Instant Genius - The truth about dinosaurs

Episode Date: May 30, 2018

The image of dinosaurs as drab, slow-witted reptilians is slowly being overturned thanks to exciting new fossil discoveries and advances in the technology used to analyse them. We talk to palaeontologist Steve Brusatte about palaeontology’s emerging golden age that is revealing what dinosaurs really looked like and why they were much smarter than we used to think. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive was buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. That's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation. and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth.

So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit namea audio.com to learn more. Dinosaurs were nature's ultimate success story. These were animals that established an empire that lasted for over 150 million years. And some of them could run really fast. Some of them were really intelligent. They were active.

They were energetic. They were dynamic. And we can even tell the colors of some dinosaurs now. and we know, of course, that a lot of dinosaurs have feathers. So that's just a totally different image than what we used to think. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC 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. Hello, and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb, Southwell, the production editor of BBC Focus magazine. The image of dinosaurs as drab, slow-witted reptilians is slowly being overturned, thanks to exciting new fossil discoveries and advances in the technology used to analyse them. In this episode, Jason Goodyear, the commissioning editor of BBC Focus magazine, speaks to Stephen Brissati, a paleontologist based at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, the Untold Story of a Lost World.

He tells us that paleontology's emerging golden age is revealing what dinosaurs really looked like and proving they were much smarter than we used to think. So one thing that I found from reading the book is that paleontology seems to be having a bit of a moment right now on several levels. There's a lot of new discoveries and a lot of new science coming out. Yeah, absolutely. And the way I see it is that we're really in a golden age right now, particularly when it comes to dinosaurs. And that's because people are finding more dinosaurs than ever before. Somewhere around the world, somebody's finding a new species of dinosaur on average once a week. So we're talking about 50-some new species every year. And that's been going on for

about the past decade or so. And it's a result of just so many people being interested in dinosaurs, so many people around the world going out and looking for dinosaurs, particularly younger scientists and scientists, a very diverse group of young people from all over, but particularly from places like China and Argentina and Brazil, some of these enormous developing countries that are opening up to the world, but are also starting to build new universities, new museums, and starting to train a lot of their own homegrown scientists. And the result of all of that is this gold rush of discoveries. So obviously, we're talking about fossils that are being found. So let's just, if you can, can you explain to me exactly what is a fossil and how does it form?

So fossils for paleontologists are the currency of our field. Fossils are what we are always on the lookout for. We'll usually go to all kinds of crazy lengths to find fossils, heat or cold, ice, snow, dust, war zones. Sometimes some crazy paleontologists have gone through in order to find fossils. And that's because the fossils are the clues that tell us about the plants and animals and environments that used to exist on Earth. And, Really simply a fossil is any sort of remnant of a former living creature or any trace they left behind. So it could be a skeleton. It could be just a few bones. It could be a tooth. It could be a bit of skin or feather or really any part of the body of an animal. Or it could be something like a footprint or an egg or a bite mark or something that an animal left behind. So all of those things together are called fossils.

they can preserve in a lot of different ways, but normally you need to get a part of an animal like a bone or a tooth buried in sand or mud, and then over time that's compressed and solidifies and turns into stone. And so that bone or tooth becomes a rock, essentially, and that turns it into a fossil. Great. So the next question then is, how do you know where to look?

It is a big detective game, really, as far as finding fossils, finding new dinosaurs. and it's not a high-tech game either. We don't really have much fancy equipment. We don't have radar or sonar that we shoot into the rocks to see if there's dinosaurs inside. But we just do a lot of walking around and looking, trying to see if there's anything that stands out from the rock,

a different color, a different shape, a different texture, something that might be indicative of a fossil. And then if we see that, if we spot that, we can dig further in. And hopefully there's more of it in the rock. So the question really then is how do we know where to look? And we do try to figure out where to look. We don't just aimlessly wander the earth with our heads down on the ground, hoping there's a fossil. But we do our homework and we try to identify those places that have the right types of rock that can preserve fossils. So four dinosaurs, if you want to find a dinosaur, you need to go to a place that has rocks exposed on the surface of the earth so we can look at them. And those rocks have to be rocks that were formed during the time of dinosaurs, during what's called the Mesozoic era from about 252 to about 66 million years ago. And they also have to be rocks that were formed in the right

