Science Friday - Art Crime Science, Long Covid Update, Earth's Slowing Core. Jan 27, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

What’s Behind The Strange Slowing Of The Earth’s Core? Even though some days feel more chaotic than others, the rotation of the surface of the planet proceeds at a pretty constant rate—about one full rotation every 24 hours. But the rotational speed of the inner core is less stable, and has been known to shift over time. Now, researchers are reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience that according to seismic data, the Earth’s inner core may have recently paused its rotation, and could even go on to reverse direction relative to the rest of the planet. Tim Revell, deputy United States editor of New Scientist, joins SciFri producer Kathleen Davis to talk about the shift in rotation and other stories from the week in science, including shared language characteristics between humans and wild apes, and a wolf population that has started to enjoy snacking on sea otters. They’ll also talk about an ancient Egyptian mummy with a heart of gold, research into why some mushrooms glow in the dark, and a tiny robot with morphing liquid metal capabilities straight out of Hollywood.   Here’s What We Know About Long COVID, Three Years Later Just a few months into the pandemic, it became clear that in some people, the SARS-CoV-2 virus caused a cascade of symptoms for months after their initial infections. These lingering effects are now commonly referred to as Long COVID. And as long as the pandemic barrels on, the population of Long COVID patients will continue to grow. Over the past three years, researchers have closely studied these symptoms, seeking to better understand its underlying causes and improve treatment. Guest host Maddie Sofia talks with Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative and co-author of a recently published comprehensive review on the state of Long COVID research, and Dr. Bhupesh Prusty, principal investigator at the Institute for Virology and Immmunobiology at the University of Würzburg in Germany.   Meet The Art Sleuths Using Science To Find Frauds At the end of last year, a big case was decided in the world of art crime. Qatari Sheikh Hamad al Thani won a case against his former art dealer, after nearly $5 million dollars worth of purchased ancient artifacts were all determined to be fake. Among the artifacts was a Hari Hara sandstone statue purported to be from 7th century Vietnam. In reality, the piece was made in 2013. Art experts say forged antiquities are extremely common in museums and private art collections: Former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas Hoving estimated 40% of artworks for sale at any given time were fake. The task of determining what art is real and what art is fake falls to scientists, who use tools like X-rays and carbon dating to get accurate readings of time and place of origin for artifacts. Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about this are Erin Thompson, art crime professor at the City University of New York, and Patrick Degryse, professor of archeometry at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Maddie Safaya. We're sitting in this week for Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll dive into what's known and not known about long COVID. And we'll dig into the world of art crime and just how experts go about authenticating priceless antiquities. But first, even though some days may feel more chaotic than others, the rotation of the surface of planet Earth proceeds at a pretty constant rate, about one. full rotation every 24 hours. But the rotational speed of the inner core is less stable, and it's been known to shift over time. Now, researchers are reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience that, according to seismic data, the Earth's inner core may have recently paused its rotation

and could even go on to reverse direction relative to the rest of the planet. Joining me to talk about that weirdness and other stories from the week in science is Tim Revell Deputy U.S. editor at New Scientist based in New York City. Tim, welcome back to Science Friday. Hello, thanks for having me. All right. So what appears to be going on with this spinning core story? Yeah, this is really fascinating. So researchers have managed to use earthquake data, effectively similar earthquakes that have passed through the earth over the last 60 or 70 years, to work out what's happening in Earth's inner core, which is the hard, solid iron inner core. There's then a liquid outer core around that, and then there's the mantle. And what's changed is before around 2009, if you'd been standing on the mantle and you'd been able to look down into the inner core, it would have looked like it was slowly spinning forwards

because it was spinning slightly faster than the mantle. But what's changed now is it's slowed down. And effectively, if you look down at it, it would seem like it was stationary because it's moving at about the same speed as the mantle. So a significant change. I've seen some stories that say it has stopped, others that say that it has just slowed down. I mean, what is right? Yeah, so it's stopped relative to the mantle.

