Instant Genius - End of year roundup: The non-COVID science that brought us joy in 2020

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

It’s been a long and strange year, and most of our attention has been focussed on the coronavirus. So, in this bonus episode of the Science Focus Podcast, the team talks about this year’s most interesting science that has nothing to do with COVID. We start off by talking about our favourite scientific developments of the year, and then we discuss the books and documentaries that we’ve loved. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Inside the December issue with the BBC Science Focus team The Science Focus team: What's inside November's issue? Dr Douglas Vakoch: Should we try to contact aliens? Dr Jacob Bleacher: Why do we need to go back to the Moon? Andy Weir: Building a base on the Moon, and crafting believable sci-fi Gretchen McCulloch: How has the internet affected how we communicate? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. With me in today's episode, I have editor Dan Bennett. Hi. Commissioning editor Jason Goodyear. Hello. And making his debut on the podcast, staff writer Thomas Ling. Hi.

It's been a long and strange year and most of our attention has been focused on the coronavirus. So today, we're going to be talking about this year's most interesting science that has nothing to do with COVID. We'll start off by talking about our favourite scientific developments of the year and then we'll discuss the books and documentaries that we've loved. So, Dan, why don't you start us off with your favourite news of the year? Yeah, so this might not.

be maybe the most profound scientific moment or, you know, the biggest breakthrough this year. But I went to this story because I think it captures everything that we sort of love about science and reporting on science. So back in January, when we were all back in offices, if you can remember those, scientists had discovered the oldest known material on Earth. And it was essentially a piece of dust that clocked in at 7 billion years old. Wow. And for context, our son is a youthful 4.6 billion years old by comparison. And so what I found fascinating about this is, so this material is what's known as

pre-solar grains. And that basically means grains that were around before our sun was formed. and it was locked away inside a meteorite that fell to Earth first back in the 60s. And I hope I'm pronouncing this right, and it was called the Merkerson meteorite. And it's been sat in Chicago in the Field Museum, and researchers sort of wanted to see effectively what was inside, because when stars die, they explode, and their materials flung out into space. And these fragments float around until they sort of end up, hopefully,

balling up into a meteorite. And so these grains become effectively locked away in this little piece of space rock, and they stay there unchanged for a billion years. So if you're lucky enough, and a meteorite falls to Earth, and you can check it, and it's old enough, you could potentially have on your hands a time capsule

of what life might have been like before our solace is informed. And so that's what they thought they could have on their hands here. And so to find out, they actually took little chunks of the meteorite and ground them up and effectively dissolved them over and over in acid until all they had left was stardust. And there's another little bit here that I think sums up one of the fundings about scientists is that apparently when they did this, they noted that it smelled like rotten peanut butter.

I mean I did this at the time And you guys pointed out to me You're like, oh, what does what earth does rotten peanut butter smell like? Because it doesn't go off, right? I did think about emailing them. I have been thinking about this quite a lot. But then I realised it might be a bit weird if this guy's literally found stardust

that's older than, you know, everything around us and I'm just really hyper-focused on this. So I left it. I left him alone. But yeah, so they found this material, and then they age it by effectively measuring how much cosmic radiation it's been exposed to. And by doing that, they came to their estimate. And, you know, all of the little bits that they found were from different, had different ages. So some were four billion, some were five billion. So it's quite remarkable that in amongst there was this little piece that was sort of seven.

billion years old. And the value of this is that with that piece, they can then understand a little bit more about star formation in the early universe. And it's sort of lending credence to the idea that actually our solar system came a little bit later on. And there might have been this very active period where lots of stars were forming in our galaxy early on. But I think more than that, I just like the idea that this rock fell in the 60s. and then a kind of cosmologist, which is typically, you know, cosmology is typically this ethereal, kind of imaginative pursuit. But there's this guy in Chicago who smashed up some rock, smelled it, and then gone, oh yeah, that's some star. I've got a little piece of star here.