environments, the environments dinosaurs were living in. So we want rocks that were formed on land, in rivers and in lakes, the sort of places dinosaurs lived, not rocks that were made in volcanoes, or not rocks from the deep earth, the sort of places dinosaurs didn't live. So we try to find the right kind of rocks, we consult the literature, we consult geological maps. So much of the world has been mapped because people want to know where to find oil and coal and diamonds. So that gives us some insight into what rocks are where. And so once we identify a place, then we go there, we start looking around and hopefully we find some fossils. So obviously these sorts of dinosaur fossils have been found in many different places, different countries around the world. But are there any particular

are hotbeds that paleontologists tend to target? Paleontology right now is a global game, and dinosaurs are found all over the place. There's very famous dinosaurs from places like Western North America and Southern England that have been known for quite a long time, but nowadays people are finding dinosaurs in Antarctica, they're finding dinosaurs above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, dinosaurs in New Zealand, even dinosaurs here in Scotland where I'm based, we're finding more and more of them out of the Isle of Sky. But there are a few places in the world that are proper hot spots.

And really the most exciting place right now is China. All of China, really. There's just different parts of the country that have different types of rocks that preserve dinosaurs of different ages. But the one place more than any other in China is in northeastern China, Liaoning province. This is this very rural, very agricultural province that borders North Korea. This is where the feathered dinosaurs are from. these very famous fossils that have only come to light over the last 20 years, these fossils that have dinosaur skeletons covered in feathers,

the most visual clue, the final nail in the coffin that birds evolved from dinosaurs and also some of the most beautiful fossils that I've ever seen. So obviously you've spent a lot of time out on the field on these digs and expeditions. And the sort of image I have, and I think a lot of people in my mind of this sort of thing is, you know, you've got a little hammer, you've got a brush. Is that really what happens? That's the image, isn't it? If you watch a show on, you know, BBC or the Discovery Channel or National Geographic, some of these great dinosaur documentaries, and you always see paleontologists going out into the desert. It's hot. It's dry. They're out there. almost Indiana Jones style, you know, brushing the sand grains off of the bone. And with each brushstroke, more of the bone comes into focus. And look, I mean, that is true in some parts of the world. The Sahara Desert, the Gobi Desert. These places are major dinosaur hunting grounds.

And it is like that there if you do fieldwork. But in other places, is very different. And Scotland, for instance, where we were finding dinosaur bones and footprints on the Isle of Sky, that is not a desert. And if you go there dressed as Indiana Jones, you're going to be really cold and really wet really quickly. So there we're in our, usually when we're out, we're in our thickest coats. We're in our woolly caps. We have gloves on. We're out on the coasts, out on these tidal platforms. So we're getting sprayed with water. It's windy. Sometimes there's midges around if it's the wrong time of year. And it can be a little bit miserable. But, you know, as I said, paleontologists were notorious for going to all sorts of stupid and crazy lengths to find fossils

and a little bit of cold, a little bit of damp isn't really going to normally deter us if we know there's dinosaurs out there. Are there any particular highlights in your career that you've had out in the field? I think one of the most fun moments was a few years ago on the Isle of Sky when I was out there with my crew and Tom Challens is a good friend of mine. He's another paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. and Tom is an expert on fossil fish. And so we went to a site where there were lots of small little fish bones and fish teeth.

This was on this big tidal platform that juts out into the North Atlantic, right on the northeastern tip of the island, right in the ruins of a 14th century castle, in the shadow of this old castle called Duntullum Castle. And for hours, we were on our hands and knees looking for these tiny little bones and teeth. Tom was very excited about the fish. I wasn't so excited. I'm more into big dinosaurs.

and big scary meat eaters and ground-shaking long-neck dinosaurs and these things. But it's a team effort. So Tom was helping me find dinosaurs. I was helping him find fish, and we had our students out there as well. And so as we were leaving at the end of the day, we got up to go back to the vehicles, and we noticed these big holes in the tidal platform. We hadn't seen them earlier. They were too big.

