The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition

Brian May, the guitarist from the band Queen, posted videos this week on social media of an overflow of sewage that had risen through his basement. Stinking black sludge flooded the floor, destroying most of the childhood photos and memorabilia that were stored there. And many others in his area of London suffered similar - or worse - fates. The cause? Well, Brian May blames a rise in construction of mega-basements - so-called ‘iceberg basements’ that, like icebergs, feature many stories hidden below the surface. Supposedly, these structures stop groundwater from properly draining. But is it true? Phil Sansom spoke to flood forecasting expert Linda Speight from the University of Reading to find out what actually happened...

Linda - In London, on Monday, there was a really heavy rainfall event, kind of the average rainfall that's normal for the whole of July fell in just a couple of hours. The impact of that caused flooding across the area. Really lots of different areas of London were showing videos of flooded streets, flooded basements, flooded rainfall stations. I believe that's the expected outcome from that amount of rainfall in such a short amount of time.

Phil - Of course, the consequence for people like Brian May is that stuff that's in basements can be damaged or destroyed.

Linda - Yeah. Brian May, unfortunately, this week, suffered the experience that many people across the country suffer when flooding happens and it's a really devastating and emotional time that your property and your personal belongings and things that hold value for you as an individual get destroyed in the floodwater.

Phil - And Brian blames it on, in Kensington where he lives, the so-called epidemic of people building huge mega basements many stories down beneath their houses. Is that a reasonable thing to blame it on?

Linda - I think when this kind of flooding happens people are really keen to find somebody or something to blame. And there clearly has been a lot of basement conversions and basement development across London. And the reason for this is because there's no other space to build in the area, and the same is true of rainfall. So when it rains a lot in London, there's nowhere else for the water to go. There's lots of hard surfaces, and when the rain hits hard surfaces, it can't soak into the ground like it would do if it was falling in the countryside or on fields and grass and woodland areas. So that means, unfortunately, where people have built basements, they've actually built something that's below ground level and the water wants to try and get to the lowest place possible, so it flows into the basements.

Phil - So is it these big basements that are letting this water build-up and creating the hard surfaces that prevent it from draining properly?

Linda - It's not necessarily the basements, it's just development in urban areas in general. I wouldn't like to say that basements have made any difference in this event, that amount of rainfall would have caused flooding anyway. They may or may not have contributed to it, but they're unlikely to have been a significant factor. It's more generally the fact that there is no space for water in our cities. And when it rains a lot, like we saw last week, the water naturally has to flood because there's nowhere else for it to go.

Phil - So even if more and more basements aren't the problem here, are these kinds of floods still getting more common?

Linda - Anecdotally, it would seem that we are experiencing more of these heavy rainfall events in the last few years. And the climate change predictions seem to be backing up this statement, saying that as the atmosphere warms, then these kinds of events will get more frequent in the future. And the reason for that being warmer air can hold more water. That means that when it rains, there's more moisture in the atmosphere and therefore more rainfall falls very quickly, and we see these heavy, intense rainfall events increasing in the future.

Phil - And how often is that likely to overwhelm a city's drainage like we've just seen?

Linda - Cities in the UK have what we call combined sewer systems. That means that both our dirty water and the rainfall flow into the same sewer system. The problem is that the way we've designed those systems uses historical rainfall data. And as I've already said, we're seeing more and more of these events, and more intense rainfall is predicted in the future. So what was once a once in 30 year event may soon become a 1 in 20 year, 1 in 10 year event, and the sewer systems are likely to get overwhelmed more frequently.

Phil - I mean, what do we do? Because these sewer systems are built beneath a city. It's not as if you can just lift it up and enlarge everything and then put it all back down again.

Linda - Nope. It's probably not practical to redesign our sewer systems, though we might be able to do that in small areas, we're not going to be able to do that across whole cities across the whole country. So what we need to do is actually make people more aware that they are at risk of flooding. And as you can see from Brian May story, it's really devastating when it does happen to you. So in the UK, we're quite good now at forecasting these types of events - the MET office did issue a heavy rainfall warning for the flooding on Monday. And what we need people to understand is when they see these kinds of warnings, they need to start taking action. That might be that they don't want to keep their best possessions down in their basements where the water's naturally liked to go. They could also think about installing flood resilient defenses onto their properties - small gates that they put across their doorways, or making their property, in general, more resilient. Moving their plug sockets higher up, putting damp-proof courses in, and things like that. So there's lots of proactive ways people can take action themselves to help protect themselves from the impacts of flooding.

