not just fundamental physics, these structures are now again showing applications in real working devices, quantum computers.

[Roland Pease]

Phil, it's always a delight to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us.

[Phil Ball]

Pleasure. Thanks, Roland.

[Roland Pease]

And the medicine Nobel was for mechanisms that stop the immune system from attacking our own tissues, with important implications for autoimmune conditions and cancer therapies. Again, work that started four decades ago. Go to our sister programme, BBC Health Check for more on that. But the Nobels weren't the only show in town. At the Royal Institution in London, I joined experts celebrating the growing use of technology in defence of our increasingly threatened global wildlife.

[Matthias Ulayan]

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the.

[Travel Narrator]

Whitney Fund for Nature's People for Planet Summit.

[Matthias Ulayan]

I'm Liz Bonnen.

[Roland Pease]

As the keynote talk from conservationist Martin Wielkowski on a proposed Internet of animals progressed, he mentioned work I was sure we'd covered on Science in action 20 years ago of tiny smart tags that allowed him to track insect flights live on the US coast. And now with Project Icarus, his ambitions have gone global.

[Martin Wikelski]

Yes, I think we need to track animals from space because they move into areas where we have no local connection. And it's really important because the connectivity between landscapes is what really makes up biodiversity. Biodiversity loss, but also biodiversity conservation.

[Roland Pease]

But this isn't sort of just by looking. In fact, this is building on work you've done over the decades using these little tracking devices. Explain all that.

[Martin Wikelski]

Yes. So we do animal tracking on board. So animals take these devices as wearables. It's almost like a cell phone. They carry that along. It analyzes their behavior. It gives us information on if an animal is active, if it's living, if it's dead, if it has problems, if it has social interactions, but also about the flight altitude, the temperature, the humidity in this area, the light level. And all of that is transmitted now terrestrially, but soon via space. So we can get it from any place on the planet.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, I think we've established you on the program maybe 20 years ago, where you had one of the. Some of these tracking devices on the backs of dragonflies. You were looking at their migration patterns.

[Martin Wikelski]

Yes, that was really exciting. At the time we had the first really small devices, radio transmitters still, but they were about 120 milligrams, so a tenth of a gram and they would fly really nicely on dragonflies. Everybody said, oh, this is impossible. And then we said, no, we can try it, we can do it. And we followed them by small plane. So it was incredibly labor intensive, but it did work. And that was the basis, the input for a global system, because we said, well, the kind of information we can get from those devices, giving animals a voice about their own behavior and their location is so amazing that we have to do this.

[Roland Pease]

And if you're going to bother to do this by satellite, does that mean that you've got to track all kinds of animals? It's only worth it if you have lots of animals that you're tracking. So give me a sense of the sort of the scale.

[Martin Wikelski]

So right now in MoveBank, which is sort of a terrestrial database, we get about 35,000 animals reporting their lives every day.

[Roland Pease]

That's a lot of tagging that you've done.

[Martin Wikelski]

Not only us. I mean, this is a global movement. We are only trying to help everybody else to bring their data together. We have about 8 billion locations and about 12 billion behaviors of animals in MoveBank of about 1,600 species. So that's what the global community of biologgers, of conservationists has already done. It's a lot. It's 1600 species and now we are starting to learn what they can tell us.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, this is all the way from insects up to, I don't know, eagles or something.

[Martin Wikelski]

Yeah, and whales and bats and everything that moves and flies and runs.

[Roland Pease]

And what do you do then with all the data.

[Martin Wikelski]

Right now it's almost like a natural history collection where initially have a. Like a specimen in your museum, and 200 years later you find that there's DNA in that specimen. So it's like novel information. Right now we are, I think, only touching the top layer of the information. What's interesting is that we are finding slowly how animals interact, how they. How they communicate with each other across species boundaries. And that is something that I think in the future will give us most of the information.

[Roland Pease]

You mean sort of if they're moving in the same direction or something like that, or maybe if they're running away from each other?

