Instant Genius - Inside the December issue with the BBC Science Focus team

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we chat through the December 2020 issue of the magazine, which is on sale now. The issue is all about the search for extraterrestrial life, so managing editor Alice Lipscombe-Southwell starts us off by telling us about the most promising places in our Solar System to search for alien life. Commissioning editor Jason Goodyer tells us about a new drug delivery system that draws inspiration from parasitic hookworms, and then editorial assistant Amy Barrett brings us back around to ET by discussing why we want to believe in aliens. We close the podcast with details of our exciting new competition, judged by comedian and author Dara Ó Briain. 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: The Science Focus team: What's inside November's issue? Finding the fun in science – Dara Ó Briain Dr Douglas Vakoch: Should we try to contact aliens? Bergur Finnbogason: Project Discovery and its search for exoplanets Ritu Raman: Can you build with biology? Robin Ince: Inside the mind of a comedian Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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with 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. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. With me today, I have managing editor Alice Lipscomb Southwell Hello.

Commissioning editor Jason Goodyear. Hi-o. And editorial assistant Amy Barrett. Hi-ya. We're going to tell you all about the December issue of the magazine, which is on sale now. The December issue is all about the search for extraterrestrial life. So today's episode is going to be an alien special. First up, we have Alice.

Alice, what are you going to tell us about? I'm going to be talking all about the search for alien life in our solar system. So obviously we've got Earth, which we know has life on it, you know, plenty of it. But there's always quite a lot of interest in, you know, all the difference of planets and moons in our solar system. And there's quite a few missions that are sort of planned or on their way at the moment to go and investigate some of these other worlds. Now, when you sort of think of life on other planets, it's not going to be large life. It's not going to be like giraffe-like things and elephants like posing about. So it's probably more likely to be microbial life.

So, I mean, for example, there is a mission on this way to Mars at the moment that's going to have a look for any signatures of microbial life there. So digging down to have a look for that. Obviously, you might have seen on the news back in, well, when was it September, there was a lot of hoo-ha about phosphine being detected on Venus. And that was really exciting. We were, yeah, great phosphine. That's a sign of life because microbes can.

produce that. That was a telescope that detected that by looking at the sort of light spectrums and things like that. Now there's a little bit of doubt coming in about whether there really is life on Venus or whether phosphine was even really detected. But nevertheless, it still raises a lot of interest in going to have a look at the planet and see if there is anything there. Unfortunately, Venus, it is quite hot, obviously been quite close to the sun. But up in its atmosphere, if you get about 55 kilometres up, you can actually get much balmyer conditions, which are a bit more like Earth, similar temperatures. Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of acid in the clouds there as well.

So anything that is living there is going to have to be tolerant to any sort of acidic atmosphere. Yes, Sarah? So is there anything on Earth that could survive those sorts of conditions? Is there anything that could survive in, you know, that's airborne or could survive in, like, those really acidic clouds? Well, scientists do say that we can look for Earth analogs. if you've got something like the Atacama Desert, which is incredibly dry. So if we were looking at planets or moons that also have dry conditions, then if we look at the sort of life that could

exist there, then that might offer some clues. Also in Ethiopia, there's some really acidic lakes. So, you know, if life can survive in those, which we think it can, then that could also be the case on these other places too. Yes, Amy. When you say that scientists are looking for signs of life, obviously you mentioned phosphine, but what other signs could there be that life exists? Well, you have to sort of look for the conditions that life could exist in. If there's a sign of maybe hydrothermal activity, I mean, on Earth we know that microbes can exist in hydrothermal vents, I mean, deep down in the ocean. They can also look for signatures in the atmosphere of life there. I mean, if you're really lucky, if you went onto Mars,

you've dug down, you might find some microbes there. I mean, things were not sure really if fossils or anything could exist on Mars. So it would really cool if you could just go and start digging fossils up. But yeah, it's probably not going to be the case. Martian paleontologist would be a really cool job. That would be amazing. That would be so cool. Yeah, so there are missions on their way to have a look for these things. Unfortunately, it's always really sort of quite tight competition to get funding for these things.

