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A fire has destroyed the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Most of the natural history and anthropological artefacts have been wrecked. What is the impact on on-going scientific research and what is the loss to science in the future?

Silurian Signature
The Silurian hypothesis speculates on the possibility of a prior, advanced, industrialized civilization on Earth. But if there were such a civilization millions of years ago, what evidence would they leave behind and how would we detect it? By figuring out the likely geological fingerprint we humans will leave during the Anthropocene, researchers think about how this could give clues to any Silurian signal in the geological record that we could have missed.

Twitter Mining
Can social media provide answers to ecological questions? Professor Adam Hart thinks so. He’s been testing the scientific robustness of data-mining of Twitter for tweets about winged-ant emergence, the first Autumn sightings of house spiders and the occurrence of vast dancing clouds of starlings, called murmurations.

A New Era for the Kilogram
The kilogram is being officially redefined – the plan is to no longer base it on reference masses in London and Paris but on a number.
Under the suburbs of Paris, in a vault deep underground, lies one the most important physical objects in our world: the international prototype of the kilogram. This lump of metal has been used to define the mass of everything for 126 years. However, in November, scientists will vote on whether to relate the kilogram to a number instead: the Planck constant.

Picture: Fire Blazes at National Museum of Brazil, Credit: Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images

Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Fiona Roberts