[Martin Wikelski]

Other, yes, but also how they socialize, if they move very close together, if they adjust their movements to others, if they move in the same atmosphere, atmospheric level, if they go to the same places to feed. All of those questions are now something that we can address. And it means it's almost like watching the stock market. You know, if there's a stock market crash, this is like animals on. On a farm that then can tell you if there is an earthquake coming or a volcanic eruption happening soon. So it's really predicting things or getting data input for potentially predicting things that we cannot predict yet.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, for me, it's the conservation aspect that really interests me. And you talked in particular about bird migrations, and we've certainly done on the program, problems with bird migrations changing, particularly because of global warming. Presumably you're seeing these enormous flight paths.

[Phil Ball]

Yes.

[Martin Wikelski]

I mean, in storks, for example, we can track them now with leg bands for their entire lifetime. So we have data on individual storks for 15 years, but we also have data for 30 years for stork migration. And that's really what you need to understand, a change in their migration routes according to climate change or human change of landscapes. And that's becoming really exciting because we can see these changes.

[Roland Pease]

One thing that's really been bothering us on the program for the past five years or so, four years, has been the spread of avian flu between species, between bird species, between domestic birds and between wild birds. And then with animals. And I'd be. I'd be so curious how the kind of data you're getting might actually help us understand the vulnerabilities within this sort of avian ecosystem.

[Martin Wikelski]

Avian influenza is a really good case because what we see immediately is a change in behavior of these animals, especially also body temperature in the birds and then obviously death. That's very easy to detect.

[Roland Pease]

So you could actually even know if there's a bird that might be. If it's tagged, its behavior might give away the fact that it's there.

[Martin Wikelski]

Absolutely, yes. For example, right now we are working with the Peruvian government because avian influencer went through the Bering Strait, came down the Western Pacific route, even went into the South American sea lion population and back into the condors. And the condors are now carrying it over the Andes into the Amazon and we are tracking that entire route. And that's really exciting because for the first time we can really trace a disease and make predictions where it will show up next.

[Roland Pease]

This is absolutely brilliant. How many satellites? I mean, is it going to be one satellite? What's the plan?

[Martin Wikelski]

The plan is to have six satellite ups by the end of next year. So the first one is going up very soon, not before November, but very soon. The second one is going up February, March, next year, a dedicated Icarus satellite. And then we have four more next year or early 27.

[Roland Pease]

Martin Wikielski of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. And when he says not before the end of October, I'm rather hoping he means launch opportunities permitting, not long after. Hope is our watchword here on Science in Action from the BBC.

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[Roland Pease]

It feels like we've been hoping for two or so decades for some kind of bedside blood test, a bit like Star Trek's tricorder, which will reveal the secrets of your state of health. But getting there has proved harder than I'd appreciated. A large study this week, however, based on blood samples from thousands of volunteers matched to their health records, suggests the dream is achievable. Like many previous efforts, the research looked for biomarkers, proteins that float in your blood and which might be associated with a condition. But rather than looking for one or two or three, they were looking for and detecting thousands to paint a kind of molecular atlas of disease. Some of them, Matthias Ulayan, who led the study, told me, circulate naturally in the blood to maintain our health and fight disease. Others leak from damaged tissue.

[Matthias Ulayan]

So obviously we have a lot of inflammation markers and they are secreted out in the blood and we look at all of them and we see them all the time and they are very interesting because they signal that something is going on and so on. But then what is also interesting is that when you have some sort of tissue damage, you then leak out these proteins. And we have, for example, brain proteins which are leaked out in some of the. And so on.

[Roland Pease]

The point is that it's not that when you see one, you say, oh, that's a kidney disease, but it's more like you're seeing a harmony, as it were, a chord being played by all the different proteins and the different chords, as it were, the hint to what kinds of diseases may be showing up.

[Matthias Ulayan]

Yeah, exactly. And also now, of course, I mean, we have these millions and millions of data points and we can just throw machine learning on it. I mean, some people would call it AI to be popular, but it's good old machine learning. And this software actually tells us that it's not this protein, which is important, but it's this profile of proteins that tells you you have lung cancer, you have breast cancer. And then we have actually also collaborated with UK Biobank and we can also see that some of the models that we have, we can actually do also prospectively, so we can actually see it before you have symptoms of cancer, which is of course very, very interesting.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, that is sort of the dream. It almost goes back to the ancient Greeks, or who take the king's blood and put it in a boiling pan to read the blood in that way. But you're doing it in a much smarter way.