So one quite interesting thing is upon Titan, they went to sent some of probes down, had a look, and it's got river valleys, it's got hills, it's got pebbles. Oh, my God, this looks just like Earth. But in reality, any sort of water that exists that isn't really water as we know it, it's made of hydrocarbons like ethane and methane. So anything that exists there, it can't be water-based life. And DNA, as we know, it doesn't exist in these conditions. So it's got to be sort of very alien life if it is there. Hi, Jason. So Titan, that's one of Saturn's moons, right? Yeah, it's actually the biggest moon of Saturn. And there are any other moons with potential signs of life on them? Yeah, there's Enceladus,

which is another one of Saturn's moons. Now that's just a tiny sort of snowball of a world. It's really so icy. It's got no atmosphere. It's got a frozen surface. But when the Cassini probe went there, it was back in about 2006, I think, 2005-2006, it found that it was jetting water out from beneath its surface. So that's impossible, that hydrothermal activity happening there, which is really exciting. Unfortunately, no missions are planned to go back there to have a look. But that could be a really good option because you can just fly past, have a look. And then the Jupiter moon as well, Europa, there's the juice and the Europa Clipper missions planned. Now, the surface of Europa is quite sort of young, quite fresh looking, which means there's probably a lot of volcanic activity

going on there. So, yeah, it does seem like it's got a subsurface ocean that's salty water as well. So again, if there's a salty ocean beneath the surface there, that could be a great place to look for life, but it would mean landing on it digging down or shoveling up some ice and trying to have a look. So these missions, if you say that they're planned, does that mean they won't be happening in the near future? Or when do we think we might actually get some results back? Well, the Juts and Europa ones, they are planned. They're probably going to be happenings in the next few years. Some missions they're sort of proposed, but, you know, if the funding's not there, you know, a lot of. of rounds of missions will go to NASA and ESA. They almost have to fight for a chance to get to go there. So in some cases, yeah, it just isn't, you know, there isn't the funding there for it.

But so there are ones planning to go to Mars as well. There's Rosalind Franklin that's planned in the next couple of years. Then there's which one's on its way. It's perseverance is on its way. There's Al-Hamad as well. Yes, they're all en route. So hopefully we might get some results in the next few years. Speaking of the probes, Alice, if we're going to be sending probes from Earth, how do we make sure we're not going to accidentally contaminate potentially inhabited worlds with our own bacteria and microbes? That's a good question. I mean, what you can do is when they're making the probes, they are so careful about that.

You don't want to go infecting other planets or other worlds. So the scientists will always wear sort of PPE, I suppose. They're wearing masks, they're wearing gowns. They're operating in a very clean environment, and they'll test it and get any bacteria off it before it goes as well. So that ensures that anything we are finding on another planet isn't from Earth and also that we're not infecting any worlds. And isn't there a danger to bringing stuff back to Earth?

Like, would we do that if we found something? Would we bring it back and then release it here? We'd be like the aliens in War of the Worlds. We'd have to cold from Enceladus, and it would kill us all. I mean, we have brought stuff back already, but it's generally sort of rocks from the moon. I mean, we can bring samples back,

and again, I suppose the same process would happen. We'd make sure that we kept them in some sort of clean room when they arrived, and you can check them first there, quarantine them, so they don't affect us. There's definitely, like, bits of moon rock in museums and stuff that you can just touch and pick up. You can touch them. Are you sure?

Yeah, well, meteorites and asteroids definitely, bits of space rock. Maybe not moon rock, that's probably not enough of that on Earth. Yeah. You break into museums and just like touching the moon rock. All right, thank you very much, Alice. So now we're going to move on to Jason,

who has something non-alien-y to talk about. Not alienity. Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's sort of alien-y, because the worm that this drug delivery system is based on is pretty gruesome. But basically, it's about this group of multidisciplinary researchers in Johns Hopkins who've created a drug delivery system based on parasitic worms. So the original idea for this came because apparently something like $600 billion worth of medication is wasted by patients.

who don't take their prescriptions correctly. Either they forget or there's some sort of other underlying factor, perhaps disability or mental health problems or degenerative brain disorders. You didn't have to call me out like this. Just because I forget a pill every now. Yeah, so there's been quite a few groups trying to get around this problem with slow release medication delivery systems. So obviously, the one that people are probably most familiar is these patches like you use for nicotine replacement therapy for people who are trying to quit smoking.

