Q&A: Love drugs and phaging superbugs
It's a Question and Answer special this week. You supply the questions and we pose them to a panel of expert guests. Joining us this time, biologist and author Tom Ireland, marine scientist Liberty Denman, chemistry writer Philip Broadwith, and comedian Rosie Wilby.
In this episode
On our excellent panel this time
Joining Chris this week, biologist Tom Ireland, marine scientist Liberty Denman, chemist Philip Broadwith and comedian Rosie Wilby
Chris - I'm delighted to introduce the panel we have with us to answer your questions. Tom Ireland is a science journalist, he's also editor of the Biologist, the magazine of the Royal Society of Biology, and he's recently published a book, it's called 'The Good Virus: The Untold Story of Phages.' I've been reading it, Tom, it's absolutely smashing, it's really beautifully written. But people won't know what we're talking about until you tell us what a phage is and why this matters?
汤姆-是的,所以噬菌体是一种发生的病毒cts bacteria. So it's a microbe of a microbe. And of course most people will think of viruses, things that make us ill and kill us, but the vast majority of viruses out in the world are viruses of bacteria and other microbes. So they're actually really important in terms of keeping bacterial populations under control. And this surprisingly old idea of using them in medicine is once again being taken really seriously.
Chris - You open the book with the accounts of the Russians using them in the war and they're going and grabbing victims in the trenches of cholera. And you think, well, there's a risk of catching cholera, but they were after the bacteria phages that were in those people who were dying of cholera because they had phages there that could potentially protect other people?
汤姆,所以这些病毒、噬菌体、绝对是夏娃rywhere, but if you are looking for a particular phage that treats a particular condition, the best place to look for them is where that nasty bacteria is. So, during the Second World War, there were reports of Soviet scouts going out and stealing corpses of German soldiers that had died of cholera, bringing them back in and then, using that, brewing up a cocktail of these viruses which they could then use on their citizens, on their soldiers, and protect them from the cholera epidemics that were encircling Stalingrad. There were even stories of people queuing up for bread and not not being allowed their bread until they'd been 'phaged.' So they'd get their dose of viruses to protect them from cholera. The Soviets used phages for decades because they didn't have a consistent supply of antibiotics.
Chris - Thanks, Tom. It's a really well told account if you want to read 'The Good Virus: The Untold Story of Phages.' It's out now, isn't it?
Tom - Yeah.
Chris - Also with us, Liberty Denman is a marine biologist and she has a particular penchant for sharks, but she's going to tell us later on all about whales and dolphins. You also have a podcast and it's called 'Out of Our Bubble.' So what bubble is it that you are talking about?
李berty - With absolutely all puns intended, I'm referring to a common habit we have as marine scientists, but also, I'm sure some of the other panelists here might agree, all scientists, we have a bit of a habit of talking amongst ourselves and given a lot of the research and work that people are doing, the wider world should probably hear about it! So it's about engaging with those much further outside of our space and with 'Out of Our Bubble' I'm particularly trying to reach an audience that wouldn't otherwise engage in the marine space at all. So it's starting with any topic you like from the very beginning. So it's actually a reverse podcast where the people that come on ask the questions and I have to try and answer them, which always makes fun and games because it's across all different topics. We've almost finished the first series, which has been on fishing, touching on all different types of fishing.
Chris - So the guests, are they experts themselves? Are they asking really hard questions or are they members of the general public challenging you to tell us why they should care about certain elements of marine biology?
李berty - It's the total opposite of having experts. It's absolutely anyone who's happy to come on and ask questions. Science material out there often comes in at a higher level than what most people may have, purely because everyone has their specialty and it's not always science. No one wants to feel stupid and there's no follow up questions you're able to ask if you don't know anything from the very beginning, phages being a great example! So you need to know where to begin and this is what it's all about: encouraging that conversation. Obviously then it develops as soon as people start asking questions - I find myself starting to get out of my depth!
Chris - Have you had any real stinkers? When we first started making the Naked Scientists, the best question anyone ever sent me was, 'how many organs can I donate and still remain alive?' I thought it was absolutely brilliant. It was at the time of the financial crisis and I thought, "well that makes sense - there's someone who's seeking to capitalise on their internal assets." Have you had any equivalents to that?
李berty - I haven't other than what I'll call "innovative ideas." I, I actually did the first episode with my best friend because I thought, "if I can't reach her, what hope do I have with anyone else?" We were talking about trying to remove plastic from the ocean in the form of discarded fishing gear, and she came up with a fantastic idea of just popping a bin bag on the back of every vessel that's out at sea and just doing it as you go...
Chris - People are seriously investigating ways of going surfing around scooping stuff up, aren't they? Because of all those gyres where the oceans mix and you get a vortex where there's tons of this stuff accumulating. One scientist told me there's enough plastic there to get to the moon and back a couple of times.