They were about the size of car tires, and we were so focused on these tiny little bones. But as we now had the perspective of walking across the platform, and not looking for the little things, we could see that there were a bunch of these holes, and they were all about the same size and shape, and they seemed to have a sequence to them. There was a bit of a left-right, left-right zigzag sort of sequence. And then some of them had little bits sticking out on one end

that looked a whole lot like fingers or toes, and then it dawned on us that that's because they were fingers and toes, because those big holes were footprint, and there were hundreds of them, and they were left by some of those big, long-neck plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs, or things of the Brontosaurus or Diplodocus mold, animals that were 10 or 15 meters long that probably weighed about 10 tons or so,

that were leaving their tracks in the shallow water of an ancient subtropical lagoon, 170 million years ago when Scotland was so much different than it is today. And that was just a really fun moment because this was the first time those kinds of tracks had been found in Scotland, and it was such a big site with so many tracks, but also because it just allowed us to really envision

to step back in time and let our minds go wild thinking about how different the world was back then. And that's one of the magical things about dinosaurs. They give us insight into these vanished worlds that were around so long ago. And you've actually identified several new species yourself, haven't you? That's right. So I've been really fortunate in my career to work with a lot of great people around the world. almost all the work I do is collaborative, and I have great colleagues in many different continents, and I've been able to study a lot of new dinosaurs with a lot of these people.

And some of these are fossils that have been found as we've been out in the field. Other ones are fossils that they have found, and they've invited me to help study. Other times there's fossils that are found by construction workers or by farmers that are donated to a museum, and I've been called in to help study those. And sometimes I've been in museums, and I've been going through the drawers, and I've seen that there's something new, something that's been hiding in there, that nobody's really noticed and that it's a new species. So all in all, it's been about 15 new species or so, and most of those are new types of meat-eating dinosaurs because the ones that I study the most are things like the Tyrannosaurs and the raptors, most awesome dinosaurs of all. So I was looking when I was doing some research earlier, there are significantly more species of dinosaurs than I was aware.

of. So once you found the fossils, and how exactly do you go about identifying it, being sure that it is, in fact, a new species? This is where the detective game sets in. And what we have to do, whenever we find a fossil, we need to identify it as best we can. So we need to ask ourselves, you know, what is it, you know, is it one bone? Is it multiple bones? Okay, which bones are they? Are they bones of the skull or are they parts of the backbone or parts of the limbs? And then once we kind of go down that list, we can start to say, okay, well, what kind of dinosaur left these bones? What kind of dinosaur isn't? And that means a lot of comparison. We have to take a lot of measurements, a lot of photographs, take a lot of notes, make really detailed observations, and then compare carefully to other dinosaurs, either by going to museums and looking at other specimens, or by,

by going through the literature and using scientific papers to see what's been found before. And it's ultimately through that comparison that we can figure out if there's something new, if we have something that nobody's found before. And usually the best clue that that is the case is that you see some feature of your new fossil that you've never seen before, something weird, something different. And maybe a big horn sticking out of the forehead or thousands of teeth in the mouth or, you know, an extra arm or, you know, something. It's not usually that dramatic, but something different, something new.

And then you can verify whether that is new through all these comparisons. So it takes a while. It takes a lot of really patient research in order to demonstrate that you have something new. And then when you think you do, you know, you write up a scientific paper, you write up a report, you describe the fossils, you illustrate them, you send it out to your colleagues. It goes through peer review. And it's kind of validated that way. And if it is something new, then you can name it, and it's a whole lot of fun giving birth to these new species and coming up with these names.