Anaemia is a common condition that makes you feel tired and weak. It’s caused by a lack of iron-rich haemoglobin that’s present in your red blood cells. People who lose a lot of blood, don’t eat a good diet, or have diseases that affect the ability of the body to produce red blood cells can all fall victim. Now anaemia is usually very easy to treat but often greatly underdiagnosed, mainly because, right now, the way you test for it is inconvenient: it involves taking a blood sample and waiting for this to be analysed in a lab. But now, researchers at Brown University have found a faster way to spot it, which can be done in literally the blink of an eye, as Sally Le Page found out by speaking with Selim Suner..

Sally - Okay, I've got my phone on selfie camera mode. I'm holding it as close to my face as possible, until it can no longer focus. I'm pulling down on my lower eyelid. And there we go, a terrifying image of my inner eyelid. Now, as a young millennial, I've probably taken more selfies than the average person, but this is a strange thing to be doing even for me. However, this may become a more normal activity in the future, as a team of researchers at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital have figured out a way to use photos of people's inner eyelids to test for anaemia, as I heard from lead author Selim Suner.

斯莱姆——有血管非常接近surface of the inside of the eyelid, and they come together to give the inner eyelid a red hue. And that's primarily what we're extracting from those images is that red hue, and using some fancy math and image processing to extract the redness of the inner eyelid and the less red it is, the more likely that that person has anaemia

Sally - Anaemia is a lack of red blood cells in the blood, and in severe cases can make you seriously ill or even be fatal. And anaemia is incredibly common too.

Selim - It's thought that about a third of the world's population is anemic to a certain extent, and this is more pronounced in developing countries and in countries where there are parasitic diseases such as malaria, and also nutritional deficiencies can cause anaemia as well.

Sally - Right now, the gold standard test for anaemia is a blood test, but Selim's team hopes to be able to develop this eyelid photography test into an app for any smartphone. But what's wrong with a simple blood test?

Selim - Well, you would have to make an appointment with your GP. They would have to order the test. You would have to go to a lab, get your arm or hand stuck with a needle and then wait for the results, which would probably take a few days. Whereas if you had this app, you can take a picture of your lower eyelid and have the results in seconds, it's that fast

Sally - Sounds simple, right? But is it accurate?

Selim- So our test is about 70 to 80% accurate in determining if someone is anaemic, and skin colour does not affect our results. So one use is that we could screen populations with this test and those that come up anaemic on our test would go on to get a blood test and get treated, so that would save resources.

Sally -
Are there any other ways this is more appropriate than a blood test?

Selim - In time-sensitive conditions, for example, after a car accident, this test could be performed with a phone in the ambulance. And if a patient is losing a lot of blood, then we could figure that out very fast.

莎莉,我没有想到。我总觉得阿f anaemia as something that comes on gradually because of diet, but I suppose, if you're losing a lot of blood, you're very quickly going to become anaemic.

Selim - Absolutely, and that could occur from traumatic conditions where there's bleeding either internally or externally or from gastrointestinal bleeding, which is a common cause of anaemia.

Sally - You said anaemia is more common in developing countries, and I imagine it's much harder to get a blood test there, but are there enough smartphones with good enough cameras for your app to be useful in those countries?

Selim - Well, we've looked into that, and even though the number of people with access to portable phones with cameras is less in developing countries, this number is growing significantly over time, and it's not as low as people think. For example, in Africa, the penetrance of cell phones with cameras is about 30%.

Sally - It's going to take a bit more research to turn this image analysis into a simple app that works on the majority of phones and doesn't require any training to use accurately. So for now I can thankfully delete all of the photos of my inner eyelid from my phone, but I'll be keeping a close eye on how this develops over the next few years.