李berty - Absolutely right. There's huge garbage patches accumulating in different places around the world because of currents and then, as a result, we're thinking, "well, do we just leave it?" And as you said, some organisations are actually going around and trying to remove it. Then it comes down to the technology as to whether it's worth it? If you have huge vessels emitting huge amounts of carbon going around to pick up the plastic, you've got that cost benefit analysis. But there's all sorts of different emerging tech that people are using as well to try and deal with it.
Chris - Thanks Liberty. With us as well this week. Philip Broadwith, he's the business editor at Chemistry World, which is the Royal Society of Chemistry's monthly magazine. Speaking of which, you've got a story in there about an amateur chemist? He got a suspended jail sentence for conducting science experiments in his garden. What was he doing?
菲利普-这是一个叫迈耶斯哥特和他的been a hobby chemist for a very long time. We interviewed him a number of years ago for a feature we did about hobby chemistry. He used to have a company that would supply chemicals mostly to hobbyists but sometimes to small/medium companies. There's a whole community of people doing chemistry experiments at home and at various different levels. There's a difference between your kitchen chemistry set and then you go up and up. This guy had not great amounts, less than a gram of a chemical called sodium nitrate, which you could use to make explosives. He probably wasn't making explosives, but you need special licences to have some of the stuff that he had and he didn't have those licences. He'd been in trouble a little bit before; his company had been closed down in 2017. I'm a really big fan of home chemistry experimentation, but it's absolutely crucial that you have, at the forefront of your mind, "is this safe? What am I going to do if this goes wrong? How could it possibly go wrong?" Doing all of that risk assessment, "what am I going to do with the waste at the end?" All of those things. It's perfectly possible to do some really cool chemistry at home, but you've got to not take it quite that far.
Chris - Are you a fan of David Hahn? Do you know who he was? He goes by the nickname: 'Radiation Boy.' He's the guy who, at the age of 16, had a fast breeder reactor in his garage. He took all of the americium from smoke detectors that he bought. He found sources of gamma rays in old radium paint and he worked out off the internet a whole heap of physics that enabled him to make his own fast breeder reactor. But he's quoted as saying, "I got rather nervous when I started having a Geiger counter going off in my bedroom quite some distance away." And he then tried to bury the products of his reactor and the FBI I think came and caught him at the roadside burying it and he was arrested. That takes home physics to quite considerable levels.
Tom - There's also an amazing story of a DIY biologist who tried to gene edit himself. So he had enormous muscles, exactly like in the Incredible Hulk. He live streamed on Facebook and injected himself with this CRISPR gene editing tool, which was apparently to knock out the gene that restricts muscle growth. It didn't work. There's been some actually quite tragic cases of people trying to create their own genetic medicines and not really knowing what they're doing.
Chris - On that thought, we also have with us Rosie Wilby. Now Rosie is an award-winning comedian. She's also an author and a podcaster. Her podcast is called 'The Breakup Monologues', which is also the title of the new book that you've just brought out.
Rosie - The clue is in the name. It's all about that very universal experience of heartbreak. We've all had a breakup at some point, either a romantic breakup or a friendship breakup or a professional breakup - or maybe you've experienced all of those types of endings. We all can feel pretty rubbish at the time. But the subtitle of the book is 'The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak' because I found many, many people who have found joy in reinventing themselves and the transformation and growth and healing that can happen after adversity.
克里斯,你改造了自己很多though, haven't you? I was looking at your biography. You went to York University. What did you study there?
罗西,我学的是电子工程,所以I was a scientist back in the day and so science has crept back into my comedy shows even though I escaped and fled into the arts world. I've always been interested in science and I think my parents had a bit of a fantasy that I might be a science teacher as they worked in education all their lives. But there is a sort of educational aspect to the shows that I've done, the book and podcast follow a trilogy of shows where I was investigating the science of love and relationships and I suppose I'm all about making it really super accessible and not talking in the jargon that some of the real boffy scientists might.
Chris - But I'm desperate to pursue this a little bit because before you did that you were a singer?
Rosie - Yes, I've been a singer/songwriter. I had an album on my own label when people were just starting to do that and the internet just started to be a thing and everyone's web address used to end with freeserve.co.uk.
Chris - You had one of those as well!
Rosie - In fact, I worked at a magazine where all the music listings were sent in by fax which was exciting. People won't know what I'm talking about!
Chris - How did the comedy come about then?
Rosie - Well, you've got to laugh about things, haven't you? I think what really happened was when my band all broke up and I went solo as a musician, I was telling funny stories between the songs because I thought I might want to fill things out a bit. I just thought, do they really want to see another miserable woman with a guitar singing bleak songs of heartbreak? I would then sort of make fun of myself in between with very sort of bleak stories about my tragic life and bad luck in love. A new career was born somewhat accidentally, but then the best things in life often are.
Chris - Well that was absolutely brilliant. What a story. Rosie's here and she will be talking to us later on a bit more about the science of love and the science of breakups. There is the team we have assembled for you.
12:34 - Why are killer whales suddenly attacking boats?
Why are killer whales suddenly attacking boats?