But they use those for other things as well. But this team particularly wanted to get a system that would deliver drugs directly to the GI tract. And the problem with that is there's a mucous layer on the tract that's continually shedding cells, excuse me. So that sort of patch won't stick to it for very long. So they're thinking, well, how can we get around this problem? So let's look to nature. There's these parasitic worms that are able to attach to this area and that live in this area for a significant period of time.

So what they did, they've made these little, they call them pheragrippers, and they're like tiny, they're about a quarter of a millimeter across, so just about big enough to see a specks of the human eye. and they're kind of a star-shaped spring system, and they clutch on to this mucous layer when they're ingested, either orally or biome, and then they can, like, grip on to the inside and slowly deliver the drug payload over, you know, a longer period of time. Oh, Sarah?

Wow, so that sounds almost a bit gruesome. So presumably because they're so small, you wouldn't feel anything, would you? No, no, I mean, they're absolutely tiny. They look like specks of dust. They're so small. Would you need to swallow loads of them then if they're so small? Because, I mean, that feels like you're going to have to swallow like a thousand of them or something to have an effect. Yeah, so that's something that they're working out at the moment.

So at the moment, they've just, they've tested them with a painkiller payload, although obviously they could be useful, all sorts of different drugs. But they're trying, the sort of next couple of stages, they're going to try and put them in a capsule like you do with, you know, if you take a flu medicine or something and it has lots of the little grains inside the capsule. So that's kind of one of the things that they'll be investigating.

Yeah, but you'd have to take a decent amount of them because they're so small. So they're not going to get broken down by our bodies before they reach this mucousy layer? No, well, they're made in a similar way to microchips, so with something called photolithography. So you basically get like you were to microchip wafer and you put the pattern on it and then shine light on it

so you can make these very fine structures. And then they work like a spring, but it's not using a mechanical spring. It's using a polymer film under tension. And then when this is exposed, in the case that they carried out their experiment, it was with temperature. So they refrigerate them.

And then once they go inside the human body, they warm up. Then the mechanism deploys and they attach. But presumably, You just pass them once they've finished. I'm not sure. What is the worm that they're based on? Is it like a tape worm or something like that?

Yeah, well, it's a hookworm. So it's got like this, the same sort of star-shaped mouth, which it hooks on. How big are they? Are they microscopic? Or are they? Yeah, they're not, I'm not sure of their exact size, but they're not like worms you go fishing with.

So what kind of things could we treat using these devices? Yeah, so that's sort of something that they're looking into at the moment. So as I say, they've tried a painkiller. But another point where this slow release system could come in handy is for the treatment that require a steady slow release. So the researcher I speak to said sometimes if you take, well, often if you take an inject, or if you take a tablet, you get a high spike in the amount of drug that's released and then it comes down. Whereas for some things, that's not really what you want. You want a slow and

steady approach. So it could be for something like that. He said that there's a multitude of applications for it. So do you think they could use that for something like diabetes, maybe, because people with diabetes need quite a sort of steady amount of insulin in them? Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure about diabetes, but I guess that's, as I say, that's the sort of idea that they're going for, this sort of slow, steady release. It's a very sci-fi kind of picture in my head that I've got of, like, you know, there's like loads of cartoons where they go, shrink themselves down, and go into the human body to solve things. I mean, this isn't the first kind of nanomedic technology that we've seen, is it? Yeah, so this is part of a new emerging field of medicine

that they've called active matter therapeutics in which this sort of, I mean, it's not really a bot, but it is that sort of thing, you know, it's a dynamic engineered mechanism. So, yeah, the research that I spoke to was saying there's so much stuff currently in the labs being developed with this that it's, he called it the future of medicine. It sounds quite similar to the work of Dr. Ritu Raman.