So not only are we finding new species all the time, we're also finding out new things about the well-known species. So you mentioned earlier about the feathered dinosaurs. I mean, is this completely shattered the image of the kind of, you know, reptilian brown dinosaur that we all grew up with? Totally, totally. I still remember those books that I had as a kid in school and the books that were in my hometown library. There were lots of dinosaur books and they all portrayed dinosaurs as these drab-colored, dim-witted, slow-moving losers, basically. They weren't very exciting animals. We now know that that's totally wrong. We now know that dinosaurs were nature's ultimate success story. These were animals that established an empire that lasted for over 150 million years. and some of them could run really fast. Some of them were really intelligent. They were active. They were energetic.

They were dynamic. And we can even tell the colors of some dinosaurs now. And we know, of course, that a lot of dinosaurs have feathers. So that's just a totally different image than what we used to think. And it's all come about, at least when it comes to the feathers, with the discovery of these very famous fossils in northeastern China. That was a game changer. And because of that, there's just no doubt in my mind.

they're the most important dinosaur fossils that have been found in my lifetime. And people are still finding new ones. It's mostly farmers in that part of the world that know the landscape really well. They know where the best rackout crops are. They're quite protective of where the best ones are because if they find a really nice fossil, they can sell it to a local museum and make pretty good money. But because there's so many people out looking, probably as we speak, actually, there's farmers that are out looking for these fossils.

it just means a lot of new ones are coming to light. And every year there's new feathered dinosaurs. And it's putting all of these feather dinosaurs together that, yes, they tell us that birds evolved from dinosaurs. But they do more than that. They tell us the story of how birds evolve, how feathers evolved, how flight evolved. And those are really interesting stories, stories of tens of millions of years of evolution of gradual change. Is this one group of small meat-eating dinosaurs, raptor dinosaurs, basically, got smaller. had their arms grow out, elaborated their feathers, evolved wings, and turned into birds.

Yeah, so you mentioned that we can determine the color of the dinosaur's feathers. How do we do that? It is an amazing thing, and I can scarcely believe that it's possible. Because this is another thing I remember in the dinosaur books I read as a kid. There would often be statements like, we'll never know what color dinosaurs were. So let your imaginations run wild. Maybe they were green or gray or brown, but maybe they were purple or pink or polka dot it.

We'll never, ever know. So it's all up to your imagination. Well, we actually now do know in some cases because about a decade ago, a grad student, a guy named Yaakov Vintzer is at Bristol now, but back when he was a grad student, he figured out that if you have really well-preserved feathers, those feathers sometimes can still contain the

pigment vessels, these things called melanosomes, these little bubbles essentially that house the pigment. And the size and shape of the melanosomes tell you what color pigments inside. So brown colors are a certain shape, and black colors are another. Ginger colors are another. And so we now know through studying some of these feathered dinosaurs that a lot of these dinosaurs had all different types of colors. Some were fairly standard, just black or white or brown. but others were iridescent and had shiny sheened feathers like crows do today.

Other ones were ginger. Some even had stripes on their tail like a raccoon. So it looks like dinosaurs had all kinds of gaudy colors. They probably did what birds do today. Use their feathers as display structures to intimidate rivals, to woo mates. And so I think our image of dinosaurs should be much more the image of big overgrown birds than this old-school image of big overgrown lizards or crocodiles. Sure.

And you mentioned there some of the new techniques that are emerging. And one thing that I find fascinating was using scanners to determine the structure of the dinosaurs' brains. Yes, this is one of the more exciting, newish developments in the field of paleontology. It's been ongoing for about 20 years or so, using. cat scanners, basically the same sort of devices that medical doctors use to look inside of our bodies just to see what's going on. If there's a problem with us, you know, they can use the x-rays of the cat scanner to see inside without having to cut us open. And we can do the same with dinosaurs. We can use cat scanners to see inside of dinosaur bones without cutting them open. And this is what

I talk about in my BBC Focus article in the June issue, this year, just this revolution of using cat scanners to do one thing in particular, and that's to look at the brains of dinosaurs, because we can use the cat scanners to see inside the heads of dinosaurs, to build digital models of the brain cavity and the inner ear cavity and the sinuses and the nerves and the blood vessels, these kind of things you can't see from the outside of the skull. And so with those digital models, then, we can measure them. We can compare them to modern animals. And this gives us huge insight into how intelligent dinosaurs were, how good their senses were,

how good they can hear, how good they could smell, what their sinus systems were like. And so we've learned that quite a lot of dinosaurs were pretty intelligent. Some of the meat-eating dinosaurs were probably in the dog or cat range of intelligence. Maybe, just maybe, some of them were even kind of venturing into primate territory at around the time the dinosaurs died. And some dinosaurs had really keen senses. Things like Tyrannosaurs and raptor dinosaurs had huge olfactor dinosaurs in their brain. That's what controls the sense of smell. So that's just a few examples.