So it's still spinning around, and there is some room for error here, but it's effectively at a point where it's moving at about the same speed as the mantle. And what's particularly interesting about this new study is that it seems to suggest that there's a continual oscillation where it ends up spinning a bit faster than the mantle and a bit slower than the mantle with a period where it's a round. the same speed in between. And that cycle appears to be about 70 years. And that's continually happening. I mean, this whole thing seems very bizarre. But are there any real implications of this change? Yes. Most of it, really, is this is just more understanding of the center of our planet, which we know very little about. It's so hard to study the innards of our planet because it's mostly rock between where we're standing and the inside. One thing it might tell us about a little bit more is that the planet's overall rotation does fluctuate a little bit from day to day,

meaning the actual length of a day, how long it takes to do a full spin, varies a very small amount. And it seems that this relationship between the mantle and the inner core where they're sort of tugging on each other and causing this oscillation may play some role in that. Okay, let's move on to our next story, which has to do with language. And the idea here is that humans and wild apes may actually share some. common elements of language. Can you tell me a little bit about this? Yeah, this is a really wonderful story. It's really looking at the origins of language. And the obvious way to start this is to try and look at our closest animal cousins, the other great apes. In this study from

researchers at St. Andrews University in Scotland, they showed people videos of chimpanzees and bonobos performing basic signs to communicate. And then they gave the humans for multiple choice options to try and guess what the communication was, what the basic signs mean. And about five and a half thousand people took this test, and you can still do that online if you wish. And the average score was just over 50%, which is double what you'd expect from chance alone as there were four options. So it seems we do have some understanding of the same basic signs that chimps and bonobos use. Okay, so when we're talking about signs, what kinds of things are they signaling? Is it just like, give me the banana or what are they talking about?

Well, yeah, I mean, some of them are that simple. I mean, it's best to see them, but perhaps I could describe one to you now and you can guess whether you can work it out. So imagine I'm a chimp. So what would you think if I held out my arm and scratched it while sort of looking in your direction? I would assume that you're itchy and maybe you need someone to give you a little itch. Yeah, exactly.

So the option there would have been groom me, which is unusual for. for a human to do, but it is in primates, this sort of social bonding via grooming is really important. What about if you were eating and I put my hand over your mouth? The eating throws me off because I would think if you had normally put your hand over my mouth, it would be stop talking or stop making noise. But I guess I'll go with that. I'll go with that. Yeah.

So in this one, the correct answer is let me have some of your food, which also will also be, like, you know, completely social phopal if I attempted that in a restaurant. But it's a sort of basic form of communication, these gestures. And the team know from previous research that chimpanzees and bonobos about 90% of these basic signs overlap between the two species. And so it's thought that the fact that we can also understand them to a degree means that probably our last common ancestor used a similar set of basic sign language. And perhaps that's how human. language evolved in the first place. That's really fascinating. And I hope that you're not putting your hand over people's mouths in restaurants, Tim. Okay, so your next story is also on the

wildlife beat. And we're going to go to Alaska and talk about some wolves who actually found a new diet. Yeah, this is really interesting. This is wolves on Pleasant Island in Alaska have made sea otters their main food source. And this is after they basically ate all the deer on the island. And this is the first known case of sea otters becoming the primary food source for a land predator. And that's a very unusual situation because sea otters spend nearly all of their time in the ocean. So it's pretty strange. So how did these researchers even figure out what these wolves are eating? Yeah. So the, the wolves haven't actually been on the island very long. They were first spotted in about 2013, and it's thought that a pair swam over from the mainland. And so a team has been monitoring them

since about 2015. A couple of years later, there were then 13 wolves up from the two that were initially spotted, and about 93% of the deer had been wiped out. So they were real easy prey for these walls on this small island. And so the new analysis, they've looked at wolf feces, and it suggests that sea otters make up about 50% of the diet of the wolf pack. They now eat almost no deer, because there's no deer left, and the rest is based around fish and other sea creatures.

So you mentioned that the otters are usually in the sea, which makes sense. And I would imagine that the wolves are mostly on land. So how exactly does a wolf catch an otter? Yeah, this is one of the really interesting parts that this research team have spotted the wolves trying to flank the sea otters to stop them getting back into the sea. And I think a wolf doesn't stand a lot of chance to catch a sea otter when it's in the sea. The sea otters are very agile in the ocean. but much less so on land where wolves are really dominant. And so they have worked out and they understand that as soon as it's in the sea, they've lost their opportunity. But if they can, as a team, keep it on land, then that's where they're on home territory. That's really fascinating stuff. So our next story, we're going to go back in time a little bit to an analysis of an Egyptian mummy. Yeah. So this mummy was in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt.

and it's been in their basement there since about 1916, but it's originally from 300 BC, and a team has now digitally unwrapped it, which means rather than actually taking it apart, and it's very fragile, so that could risk damaging the mummy, they used hundreds of high-resolution X-ray images to work out what was inside.