For the rest of the show this week we’re going behind the scenes of the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition which has been happening online this year - because of Covid... The Royal Society was established in 1660 by the acclaimed architect and astronomer Christopher Wren. It’s the oldest national scientific institution in the world, and exists to promote, fund, and advise on scientific matters. Although for many years its meetings took place behind closed doors, it later started putting on shows and demonstrations for the public of the latest scientific research, which would have been quite a spectacle at the time, as we heard from chief librarian, Keith Moore...

Keith - I would have loved to have gone to a 19th Century Royal Society exhibition. The place would have been fizzing with floral displays, displays of electricity...great scientists were there - so you might have talked to Michael Faraday or James Clerk Maxwell. And the exhibits were very eclectic, so yes there was great science there, but you might also have seen art by the latest pre-raphaelite painters or materials sent to the Royal Society from all parts of the world - so rough diamonds, rubies, manufactures of different countries, it generally was a mixed bag of things. So the great scientists of the Royal Society we’ve all heard of, people like Issac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Howard Florey in the 20th century, Albert Einstein was a foriegn member. And it’s surprising how many of these people exhibited at the summer science exhibitions. Alexander Fleming, who developed penicillin, showed his early research at the Royal Society just after the first world war. So some very famous people have showed their science, and the summer science exhibition continues in that tradition.

With the summer heat we’re experiencing here in the UK, some may suspect they’ve been a bit smellier than usual? Well, that’s down to the bacteria that live in our armpits. We’ll hear more in a moment how understanding them better could lead to superior deodorants. First though, let’s hear from the Royal Society’s Keith Moore about how microscopes - and the formerly invisible world of microbes they enabled visitors to see - have always been a huge hit over the years...

Keith - Microscopes were a really important part of how science was demonstrated in the 19th century. And one of the great pioneers, Robert Koch the germ theory pioneer, sent specimens of tuberculosis, leprosy, and other bacteria for exhibition by William Watson Cheyne in 1882. And of course, later Koch would go on to win a Nobel Prize for his tuberculosis research. Visitors to the summer science exhibition would be able to look down microscopes and use them. They would see interesting things down there, perhaps minerals or small creatures, but scientists attending might be interested in the instrument itself. So instrument makers would demonstrate their wares at the Royal Society in the hopes that scientists might buy one of those instruments.

Of course a lab wouldn’t be a lab without a microscope these days, and some scientists use theirs to stare at what’s living in the average armpit. The University of York’s Gavin Thomas does just that, as he told Eva Higginbotham...

Gavin - It's the microbes that make us smell. And to understand that we need to think a little bit about what sweat is and the different types of sweat that there are. So if you look at our armpit, it's a very rich environment with different types of sweat glands, but the type of sweat glands that we normally see on our open skin, which are called eccrine sweat glands that make the kind of salty water we know that we use for thermoregulation, they are found in the underarm, but also another important type of glands called the apocrine glands. And these apocrine glands make different types of sweat, which contains a range of different chemicals, but also the odourless precursors that are acted on by bacteria to form the molecules that we know as body odour.

Eva - And what kind of bacteria are they that live in the armpit?

加文,我们发现一些特定的细菌called Staphylococci that were important in this process. There's lots of different types of bacteria that live in the underarm. We like to think of it as a bit of an oasis on the skin. So the skin has different parts, the open skin, scalp, for example, your feet and your underarms, they're all different environments. And they all have their own populations of microbes. So the underarm has a particularly rich set of microbes, very diverse set of microbes, and only some of those are actually able to make body odour. And we kind of pinpointed the ones that are able to do that.

Eva - And do those bacteria like to be in the armpits because they like to eat the molecules that are in that sweat you were talking about.

Gavin - Yeah, we think so. I mean, we haven't formally proven this yet, but we know that these odour precursors, when the bacteria take them up, they take them up first into their cells and then they actually partly break them down, and they eat the things that they're releasing. So they release nutrients from those molecules and then the final molecule that they can no longer use, they then spit it out. And that molecule is the volatile molecule that forms one of the most pungent components of body odour, which is called a thioalcohol. So we've been working on discovering how these particular bacteria recognise this odourless precursor, take it up, break it down, producing what we recognize as BO.

Eva - And does everyone make the same molecules and so smell the same? Because some people just are smellier than others.