Chris Smith asked marine scientist Liberty Denman...
李berty - This is a very hot topic now, as you say, and I must be honest, I'm not entirely sure how long it's been going on, but I do know that it has started increasing in frequency as well. And I think we are safe to say that, short of being an orca, we can't one hundred percent say what the reason is. The current assumption from experts around the world is that, quite simply, they're playing and having fun as all mammals, us included, do. They like to have fun. The problem is they're having fun by ramming boats and removing rudders from them, which tends to result in them sinking, which, even being the hardest of nails, you might want a change of underwear after that. So I can understand the fear from it, but the general assumption is they are playing.
自由——有一些阴谋论have come out after it, which I think always grab the attention, don't they? If you look back historically, we haven't had a fantastic relationship with the species, us being the perpetrators. There's been no recorded kills of orcas on humans in the wild, but unfortunately we have had them captive and unfortunately still do in some places. And they're very emotional creatures and they also have incredibly good memories. And when they are in the wild, they live in pods, they're matriarchal, which means they learn from the female figures and it's often their grandmothers that they learn the most from. They provide the teachings really. And as a result, one of the conspiracy theories is that this one particular orca, female grandmother orca, had a poor experience with the sailing boat and then decided to teach the others within the pod to start doing this. As I said, I'm convinced that that's probably not the best case scenario and the assumption is that they are in fact just playing and having fun. But we don't know.
Chris - Is it true that there was one particular orca who started wearing a dead fish on its head and then all the other orcas in the area started copying? This example of orca culture that's spread across a huge region. Because dolphins do that with sponges, don't they? In Australia, there's a sponging population of dolphins that put these sponges on their noses to ostensibly protect their noses when they're ferreting through the subsurface?
自由——我的意思是所有这一切真的告诉你ultimately cetaceans, these whales and dolphins, know how to have fun and they enjoy doing this. And they're also incredibly emotional creatures, the way they actually have a more extensive brain than ourselves and have the ability to experience and process emotions to a greater extent than we do, which is also why, on the captivity side, you can hear quite literally in their communications and their cliques that they are deeply unhappy also with that culture as well. There are different pods and it goes across cetacean species, that they all have a slightly different dialect sometimes and communicate in different ways. So they have communities in the same way we do as well.
16:45 - Are water conditioners worth it?
Are water conditioners worth it?
Chris Smith asked chemistry writer Philip Broadwith...
菲利普——好吧,这里有两件事。其他e's magnetic devices, which I think I can fairly safely say if they're outside of the pipes do next to nothing, they might wiggle, but you've got ions dissolved in the water. So you've got charged things moving, charged things that move, and have a magnetic field associated with them. So there is certainly probably some kind of interaction between the magnet and the ions moving. Whether that stops them furring up your pipes, I don't think that that's true. But, what I think Neil's talking about in this question is something called a water conditioner, which is slightly different to a water softener. So I'm just going to quickly go through what those two different things are. A water softener uses a kind of resin and it's the same kind of thing you might have in a jug in your kitchen or like plumbed into your house. What hard water is caused by minerals in the water, calcium carbonate, and it's the calcium particularly, that's the problem. If you take the calcium away, which is what the ion exchange resin in those filters does, and replace it with sodium, you end up with something that doesn't then form limescale. So that stops you from making a limescale. So that's a kind of chemical reaction. It's an exchange. You take the calcium away and you replace it with sodium. But the problem with that is you can't then really drink the water. It's got too much sodium in it. You become high blood pressure, because there's all sorts of other problems. So you have to have a separate water tap if you have a softener plug plumbed in.
Chris - It is quite funny to not tell people that if you have a guest over at your house and you see what the reaction is and see if they comment on the water and if they come from London and they've been drinking Thames tap water, then inevitably they often say actually the water tastes better.
Phillip -
Chris - So the pressure of movement through a pipe, for example, should dislodge it.
Phillip - Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen a lot of results like furring up in pipes. But one of the tests that they do with these things is take some of the water that's been treated, get an immersion heater, stick it in a bucket of water, run it for six hours at 75 degrees, and then dissolve off all the scale and see how much calcium is stuck to that immersion heater element. And if you take water that hasn't been treated and water that has been treated, the water that has been treated has about a quarter as much scale on the element after that test.
Chris - Thanks very much Phil.
20:12 - Is love really a drug?
Is love really a drug?
Chris Smith asked comedian Rosie Wilby...
Rosie - There's actually an anthropologist, Helen Fisher, who's done an immense amount of work into the stages of love when we go through lust, love, and attachment. And in fact, there are different chemical states of the brain that are attached to these different stages and they're very distinct separate stages. So it does actually mean that being a human being, having a monogamous lifelong relationship is pretty challenging because you can be in love with one person, in lust with another and attached to another one. So it makes marriage and monogamy quite challenging and tricky. And so indeed we do become so attached to our partners as we get longer established into a relationship, we are releasing these very addictive opiates. And we all quite literally, as Paula mentions, suffer a withdrawal when that person is suddenly removed from our lives. Particularly if you are the person who thought the relationship was going along swimmingly and the other person has maybe dumped you by email like I was many, many years ago.