Turns out the mummy was a teenage boy, who was between about 14 and 15 when he died, and he was buried with dozens of, of interesting amulets. Wow. This mummy also had a second heart. Is that right? Yeah. So amongst these amulets, one of them was like a 30-centimeter golden scarab beetle, which was placed inside his chest cavity, symbolizing a heart. And it had inscriptions on the back of it, including from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which contains sort of magic spells to

help guide you through the afterlife. He also had a golden tongue inside his mouth. And an amulet in the shape of fingers next to his left thigh and other amulets made from gold, stones, and brightly colored ceramics, all of which were meant to serve the purpose to help him on the arduous and difficult journey to the afterlife. So how would having all these extra body parts potentially help an Egyptian boy on his way to the afterlife? Each of them serve different purposes. So for the second heart, because his own heart is still in the chest cavity, Most of the other organs are removed, but the heart is still there. It's thought that the particular role that played was that it was help keep his heart silent on the day of judgment, which would help him pass that test.

The tongue should help him speak on the journey. So each one played a slightly different role according to the Egyptian beliefs at the time. But they were all to help him what was a very difficult journey, hopefully just to give you the edge to make it through. We have one more story that I want to get to. and these videos came out this week that were pretty amazing, and they looked a little bit inspired by Hollywood, a robot that can shift into liquid metal. What the heck is going on here?

Yeah, the videos are amazing. You've got to try and see them. It's a tiny metal robot, and robot in quite a loose sense, that can liquefy itself and reform. So in one example, the team could make the robot liquefy, drag a little light bulb on a circuit board,

into position and then solidify to solder it in place and then the light bulb lights up. In another one, the researchers put it into a fake human stomach where it melted onto a foreign object and then drags this object out. It's really gross. And then perhaps my favorite one, which I think is the video that's been spreading around a lot, is where the robot is shaped into like a sort of Lego man shape. And then it's put behind some fake jail bars. And then to get out to escape, the robot then melts and slides through the gap, sort of Terminator 2 style. That is absolutely fascinating. And it sounds a little bit troubling, but I mean, I guess there's a purpose here.

Yeah, there's a purpose here. And it should also be said that this robot is not very clever at all. It's really just a blob of metal and magnetic components. So the researchers have to drag it around with very precise magnet. So this robot has got no autonomy in any meaningful sense at all. But it could still be useful. So, for example, one use case they see could be that if you're on a spaceship and perhaps a screw gets lost, perhaps you could drag this robot into position, it slides into where the screw was, forms into a screw shape, and then solidifies. So you don't need to use any additional screwdrivers or anything like that.

The robot could just do everything you need. All right. I guess we'll have to keep an eye on this and see how it develops. Thank you so much, Tim, for bringing us these stories. No problem. Thanks for having me. Tim Revell, Deputy U.S. editor at New Scientist, based in New York City. After the break, Maddie Sofaya gives us an overview on the latest long COVID research,

what we know so far and what scientists are still figuring out. We'll be right back after the short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Maddie Safaya. Just a few months into the pandemic, it became clear that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was causing a cascade of symptoms that last months after initial infections. what we call long COVID. And as long as the pandemic barrels on, the population of long COVID patients will continue to grow.

Now there's a mountain of research about long COVID, seeking to better understand its underlying causes and mechanisms and to improve treatment. Joining me now to give us an update on the latest long COVID research are my guest, Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-led Research Collaborative based in New York City. and co-author of a recently published review on the state of long COVID research. And Dr. Bupesh Prousty, principal investigator at the Institute for Virology and Immunobiology at the University of Wirtzberg in Germany. Thank you both for joining me. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Okay, Hannah, I think we should start off by saying that even, you know, fairly mild cases of COVID can lead to long COVID.

This idea that people only develop long COVID if they get really sick is a misconception, right? Absolutely. And can you talk to me a little bit more about that and like, you know, how many people around the world have long COVID in general? I know that's, you know, kind of difficult to estimate. It seems like there is a minimum of 65 million people worldwide with long COVID, given the amount of infections that have been confirmed, but also the amount of infections. that have gone unconfirmed due to lack of testing. It is a serious number, and the majority of these cases happened after mild acute cases. Where did this idea that only people that got, you know, hospitalized got long COVID, where did that come from?

