Nature Podcast13 Aug 2025

Sun-powered flyers could explore the mysterious mesosphere

00:46 Tiny solar flyer

Researchers have used a phenomenon known as thermal transpiration to create a solar-powered flying device that can stay aloft without any moving parts. The diminutive device, just one centimetre across, consists of two thin, perforated membranes that allow air to flow through the device, generating lift. Although only a proof-of-concept, the team hope that a scaled-up version of the device could be used to measure conditions in the mesosphere, a particularly hard-to-study part of the Earth’s atmosphere, or even on Mars.

Research Article: Schafer et al.

News and Views: Levitating platform could ride sunlight into the ‘ignorosphere’

News: These tiny flyers levitate on the Sun's heat alone

07:57 Research Highlights

A 3D scan of body art on a 2,000-year-old mummy reveals the techniques used by ancient tattooists — plus, the bacterial cause of a devastating sea-star disease.

Research Highlight: Intricate origins of ice mummy’s ink revealed

Research Highlight: Mystery of billions of sea-star deaths solved at last

10:22 Quantum gravity goes to the lab

Despite being one of the most successful scientific frameworks in history, there is one thing that quantum physics can’t explain: gravity. Whether gravity is quantum in nature is something that has had physicists vexed, but now a slew of experiments are being planned to try and answer this question. We hear how these experiments will work, and what their results might mean for physicists’ understanding of the universe.

News Feature: Is gravity quantum? Experiments could finally probe one of physics’ biggest questions

20:26 Briefing Chat

How genes can have different effects depend on the parent they come from, and how lithium shows promise in treating Alzheimer’s disease in mice studies.

Nature: These genes can have the opposite effects depending on which parent they came from

Nature: New hope for Alzheimer’s: lithium supplement reverses memory loss in mice

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