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This is the podcast of BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on the 29th of May, 2025.

Hello, fellow philomaths.

I'm Marnie Chesterton, and that is my new word.

It means a lover of learning.

Epistemophiles.

There's another.

There are millions of us out there, and I know that partly because I've seen Radio 4's listening figures.

And what is Radio 4 but an audio temple to knowledge?

I also know because lots of you have been getting in touch with Inside Science, wanting answers to various aspects of how the world around us works.

Today, we've assembled a panel with decades of dedicated study between them, and we'll be tackling a selection of your questions on everything from life on the moon to the death of plastic bags.

Let's meet them.

Hello, I'm Catherine Haymans.

I'm a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and I'm also the Astronomer Royal for Scotland.

Hi, I'm Mark Mazin and I'm a professor of Earth System Science at University College London, which people look at me and go, what does that mean?

So I sum it up by saying I study climate change and environmental change in the past, the present and the future.

And I'm Dr. Penny Sarchet.

I'm Managing Editor at New Scientist and originally a biologist by training.

And we kick off with an international listener from Oregon in the USA who heard an Inside Science episode from back in March where we were talking about the global mineral grab.

And let's have a listen to her question.

Your episode about critical minerals got me thinking about lithium batteries.

Is it known what happens to these batteries once they're discarded, whether into tips or in vehicles and scrapyards?

And do we know what adverse effects there are on the environment, such as soil, water, air, if lithium batteries start leaking?

Mark, this is tangential to climate research, I feel.

So any ideas?

Oh, absolutely.

So the really good news is that lithium-ion batteries are currently being recycled.

And just to make sure that the listener is reassured, there is a former Tesla co-founder...

who produced a company called Redwood Materials that recycles 70% of all North American's lithium batteries at the moment.

And that's really important because then you take all those goodies and then you make them into components for new electric vehicles.

But I have to actually warn listeners about the internet, okay?

I feel this is something important.

Because if you go on there, there is a commonly quoted figure from 2019 that says only 5% of lithium batteries are recycled.

Now, this is what I call a zombie statistic.

which is it's wrong.

It was wrong when it was published, but it just won't die.

So if you really want to be reassured, there's a 2023 paper that says about 59% of batteries worldwide are recycled.

Is that all or just lithium?

Just lithium batteries.

Okay.

Now, of course, that's nowhere near the 100% that we need.

And that comes to the listener's other point.

Is it bad when we throw them away?

No.

Oh, yes.

So the first thing is that lithium batteries contain lots of heavy metal.

So cobalt, nickel, manganese and toxic electrolytes.

And in landfill over time, these materials can leach into the soil and the groundwater.

And this causes contamination to the drinking water and the soil, producing health risks for humans.

Also, batteries are highly flammable.

This is why when you go on a plane, they say, please don't put them in the hold.

So, of course, when these batteries go into landfill, again, they can easily catch fire or explode.

Now, the problem is that fires in landfills are really, really dangerous because it's not just that waste that actually produces pollution, but you're looking at hydrogen fluoride, which is incredibly toxic gas being released.

and the other thing is which really breaks my heart is in many parts of africa and asia they basically burn batteries to extract the actual valuable metals out now as you can imagine this is produces not just hydrogen fluoride which is incredibly corrosive gas but dioxins as well and of course persistent organic pollutants and these airborne toxins we know are affecting the people doing the burning but also the local communities

So we're at 59% recycling, if that paper's correct, but we really need to be at 100%.

Yeah, I mean, I read something about the disposable vapes and the number of those that are just going straight in the bin.

Oh, absolutely.

In this country, that's become a huge issue because, of course, you can't recycle them as easily because you've got all that non-recyclable plastic and you've got the lithium batteries inside.

Thanks, Mark.

And of course, all the issues with lithium and other battery waste are because we're looking for ways to power our lives.

Which brings us to another listener question.

Free electricity, anyone?

Have a listen.

Hi, Inside Science.

I'm hearing everyone on social media about Nikola Tesla's free electricity.

Is there anything like free electricity?

Is it a load of rubbish or did Nikola Tesla really discover how to get free electricity out of thin air?

If it really is something, why are we still struggling with fossil fuels?

Please would you debunk that for me?

Thank you.

Penny, I'm clearly not on the right social media.

I've never been told about free electricity.

It had not crossed my filter bubble either.

And so I guess at this point I'll echo Mark's warning about the internet.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories on there.

Not everything is true on shock horror.