I think that there have been a lot of misframed narratives over the course of the pandemic, and that is a serious one that really got traction, even though there was never really any truth. I mean, it is the case that if you are hospitalized, your odds of getting long COVID are much higher. But because hospitalized patients are such a small fraction of infections, the majority of long COVID happens after mild infection. Dr. Prousty, let's talk about a disease that can occur after viral infections, often called ME-CFS or myelgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome. you've been studying it for years prior to the pandemic, and now you're studying long COVID as well. Can you talk to me a little bit about how those illnesses are similar or overlapping? I believe that without knowing MECFS, we possibly cannot know long COVID.

In this regard, we are in a unique position as we are studying both the diseases in parallel. and there are only a handful number of places where this type of parallel studies are going on, and I think this is the key to success. What we have been doing in the past is to understand the development process of MECFS, and MECFS is believed to be a post-viral illness and is also believed to be a mitochondrial disease. And after the pandemic, we got the opportunity to prove this hypothesis that MECFS, like, conditions can also arise after a viral infection. So here, the SARS-COVID infection. Right. And so there are a set of symptoms that are very similar, you know, that long-COVID

can cause MECFS. Can you talk to me about a few of those? So it's not very clear that if every patient or long-COVID patients will develop into MECFS. So certainly there are a small subgroup of long COVID patients, they develop MECFS. The common symptoms between MECFS and long COVID include the namesake, fatig, but this is not the whole story. Patients have neurological issues, including brain fog. The interesting thing is that not every patient has all the clinical features that we talked about.

Some patients have different symptoms. Right. And you know, one thing that struck me, Hannah, when I was reading your paper is just how long COVID can affect, you know, almost any part of the body. So many different systems and organs, you know, the heart, the lungs, the gut, the immune system, the reproductive system, neurological symptoms. I mean, how does long COVID have the capacity to affect so many different parts of the body? That's a great question.

I think, you know, our whole society really thinks of the body as separated parts. You know, the brain is different from the heart, is different from the nerves, etc. But really, that's kind of a misunderstanding. Everything is connected to everything else. And when you have something like long COVID that seems to have a pretty significant endothelial dysfunction, for example, meaning that it affects the blood vessels, you're going to get symptoms and pathologies across many different organ systems. So it's not unrelated, actually. It's related to an underlying systemic.

pathophysiology. Right. Anytime you get the blood vessels involved, you're in trouble, kind of, you know? Absolutely. Okay. So we have a pretty good idea of what parts of the body long COVID effects, but less of an idea of kind of the underlying causes, right? Dr. Prousty, researchers like you around the world are trying to get a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of long COVID. What's your hypothesis? I mean, when we talk about hypotheses, there are many hypotheses in the market and possibly, in my opinion, all hypotheses are correct. But then the question is how to thread them all together, giving a meaningful explanation for the development of this disease. The most important or most widely discussed hypothesis are the presence of persistent virus causing multisystem damage.

But our hypothesis is a little bit different. We believe that it is not this. COVID-2, which is directly responsible for the disease, we believe that other latent viruses like herpes viruses, they are reactivated after the SARS-COVID-2 infection. So SARS-COVIDs infection is the first hit. And afterwards, we get this reactivation of these viruses, which are key players, and they cause widespread mitochondrial abnormalities, including changes in metabolism and energy labels. These herpes viruses, proteins, they are similar to many of our progester So they act like our own protein and they control secondary clinical features like auto-antibodies, endothelial dysfunction, the microplots, allergy, overlapping symptoms with other clinical conditions.

So many different conditions can be explained. Clearly there is inadequate information available at this moment, so we need to understand it better and develop more innovative strategies to tackle the issue. So let me see if I've got this. So I think a lot of times we think of viruses like, you know, let's say you get mono in college, right? Epstein-Barr. You get that, you heal from it and you're done with it. But that's not the case, right? These viruses can hang out in our cells, in our body. And then something like, you know, SARS-Co-2 comes along and it kind of rewakes it up and causes, you know, another cascade of different symptoms. So these viruses are kind of hanging out, and then another virus can activate them. Is that about right? Yes, exactly. You know, I understand that this area of research, like, you know, chronic illnesses in general, have, you know, been understudied. I think it's fair to say. Has the pandemic

and the arrival of long COVID brought more attention to your work, Dr. Prousty? I mean, one benefit from the pandemic is that patients, clinicians, and basic science researchers are now much more in touch with each other now than before. And the knowledge base of long COVID is bringing more and more researchers and innovative tools into the field, which is really good. Right. Let's talk about, you know, some of the opportunities ahead of us. Let's talk about, you know, potentially treatments for long COVID. rest might actually be the most important, right, Hannah? I mean, talk to me a little bit more about that.