Chris - You're not sour about it at all?
Rosie - We like to joke, laugh at ourselves about the breakups and the way we respond to them and not have goodies and baddies and heroes and villains. And I joke that I felt much better once I'd corrected her spelling, which was actually fine, but it's more a joke about my own pedantry. I changed the font as well. Wingdings was far preferable.
Chris - One of my friends, who I worked with, failed a medical exam and she actually said she felt like she'd been publicly dumped when she got the results of the exam. It's like a personal affront. I wonder therefore, if our love for our subject and the things we do a lot, as well as being in love with other people, whether subjects work the same way and our hobbies and so on.
Rosie - Definitely. Anything that we become attached to. And what I've been particularly fascinated in is how the relationships that don't even get started are some of the ones that we become the most attached to. And if you visit the Museum of Broken Relationships, which is in Zagreb, in Croatia, not in Split, which would've been brilliant, some of the exhibits that have the most heartfelt dedications next to them are the ones where somebody maybe met somebody and they thought they were amazing, that was the person for them, but no relationship actually really happened. It's like this sort of unopened Christmas present full of potential that never gets explored. You never take the rose tinted glasses off.
Chris - Best breakup story on the breakup monologues?
Rosie - Well, there've been so many, and I'd love people to listen to the podcast, but there was a very dramatic one from a friend of mine where her boyfriend went off on his bike after she had dumped him and he was involved in an accident. And when she got to the hospital,
Chris - She apologised for loosening the wheels?
Rosie -
Chris - That's a great story. Does this mean also, Paula goes on to say, could we combat rejection in love in the same way that we treat people who have drug addictions then?
Rosie - What's really interesting is something that I have done episodes about and written about in the book is the area of research that a neuro ethicist I know is looking into and into the idea of love drugs and anti love drugs, which would either help us to stay in a relationship, drugs like MDMA, which before it became outlawed as a rave drug, were used in couples therapy and drugs like SSRI antidepressants, which could be used as a sort of anti love drug, which would help you attach, uncouple from perhaps an abusive partner who you don't want to feel this sense that you must stay with
Phil - It's kind of interesting that you mentioned MDMA there, because we just had the news. I don't know if it was last week or the week before, Australia has started or has enabled the use of MDMA and psilocybin from magic mushrooms for various mental health conditions.
Chris - Yeah, that's absolutely right. It was the end of June. The regulator in Australia allowed the use, under certain conditions, of those two agents, ecstasy and psilocybin. It's quite good literature though, supporting their use in people with really profound depression states where they appear to get really quite good benefit from using them. The interesting thing about ecstasy is that Merck, the drug company that invented that in about the early 1900s, around the time of World War I, they were looking for drugs that would suppress hunger among troops and they gave him a load of ecstasy and then discovered they didn't want to fight anymore!
25:37 - Can fungi feed on ionising radiation?
Can fungi feed on ionising radiation?
Chris Smith asked biologist and author Tom Ireland...
Tom - In the 1980s, there were scientists working in the destroyed reactor at Chernobyl, where absolutely nothing grows. Except, they found several species of black mould like fungi growing on the walls where the radiation levels were just absolutely off the charts. And these fungi weren't just managing to survive in there, but they seemed to be thriving. They were growing towards the most powerful radiation. And the further tests even suggested they were using the radiation as an energy source, in a similar way to how plants use sunlight to grow. And this is all down to melanin, which is this amazing family of pigments that protect us and mammals and all kinds of animals from UV radiation. And this seems to be completely central to protecting the fungi from these crazy levels of radiation and actually helping them use it to their advantage.
汤姆,所以仅仅是非常令人兴奋的研究rch, there's this idea that you could use these fungi and melanin to help protect people from radiation. So for example, when they receive radiotherapy, you could have some kind of agent that contains a special form of melanin that's able to protect the rest of the body from the radiation. And the scientists are also looking at how this could be used to protect people in space. So making space suits from melanin or making buildings on a Martian colony from this fungi, so it grows itself and it's radio protective, that would be a cool idea. One of the scientists who's involved in this research, the starting point is to make little tiny melanin space helmets for mice, and bombarding them with radiation to see if these little astronaut helmets protect them from radiation.
Chris - The most fascinating story I heard about life from radiation, it was a while ago now, about 10 years ago, a lady called Lisa Pratt. She had been working with people going deep down gold mines in South Africa. And they had discovered in one of these mines a pool of water, which you could prove by looking at the composition of the water, had not been in contact with the world for up to 120 million years. But what was extraordinary about this pool of water is it was thronging with bacteria. And if you've got a bubble of water that hasn't had any contact with the outside world for 120 million years, but there's life flourishing in it, you have to ask the question, well, what's it feeding on? It must be eating something. And when they unpicked this, they realised that there are in those rocks enormous numbers of uranium atoms, which are breaking apart radioactively, spitting out these alpha particles, radiation, this is busting apart water molecules and making them into a reactive form of water, which was then attacking minerals in the rocks and liberating sulphur compounds that a whole group of bacteria could then consume. And in turn, those bacteria would feed other bacteria. And so they had a whole community of microbes all surviving because of radiation in the rock. And their argument is, well if they can survive down there, kilometres underground, living off uranium, there's no reason why they couldn't have similar life processes going on in planets elsewhere in the solar system and beyond.