she has developed this sort of balloon-shaped thing that you can swallow and it expands in your stomach. I think it's the idea is for people who are trying to lose weight. This thing expands in your stomach and makes you feel fuller so you eat less, which can help people who are struggling to lose weight and then eventually when you're done with it, it can break down in your stomach and then you know you pass it as normal. So it sounds like that's a fairly sort of common idea of creating these things that will sort of stay inside the body. Yeah, sort of dynamic systems that, yeah, you take them orally or whatever, and then they expand or they grip on or something and then they do their business. Then once they're

finished, so like for that, you wouldn't then, that would be a replacement for sort of more severe invasive bariatric surgery, I suppose. So what are the current limitations to this technology? How do you mean limitations? So what are the current challenges for those researchers in actually getting this to the stage where patients can take it? I think that the next phase will be the capsule. That's what they're working on now because they need something to house all of these tiny little things in. Also they've just gone, so they've tested this in animals.

Now they're trying to get human trials going. So that's the sort of phase that they're at now. And do you reckon they'd be quite affordable as well when they come out or is it going to be sort of quite expensive medicine that's only out of reach for most people? I suppose that would depend on the drug that's delivered by them as well as this mechanism. But presumably if they're used making currently existing microchip fabrication techniques, I can't imagine that they'd be prohibitively expensive. Thank you very much, Jason.

and now Amy, we're going to go back to aliens. I'm going to make this an alien sandwich. Yeah, so in the current issue, we've got science writer Sue Nelson is telling us about why we want to believe in aliens. So we've talked about the search for aliens that's already going on, but why do we want to, why do we have this hope that there are aliens out there? And most of us do, most of us do believe that there is some form of extraterrestrial life, but obviously some people take it to slightly different levels than others, should we say.

So Sue likens the belief in aliens to the belief in religion. There are studies that have looked at the relationship between believing in religion and believing in aliens. And actually it kind of goes the way that you don't think it would. So people who are more likely to believe in religion are more likely to dismiss alien sightings, UFO conspiracies, that sort of thing. And so looking at the psychology of why I want to believe, Sue talks about the psychology of religion. So religion gives us this kind of sense of purpose, the sense of meaning. That's why a lot of people follow it. And for some people, you know, believing in UFO conspiracies and other conspiracy theories does give people that a sense of confidence in the world around them for perhaps things that they couldn't explain through other ways.

So there's, you know, the people that don't believe in landing on the moon. I mean that for some who don't understand the developments in technology, that would be quite a hard thing to imagine because we look up and we see it so far away. It is hard to understand if you don't have that understanding, that education of how we did it. So it's easier for some people to believe in conspiracy theories. And that's actually been shown in studies. So research by the University of Freebook did find that belief in conspiracy theories correlates negatively with education. So people who are more educated are more likely to reject conspiracy. theories. But thinking about why we want to believe in this conspiracy theories is kind of

multifaceted. So, you know, escapism makes sense, right? We all need to explain the things that are going on around us. And there's actually a shocking statistic that apparently one in two Americans think that UFOs exist and have already visited with. So if you go to America, you're likely to find a lot of people that claim to have seen a UFO or at least to know someone who's seen a UFO or believe in these stories. And there are so many stories around. So there's the incidents in Italy to local football clubs were playing a match when suddenly all of their supporters looked to the skies and saw these kind of strange shapes. They were kind of white threads falling from the sky. And that was, I think it was like thousands of people that all saw this.

of course, you know, some attributed it to UFOs. Some did say that actually it's probably just an organic compound. So we know that there are spiders that migrate and actually use their webs as sales, which is awesome. And we should do a whole podcast about that. But it could be that those were the threads that people saw. So there is usually, you know, an explanation for things that people see. And of course, there was, was it earlier this year or last year when there was a

a big group of people who wanted to storm Area 51, believing that there were UFOs and proof of aliens being kept there by the Nevada military base. And so Sue's talked to psychologists to try and understand that, and Professor Chris French attributes it to top-down processing, right? So your beliefs and your expectations actually change what you're seeing and what you're perceiving. So if you've heard someone talking about aliens

or someone talking about UFOs, and then a couple of days later you see something that you can't explain in the skies, part of your brain is kind of trying to attribute things in your recent memory to what you're seeing, and it changes what you perceive. So does that mean it's sort of a cultural idea?