[Matthias Ulayan]

Yeah, we do it in a smart way, thanks to all the biobanks that have been collected for many, many years. And I just want to point out one of them is called BAMSA, where we have followed hundreds of children from 0 years old to 25 and we have blood samples every year. So it's incredible to actually be following the same individual. And we can do it now because that 25 years have gone.

[Roland Pease]

And I think your paper said there are quite significant changes over those years.

[Matthias Ulayan]

Especially in the puberty. I mean, it's just amazing what Happens, you know, before puberty, males and females are similar. In puberty, a lot of things are happening and it's almost an explosion of things happening, separating the males and females.

[Roland Pease]

I suppose what I'm curious about is, well, firstly, how big are the variations in some of these proteins? I presume they're all present in incredibly low concentrations in the first instance, and then some of them. Is it going up by 2%, 5%, 100%?

[Matthias Ulayan]

No, no, I, I would say for some of the intracellular markers that are being released by cell death, they go up, you know, 10, 20 times. And some inflammation is also about five to 10 times, but it's not more than that. So it's very important that you have relatively good quantification in the assay. But both the olink and the somalogic are very, very good assays and technologies.

[Roland Pease]

So just be specific about some of the diseases which you think from this study you can say, okay, this person probably has Alzheimer's, let's say, or kidney disease or a cancer.

[Matthias Ulayan]

Well, we have rather good profiles for lung cancer, for colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer and liver cancer. But I would still say that we will not go into the trap like everybody else does to say we now have a, you know, something you have to really. And this is why we say let's put all of this in an open access database and people can then do their own validation.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, in a sense, none of this, I presume, would be rolled out in a clinic until it's gone through some kind of clinical trial, which is not taking your biobank data, but actually taking real patients coming into hospitals and seeing if there's a good match between the kinds of patents of proteins that you're seeing and, and developing diseases. And that's exactly.

[Matthias Ulayan]

And it's a rather expensive exercise.

[Roland Pease]

I'm glad you said that.

[Matthias Ulayan]

And this will take time, but, you know, I still think I'm biased, but I think, still think that we're seeing a revolution in, you know, biomarker and blood profiling.

[Roland Pease]

So you do see this in the long run as being a point of care approach where as well as taking your heartbeat and your blood pressure.

[Matthias Ulayan]

No, I am absolutely sure that not that far future, we will take a blood sample at home once a year in a sort of screening procedure. But before we do, you know, we do that, roll that out, we have to make sure that we are not, you know, frightening more than we are helping. Because right now there is a lot of false positives and false, you Know, like the PSA test that, you know, you have a prostate cancer test, but probably it makes more harm than help because people would not die of the prostate cancer, they will die with prostate cancer, if you understand what I mean. So you have to know what you're doing and you have to help more than you threaten people. But I'm absolutely sure that there will be a blood test at home every year in the not so far future.

[Roland Pease]

Matthias Ulain of SciLife Lab, the Swedish consortium that mined those data, bubbling over with enthusiasm, which is what I love. The dry charts and data are in science this week. Molecules floating in the ejector of ice volcanoes on Saturn's moon's Enceladus are where we end this week's edition. And a bit like those biomarkers, they're sampling the conditions in the deep ocean beneath the satellite's icy crust. More importantly, these are quite complex organic carbon containing molecules of the kind you'd hope to find where life is possible. What's surprising is the samples were collected almost two decades ago as NASA's probe Cassini passed through one of these icy plumes and one of Saturn's associated rings. But it's taken that long to to learn how to interpret the details. Noze Kawaia told me why Little Enceladus keeps astronomers looking.

[Nazair Koir]

It's 500 kilometer diameter, a tiny moon. It has an icy surface all around. Then the underneath of the ice we have the liquid water ocean. The interesting thing is that there is no extraterrestrial ocean world which is actually emitting its ocean material into the space space, and we are capturing it. So that's why it is such a fascinating object.

[Roland Pease]

What's interesting is that Cassini launched such a long time ago, we actually featured when it was buried into Saturn eight years ago. And here you are going back to data that you collected from Cassini almost 20 years ago, and you're finding something new.

