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This month, we spoke to Alison Atkin, an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Sheffield. As part of her PhD, Alison is looking at ways of using mathematical modelling to help identify and understand mass fatality incidents. We spoke about her work on the Black Death, a pandemic disease that was first seen in Britain in the 14th century. We also spoke to Lewis Dartnell, a UK Space Agency Research Fellow working at the University of Leicester. Lewis has recently had a paper published in PLOS ONE, which details a potential new way of rapidly identifying bacteria in a hospital environment. We spoke about the work and about how technology developed to help discover life on other planets is being adapted to solve health problems on Earth. Image Credit: Thinkstock