I think that's something that the public needs to know about, which is that rest in the early weeks after the acute infection may be able to prevent long COVID. We absolutely need more research into this, but it seems very promising. And the reverse is also true that people who, you know, rest for three or four days after COVID and then try to get right back into their exercise routine, often, fact, themselves bedbound for a year or two years, et cetera. We need to understand why that's the case so that we can do further understanding into what's happening. But more important than rest, we really, we need widespread clinical trials both for drugs that can be repurposed for long COVID and

drugs to develop for long COVID. And those drugs need to all be based on the hypotheses of people who have been working in the field of ME-CFS for years because this is just not at all a simple disease. This is a really complex, multisystemic illness, and we need experts to understand it at the forefront of this research. Yeah. Can I talk to you a little bit about the research, Hannah? I mean, we know that racial and ethnic minorities disproportionately get COVID because of where they work, you know, how much time you can take off. And we're seeing those disparities in long COVID as well. Do you see this being addressed in research in treatment? Do you see patient-centered and focused, you know, research in that area? For the most part, not yet. There's still a lot of

research done without patient involvement. There's still absolutely no support systems for people with long COVID, financial support, even clinical support. The experts who do know about these conditions, you know, number in the dozens in the U.S. at least, and the wait list for all of them are, you know, nine to 12 months, if not longer. So right now, yes, all patients are generally being left to kind of flounder and do what they can on their own, but I don't think it is understood how urgent this problem is and how many resources need to be directed toward it. Okay, that makes a lot a sense. I want to ask you about something I read lately, some new research suggesting that getting reinfected with COVID increases your chance of developing long COVID. Dr. Percy, are you familiar

with that? Do you know why that might be the case? I mean, we can always argue if our hypothesis is again correct, then the more frequently you get infected with the COVID infection, the chances of reactivation of these herpes viruses are more and more. So it's nothing to do with the number of the reputation of the infections, rather the possibility of reactivation. The chances of reactivation are even higher. But definitely we need more research into this process. Dr. Percy, let's turn to identification.

You're working on biomarkers to identify two different subsets of long COVID patients. And biomarkers are just tests we can run or things we can find in the body to determine if a disease is present. Now, one of these groups are people that just might take extra time to recover from that initial infection and get better after about two months. And the other group are those with symptoms that are much more debilitating and remain for months and months, six months a year or more. Why is it so important to differentiate between these two groups? So the whole idea of long COVID and its similarity to MECFS lies here. So typically MECFS is a disease where patients, they start the symptoms, and over a period of time, like from several months to several years,

they just pass on to a stage where it seems that there is no coming back. So this is typically the MECFS. Long COVID is still very fresh. very new. We are only knowing it from last two to three years. So we still do not know exactly if the long COVID patient will have the similar fate like MECFS. But we clearly know that a group of long COVID patients or so-called long-COVID patients, they revert back. They come back to normalcy. And we have seen with MECFS also that a large number of patients also return back to normal living conditions.

So we believe that there is a sort of a switch in our body, and the switch is made on at a certain point of time where there is not easy coming back. And we want to identify this switch. So basically, so what we hypothesize here is that our body's response system, we call it as a cell danger response system. Every cell knows that there is a danger coming and the body knows how to switch on and switch off this system. Now, at one point of time in MECFS patients, we know that the system is switched on and it is not made off.

So the body always responds to a threat or infection-like condition going on in the body. And that's what differentiates the patients with long-lasting symptoms and the patients who recover. And there is the key which revolves around the mitochondria, how mitochondria coordinates with other cells. And our core focus of our work is to understand the entire process around here. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-led Research Collaborative, and Dr. Bupasch Prousty, molecular virologist at the University of Würzberg in Germany. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Before we let you go, I want to ask you both, you know, what needs to happen?

Obviously, a lot of our long COVID problems would be solved if we had adequate COVID prevention, equitable access to health care and rest. But what can medical professionals be doing right now? Dr. Proustie, why don't you start us off? The problem cannot result at the ground level with the general practitioners because the disease is so complex. It involves multi-system issues. There has to be centers which can handle this type of patients. Hannah, what do you think? I mean, do you think there's a role for general practitioners here?