And we now know through these things that dinosaurs, they weren't these dim-witted creatures that were just waiting around, waiting to go extinct. But a lot of them were very intelligent. They had keen senses. And for something like T-Rex, for instance, it had both brains and brawn. And that's what made it such an incredible predator.

Sure. And there's also mentioned in your book a technique that I'd never heard of called photogrammetry. So yeah, could you tell me a little bit about that, please? This is a fun technique because what it is is a method where you can take a bunch of photographs of something from a lot of different orientations and then use software to stitch those photographs, that series of two-dimensional photographs together into a 3D model that you can spin around and manipulate and measure. And that's really helped with a lot of things. A couple of things in particular.

First of all, it means that we can build 3D digital models of dinosaurs' skeletons just by taking a bunch of pictures of, say, a skeleton on exhibit at a museum. And then once we have a model like that, we can input it into computer animation software, the same sort of thing that movie makers use, and we can use that to test hypotheses about how dinosaurs move, you know, could they run fast or not, how they held their bodies, how high their necks could reach into the trees, those sorts of things. But the other thing photogrammetry is done is it's been really helpful in studying dinosaur footprints, especially on places like the Isle of Sky where there's these huge footprints on these tidal platforms. You can't move those. You can't

take those somewhere else. And they're eroding constantly. So photogrammetry allows us to make a record of that site, which is good for conservation purposes, but also with a really detailed 3D model, we can measure the footprints, we can measure the spacing between them, and that can tell us how fast these dinosaurs were moving and what environments they were living in. So this relatively simple technique of just taking a bunch of pictures and using some software to put them together has been a huge help to paleontologists. So what are some of the kind of headline discoveries that you've managed to make using this technique? So for us, at least for me and my students and my team, we have used on the on the Isle of Sky. I have a master's student, Paige DiPolo. She just finished up last year and she's

thankfully coming back to Ed and brother to do a PhD because she's an incredible young student. She has not only a geology background, but also an engineering background. And she put both of those two things together to become a really, really good photogrammatrist, I guess would be the name. So she's flown drones around these footprint sites on Sky. She's built really detailed digital models. of them. And that's helped us to figure out how many tracks we have, how many trackways, how many different dinosaurs, how fast they were moving. But it's also helped us to identify some new types of tracks. And some of these we haven't announced yet. But I'll just say here, you know, we have tracks of the big long neck dinosaurs on the Isle of Sky. We have tracks of some meat-eating dinosaurs,

which are probably about horse size or a bit bigger. But we're finding tracks of some new things, some new species, some smaller species, but also some pretty big species. And I won't say exactly what, because we've got to finish studying them. But this technique of flying the drones and making these models has revealed that we have some new footprints. And that's really exciting because this is helping us fill out that prehistoric scene. It's giving us a better understanding of which animals, which dinosaurs were living on the Isle of Sky back then. So do you think we'll ever truly know what a dinosaur, everyday life was like, you know, will we ever reach that point in knowledge where we can

confidently say, this is how it behaved, you know, this is what it ate, this is how it moved, etc.? Yeah, day in the life of a dinosaur. It would be a really cool thing to know that information, just to know what was it like to be, say, a T-Rex going about your everyday business. Now, these dinosaurs, they live so long ago that there are many things that are difficult to know. And I hate saying that anything in science is impossible. You never want to say that as a scientist because it shuts the door to future discovery. But because we can't sit around and watch these dinosaurs, there's bound to be certain things that we just won't ever know about them. But fossils can tell us quite a bit. And for something like T-Rex, for example, I have a whole chapter