So, yeah, that was probably my favourite. So if he knows it smells like peanut butter or rotten peanut butter, does that mean he's then breathed in some stardust? That's a good point, actually. Yeah, presumably, to an effect, he has starduff inside him. I mean, I suppose, you know, there is that awkward thing that we're all stardust. You know, we are all... Smelling of peanut butter.

Spelling of peanut butter. But he's probably got more stardust in him than any other sort of person on the planet. He's like the oldest person on the planet. Yeah, I mean, he would. I mean, how, I don't want to cast any aspersions on this close character, but how tempting would it to be to just, you know, you're doing your little digging and then you get a little piece, and you're like, I'm just going to put that in my pocket.

Just walk off and then I've got a piece of stardust. He's made it into a nice brooch. Yeah, I would love a stardust brooch that would be spectacular. Okay, I think we should move on before we libel this guy. So, in case. Jason, what was your favourite news of the year? So continuing the space theme, the thing that got me all whipped up into a frenzy

was Nurse's announcement in September that they're going to be launching their Artemis missions starting at the end of next year. So for those who don't know, the Artemis mission is going to be the first crude missions to go to the moon since 1972. And it will also contain the first female astronaut to land on the moon two. So I thought this was super exciting.

It's quite a long-term plan, planned over several years. But at the moment, they're just testing out the launch system and the crew module that they're going to be using for it. It's called the imaginatively named Space Launch System, and then the Orion Q, crew module, excuse me. So they're looking at the end of next year, sort of sending those on another imaginative imaginative name, Artemis 1 mission. So that's going to go up for 26 days, including six days in orbit around the moon, completely uncrewed, as a sort of, you know, a safety test and everything. So fingers crossed, that goes well. Then in summer 2023, next up is Artemis 2.

So this will be the first crude mission to be taken by the Orion and the SLS. So that's super exciting if that goes ahead in that sort of short space of time. And they'll be doing a flyby of the moon and then coming back down to Earth. So if that proves successful, that would be the first crew mission that's gone out of low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. That's pretty amazing because even I wasn't born then. Wow. So why are they going back to the moon? Because science, really. We haven't, you. You know, we haven't been there for, you know, as we say, so long since the early 70s. But on a serious note, so they're going to, it's the first sort of step in establishing a permanent moon base.

And then they're exploring potentially crude missions outside the solar system, you know, for all things going to plan. So it's super exciting, super positive news story and what has been a bit of a stinker of the year. And it's part of this sort of surge of kind of interest again in the moon, isn't it? Where you have China and the Changi missions, you have some private enterprises that we've reported on throughout the year, looking at potential moon-based locations. So, you know, it's a massive, I think, I think this is at the same. center all of that certainly means that more so than ever before it looks like there'll be human feet on the moon this decade? Yeah, I mean, optimistically, yeah, we hope so.

I mean, they're also working on the Luna Gateway, sort of the planned small space station that are hoping to go up there. So, I mean, it could be, fingers crossed in, I don't know, within the next decade, we're regularly seeing astronauts flying up to this Lunar Gateway and even perhaps on landing on the moon and doing some sites on there. So that would be great. Do you know how long it's going to take them to get to the moon again? Like have we got any faster since the 1970s?

Oh, I don't know, actually. Yeah, that's a good question. Because they've got these, it's like the SLS is an enormous launch system. So it's, you know, over 100 meters tall. It weighs tens of thousands of kilos. But I'm not, in terms of speed, I'm not sure, to be honest, that if it would be... I'm not sure how much the boosters have moved on,

you know, in terms of propulsion and that sort of thing. I don't know. I wonder if it's like transatlantic flight, whereby actually it's about efficiency, more than speed these days. And, you know, maybe 20 years ago, it was like six hours to get to the USA or seven hours. And actually now it's 9, 10, 11.