Tom - And that probably tells us quite a lot about potential ways that life started on earth as well, where there wasn't much organic material around to eat. And these strange ways of making energy and growing were probably the ways that life got started in the first place.
NHS themed quiz
Chris Smith with the questions, posing them to Tom Ireland, Liberty Denman, Philip Broadwith and Rosie Wilby.
Chris - It's quiz time. What happens here is that we divide our panel into two teams: Team 1 are Tom and Rosie. Team 2 are Philip and Liberty. And there are three rounds and these are multiple choice. You are urged to confer and the team who get the highest score wins the prize beyond price, which is the Naked Scientist big brain of the month award and the team who don't win all get laughed at. Did you win the last time or are you a sore loser, Phil?
Tom - I'm not sore. But we definitely didn't win.
Chris - You didn't win. Last time you did send me an email afterwards to complain about one of the questions, but you weren't sore or anything. It was all fine. So let's go to round one, which is 'The Rest is NHS History.' And Team 1, Tom and Rosie, here's your question. Europe's first ever liver transplant was performed here in Cambridge, would you believe, but what year did that take place? Was it A)1968 B)1974 or C)1980? What do you think, Tom And Rosie?
Tom - They're not that far apart from those options, are they? Well I know people were experimenting with transplants a long time ago, so I would go with the earliest one. What was the earliest one please?
Chris - 68.
Rosie - They probably didn't do a great job, to be fair. I reckon they had a disaster.
Tom - Yeah, they might have found out why they needed another 20 years of research to do it.
Chris - Well, amazingly, three years ago on this programme, we interviewed Angela, who is now living in France, she is the world record holder for longest surviving transplant, not of a liver, but for a kidney. Also done by Sir Roy Khan, who taught me when I was a medical student. She is at 53 years after her kidney transplant, and therefore the longest surviving transplant recipient.
Tom - I've lost faith in my original argument then, but should we just go in the middle?
Chris - They're going 1974. I'm afraid it's not the right answer. 1968, professor Sir Roy Khan at Addenbrooke's hospital did the first liver transplant in Cambridge in Europe in 1968. So that's 0 points for you from our jury. Team 2, Phillip and Liberty, which groundbreaking drug became widely available on the NHS in 1961? Was it A) paracetamol B) aspirin or C) the oral contraceptive pill. What do you think?
Philip - I feel like aspirin and paracetamol are a lot earlier than that. Aspirin, that's Bayer in the late 19th century.
李berty - I'll take your word for it. While I'm wildly competitive and want to win, I've got absolutely none of the medical knowledge to back this up.
Philip - 1960s is like the start of the freedom of whatever. Basically, women's liberation, helping contraception and all of that concern.
李berty - That would probably be the only educated guess I could have attempted.
Philip - That's contraception's kind of era.
Chris - So what do you think the answer is?
Philip - We're going to go contraceptive pill.
Chris - You're correct. Round 2: Between a Vaccine, a Rock and a Hard Place. Your question, Tom and Rosie: in 1958, the NHS introduced its first mass vaccination programmes. Were they for A) polio and diphtheria, B) Measles and mumps or C) yellow fever and typhoid. What do you think?
Tom - I think polio and diphtheria is always told as one of the great success stories of vaccination. I imagine yellow fever is something that may have been developed when people started travelling to more exotic places later in the century. I would say the first one.
Chris - You going polio? You're off the blocks. It is indeed polio and diphtheria. Off the back of Salk and Sabin's amazing vaccines that have gone on to save millions of lives and prevented enormous amounts of ill health from paralysis. In 1999, Philip and Liberty, the UK became the first country in the world to vaccinate against, what was it? Hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, which causes meningitis, or chicken pox? What do you think?