加文-是的。这是个很好的问题。有一个genetic basis behind this in terms of the amount of those odorless precursors I just mentioned, and how much you've actually made. So we know that there are some populations of people in the far east to have a genetic mutation in the enzyme that actually secretes the precursors into the underarm. So these people don't make, or don't secrete, as much of the precursors. And therefore aren't able to make so much thioalcohol. Now they do still smell, but they smell differently to a Caucasian person because they're missing that key component of the body odour. Body odour is made up of a range of different molecules. The thioalcohols that we study are the most pungent component. So without them, they actually smell slightly different to what a Caucasian person does. And also the actual population of microbes in the underarm clearly has an effect because we know that some people have produced higher or lower levels of actual body odour. So at least two things influence that.

Eva - And can we try and use this understanding of this breakdown of these molecules in these specific bacteria to try to make better deodorants and so people can smell less?

加文-是的。So that's what we're trying to do. And that's what our colleagues in Oxford are looking at. So because we've discovered how the bacteria take up those precursors and how they break them down, we can try and design targeted drugs that will inhibit that particular process. So that, we think, is better. If you look at current deodorants and antiperspirants which either kind of mask body odour or prevent the precursors being secreted, many of them contain a kind of general anti-microbial things like triclosan. These will kind of effect all the microbes in the underarm. And what we really want is to design something that will just specifically hit the microbe which we've discovered, which is called Staphylococcus hominis that makes the odour, so this information should be able to help us make a much smarter deodorant.

Eva - So we'd like some kind of very specific armpit antibiotic that would just knock out the specific, bad-smelly ones.

Gavin - Well, not even an antibiotic in that sense, we don't even need to kill the bacteria. We just need to stop that particular process. So the idea is that we really go in and stop the transporter from taking up the precursor. We're not killing the bacteria and we shouldn't be changing the microbiome too much. So it's a really, really kind of guided weapon to inhibit the particular process that leads to odour production.

Eva - So there you go. We often think about trying to keep our gut microbiome happy, but perhaps we should be thinking more kindly of our underarm microbiome. One of my questions is what is the point of all of this? Is there any reason that the bacteria should be in our armpits breaking down these molecules in this very specific way? How could this have evolved?

Gavin - Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, that's what we're really trying to understand now because we understand which bacteria do it, how they do it, but not why they do it. So our research has suggested that the production of this thioalcohol molecule is, is a pretty ancient process. So it certainly predates our split from other higher apes. So it's been among us all the way through human evolution, and we know that other mammals use microbially-derived volatile chemicals to communicate with each other.

Eva - Is that what a pheromone is?

Gavin - Exactly. That is the definition of a pheromone. It's a volatile chemical that's used to communicate between animals of the same or potentially different species. So these might be human pheromones in our evolutionary past. They might've been important to humans in terms of communicating.

Eva - And do you think they could be important to humans in communicating now? Is there anything we could be doing by being quite clean these days and washing our armpits and applying deodorant? Could there be some benefit that we're missing out on?

Gavin - That's a difficult question to answer. I mean, we know that if you go back a couple of hundred years, we all had a strong odour that would have been part of our personality, our character. And then the Victorians come along. They associate odour with illness and therefore as part of cleaning up the cities and the environment they get rid of smells. Smells are linked to disease. And that, on the whole, is a very sensible thing to have done. So we have an environment now where we have a lot fewer smells in our environment. And again, in the early 20th century, a lot of soap companies really rammed home the idea that BO was bad to sell their product. So it's difficult. Is this conditioned in us is, is BO really actually bad? And again, I always like to make this nice quote that Napoleon famously apparently wrote to Josephine when he was returning from the battlefield where he said, "I'm coming home, don't wash." So clearly for Napoleon, the unwashed smell of Josephine had a positive association for body odour. Whether there's any direct benefit now, it's difficult to say

Eva - So more research to be done then. So Gavin, what can people see if they check out your stall online?

Gavin - So we've got a great arcade game called backman. You can play a Staph. hominis, it's the bacterium I've been talking about. You can go around and try to defeat the other skin microbiome and eat odour precursors. And on the website, you can read much more about the science behind what I've just been talking about. And also there's a quiz there too. And also some videos from the Oxford team saying about how they're developing these new drugs to try and reduce body odour.