So it could be going... They could be going for... you know, putting less fuel on board to make everything lighter and get there more efficiently. There is a bit of sort of one-upmanship between the NASA SLS system and the SpaceX Starship, which is, I suppose it's equivalent, which is, I don't know if this is by design or an accident, but it's slightly taller. But the Starship's actually fully reusable, whereas the NASA one doesn't recover. its boosters. So that's sort of a slightly, I wouldn't say controversial, but that's a point

of difference between the two that certain people like to point out. Let's just leave it down. Okay, thank you very much, Jason. So Tom, what did you like in science news this year? I'm really excited to talk about this. I think the one event I thought was amazingly significant this year was the Elon Musk-Pieg news conference. That might kind of sound like a, kind of weird psychedelic dream, but I'll explain it. So, oh, yeah, or earlier that, Elon Musk, who most people know is the CEO of SpaceX. He sort of teased an unveiling of a new technology for Neurilink. That's another one of his companies. And I think it's about February, he started saying that NeurLink is going to demonstrate a working version of their brain machine

interface chip. So that's basically an implant that could show a person's brain neurons firing in real time. So every time the person moves, you could sort of see their brain patterns in that respect. So everyone was kind of expecting Elon Musk sort of walk out maybe with like a brain chip in his own head. But instead, he trotted out Gertrudev the pig. And in a news conference had all the straw on the floor. But with all these monitors and the backgrounds and then it got like quite black mirror quite quickly. But not in the way you're sort of moving. So Master of him,

that Gertie had like a sort of coin-sized chip in his head. And it's just below her skull. And it contained, I think it was 3,000 electrodes sort of attached to threads, they didn't that a human hair that can monitor a thousand brain neurons at once. And although it took Gertie a bit to get going, I think she was a bit camera-shy.

She eventually started sort of sniffing around at the straw and eating it. And as she did this, all the chip that was connected to neurons, that control the sort of smell and sort of snout muscles started to light up. And you can see it in the screen behind her. So, yeah, it was really, really, really cool to see. But I guess the big question is what was the kind of point in it?

I guess it's quite cool to see a sort of pig snuffling around, but, you know, why is it going to lead? Well, neuralinks say they're developing devices like this for people who are paralyzed or suffered from neurological conditions. to essentially control phones and computers with their minds. So you wouldn't need to sort of unlock your phone or, you know, go on Facebook. But you could do it all in your head, which is really cool. In fact, Elon Musk sort of claims that these chips might be able to cure dementia, as well as doing things like summoning a non-branded electric car with your brain.

Now, a lot of neuroscientists are skeptical about these claims saying it was a long way off. But according to Musk, it's the first step in sort of creating this human, superhuman intelligence, as he describes it, something which he believes will be essential in guarding humans from future AI if it goes rogue. So, well, sort of demonic AI finishes all off. I guess we have to find out in 2021. Something Musk's worried about this sort of AI superpower, turning evil and going rogue against us. Yeah, if I hadn't talked about that before. Sure, actually. He's been quite vocal in saying that we need to be very careful with AI. We need to make sure that we've got AI that understands human goals, I think.

I think one analogy he's brought up before is if he told an AI to build paperclips. Oh, yeah. If he just left that instruction, they will basically harvest humans in order to make more paper clips than the end. Yeah. So hopefully then, if all goes to plan, Neurrelink will save our bacon. Yeah, I don't know how Musk has the time for all this. I mean, it's got SpaceX, electric cars, NeurRLink. It's got his snow in a lot of troughs, isn't he? You've got another of these lined up, Jason. Well, seriously, though, he's not alone, is he? He's not alone, is he? He is a lot of. him, James Lovelock, you know, mostly very prominent scientists who have no real, they don't

work in AI, it's probably what unites them, they're sort of terrified and think that we need some kind of, you know, human machine interface in order to be able to, I don't know what, do war, I suppose, with the robots in the future. And then if you, when you talk to AI researchers, I mean, I suppose they're a bit biased, but this is completely unfounded. But I think it does embody this idea that AI is sort of barreling along faster than we are keeping track of it. I mean, just look at how we've created regulations around data. It's been very slow to kind of keep up the reality of it.