李berty - This is a very rogue piece of information, but 1999 happened to be the year I was born, and I'm pretty positive I know the answer to this one purely because it felt like I needed a few random pieces of information so that when it came to a pub quiz, this is my moment. I hope I've got it right now I've said all this, but I am fairly convinced that it's meningitis
Chris - And it would be absolutely right. And your recollection of university is right as well because the way they did the study, this is meningococcal meningitis C, is they recruited a whole load of students going to freshers' week events and they followed them across the whole of freshers' week to see what the baseline rate of carriage with meningococcal infection is. Because a small minority of people in the population naturally carry this infection. And we think that close personal contact is how it spreads and that some people catch it who are also vulnerable to it and it then gets into a place it shouldn't and causes meningitis. So they then tracked the students through freshers' week and all these discos and they showed there was a paper in one of the medical journals showing a positive correlation. The more parties and the more discos they went to the higher risk of acquiring meningococcal infection. So the vaccine group did not acquire any infection and it was so obvious that there was a stark difference between the pickup rates. Something like two thirds of the students had it by the end of freshers' week in terms of carriage. Compared to the vaccine group, people weren't picking it up. So it was so obvious the difference that it was immediately just fast tracked through. But anyway, you were quite right. Well done. Team 1, round three. Round three is called 'anatomically speaking.' Tom and Rosie, your question is: the funny bone is no laughing matter. It isn't a bone either, but what's its proper name? Is it the whimsical nerve, the ulnar nerve, or the vagus nerve?
Rosie - I thought I knew this, but I'm not sure now.
Tom - I'm no anatomist, I've never cut anyone open you'll be pleased to hear, but I think the vagus nerve is central I think and it's to do with the nervous system. The first one, the whimsical nerve, sounds made up.
Chris - You're going for the ulnar nerve and you would be right. It is indeed the ulnar nerve. This supplies the lower half of your hand, including your index and little finger, and it runs down your arm winding its way around the elbow. And when you bash your elbow, you pinch the nerve against the bone and you then send all these volleys of nerve impulses up and down the nerve, which is why you get the funny symptoms and the weakness that you get. Hence it gets called the funny bone. Well done. You get a point for that. So you are on two and Phillip and Liberty over to you. Laparoscopy, we want to know, is more commonly known as what is it A) cataract surgery, B) vascular surgery or C) keyhole surgery.
Philip - As soon as you said keyhole, I was like, that's what I thought it was! And I think we both had the same reaction. So either we're both completely wrong or we're going to go with group confidence.
Chris - Yeah, you're absolutely right. It was keyhole surgery. This is also called minimally invasive surgery or sometimes bandaid surgery.
Chris - Three from three. Well done. You are this week's Naked Scientists Big Brains of the week. We'll give you a round. Well done.
40:38 - How do whales and dolphins sleep?
How do whales and dolphins sleep?
Chris Smith asked marine biologist Liberty Denman...
李berty - Yeah, that's a really good question actually. Sleep is a really interesting one because, in the marine world, there's lots of different degrees of sleep, and that's different between different species, almost all of which is quite different how we do it. So obviously as humans, when it's dark outside, we have what we'd call a pineal gland, which releases a hormone called melatonin. Basically means as soon as it gets dark, our body goes to sleep. We obviously tend to do that by shutting our eyes and having a lie down depending on the person. Fish don't have eyelids, so they tend to sleep with their eyes open when they do. And a lot of the research detailing sleep actually is based on behaviour rather than tracking their brain movements in the same way we would for humans. Coral reef fish don't need to swim to breathe because they have this thing called their operculum on their gill and they can flush water over their gills and therefore can basically just have a little rest on the bottom and hide in the coral or wherever else to stay away from predators. Larger fish out in the open obviously have a very different situation. So to stay on fish for a second, those tend to be called obligate ram ventilators, which means they have to be moving through the water to breathe. And that means if they're ever sleeping or resting, they have to be constantly moving. And this is very difficult to understand. So the research is quite thin on the ground, but the assumption is that they tend to just slow down their swimming, face into the current, let the water flow over and just enter a relaxed state.
Chris - You could drown them if you pulled them backwards through the water?
李berty - In theory, yes. Obviously their gills, it's how they get the oxygen from the water into their system and they're very, very delicate. So yes, going backwards through the water wouldn't move the water across the gills in the way that's required. So that would essentially ruin a fish's day. But that's obviously again a bit different for mammals. The whales and the dolphins as you're talking about, because they obviously breathe air, we have a better understanding of their sleep patterns because we've had them in captivity again. So what happens is these toothed cetaceans, the whales and dolphins, will sleep with one side of their brain at a time, typically shut off from sleeping with the opposite eye awake. And this unihemispheric sleep is assumed to allow for the observation of predators. Things get in the way, just staying aware of the fact they need to breathe.
Philip - Yeah, so they're sleeping under the water, the whales, so they don't have to sleep somewhere where their blowhole can have access to the air?
李berty - Yeah, so there's different types of sleeping. Dolphins for example will literally be cruising along the surface, and then they can breathe every 30-40 seconds for comfort purposes. But again, for the whales being underwater, they can hold their breath for an incredibly long time and dive to incredible depths, especially the sperm whales because they hunt in the depths and eat giant squid so they can hold their breath for a lot longer and it actually reduces their heart rate and their breathing weight, slows it down. And therefore they can just stay under for longer basically.
Chris - I did read that one of the other things that some of these marine active mammals do, like seals as well, is that they change their dream sleep. When we go to sleep, part of our night is spent dreaming, and part spent in a really deep sleep. And apparently when they go to sea for hunting purposes and feeding, they suppress the amount of time they spend dreaming and they spend a bit more time with one of these phases disabled. And then when they come back ashore they compensate and reset things so that they don't have the same sort of even balance that we do. So they change their way of sleeping when they go to sleep as well as doing what you are saying, turning on and off one side of their brain alone.