I would agree with Dr. Prousty. I really think that one of the things we're facing is this just serious lack of both provider and researcher education into post-firal illnesses. I mean, there's not a lot of research on it, but a study done a couple years ago, showed only 6% of med schools actually teach these illnesses. And that has translated into really awful care for patients. And also, yes, research where people are kind of starting absolutely from scratch and not building off the massive amount of research done in myelgic encephal, myelitis, and desadonomia. So I would say that kind of a mass provider and researcher education program needs to

happen. You know, one thing we took away from our review is that there's just so much. much research that's out there. We keep hearing there's not enough research in long COVID and MECFS, but we had 300 studies that we had to pair down to the 200 studies that ended up in the review. All biomedical findings, all consistent with work that's been done before in this field across, you know, many different things like deformed red blood cells, reactivated herpes viruses, neuroinflammation, et cetera. And we just need everyone to kind of get up to speed on these things. Thanks to both of you for being on Science Friday. Thank you. Thank you. Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-led Research Collaborative based in New York City and co-author

of a recently published review on the state of long COVID research. And Dr. Bupasch Prousty, principal investigator at the Institute for Virology and Immunobiology at the University of Wurzburg and Germany. We have to take a quick break. And when we come back, Kathleen Davis will take a look at the world of art crime and how science is used to identify what artifacts are real and which are fake. This is Science Friday. I'm Maddie Safaya. And I'm Kathleen Davis. At the end of last year, a big case got decided in the world of art crime. A Qatari Sheikh who bought five million dollars worth of ancient artifacts found out they were all fake. And that is after he paid for them. The shake successfully sued the art dealer for negligence.

This whole case begs the question, how common are forged antiquities, and how is fake art authenticated? To answer those questions, we turn to science and my guests. Aaron Thompson is an art crime professor at the City University of New York, based in New York City. And Patrick DeGreese is a professor of archaeometry at the Catholic University of Leuven in Leuven, Belgium. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you for having us. Great to be here. Thank you. So, Erin, walk me through some of the details about what happened in this case.

I mean, what kind of art was involved here? So Sheikh Hamid decided that he wanted to expand his already extensive art collection. He was introduced by a relative to the dealer John Ashkenazi, and he told him, I want to buy ancient art that is suitable for lending to museums. And Ashkenazi said, great, I've got just the things. He ended up buying seven objects. My favorite is a serpent bracelet that looks like something Cleopatra would have worn. The rest were sculptures from ancient Cambodia, ancient Gandhara, and it turns out that not a single one of them was authentic,

even though he had paid nearly $5 million. So Patrick, I know some of the details are sparse on this case, but can you walk me through broadly? What kind of methods can be used to determine the authenticity of art? Well, you'd be looking for anachronisms, basically. You'd be looking at the technology used to make these objects, which should correspond to a certain geographical frame or time frame. What is normal for that time period to get your objects made in a certain fashion? And so if you analyze them and you find details in its makeup or its chemistry that do not

correspond to that specific technology, the object would be wrong for that time. period for that geographical frame. And so you would be asking serious questions on how that happened for this particular object. How long might it take from start to finish to determine the authenticity of a piece of art? It will often be a debate. So an analysis as such does not take too much time. It's a matter of days, say, to get your basic data. But then the discussion will start what your data are telling you. Is this normal? Is this a right analysis? A right? composition for an object? And if it's wrong, you will often start a debate on, yes, but what was exactly analyzed? Could it not be that this is a later addition or a conservation of an object? So you try to

justify the composition that is not consistent with a certain time period or a certain region. And so how long does it take? Well, as long as you can drag the debate, you can discuss over a composition. Is there a risk of damaging potentially real art and artifacts by doing these tests to determine authenticity? Yes, unfortunately there is. There are techniques that are entirely non-invasive, so where you analyze an object hardly without dutching it, but most techniques that will give you very, very good results, accurate and precise, as is it termed in the analytical world, then you will often need a sample, a little piece that is taken from the object, and so that is damage to the object. So yes, there is a risk in analyzing objects.

And does that potentially change the value of this artifact? It's a balance again. If you can prove by analyses or at least suggest that it is consistent with this time period or this origin, which gives it an immense value, then it's a good thing to have that analysis. We should realize, however, that most of these art objects or antiques are not analyzed. Often, this is very rarely done. It is often only done when there is all. already debate on an object when an object is deemed odd. I would think that most sellers of questionable antiquities don't ask for tests, not because

they're worried about damaging the object physically, but because they're worried about damaging their optimistic assessment of how old the object is. So, Aaron, I mean, this brings me to my next question. I mean, broadly speaking, how big of a problem are forged antiquities? Well, first I want to say that this case is so fascinating because the obviousness of the forgery for one of the pieces was an unfired clay head supposedly from the fifth century and that means it was unbaked just raw clay imagine if your kid brings home a plato sculpture from preschool and then it survives for the next couple of millennia no that's not going to