[Nazair Koir]

Yes, this data was obtained during the flyby of Cassini when it flew through the plume in 2008. And scientists actually looked into this data. But, you know, the knowledge and the experience and the experiments were not set right at that time to understand the exact composition.

[Roland Pease]

So you've gone back because you've now got a better idea how to interpret those data.

[Nazair Koir]

Exactly at that time. The paper was published in 2011, and that study could only tell us that.

[Roland Pease]

There are organics, these are carbon containing molecules.

[Nazair Koir]

Yes, but. But there is no further information that what are these and what are their implications? And gradually Cassini actually collected Lot of ice grains throughout its life journey. And we gradually looked back into that data to find out what we knew.

[Roland Pease]

Now, just to get the sense of what these data are, my impression is that as Cassini flew through the plume, there are all these ice grains that basically hit the craft a bit like flies hitting the windscreen of a car. But you have a machine that a device that can weigh some of them and weigh the molecules inside them, and that's how you're recognizing the molecules.

[Nazair Koir]

Exactly. So there are a number of instruments that were on board to Cassini spacecraft. And during this flyby in 2008, we of course we have the instrument. Its name is Cosmic Dust Analyzer. It's a mass spectrometer and it is sensitive for ice grains. And what happens when the spacecraft flew through actually about 21 kilometer to the closest approach to the surface and gradually it enter into the plume at a very high speed. And the speed was approximately 18 kilometer per second. And at this highest flyby speed, it actually collected the ice particles which enter to this analyzer. And because of this relative speed, the particles hit the instrument target and then they vaporize and ionizes and those ionic species produce the so called mass spectrum. And that mass spectrum we evaluated to understand that what molecules are there?

[Roland Pease]

So obviously these are ice crystals. They've got the water that's come up. I guess there's water molecules in there, but it's all the other organic ones. And my impression is that they're interestingly complex. The ones that you're actually now beginning to identify.

[Nazair Koir]

Yes. So one thing that your audience needs to understand, that Cassini not only collected the ice particles directly from the plume, but Cassini continuously collected the ice particles which are emitted by Enceladus. But they left the gravity of Enceladus and they settle down in the ring. So that means those ice cranes were also the sample coming from Enceladus.

[Roland Pease]

So you've got, as it were, old and new ones.

[Nazair Koir]

Yes, so the old one and the new ones. And we wanted to know whether this difference in the age translate into the composition or not. But we were surprised that these freshly iced grains contains the similar organic compounds which we discovered earlier in the E ring. So that actually confirmation that these grains actually are coming from the subsurface ocean. So this is one thing, but just directly to answer your question about the complexity of these organic molecules, there are certain other organic molecules which were discovered for the very first time in this work in the ice grains. And they had the complexity in their structures. And when we Think all these properties of these molecules together with earlier molecules and we fit these puzzles, then we found that these molecules actually fit in the picture to the complex chemistry that could lead to more complex organics under Enceladus conditions. So this is what we, we think.

[Roland Pease]

So. So the point is that there's some kind of series of chemical reactions, carbon chemical reactions going on inside Enceladus, because these were fresh grains, so they're not something that's been driven by sunlight or anything like that and they're being jetted up. So that's telling you there's some kind of chemistry going on that's sort of encouraging in terms of the idea there could be the conditions for life.

[Matthias Ulayan]

Yes.

[Nazair Koir]

You can just imagine that once you confirm that these organics are not because of the radiation processes, that means their age is just minutes. As soon as they were emitted, the spacecraft captured. So that tells us, the complexity, tells us that the synthesis of more complex organics is possible inside Enceladus and probably this is happening right now. So this naturally enhances the habitability potential of enclosures.

[Roland Pease]

Sadly, it may be two or more decades before we get a space mission there to find out that patience in science thing yet again. Nazair Koir of the Free University of Berlin may have a better chance than me of seeing the results, unless my biomarkers are favourable. Science in Action, however, won't be around to report them. After six decades of broadcasting the latest story stories in science on the BBC World Service, the program stops airing at the end of the month in three weeks time. I'm Roland Pease, Today's producer is Alex Mansfield and we will both be back next week.

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