Lost in Science Chris Lassig, Stuart Burns and Claire Farrugia and others.

This week, Stu looks at the effectiveness or not of platelet-rich plasma for treating musculoskeletal injuries in sports medicine, and for so-called vampire facials in beauty treatment; and Chris digs into a new study on the physics of flight and the surprisingly simple formula for the frequency of flapping wings, which he then uses to calculate whether a human could fly by flapping their arms.Jensen JH, Dyre JC, Hecksher T (2024) Universal wing- and fin-beat frequency scaling. PLOS ONE 19(6): e0303834. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303834

Chris looks at how likely we are to find Dyson Spheres orbiting distant stars and Stu finds out whether plants can use complex molecules as nutrient sources

This week on the show, Claire delves into groundbreaking research showing orangutans self-medicating with pharmaceutically active plants, marking the first recorded instance of animals treating themselves this way. Meanwhile, Stu explores cannonball or artillery fungi, a type of fungus capable of shooting its spores over six meters, and discusses the havoc they can wreak on homeowners. Tune in for these fascinating insights into the natural world's innovative behaviours!

This week, Chris dives back into the murky world of research misconduct, to try to find out how much AI tools like ChatGPT are being used to write scientific papers, and how much of a problem it is; and Cat updates us on the search for planets orbiting other stars, including a pink, fluffy, fairy-floss planet.Andrew Gray 2024, ChatGPT "contamination": estimating the prevalence of LLMs in the scholarly literature, arXiv:2403.16887. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.16887Chris Stokel-Walker 2024, AI Chatbots Have Thoroughly Infiltrated Scientific Publishing, Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chatbots-have-thoroughly-infiltrated-scientific-publishing/Weixin Liang et al. 2024, Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers, arXiv:2404.01268. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2404.01268Barkaoui et al. 2024, An extended low-density atmosphere around the Jupiter-sized planet WASP-193 b, Nature Astronomy. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02259-y

Nothing is ever truly Lost in Science, we can always discover it again. This week Stu raids the archives of Lost in Science to find some stories from years gone by and presenters who have moved along. Chris talks about the oldest known fossils, Beth Askham talks about zombie bacteria and Stu talks bout the toughest substance known to animal kind, all stories from 2015!

This week, Chris gazes at the recent spectacular auroras, and explains how matter ejected from the Sun leads to pretty lights in the sky; and Stu digs deep to find out what the actual research says about the effect of social media and internet use on the mental health of young people.