2025-07-18
30 分钟Hello and welcome to the World, the Universe and Us, the weekly news podcast from New Scientist.
I'm Dr Penny Sache.
And I'm Dr Rowan Hooper.
On today's show we discuss the controversial proposal that we abandon the 1.5 degrees target as the limit for global warming and instead set it at 1.7 degrees.
We're also going to hear about the earliest evidence for plate tectonics on Earth and find out how that influences the outcome of the Drake equation and that's the number of extraterrestrial civilisations in the Milky Way.
So that's the world and the universe and us.
Yeah, where's the us in our title?
Well this week we've got exciting news of how we could modify our microbiomes.
The gut microbiome has been implicated in everything from cancer to mental health and
as we've begun to understand this more deeply there's been this kind of tantalising question of can we use science to smartly improve and fine-tune our microbiota in a way to sort of prevent or even treat these diseases.
So this week there's news from a small trial that gave people genetically engineered microbes in an attempt to prevent kidney stones from forming.
Niche.
Well not actually.
stones affect one in 10 people apparently, so quite common.
Could this be the first step though, is the big question,
towards gene editing our microbiome and treating all kinds of things.
And Grace Wade is here to tell us more.
Hi. So what's really interesting about this study is that usually when researchers have tried to change people's gut microbiota,
they either focus on giving them naturally occurring gut bacteria or genetically modified bacteria.
But this usually doesn't work