happen and as soon as the first conservation scientist laid eyes on it through a microscope she saw a piece of plastic protruding from the cheek that's a real bad sign But forgeries are such a problem because there are so few incentives for anyone to ever definitively say this object is a fake. A dealer doesn't make money if they can't sell objects, if they have to say it's a fake. A collector doesn't want to hear that they paid a lot of money for something. So this case is so rare of an instance of a collector coming out and saying, I was fooled and I want my money back. Forgeries have always been a problem, especially of beautiful ancient art. we've been faking ancient Greek art since the ancient Romans wanted to buy it.

It just has kept going over the centuries. And it's no surprise that today when there's a lot of people with a lot of money who have a lot of coffee tables to fill, there's going to be forgeries produced for this market. Is it possible that there are fakes in our museums that we go to and love to visit? Oh, 100%. I always joke that there are things in the Metropolitan Museum that I will eat if they're authentic because I don't think there.

Wow. Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum, wrote a great book about forgeries in the art world, in which he estimated that in museum collections, on the art market, among all of the art he'd ever seen, he thought that about 40% was fake. Wow. Especially in the time that these museums were acquiring their collections,

they were paying for artifacts and quite significant amounts. and we're talking, say, 100 years ago, some objects were bought from excavations. But of course, as these amounts were paid and private collectors collected next to museums, a lot of money went around in this world. And so there was an incentive to start forging a certain type of object. So museums either bought objects themselves or acquired objects through these private collectors donating their collections to museums. So yes, there was an opportunity there to make your object.

get a bit of profit out of it. Speaking of this, I mean, what methods are actually used by foragers to make their forgeries look convincing? I think they are very talented people often. They often copy ancient techniques. And so you would start with taking the original material or mixture of materials, imitating that. And then they are very talented artists, whether it is a painting or a sculpture or another artifact, they can make really good art that looks exactly like the thing it's supposed to be, the ancient thing that it's supposed to be. So they would copy techniques and materials from the original and then try to make it as convincing as possible.

And then it is up to the museum or the collector or the person analyzing the object to find the flaw, to find the anachronism, the one thing that is wrong with that composition. Depending on the material that you use, stone would be the material that would be easiest to forge in a sense because you don't alter much to the composition. If you take a stone similar to the ancient material, the ancient origin quality, and it's still available, it's very hard to tell you only have the hand of the artist to discriminate between the original and the forgery. The more complicated a material becomes where you have to mix raw materials and. and melt them and change them again, then it becomes easier to detect flaws in a technology or a composition. But in terms of artistry, in terms of being talented artists,

I think forgers are often very talented people. Gold is also a forgery material of choice because you can just measure the appropriate purity of the gold, what additions to the metal were in various ancient cultures. And it doesn't tarnish. So you can have a perfectly shiny piece, of gold from antiquity. Recently, someone 3D printed an ancient Roman ring, gilded that, and then sold it at auction,

and it was only because someone noticed, wait, this doesn't weigh quite as much as an actual gold ring should be that they were caught. Wow. Who do you think bears the responsibility to test if these items are real? I mean, do you think that falls on the buyer, the seller, museums themselves? I think buyers are responsible, not so much for whipping out an XRF machine. and a electron scanning microscope, but for asking where did this come from this ancient object?

Because then you can know, a forgery doesn't have a deep ownership history. It has maybe some fake documentation that you can detect more easily than you can detect the composition of copper or something. And by asking those questions about the origin of an object, you also avoid buying looted or stolen or smuggled antiquities, which is the other big curse of this market. Yes, indeed. I think nowadays I'm not very familiar with the private markets. I am familiar with museums and official instances, etc.

And there the problem is much more towards looted artifacts, smuggled artifacts. Is this illegal export? Is this object legally in circulation rather than is it forged? Patrick, do foragers get wind of what techniques scientists are using or researchers like yourself are using to determine fakes and then use different methods to try to evade these techniques. It seems like it might become kind of a circle. Absolutely. They follow scientific literature. I'm convinced when something is detected, oh, we need to counter this again. An example is absolute dating. There are methods to date in an

absolute way how old some objects are. For some materials, this works very well. For other it doesn't. But for instance, for ceramics, which is basically fired clay, you have techniques to measure when a material was fired when it was made from a clay into a ceramic. This gives you an absolute time measurement since production of the artifact. And so there are ways to counter this by irradiating objects. And so there have been instances of forgeries made that were irradiated after the forgery was made to make the object look much older than it is in reality. So you can try to counter these detection methods and techniques.