李berty - Yeah. And dreaming is such an interesting thing to think about as well. Obviously here we are talking about whales and fish, and actually species like octopus, cephalopods, we've been tracking dreaming in them and how they change their colour and the texture of their skin as if they're experiencing things, which shows that they're in fact dreaming and they have incredibly extensive intellectual capability. And something that we aren't really appreciating until now, until we're documenting this. So the dreaming side is really fascinating.
45:01 - Can chillies cause health harms?
Can chillies cause health harms?
Chris Smith asked chemist Philip Broadwith and biologist Tom Ireland...
菲利普-据我所理解,辣椒素and other hot compounds - like allicin that's in the sulphur compounds in hot things like wasabi and mustard - all activate exactly the same receptor in your body as it responds to temperature. That's something called TRPV1. I'm not going to go into the long name, but it's the same receptor. So the same thing in your body that is responding to changes in temperature is also responding to this chemical stimulus. And after that, everything physiological is exactly the same. The degree of activities, how painful is it? With chillies, there's different ways of experiencing chilli. If you just cook with a chilli fruit, you're going to get a certain amount of chilli depending on how hot the chilli is. They're measured on a thing called the scoville scale, which originally was how much do I have to dilute this stuff in a sugar solution until I can't detect the heat anymore. But now it's directly correlated to an actual physical amount of capsaicin, and chilies range from zero, which is your kind of bell peppers, up to a few million, which is California reapers and ghost peppers or whatever, probably best not to eat them. You can get chemical burns from eating these chilies. They can physically harm you. But if you take the membrane of the chilli and extract the capsaicin out of it and get pure capsaicin that has a scoville rating of 16 million, which is a lot and eating that definitely will cause you problems.
Chris - A friend of mine used to work on the pain system in the body and he used to use pure capsaicin in the lab and he said he went for a wee one day and it must have had some on his fingers. He said it was the best lesson in washing your hands before you go to the lavatory that you're ever going to get. And then people have said to me, as a virologist, they say you can always tell the person who works on herpes in the lab because they always wash their hands before they go for a wee. What do we know about the physiological effects of chillies in the body? Does it do harm? Is it good for you, Tom, anything you can tell us?
Tom - Yeah, so as Phil said, this is essentially setting your alarms off that there's dangerous heat or abrasive damage to your tissues when there isn't. So you get all the physiological responses that's trying to flush this stuff away. So you get your mouth filled with saliva. This is if you're eating it of course and your nose and your eyes start to stream and you can get similar effects at the other end of your digestive system as well. So in a sense your body's responding as if there's some kind of dangerous heat in your mouth, but because there isn't actually any burn damage or abrasion to your flesh, you don't get the inflammatory response that you would get if you were actually seriously burnt. But what happens when you have these really extreme chilies where they've been bred to have these scoville units in the millions is actually the pain is so intense that you start getting these really horrible symptoms that can feel almost like you are experiencing some terrible damage. I've seen a video of my friend at a chilli pepper festival, which started off quite funny, but he soon starts to feel really unwell and overwhelmed with pain and he's unable to breathe and the ambulances are called and it's really unpleasant. But again that's just caused by the pain itself. It's not actually any burning going onto his mouth.
50:07 - How do we protect our oceans?
How do we protect our oceans?
Chris Smith asked marine biologist Liberty Denman...
李berty - It's a very good question and a very daunting task as you say. It's something that's also thrown about a lot more in the media. People are talking about it, everyone's becoming a bit more environmentally aware, particularly for our oceans, which definitely suffer with the 'out of sight, out of mind' situation. And also, as you said, the fact it covers 71% of our planet, it's a very big space to try and monitor. I think a huge answer to that is actually coming from the technology space. I'm a really big believer in having collaboration between sectors and between countries. If we're going to solve a problem that big, you need to have collaboration. And I really think that AI and unmanned technology has got a really big role to play here because fundamentally AI can accelerate our ability to understand ocean dynamics, collect data and, again, that data can have all sorts of applications and it has all sorts of weird and wonderful use cases from being able to be applicable for processing habitat mapping data, which allows us to do so more quickly, to understand what's actually there because we can't protect it if we don't know what's there, also to produce models for populations. Illegal fishing and bycatch presents a real issue for sustainability and fish stocks, and using AI and cameras on boats instead of having human observers, which is also historically quite a dangerous job depending on who you're doing it for, this provides a technology that will figure out and identify species that have been brought onto deck on which undoubtedly at some point will be a protected species or too much of something. And this technology can actually identify that quicker and faster for us. Which, again, it's all just saving people power because otherwise it's difficult to do it on that mass
51:59 - Can we use spoil heaps to absorb CO2?
Can we use spoil heaps to absorb CO2?