So like if you lived in a culture that didn't have this concept of aliens, but instead had a concept of, say, angels or something like that. if you saw an unidentified light in the sky, you might attribute it to something completely different. Well, I mean, if you think about how we were raised, if you were raised religious, you might be more inclined to attribute certain actions to acts of God, as opposed to someone who was raised in an atheist household.

Same with conspiracy theories. If you have family members that say they've seen UFOs, you might be more likely to believe in them. And it is a community thing in terms of education as well, because obviously members of the same community are likely to have the same levels of education. So if we know that belief in these conspiracy theories is related to education, it makes sense that we'll see the same groupings as we do in levels of education. It's really interesting, actually, because a lot of UFO sightings tend to be, people tend to claim that they've seen flying saucers, right?

The image of a flying saucer is what we picture as well when we talk about UFOs. But actually, the first use of the phrase, flying sources, wasn't actually to describe a UFO's shape. So there was an amateur pilot called Kenneth Arnold, who reported, after doing a private flight, he'd seen these nine shapes that were moving in the sky, right? So he said that they were moving at speeds that the wee humans couldn't move at. So he said it couldn't be human aircraft. And actually what he said when he was describing the way that these were flying, he said that they looked like they were saucers that were sort of skipping over the water.

You know, like when you throw a stone and it kind of skips, that's how we described them. And he said they were like saucers flying. But of course, we didn't take it that way. We then went on to use. And it says in the piece that the media kind of were consumed by this image of a flying saucer. And lo and behold, all the descriptions of UFOs that come out. out since then tend to be around this shape, even on our front cover of the issue is a flying

saucer because it's so prevalent. So people try and attribute these sightings of UFOs or perhaps alien encounters to different things. So there are some psychologists looking into sleep paralysis and there's some sort of similarities between what happens when you experience sleep paralysis and stories of alien abduction. So when you have sleep paralysis, it's a kind of a state between waking and sleeping when you're kind of, you're paralysed on your bed. And lots of time it's associated with other symptoms such as like a weight bearing down on your chest and also strange probing symptoms, which sounds very familiar to alien abduction stories where they say, you know, someone's perhaps taken them, applied pressure to

them to kind of keep them bound. And then there are lots of alien abduction stories that go along with sexual encounters. So it makes sense that there's kind of an overlap between sleep paralysis and these experiences. That's really interesting because I've only had one sleep paralysis instant in my life and it was terrifying and it was horrible. But I did have that sensation of the pressure on my chest and then like a demon in the room as well. Now I'm not religious. I also don't believe in aliens. But if I was that way inclined, then maybe I would have been like, it was an alien that did it or something rather than just accepting it was something weird going on in my brain. Yeah, my housemate, old housemate used to get it a lot, but she saw a witch at the end of her bed. Yes, it's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, I've had it, I've had it one time, and I didn't see anything, but I could hear, I could hear what sounded like someone walking through my flap. So I wonder if sleep paralysis is related to some sort of, almost like a dreamlike hallucination, to your brain is sort of inventing things, so like seeing a figure at the end of your bed or hearing things around you, And that could explain why you might see like a little green man, for example. Absolutely. Hallucinations are sort of really closely linked to sleep paralysis. And hallucinations can also change depending on your memories.