But it's interesting because as a psychologist, I'm totally fascinated by it. and especially what you might be able to learn when you're able to, you know, see brain activity neuron by neuron as you're doing tasks and what that will mean for how we understand the brain. Yeah, I think Masque described it as a fit bit of the mind really. So not only will other people sort of be aware of how they're kind of feeling, you yourself might have a better understanding of your own emotions, which would be really cool but terrified. Okay, thank you very much Tom. So now I'm going to tell you about a new story that I found amazing from this year. I, like Dan and Jason, I'm a fan of space. It's quite space-heavy this.

I love exoplanets. And there was a new story this year about the coolest exoplanet where it rains molten iron. So this is a planet called Wasp 76B. and it is tidily locked to its star like our moon is to us, so it always shows the same face to its star. And what this means is that it has one side that is really, really hot on the day side,

it reaches 2,400 degrees Celsius. And the night side is much, much cooler. It's still quite hot. It's still around 1,500 degrees Celsius, but that's a huge difference between the two of them. And so when it was studied, by the very large telescope earlier this year. They found this huge temperature difference.

And they also found something weird, which was that on the day side, there was a huge abundance of iron vapor. So now iron is a metal with a really high melting point. So that's surprising on its own that you can vaporize iron and have it in the atmosphere. But then they also found that they didn't find such a high concentration of iron on the night side. So they came to the conclusion then that

what must be happening is that it gets so hot on the dayside that this iron evaporates from the surface of the planet. And then the huge temperature difference drives these really strong winds around from the day side to the night side of the planet. And that carries this iron around. And then when it gets to the night side, it's too cool for this iron to stay as a vapor. So it then cools and condenses and then rains down onto the night side of the planet. And that in itself is just really cool. But I also just thought it was amazing that we can now study the weather on other planets. How great is that? So this other planet is 390 light years away from Earth. And we know what the weather is like there. And I just think that is an amazing advancement in

science. Do you think they should add like, do you think they should add a segment on the news maybe for like other planets, the weather there? That would be cool. I don't think we quite have enough detail yet to forecast it. We can only like tell what elements are in the atmosphere. But still, if we could, that would be very exciting. This does remind me of a conversation I had with our content director who, when we were sort of pitching a story about exoplanets, I was telling him about, I think it was another of these exoplanets that they hypothesized could be sort of heavily covered in diamonds. And his response was, no, it's not.

What'd you mean? He was too far away. How do we know? So that brings me to my question. So how do they see this? How do they get a sense of the materials and temperatures that are kind of present on a planet like this? Okay, so essentially, do you know that image of when you put sunlight through a prism and it splits into the colors of the rainbow? It's based on that concept.

So if we have sunlight, we can split it into all of its different wavelengths. And now if that sunlight is, when it travels through a material, like a gas or something, that gas will absorb certain wavelengths of light. So if we then look at the way, if we then split the sunlight that reaches us, we'll see that there are some wavelengths missing. And from that, we can figure out what elements it has traveled through, what element, because each element has a specific, a specific sort of signature of wavelengths that it will absorb, a bit of. bit like a barcode, because it's sort of stripy like a barcode. So we can look at the light from the star that Wasp 76B orbits as it travels through the atmosphere of Wasp 76B and then reaches Earth. And so we can see what elements are present in the atmosphere of that planet based on what wavelengths of light it has absorbed. I think that's amazing. Yeah, easy.

I just can't stop thinking, though, if you were to visit that planet, what sort of umbrella would you need? A steel umbrella, would that work? A bulletproof one would have a Kevlar or something? Yeah, I think he would be pretty hairy, wouldn't it, going to the shops? Yeah, I don't know of any... I can't think of a material that could survive that. It's hot enough to evaporate iron.

Yeah, and I mean, It's a good point because it's, I suppose, the reasons we might wonder why scientists are doing this kind of stuff, and it's not so much about going there or ever. But as we see these exoplanets, we discover more and more that the rules that we had about planet formation have to be kind of changed and revised all the time because we find these just bizarre planets that kind of don't meet our expectations at all.