Chris Smith asked Philip Broadwith...
菲利普-这听起来太疯狂了,但它不是actually. It is something that people are definitely looking at. There's a phenomenon called enhanced weathering. Certain types of rock - silicate rocks like basalt, olivine - carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in water on the surface, so either in rain or in the sea, that makes carbonic acid, it makes slightly acidic water. That acidic water can then start to dissolve the rocks and weather them away. That's a natural process of weathering. And as it does that, it creates carbonate. So it makes carbonate rocks elsewhere, or it dissolves the carbonate into the water, which goes into the ocean and actually reduces the acidity of the ocean, which could also be a good thing. So if we can speed that process up, we can turn it into a way of absorbing CO2 to speed it up. You basically increase the surface area of the rocks. So you grind them up very fine and you spread them out over farmland or over the beaches or anything like that. So there's people doing experiments with olivine, which is a magnesium silicate mineral. It's green and they grind it up and they spread it on bits of the beach and see what happens, see if it absorbs, see how fast it weathers, see how fast absorbs CO2 where it ends up. But, equally, there's people doing it on farmland and because of the way it weathers there, it can end up adding nutrients to the soil. So it has all sorts of benefits. Whether we can do that with slag from mines and whatever, it's entirely possible the risk that you have there is what else is in those slags? So maybe there's other metals, maybe there's arsenic, all sorts of contaminants.
Philip - These materials are not homogeneous. There's lots of different places where we've had slag from different processes or mine tailings from different mines. There may well be some of those that are suitable for doing this kind of thing. The other side of this obviously is that you have to smash the rocks up really small and that takes energy. So how much energy is associated with grinding the rocks up? Does that offset how much CO2 you're going to absorb? How fast is that process going to happen? So there's lots of things going on, but it's not a completely crazy idea.
54:37 - Can phages reduce our reliance on antibiotics?
Can phages reduce our reliance on antibiotics?
Chris Smith asked Tom Ireland, author of a book on the topic...
Tom - It's not feasible to just keep making more antibiotics to solve this issue. There's this lack of commercial interest at the moment, which is a real problem. But even if we do get new antibiotics coming online soon, resistance will emerge to those antibiotics really quickly too. We're just using too many of them. They're being flushed out into our waterways, they're in hospitals and clinics. So we really need completely new ideas and approaches and in my book I talk about this idea of using the natural enemy of bacteria which are phages, the viruses that infect bacteria. And what's neat about phages is that they're exquisitely well evolved to kill bacteria. They do this amazing thing where they sense the bacteria, land on it like a little lunar lander on the outside of it, inject their genes into the bacteria, essentially hijacking the bacterial cell to become a virus factory. And then when the bacteria is full of cloned viruses, the virus issues this final command for the bacterial cell to kill itself and pop itself open.
Chris - Like a party balloon full of glitter.
Tom - Yes. But kind of horrible and icky and viral. But I'm sure if you are suffering from a drug resistant infection and these phages start working, it would be like a celebratory balloon popping full.
Chris - It really does save lives, doesn't it? We had, on this programme, the scientists who helped a young lady who had cystic fibrosis and was suffering from a disseminated infection with a particular bug, a bit like TB. That had gone all over her body and it was resistant to all the antibiotics we had and they found some bacteria phages that they gave to her and saved her life.
Tom - Yeah. I think I know the case you're talking about and one of the phages that was used in that case was found on a rotten aubergine in someone's compost heap in Cape Town. So that's another thing that's very cool about using phages is they are absolutely everywhere. There's trillions of them probably in this room as we speak. You can find them in sewers or a stream or a lake. And as I mentioned earlier, wherever you find nasty bacteria, you find potentially medically useful phages. So we'll go from this situation where we might spend years and years developing a chemical antibiotic, but actually it is possible to also just pluck a virus out of a sewer and use that as an antibiotic, which gives us hope for this very scary crisis of drug resistance that we're facing.
Chris - One of the first guests we had when I first started making radio programmes was a gentleman who was trying to tackle MRSA, and he'd made a nose spray that could spray bacteria phages into the nose to decolonise a person before they went into hospital for an operation. He told me the Ganges in India is one of the best places to get water samples for bacteria phages because it's so polluted. There's so many different bacteria in there, you can find any phage you like living in there.
Tom - Yeah. It's a wonderful introduction to the book actually. We are talking about this river that's known as a holy river with this cleansing spirit. And people in India, they go on pilgrimages to the Ganges and they bathe in the Ganges, which is absolutely full of the worst bacteria on the planet. But this idea that it can heal people has remained for centuries. And some people think that it's because it's actually full of these viruses that can prevent diseases. So interestingly, epidemics that should go downstream through the Ganges stop, or they go upstream instead. And it's thought that's because of the kind of protective properties of all the bacteria phages and viruses found in that water.
Chris - Or it could just be the people who survive the experience are so fit and they're so healthy that nothing's going to kill them. So it could be that too. It could be survival bias, couldn't it?
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