But yes, what's free electricity supposed to be?

So this is a conspiracy theory.

And the idea is that Nikola Tesla came up with a way to get energy...

out of thin air and that this was suppressed or destroyed by perhaps a government or the industry to prevent us all from having cheap, free, clean energy.

Wouldn't it be lovely if we could have that?

Categorically, no, that didn't happen.

The idea where people seem to get a bit confused is Nikola Tesla obviously had loads of interesting ideas.

A

But the one that often kind of gets misinterpreted here was he was very interested in whether we could distribute energy wirelessly through the air.

Tesla towers.

Yes, exactly.

And that's about moving electricity, not creating it.

So that's kind of what's been co-opted there.

In terms of whether free energy could exist, the fundamental thing about energy is you can't actually create it or destroy it.

It only gets converted from one form to another.

And how do you define free?

There's so much energy streaming out of the sun hitting our planet every second.

That's pretty free.

We just have to convert it with solar panels or all the various other things.

So there is kind of readily available energy sources out there, but we're always going to have to convert them somehow.

Yeah.

Oh, I agree, Penny.

We've got hydro, we've got deep ground temperatures, solar and wind, all that are easily accessible.

However, the biggest cost usually is the distribution of that energy, because where you produce the energy and where you want to use it are two different places.

And that actually is where you lose quite a lot of the energy on transmission lines and in cables.

Also, we're looking at the future because, of course, fusion will be coming online in the next 20 to 30 years.

And this is where Catherine is going to help out.

Because of the wonderful equation by Einstein, it means that if you destroy a very, very, very small amount of matter,

you get this colossal amount of energy.

So you just have to go, oh, let's destroy that.

Lots of free energy.

But of course, the actual physical cost of building this stuff and researching it, that's where the financial cost comes in.

And to speak to your point about distribution, Tesla's idea that you could wirelessly transmit electricity is true.

We have wireless phone chargers now, but it's actually not as efficient as just putting it down a cable.

And that's why we don't have that means, you know, instead of the National Grid today.

And Catherine, coming to you, can you fact check Mark?

Yeah, so E equals mt squared, that's the famous equation.

You need quite a lot of mass to create the energy, so a single fusion reaction in the sun that converts hydrogen into helium.

only releases as much energy as there is in one trillionth of a peanut.

But there are lots and lots of these reactions occurring in the sun, and that's why the sun is so bright.

So I was interested, Mark, that you thought fusion was going to be in sort of the 20, 30-year timescale.

I really hope it is.

I think if people invested in fusion, it is a very powerful

way to create green, clean energy.

Catherine, I'm sensing scepticism.

It's one of those things that's always been 20 to 30 years ago.

And last time I checked, it was like, oh, 50 years away.

And I was like, hang on, it's got further away since I last looked.

It's very hard to do because you need to get to such high temperatures to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion that

So you can get the protons close enough together to fuse.

People are getting really excited about mining on the moon because there should be lots of helium-3 there, which comes out of the sun on a solar wind.

And helium-3 is probably the easiest way we can get energy out of fusion reactions here on Earth.

But mining on the moon is way more than 20, 30 years away.

But with some serious investment, that's a great way of producing energy as well.

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Just a reminder, this is Inside Science.

I'm Marnie Chesterton, and I'm joined by climate scientist Mark Maslin, astronomer royal for Scotland Catherine Haymans, and managing editor for New Scientist Dr Penny Sarchet.

This excellent panel has been assembled because we're dedicating the entire show to answering listener questions.

Well, Catherine, since you've mentioned the moon, can I move us on to a question from Peter Cornish who asks, why is the moon sterile?

And he says, my understanding of the origin of the moon is...

is that there was a collision into the Earth by some body and a large chunk was carved out of the Earth and formed the Moon, presumably with some material of the colliding body.

My question is, if the Moon is, at least in part, formed of the same material as Earth, then why is the Moon so sterile when the Earth is so fertile?

Yeah, that's a fantastic question from Peterson.

He's right that the Earth and the Moon formed after a cosmic collision in our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.

And we know that to be the case because the chemicals on the Moon are very, very similar to the chemicals in the Earth's core.

So if they're made up of the same stuff, why haven't we seen life evolve on both?

Well, for life, we need two things, water and an atmosphere.

So let's start off with the atmosphere.

The moon is just too small to have enough gravity to keep an atmosphere on it.

So even if there was gas after this collision, it would have flown off into the universe.