And, you know, like you say, get these, these, the light back from, the star and you're like, well, what on earth could be causing this data? And, yeah, then we have to figure it out. Okay, right. Now let's talk about the books and documentaries that we have enjoyed this year. So we've got the Christmas period coming up. We should all have a little bit of time off work. So that means you've got a bit of time to read some books, watch some documentaries, something like that. And there's loads of great science stuff that's been out this year. So, Dan, what have you enjoyed this year?

So in terms of a nonfiction book, I really enjoyed Tim Specter's, Tim Pector's latest book, Spoonfed, but I have bored everyone about that before. But if you want a good primer on, you know, what kind of food you should be eating to stay healthy and you want something that's going to make you feel positive and not kind of weighed down by all the different research, I think that's a brilliant guide to, you know, nutrition and diet science. But more, I kind of briefly, so this year, for the first time I read Doom, which I think sci-fi lovers would probably gasp at that idea. But, you know, the films are coming out and I wanted to understand what the, you know,

because there's such a cult following and people love it. and obviously for the magazine I wanted to see what we ought to do around it and it's funny because I really enjoyed the book when I read it, read it. It's a very, it's sort of very fast-paced work and it's almost, obviously none of us gone on holiday this year, but it did seem like a great

holiday read. And I thought it's all of, I mean, I think it's fair to say if anyone's seen the films, it's a little bit silly. I mean, the main character is called Paul, which didn't strike him as a very science fiction name. And they're all obsessed with spice, which is a... An 80s deodorant. I mean, it may as well. No, it's a sort of almost magical material that seems to do everything, including give you sort of almost superpower,

superpowers, the ability to sort of predict things and even longer life. But the reason I've sort of thought about it and stuck with me is when it's written, I should have double-checked this, but it predates, you know, most of the science fiction that we kind of is in popular culture right now. And I know this isn't really science fiction, but even Star Wars, you know, a lot of the ideas and kind of world building that is in Dune, you can see, you can draw a line to Star Wars, which is coming back in a big way at the moment,

in that you've got, you know, Paul or Luke, who's kind of a bit of a bland character and he's going to save the universe. But then you look around, you know, June's all about terraforming, so terraforming this desert planet and, you know, making it more habitable. and the characters that arrive there, it's funny because it's all corporations,

but they've fallen back into sort of hierarchical things that look like monarchs and all of that. Indeed, one of the characters is a Duke. So it's all a bit silly, but I can't admire, can't but help admire, the kind of science fiction world building that was in the book. And yeah, I think definitely, I think it's probably going to be a very hard film to make. So I'm not sure how the film's going to go, but I definitely recommend the book. Okay. Thank you, Dan.

Jason, what do you recommend? So one book that I read this year, it's actually a reprint. It was a few years ago it was first published, but now it's been reprinted and updated with the latest science and new case studies of things. It's David Nutt's Drugs Without the Hot Air. So most people will be familiar with David Nutt as the, he was the former what they called Drugsar or Drugs Advisor for the government. He's been this sort of kind of unfairly regarded as kind of a maverick figure, which he isn't

at all. You know, it's not like some sort of weirdo psychonaut that's saying everybody should take illegal drugs and it's not like that at all. So if you read the book, what you get is a real clear-headed evidence-based. analysis of all things to do with drugs. So it can be his opinions on how he thinks the lawmaking policy surrounding drugs is being clouded with various emotional political judgments. And it's just a very clear, as somebody who studied science, it's a very clear application of the scientific method in a very pure way. And he expresses his ideas and his thoughts very clearly.

So it's a really great read. And he covers all sorts of things, like the history of drug regulation, where he thinks it's gone wrong, right up to his current work that he's doing now on... This is like one point I really found ironic about the book and the policy surrounding legal and illegal and illegal drugs. There's now work going on using drugs...