in the book about T-Rex because we know so much about T-Rex. There are so many fossils and they've been studied in so much detail by so many people using so many different types of technology that we probably know more about T-Rex than we do about a whole lot of modern-day living animals. And so we know how big T-Rex was. We know that it was about the size of a double-decker bus. It was 13 meters long. It weighed seven or eight tons. We know that it had a head with railroad spiked teeth that could bite so hard they would

crush through the bones of their prey. We know that his body was so bulky that it couldn't really. really run that fast, not in that Jurassic Park style of chasing down the Jeep, but it probably could only run about 10 miles an hour or so. So it was probably more of an ambush predator. We have fossil bite marks on bones of duck-billed dinosaurs and triceratops that perfectly matched the size and spacing of T-Rex teeth, so we know T-Rex ate those types of dinosaurs. We do have some footprints of T-Rex that give some insight into how they moved. We don't have any eggs or nests of T-Rex yet, but for other dinosaurs we do, and we can tell that some dinosaurs

took care of their eggs. They sat on their eggs and tended their nest just like birds. And bones themselves preserve growth rings, just like a tree truck. We can tell how old a dinosaur was when it died by counting the rings. And given enough fossils, this allows us to build growth curves to calculate the rate that dinosaurs grew. We can tell that T-Rex grew so fast during its teenage years that it was putting out about five pounds or about two, two and a half kilos of weight every single day. And so these are just some of the fact toys that come from real fossils. And so while we'll never know everything there is to know about a T-Rex, I think it's incredible just how much we do know about an animal that's been dead for 66 million years.

Yeah, I think one thing that a lot of people will, one, answered about the T-Rex is why were its arms so small. And this is something I talk about in the book. I knew it's something that readers would want to hear about. And so the short answer is that we don't know for sure. Of course we don't know for sure because none of us were around to look at T-Rex, to watch T-Rex, to see exactly what it was doing with those arms. But we have some good ideas.

And there's a few things to kind of set out from the outset. I mean, first of all, the arms are pathetic. They are tiny. They're just about the size of our arms. And so, you know, imagine a bus size animal with these little arms flapping around. They weren't doing that much. But they were doing something because they're muscular. They're quite muscular.

And because they are still there. Evolution usually gets rid of something if it's useless. So, you know, snakes losing their legs is one good example of that. So they were doing something. And the muscles give us a little bit of an insight. the muscles on a T-Rex arm that are really big are the muscles that help pull the arms inwards. And so my friend, Sarah Birch, who we did our undergraduate together in Chicago, and then I went on to kind of more of a career in studying evolution. And Sarah went into more of a career of studying anatomy.

And now she's one of the world's experts on dinosaur muscles and dinosaur anatomy in general. She did a study of T-Rex. She looked at the muscle attachments on those arms. she compared with modern animals, and she reached the conclusion that the T-Rexes were probably drawing their arms inward quite a bit, and maybe they were using their arms to brace themselves as they were feeding, because they would have fed so violently, their heads were so big, their teeth were so strong, they probably needed to brace their body as they were ripping into a carcass. So that's, I think, the best hypothesis we have, but it still is a little bit of a mystery. That was paleontologist Steve Brassati talking about his latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, the Untold Story of a Lost World.

Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In our June issue, which is on sale now, we find out whether we could use wormholes to take handy shortcuts through space, investigate Stephen Hawking's last theory, talked to Jane Goodall about her career in chimpanzee conservation, and delve into the science that could help us close the gender pay gap. Did you enjoy this podcast? you liked what you heard, then why not subscribe and leave us a review. You can find us on iTunes, Acast, Stitcher and many of your favourite podcast apps. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC 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. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or

crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Tocovus is the go-to for premium handcrafted Western boots. Stop by any store location for a warm welcome, a cold drink in hand, and a truly one-of-a-kind shopping experience. Let our friendly staff help you find your new go-to boots, whether your first bear or your 50th. Finish things off with a complimentary boot brand to make them extra special. Come for the boots, stay for the good times. Tocovus Forever West.