So that's why our moon doesn't have an atmosphere.

And then what about water?

Well, interesting, there is water on the moon.

So there's been lots of different moon landers recently.

looking at the chemical composition, particularly at the poles.

But it's very, very dry.

There's hardly any water there.

And this is what makes us believe that the oceans on our planet arrived at a later date after this collision and that that water was transported to our planet from the outer reaches of our solar system by asteroids and comets.

And that's why we have copious amounts of water here on planet Earth and not on the moon.

And that combination of water and the atmosphere gives life an opportunity to evolve and thrive.

Catherine, can I check, is the moon actually sterile or have we contaminated it over the past few decades with a bunch of missions?

That's a really good question, particularly because we've got lots of companies

Sending these moon landers up there to do various things.

One of them recently contained an art exhibit of a lot of balls.

I forget the name of the artist.

And one does worry when it's not national agencies sending things to the moon that the care and attention that's paid by national agencies.

space agencies to ensure that we don't contaminate other planets.

There's always a concern when private companies start sending things into space that they don't take that same care.

And as we look forward, NASA is planning to send humans back to the moon in the Artemis program.

They've got grand plans of mining on the moon.

So I think even if it is still sterile now, in the long term, it won't be.

Penny?

There's sterile and then there's also fertile, which was part of the question.

And so that's talking about microbial growth.

But there is interest in, well, could we actually plant things on the moon?

Can we grow things in regolith or moondust?

And we have to remember, you know, first life on Earth was microbial.

It didn't need soil that was filled with loads of decaying organic matter.

But when we're actually talking about planting trees and plants and crops and things...

That's really drawing on millions of years of humus, isn't it?

All the decayed organic stuff.

So if you want to grow stuff in the moon dust, we're going to have to sort of add all of the nutrients that are needed ourselves.

Well, guess what?

The Apollo missions left 90 plus bags of human poo.

Could come in handy.

On the moon.

I didn't know that.

That's a cracking factor.

I know.

So every kilogram of poo you leave behind means that, you know, it's easier to take back off again.

So we've really made our mark.

And when I was asking about bacteria, I was thinking there's got to be some interesting stuff in there.

Anyway, that's there to fertilise future plants, Mark.

I was also going to say that, of course, we know that life evolved on Earth about four billion years ago.

So half a billion years after the moon was separated from the Earth.

And so that genesis, which is either in deep vents or in the shallow seas, occurred here.

And so there's no way of then going, oh, how do we get it to the moon?

Unless, of course, as you've said, astronauts basically take it up there from their gut biome.

Well, thank you, team.

So there might be bacteria on the moon.

Maybe we brought them.

But basically, the moon is too small to have its own atmosphere.

And so it's quite harsh conditions up there.

On to our next listener, who's asking about microbes closer to home and whether they can help us out with a mess we've got ourselves into.

They write...

Hello.

Are there any microbes that consume the waste plastic particles in the ocean?

If not, would we expect some to evolve?

And if so, on what sort of timescale?

Who wants this?

I'm happy to go for it.

Go for it.

It's a very cool question.

So I basically dug into this because I was fascinated by this.

It turns out there are some marine bacteria that can break down low-density plastics.

We've also found some bacteria and fungus on land that break down plastics, but very specific types of plastic.

I love one publication I read.

The bacteria were found outside a plastic recycling facility in Japan.

Ah, perfect place to evolve then.

Exactly.

We've also found caterpillars of the wax moth can eat common plastics because they've got an enzyme in their saliva that breaks it down.

We also know that polystyrene can be eaten by mealworms.

And there's also gut microbes that can munch plastic in beetle larvae.

So

there are small isolated cases the problem is and i'm sure that evolution would eventually work out how to deal with this substrate but we don't have that sort of time so if we look at the facts 300 million tons of plastic are produced every single year okay and this is ending up in our rivers and our oceans we're literally drowning in plastics

so for me one of the things that we're starting to do is accelerate evolution so we're developing genetically engineered microorganisms that can actually munch on plastics we've also isolated those enzymes from the caterpillars to speed up the breakdown and allow us to recycle plastics more but i'll come back to a simple fact which is

That's really cool.

But guess what?

Why don't we just use less plastic?

Why don't we ban single-use plastic?

And the last one is, if we have to use plastic, let's stop making it go into the environment.

Let's make sure that our water companies actually capture it and don't just flush into the rivers and into the oceans.

Thank you, Mark.

Lots to think about there.