Well, so this research named Ben Sessa in the University of Bristol he's been treating alcoholics in a recovery program using MDMA which is the chemical component of what people on the street call ecstasy and he's been met with great success and there's also something stopping people smoking tobacco using illegal drugs so that sort of sums up for me anyway a lot of what David's work has been on noticing how backward that the regulations surrounding this are the fact that we're now finding success in using currently illegal drugs to treat addictions to current legal ones. Did he go into about how it seems almost crazy that alcohol is legal and his other drugs are? Yeah, he does say, like, his own view on alcohol as well. He says he does drink it occasionally, but he's, um,

It's basically it's a quirk of history, isn't it? And it's like our drug of choice, thanks to its historical evolution. And it's received certain preferential treatments due to that fact. But yeah, so in his risk assessment, alcohol's more dangerous than a lot of the current, at least Class B drugs. Yeah. I think I spoke to him early in the year when his book this edition was published and I think it's particularly interesting when it comes to alcohol because he just you know clearly the harm caused by alcohol far outweighs all of these but there's a point that he kind of discovered

when he got involved in politics in that you know you the trouble is when these things are put into law and they become political. Not only is it, you know, there's obviously the court of public opinion, but you have a struggle to essentially legalize something because effectively you have populations of people in jail because of this thing that you're legalizing or illegalizing. So suddenly if you were to make alcohol illegal or if you were to make another substance illegal,

you're making a big, statement about those people that you've been prison. So that's where the kind of, I think the policy side of this thing, you know, it was never something that was ultimately for him because, as he was sort of say, you know, I'm here to do the research on that's, I, you know, give you the information about the risk, but I'll leave the politics to everyone else. Okay, thank you very much, Jason. Tom, what would you recommend from this year? Well, I'm going to talk about a TV show instead of a book. As much I really want to keep on talking about Tiger King,

which apparently was still in 2020 since a very long time ago, I'm going to talk about another Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma. So it's a docufilm. It's only about 90 minutes, so it can be done in one sitting. But with that said, it's not an easy watch at all. As you can probably guess from the title, it delves into social media and specific. specifically how platforms such as Facebook are designed to be addictive

and how the sort of impacts our overall health. And the film kind of argues that in order to keep grabbing our attention, these apps will show you more eye-catching content that inherently lead to quite sort of damaging rows, whether it's conspiracy theory videos or sort of flat-earthur kind of stuff. But even if you don't end up on crazy Pizza Gate or Q-Anon kind of group, and only go on social media to look at political news or opinions, there's the argument that you'll be shown things that are gradually more extreme.

So, I mean, this is nothing specifically new, but the film presents quite compelling studies that, say, in the US, for instance, political opinions have become much more polarised since these algorithms have been used in a big way. This is only correlation, not causation, but it's still really interesting. I think particularly in this film because of who's presenting it. So this film contains many of the people who actually built these algorithms. It features people like Justin Rosenstein,

who's the man who invented the like button. And it's quite interesting how a lot of these people, they don't let their children use smartphones because they've seen how addictive these social media apps are on there. But all of this was enough for me to take Facebook off my own phone. And what was really interesting was I left Facebook for a few days. And then I came back on the desktop version. And there was so many notifications that weren't really that relevant to me.

So it's like this old school friend did blah, blah, blah. Like the guy you talked to Facebook six months ago has a new partner. It felt like it was really trying to, it was pulling out all the stops to try and get me sucked in, which is exactly what this sort of documentary said might happen. And if you want to face that kind of dread, all the social dilemma is streaming, now. One thing I found quite interesting about Facebook was that I had it for quite a long time. And eventually I realized that it was so good at this, at this drawing you in and keeping

you addicted. But it took me ages to notice that I wasn't actually enjoying using it at all. It was just becoming such a habit. And, you know, they were pushing more and more adverts to me and showing me less and less of the content I actually wanted to see, which was, you know, things that my friends were doing. But, you know, eventually I realized that I wasn't actually getting what I wanted from it at all. And then once I finally managed to stop using it, once I managed to break free of the Facebook addiction, I didn't miss it at all.

Yeah, I don't really miss it now too much, apart from when I do go on the desktop version every, like, month, and then instantly get sucked in. But yeah, what I found really, really interesting about this film and when I talk about the algorithms, is the data they collect. Obviously, I knew that Facebook probably has quite a lot of data, personal data, but they capture data by the microsecond of how long you look at every post. And then using that, they can, you know, generate content that you're more like to spend time on. So, yeah, it's quite scary. So have you guys deleted your profiles or your profile still there?

