Ian Sample
speaker
2,123 appearances
29 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 4d ago
Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.
Appearances
A lot of old people will die of problems because of their blood vessels being too hard.
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Their blood vessels are hard and they have problems with that.
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What are you going to do?
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Have something that goes in and changes all of your blood vessels and makes them more elastic?
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I mean, that's an incredibly difficult thing to do.
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So there is a long way to go, even if this is a success, but a success would be monumental.
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Well, you might have a chance.
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In the centre of the Pacific Ocean, between Samoa and Hawaii, there's a tiny speck of land.
The island has no permanent inhabitants.
Scientists like Dr Toby Kears.
When she visited, she was stunned by the abundance of life on the island, including the absolutely ginormous coconut crabs.
Palmyra is also known for its incredible seabird populations.
Calls from colonies of red-footed boobies and sooty terns fill the air.
But there's something far quieter and less conspicuous that lies at the heart of the atoll's ecosystem.
Toby and her team have just published the first global map of mycorrhizal fungi, the planet's incredible underground network which supports plant life above ground.
According to some estimates, they draw down 13 billion tonnes of CO2 into soil systems every year.
There's so much subterranean fungi that, stretched out, it would reach from the Earth to the Sun 750 million times.
And Palmyra offers an ideal case study for the role these mycorrhizal networks are playing and how they can help us to restore landscapes across the globe.
So today, a trip to an atoll in the middle of the ocean and what it can teach us about the fungi quietly engineering the natural world.
I'm The Guardian science editor Ian Sample and this is Science Weekly.
Showing 1261–1280 of 2,123 · page 64 of 107
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