And moving on now to an absolutely brilliant question from 11-year-old Owen, who asks, when you pick flowers, when are they dead?

Is it when you pick them or when they're all dried up or somewhere in between?

Thank you so much, Owen.

Team, the dead aspect of flowers really splits whether you enjoy cut flowers in my family, some of whom think that giving someone flowers is like offering them the chance to watch something die in a pot.

Catherine, where do you stand on flowers?

I really hope they're not dead after you pick them because I do really enjoy looking at them.

I've got a

Yes.

So are they dead?

Are they alive?

This is kind of a version of a brilliant Infinite Monkey Cage episode where Brian Cox said it was the most profound question they'd ever been asked, which is, is a strawberry alive?

And genuinely, it still keeps the philosophy message boards busy.

Penny, I'm turning to you because you've got a doctorate in plant genetics and development.

Is picking a flower the equivalent of chopping off a hand and putting it in a pot?

Yes.

Yes, it is a bit.

But I think the key thing here is you compare animals and plants.

It's actually quite difficult to define death, even in us, in animals.

We tend to go on when the heart stops and can't be resuscitated.

But there's nothing like that at all in a plant.

So the answer is that it is somewhere in between.

If you've cut a plant and you have it in a glass of water...

It can continue to respire and do cellular processes for a little while.

Part of that's because there's no blood pumping required for oxygen to get into a plant.

That can happen by diffusion, so it carries on.

And similarly, for a few days, it can continue sucking up all the water it needs from being in a vase.

But gradually over time...

all of those cells stop getting quite what they need and you do get this gradual decay.

And so there's no kind of dividing line.

However, it's not necessarily the be all and end all.

If you cut off the flowering part of a plant, that's kind of programmed to flower and then do its job and that's kind of it.

So there's a limit to what that can do.

But with a lot of plants, if you cut off another bit, a leafy bit, for example, and you stick that in a vase, you might think it's on its way to then die.

But obviously this is a

a really common way of taking cuttings and it can use that water and oxygen to grow an entirely new root system so that is one of the cool things about plants is there's much more sort of fluidity when it comes to is it alive is it dead and can you bring it back to life okay thank you erwin uh thank you penny so conclusion somewhere in between yeah like like the rest of us katherine that's comforting i hope your your daffodils they'll be fine

on to hand in a jar but you can extend the life so the really interesting thing is how do we get all these wonderful cut flowers from around the world because what we've discovered is if you keep them at between one and three degrees they can last for weeks before they start to decay so it's interesting that sort of a normal flower lasts a season

But if you cut them, there are ways of actually extending their life, even though you have basically started the decay process or you accelerated it by cutting it.

So one of the things you can do, and this is for listeners at home, which is if you have cut flowers, put them in water, make sure there's nutrients and there's sugar, and also keep them in the coolest part of the house because they will last a lot longer.

Keep your flowers in the fridge.

That's great.

I have pictures of you opening going, oh, look, beautiful arrangement clothes.

Where's the milk?

Exactly.

Yeah, get rid of the milk and that's where the flowers go now.

Yeah, chuck the daffodils into the milk drawer.

Exactly.

Perfect.

I'm sure Gardner's Question Time will be in touch with us on that.

We could talk about flowers being dead or alive for hours.

And for further listening, I do recommend Googling monkey cage and dead strawberry.

But we must move on because we've had a question from Tricia.

Let's listen.

Why don't they build satellites with the capability of being ordered to come home again?

They should be capable of returning and being remotely guided back to the sender in much the same way as a drone.

Then they can recycle the elements, saving themselves money and resources.

This one's for you, Catherine.

So let's think about the company SpaceX, which is currently really leading the field and revolutionising space travel by recycling their rockets.

And that's really reducing the costs.

I don't know if everyone saw the fantastic chopstick manoeuvre from October last year.

If you haven't seen it, Google it because it's absolutely awesome feat of technology and engineering.

This new super heavy rocket that SpaceX are developing at the moment is the biggest, most powerful rocket they've ever built.

They captured its main booster on its way back down using basically a giant pair of chopsticks.

And that's the majority of the costs.

The Crew Dragon capsule that they use to send astronauts up to the International Space Station and bring it back down again, that again is also recycled and it has a really strong heat shield on it because when it comes back down through the atmosphere, it's tumbling at such great speeds that it reaches thousands of degrees in temperature and so it needs a really strong heat shield.

Now, Trisha was asking specifically about the satellites.