I've deleted mine, yeah. I wouldn't get that far. I'm not crazy. Because they do, they do kind of create sort of, you know, your shadow is sort of still there in the system. So I wonder, it's increasingly hard to get rid of. And there's still probably a digital Sara in the Facebook database. Yeah, I mean, I have a WhatsApp account. So they still have my details.

They still know about me. I still know what you like. Yeah. Still know what I talk about. The cookies are still following around the web, so they're probably still able to tell you exactly what you want before you know you want it. This sounds like a great film. Like, Real Life Sawa with Shadow Sara. Yeah, I wonder how Shadow Sara is different to Real Sara.

Well, what did Real Sara, what book or film did Real Sara like this year? Okay, well, Real Sara liked a documentary. on Netflix that only came out at the start of December and it's called Alien Worlds. And it is this really interesting, it's like a sci-fi nature documentary. So it is, the idea of it is a nature documentary but set on a different planet.

So the idea is that all life on Earth follows the same basic laws. All species need to eat or find energy somehow. They all need to reproduce and they all need to avoid being eaten themselves. So why would those laws be any different anywhere else in the universe? It's got to be

the same driving factors behind all species, all life, everywhere. And so what this documentary does is that it takes an exoplanet and the conditions on the exoplanet and asks, how would

life survive and thrive here? What sort of life would would survive here, and it draws inspiration from real species on Earth. So one example is that there's a planet like Wasp 76B that I was talking about earlier. It's tidily locked, so it's got one really hot face and one really cold face. And the species that they imagine is, they call it a pentapod. It's a little cat-sized creature with five legs. And it's not a specialist species.

It's not one that is specialized to its environment. It's a generalist. It is one that can adapt to whatever environment it finds itself in. And so what the documentary does is that it tells you a bit about the species, and then it will flip back to Earth, and it'll show you a species on Earth that does the same thing. And it explains why this is, you know, explains the science behind it. There's so much science in this program,

and why that science is a good adaptation. for the species. So for example, there's a, the species it compares the pentapods to, or one of the species it compares the pentapods to is leaf cutter ants. So like many colonies of ants, each individual can fill one of a number of roles. It can be a soldier, it can be a forager, it can be a worker, and they're all the same species. They have all the same genes, but what role it gets placed into depends on, its environment and, you know, what roles are needed. And what role it adopts then defines how its body develops. They can be much, much bigger or much, much smaller than each other,

depending on what role they play. And the idea is that pentapods on this fictional planet could do a similar sort of thing is that they have a, all of them have the same set of DNA, but depending on the environment that they're born into, they will develop a vastly different body to adapt to their environment. And it's a very interesting series, and I highly recommend it, but one thing I would say is probably don't watch it whilst you're eating your dinner because there are a few clips of these species mating, and it is kind of gross.

I'm trying to animate that. Yeah. So, Jim, okay, it's got 18 legs, and they entangle in the sea. poke me a picture go there's going to be multi rain coming down

there's three sons they're all setting at the same time but it's beautiful but I mean it's not that's not really that dissimilar in a way I mean it's a logical extension of what

you know biologists or astrobiologists do to hunt for alien life they they look around on earth and look at things that have occupied niches in the extreme places and they look for signs of those things elsewhere, right? Yeah, absolutely. So if you do want to learn any more on this topic, we have an article on it in the December issue of BBC Science Focus magazine.

Astrobiologist Dr. Eric Kirshenbaum has written about that for us. And so you can either pick up a copy of the December issue or you can go to sciencefocus.com and search for what might aliens look like. Or, of course, you can just watch Alien Worlds on Netflix. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. The December issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. It's a special issue all about the search for extraterrestrial life. In it, we talk to a scientist who is beaming messages into space

for intelligent alien species to hear. We explore the best places in our solar system to look for life, and we discuss why we want to believe in aliens. And as always, there's much more insight. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

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