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There are more than 100 different Covid -19 vaccine trials currently going on. We look at which seem to be the most promising with Helen Branswell from Stat News.

And we examine a very old idea, using antibodies from one virus – in this case SARS, to counter another virus SARS- CoV-2 , which causes Covid-19. Davide Corti from Vir Biotechnology says a version of these antibodies offers potential for both vaccination and treatment.

Race and Covid -19, there seems to be a link between ethnicity and susceptibility to the virus which can’t be easily explained away by economic factors. That's the finding from a study of nearly 6 million people in the US conducted by Epidemiologist Chris Rentsch from the London School of hygiene and tropical medicine.

And social distancing in ancient times, how plagues and pandemics in the past seem to have been defeated using similar behavioural adaptations to those we are current employing. Archaeologist Shadreck Chikure has seen the evidence in sites across Africa.

Also here are over 7000 living languages on earth today. These mutually unintelligible means of communication are closely associated with different groups' identities. But how does a new language start out? That’s what listener BK wants to know. BK lives on one of the islands of the Philippines, where he speaks three languages fluently and has noticed there is a different language on almost every island.

Presenter Anand Jagatia finds language experts from around the world who tell him about the many different ways that languages can form. Professor Dan Everett explains that languages naturally change over centuries to the point they are mutually unintelligible, and Quentin Everett describes how his research has identified striking similarities between biological, and linguistic evolution. Sally Thomason, Professor of linguistics in the USA tells us about the more unusual ways that languages can form through contact, or purposeful distancing measures, and Anand speaks with a producer of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s Pidgin service, about how the contact language nigerian pidgin may be developing into an official language West Africa. Finally, the inventor of a constructed language from the movie Avatar, tells CrowdScience what he has learned about language by creating the fully functional Na’vi language from scratch, and what Na’vi’s adoption by speakers around the world can tell us about the importance of language for creating community.

Hearing from different languages from around the world through the programme, CrowdScience get to grips with the many ways new languages can form.
(Image:Vaccine trials Credit: Getty Images)

Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Julian Siddle