And you see in the over time that forgers will adapt their methods and will use new approaches and learn from what science tells us. There is an arms race between those who try to convince people that their objects are real and those who are trying to detect that they are not. And it's been happening for a long time. In the late 19th century, some scholars of ancient Greek statues said, oh, these objects on the market are fake because, look, they don't even have any root marks. So if something is buried four thousands of years, it develops a sort of incrustation from the soil, and roots growing around it will make specific marks. And so forgerers said, okay, no problem. We're going to plant some basil on top of our next round of forgeries that were aging in the ground,

and then they get some lovely root marks. I'm Kathleen Davis, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm speaking with Aaron Thompson and Patrick DeGre. about forged antiquities and the science used to determine what is real and what's fake. So earlier this month, I spoke to Martin Polkinghorn, who is an associate professor of archaeology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Martin studies Cambodian artifacts. And a few years ago, he went to a workshop in Ancor that creates forged antiquities to sell to art collectors. And this is what he had to say about that experience. Without specific information,

whether that begins with local knowledge or archaeological records that link a sculpture to a certain archaeological site, every single sculpture must be questioned, whether it is real and fake, if it appears in an international collection. So I'm curious, how do you both react to that? Is that something that you agree with, that you disagree with? I agree absolutely that without archaeological excavation, you can't know for sure. there are also cases through history of forger's staging excavations. So they make something, they bury it, they bring the customer in, and then, oh, we've

discovered this. Don't you want to buy it? So I really have reached a level of paranoia about authenticity of ancient objects. But I think it's justified. And it is astounding to me how many people collect Cambodian ancient sculpture without knowing that either it came out of the country, completely. illegally, or it was faked. I think there's an element of superiority in the market in thinking, oh, ancient Cambodians

have this wonderful sculptural technology, but now these modern people, the modern inhabitants of the country don't know how to do it as well. But they do, and they're making beautiful sculpture, and then throwing it in pits with some acid for a couple of months, and then selling it to you, or to the shake in this case for $2.2 million is what he paid for a statue that he thought was ancient. I agree entirely, but it does depend on the market, of course. If there is a market for it, then foragers will be attracted to it. This shows an evolution through time. When there is an interest, you will see that foragers for financial gain will move towards that market. And so

in that certain time, then a certain category of objects becomes very suspect and should be investigated more thoroughly in other time periods. That will be other regions, other types of artifacts. But it's always that middle range of market, I'd say, if you have this really, really expensive, say, a Van Gogh painting, et cetera, that will be subjected to so much scrutiny that it becomes very, very difficult to pass something as right when it's wrong. And when it's a very cheap market, it's not worth going through the trouble of forging materials. So that middle segment where there is a market and an interest, that is the one to look for or to have a very great interest in looking for forgeries.

Well, and if you listeners want to look for forgeries for yourselves, I encourage you just to go to eBay and search for Greek antiquities, Roman, Cambodian, whatever, and you will see some pretty laughable forgeries, I would say. So we're almost out of time, but I do want to touch on this

fact that is sort of an unpleasant reality of art collections and some museums where, you know, many of these contain items that were eluded or stolen from their places, of origin, if not faked and brought to another country. I mean, how do we disentangle our appreciation for, you know,

heart and museums with all these ethical complications? I know that's a big question, but is there a way to do that, Aaron? I think museum visitors have to ask, where did this come from? It's a hard question to ask, but we need to do it. These days, we're worried about what is the sourcing of our? Our coffee is our chocolate ethically harvested. We can be ethical consumers of art as well. There is an opportunity for education there.

Even if objects are returned and forgeries are kept and displayed, it is not a disadvantage. It's an opportunity to educate on looted art, on forgery, on history of the whole discipline. So yes, there are options there. I would like to thank my guests, Aaron Thompson, art crime professor at the City University of New York, based in New York City, and Patrick DeGrease, Professor of Archaeometry at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Thank you both for joining me today. Thank you. And that's all the time we have for this hour.

Here's Sandy Roberts with some of the folks who help make this show happen. Nehima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Beth Rami is our controller. Jordan Smudjik and Jason Rosenberg are grants managers. Melissa Mayers is our office manager. And I'm Sandy Roberts, education program manager. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Sandy. B.J. Leederman composed our theme music. I'm Maddie Safia. And I'm Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.