So what we hallucinate at the time isn't always what we say we've hallucinated when we're talking about the hallucination. So there's a lot of like false memories that are involved in both sleep paralysis and hallucinations. So if we sort of try and recall an event, often we don't recall. call it very accurately. So our brain tries to fill in the gaps and it might confuse itself with something that happened even just earlier that day with the hallucination or the dream or the nightmare. So there's a lot of like false memories being involved. And so there was actually, there's been quite a few studies where participants are asked to look at, memorize a list of words, right? So they

they'll have a list and it'll say, you know, snooze, snore, dream, nap, bed and blankets. And you'll read the list and you'll be asked to memorize it. Then you'll go off and do something unrelated. So you're not, you're not memorizing these actively. It's just trying to find out how well you can recall them. And then you come back and, okay, Sarah, tell me one of the words that I just said. Snow's? Yeah, Alice? Snow. Jason? Sleep. Oh, okay. So Sarah and Alice definitely remembered correctly. Those were words that I used, but sleep actually wasn't one that I mentioned, but because all these words are associated with sleep,

we tend to put them in the list because our brains aren't working kind of, because of the way our brains are working to try and remember the common theme with all those words. Wow, that's really interesting. Jason fell exactly into the trap that you set. I have a feeling Jason was doing it to help out because he's read the piece. But it's a really interesting area of research and the psychology of why we want to believe, especially in 2020 when there are conspiracies and fake news abound. I think it's really important that we understand the way our brains work around this,

so we can kind of identify it even in ourselves as to what we're thinking and what we're remembering and what we're perceiving. Okay, thank you very much, Amy. And now you've got something else to tell us about. Very exciting, yes. So with the sale of the December issue, but we've also got the announcement that we are running a competition with Dara O'Brien. So you may have seen him on television.

He's a very funny man, and he is also a very great writer. So he's recently published a book called Is Anybody Out There? So it's kind of aimed at children, young adults sort of thing, but it's a really funny and great introduction to aliens. And with the help of Dara, we're going to be judging all of your conceptions of aliens. So we're asking everybody who's listening, everybody who's reading the magazine, to draw a picture of an alien. Now, you might be tempted to go away and draw the little green man with the kind of round, pointed-chinned face.

But luckily, we've got some tips in the magazine to help you from Dr. Eric Kirshenbaum, who's a zoologist and looks at the rules that evolution has taken on Earth and helps us apply those to some of the places that ice was mentioning or even further any of the planets in our solar system and beyond. So we're inviting kids and adults alike to send in their drawings of aliens to be judged by Dara O'Brien with the winner announced next year. How is Dara going to choose the winner? Well, if we get quite a few, which I'm sure we will, we'll be short-listing them and then sending them off to Dara for final judging. So what we'll need you to do is, as we're not in the office at the

moment, please send them to our address because they'll just pile up and they'll go to waste, which would be a shame. So please, can you scan them in, email them to reply at sciencefocus.com, or you can post them on social media. We've got a hashtag, which is hashtag my alien for SF. But there'll be details on our website, just go to sciencefocus.com, and you can find out more about that. So are we looking for the most realistic alien, the best alien, the most creative alien? Well, as Alice mentioned, the likelihood of finding alien life is that it will be microbial. And, you know, you can draw a microbe if you so wish, and that might be the most accurate drawing that we would get in. But, I mean, there's lots you can think about when it comes to designing your aliens.

So, for example, think about how the alien might live. So, okay, if they're in, on Venus, we've talked about how the clouds of Venus are kind of, is it very acidic? That's right, isn't it? So if they're having to get their food from this kind of, from the atmosphere rather than stuff that grows on the ground, perhaps, think about how they're going to do that. So are they going to need a really long neck to reach up to the heights of the atmosphere? Or are they going to be in a planet where there's lots of liquid? It might not be liquid water, but it might be. be liquid of ethanol or something like that. So are they going to be swimming? Are they going to be walking? And we can look at animals on Earth and see how they've adapted to where they live to relate that to how animals or how aliens might live on other planets. Okay, great. Thank you, Amy. I'm sure we're all really looking forward to seeing the aliens that

you come up with. So that's sending them into reply at sciencefocus.com or tweeting them to us at hashtag My Alien 4SF. So thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. The December issue of Science Focus magazine is out now. Also in this issue, we look at the camera that could change our view of the cosmos. Stuart Clark discusses the discovery of water on the moon, and we choose our top Christmas gifts for science and tech lovers. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team.

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