Now, these are much cheaper to build than the rockets that get them up there in the first place.

They're fairly lightweight.

Each satellite in the SpaceX fleet is about half the weight of a cow.

So not super heavy.

It's about the size of a small car and they have a lifetime of five years.

And it's much cheaper to let them burn up in the atmosphere on their way down than it would be to kit them out with a heat shield.

So when they come down, they could be recycled here on Earth.

I'm not a fan of these satellites, I must say.

They make it really hard for us astronomers to do our job of looking out into the universe because there are so many up there.

They're also starting to become a bit of a problem here on the ground.

In what way?

Some of them don't completely burn up in the atmosphere as they're supposed to.

So January this year, a giant chunk of SpaceX satellite metal came down in Kenya.

That size of a big car came down in a field in Saskatchewan at the end of 2024.

And it's not just SpaceX that are putting these satellites up there.

There is a global race for worldwide satellite internet connectivity issues.

And at the rate that satellites are being launched at the moment, there are going to be 100,000 up there by 2030, with them coming down at a rate of about one per hour.

And people are starting to get really worried now about the vaporised metals in the atmosphere as they come down.

They're burning up all of the aluminium that they're mainly made up of.

Where does that go?

It just stays in our atmosphere.

It's just vaporised metals.

And that's a problem for our ozone layer.

And from an astronomy perspective, I'm genuinely concerned about our ability to conduct science because our low Earth orbit is being clogged up with all of these satellites.

And so from a human perspective, we've got this new source of pollution in our atmosphere that really hasn't been well thought through yet.

And there's no regulations on this at the moment because these space companies are moving much faster than international space law can keep up with.

particularly when the CEO of the leading company has the ear of the President of the United States.

So to answer Tricia's question, we can't get them back home again because it's expensive for them not to burn up in the atmosphere.

But the fact that they are burning up in the atmosphere is a problem and the fact they exist is...

in the first place is, for me, an even bigger problem.

Thank you, Catherine.

We've got time maybe for just one more.

Penny, take a listen to this.

My name's Ali Slade.

I live in Midsummer Norton in the south-west of the UK.

And my question is, there's a distinctive smell when rain falls on dry tarmac.

And I wondered what caused that smell.

In a word.

Yeah.

Hey, there we go.

I'm so glad because it's one of my favourite words.

And this is the phenomenon of the smell of rain.

What's mostly been studied, I have to say, isn't tarmac, so man-made surfaces.

Mostly the research so far has looked at kind of dusty, sandy clay soils.

And it's quite well established that, especially if there hasn't been rain for a while, when it does rain, and it has to be the right amount of rain, not too much, not too little...

What you get is kind of an aerosolisation of all kinds of smelly things that have built up in little air bubbles in the soil so that these tiny little pockets of smelly things get pushed up into the air when the rain falls.

And some of the things are lovely.

So if you've had a really dry period, plants start secreting growth inhibitors so that they kind of don't overgrow it at a really difficult time.

That's part of the smell.

There's also spores of certain types of bacteria.

That's part of the smell.

And it's really evocative.

It's lovely.

Any particular sort of, do you want to give us sort of a wine note?

Oh, yeah.

I'm never very good at that kind of, sort of slightly grassy, dusty, musty, but there's a freshness.

Yeah, what would that do?

I'll have a glass of that.

What I don't know is if tarmac would be any different.

Potentially, you might be smelling the petrichor from the soil because that can carry a bit of a distance.

And there's some evidence that our noses are really sensitive to it because we really care about when it rains.

So this is something that we can pick up on.

Or maybe, you know, I'd hypothesise with other man-made road surface materials, you might get off-gassing of other substances, maybe the less lovely biological ones and maybe more chemical ones.

So I think it's plausible that tarmac might have its own kind of petrichor, but I don't know.

Thank you very much, Penny.

And that's us really out of time, which is sad because we have plenty more questions up our sleeves.

And I hope that the philomaths listening have learned something new and that the panel's answers have left you satisfied.

Often our answers lead to more questions.

And if they do, then please do send them our way.

The address is insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

And we do read every single one.

Dr Penny Sarchet, Professor Catherine Haymans, Professor Mark Maslin, thank you all very much.

Bye!

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Dan Welsh and Debbie Kilbride.

Technical production was by Sue Mayo.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype?

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This weekend, elite athletes from around the world are descending on Las Vegas, where they'll compete with the aid of performance-enhancing drugs.

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For more, listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.