Science Friday - Egyptian Dinosaurs, Leaking Data, Huntington’s Research, Mole Rats. Feb 2, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: February 2, 2018

Dinosaurs existed all over the world—fossils have been found on every continent. Africa is no exception, but far fewer fossils have been found there from the late Cretaceous era—the period before the dinosaurs went extinct. But a new discovery in Egypt could provide clues about the evolution of dinosaurs in Africa. Click here to learn more. Last weekend, an Australian researcher pointed out on Twitter that a “heat map” of popular running locations released by the fitness app Strava could be used to help identify the locations of military installations in deserted areas. Is big data revealing more than you know—or want other people to know? New research shows that decades before outward signs of the neurological illness show, Huntington’s disease will affect the development of an embryo. What the naked mole rat lacks in conventual cuteness it makes up for with some superpower-like qualities—including an aversion to cancer and the ability to defy the laws of aging. Ira digs into the data to find out what else we could learn from these, well, interesting-looking creatures. 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 Ira Flato. A little later in the hour, a look at what data your apps might be sharing without you even knowing about it. But first, at one time dinosaurs ruled the planet. You know that. They existed on every corner of the world. Fossils of the animals have been found on every continent. And Africa is no exception. But the history of dinosaurs in Africa is a little bit hazy.

It's incomplete. And now a new discovery might help clear that up. A titanosaur, a giant sauropod, has been uncovered in Egypt that dates back to the final dinosaur era about 60 to 100 million years ago. A rare find for that part of the world. The discovery was published this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. And my next guest is here to tell us what this missing puzzle piece tells us about dinosaurs in Africa. Eric Gorsak is author on that study. He's also a postdoc researcher at the Field Museum, famous Field Museum in Chicago.

Welcome. Hello, thanks for having me. So this dino is from a group called Titanosaur. I heard that he had sort of a bit of a Jay Leno chin. Yeah. The new dinosaur Monsaurosaurus belongs to the group Titanosaurs, and they're very successful clade of dinosaurs during the last act of the age of dinosaurs during a Cretaceous period.

And one of its defining features is its chin. It's a very well-developed chin compared to other titanosaurs. So what does this tell us about this dinosaur? What's just significant about this finding? Yeah, so the last 20 million years or so of the Cretaceous, that last act of the Age of Dinosaurs, is pretty well known across the world, like in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Madagascar.

But when you look at mainland in Africa, it's been this giant question mark. There's only been a handful of fossils found during this time, And they're usually fragmentary and just provide a little bit of information, and we can just have a more general feel of what was there. But nothing more specific, like what kind of species were there, who were they more closely related to. And so this new dinosaur, Montsorosaurus, has very informative skeleton, and we understand at least partly what was living on Africa during this time, and who it was more closely related to. Does it look like the other dinosaurs or the other titanosaurs, the same size, things like that? Yeah, generally, the Gestalt is there.

But in terms of size for the body, it was on the lower end of the Titanosaur body range spectrum. It was definitely a small to medium-sized Titanosaur, which even to us, it's still a large animal. Its shoulder would probably be about the height to my head, and its neck and head just a couple feet floating above that. But other Titanosaurs include the largest dinosaurs who have ever lived and the largest land animals who have ever lived. some recent finds like Dreadnoughtus, Nodal Colossus, and Pettigotain are just tens and tens of tons as large, whereas Mountsaurus is on. Do you have any, we have an idea why? Why? Oh, you're back.

We had a little bit of digital hit there. What? No, sorry. Go on with your question. That's okay. It's like being on a cell phone and you drop out. That's what we had for a second. Let me rephrase my question.

Okay. This dino lived during the late Cretaceous period, the last days of the dynos, before they were wiped out. But fossils from this era in this part of Africa are pretty rare. Why? Why are they so hard to come by? Right, that's a great question. Part of it is if you look at Africa, most of it's covered in some sort of vegetation like grassland, savannas, jungles, rainforest, and all that. So the amount of exposed rock for much of the continent is just obscured from trying to look for them. So that kind of leaves the deserts like the Sahara and some deserts down south.

But when you look at the Sahara and trying to find these late-Cretaceous deposit, there's not much there. Or what we do know about this time period, it hasn't really produced those fossils that we need to be, that are informative. So those fossils that have been collected are few and far between. There are only like a few bones here and there. So, yeah, it's just a matter of just going out there and just finding more of those deposits, better characterization of them, more science to be done. to understand those rocks, as well as finding the fossils in those rocks that can tell us more about what was living there. You know, when I was looking, I was doing some research on this finding. I got involved in the whole continental movements, Pangaea.

Isn't that fascinating? I mean, is that how they got around, why we find fossils of dinosaurs in different parts of the world? Because the continents were still butted together? Correct, yeah. During the Mesozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Triassic and Jurassic, the first and second acts, so you will, if you will, for the age of dinosaurs, you had a pangia, this one landmass, and dinosaurs were all over, and they all looked similar to one another. But it wasn't until the Cretaceous that the continents really started to take off and break apart from one another.

And one of the large questions is how this large-scale change in Earth's history affected different biotas on the different continents as they moved apart. And this has always been kind of a puzzle for paleontologists, and especially the southern hemisphere. year. But with recent decades of finding new fossils in South America, Madagascar, India, and Australia, we still have this question mark of Africa, the second largest continent, as well as being more or less in the middle of the previous Pengean supercontinent. So it's this giant chunk in the middle that's still a question mark and how does it connect the dots with the surrounding land masses, with the different

animals living on those landmasses. On number 844724-8255, I opened the phones with my own peril because we get so many people who want to talk about dinosaurs. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. How did you get involved in? Were you fascinated by dinosaurs as a kid? Is that why you got involved? Well, that was also 30 years ago when I got really into dinosaurs at a very young age.

But I was working on my doctorate, my PhD at Ohio University, where I started to do research on dinosaurs of the Southern Hemisphere, and it became more focus on Africa and trying to fill in these gaps. And so the dinosaur group that I mainly focus on was titanosaurian dinosaurs. And so working with my advisor, they had several skeletons from Tanzania, and then it just kind of branched from there with different projects, with different colleagues. I started working with different titansors from, like I said, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, and now Egypt.

So I just became this expert on titansors from Africa, and I was just kind of knowing the people and just kind of got contacted. and the lead author, Hisham, just showed me some pictures, and I was super excited when I saw those to just jump on board. But you also were looking for fossils in Antarctica, right? Now, a lot of people say, how does a dinosaur survive on that cold? But that Antarctica was on the equator at one point, wasn't it? A long, long time ago.

But during the age of dinosaurs, it was slightly further north, but not too far from where it is now. But it was still connected to South America, Australia, and Indo-Madagascar was tucked in there along with. with Africa. So it was a completely different time in Earth's history, and it was much warmer. So dinosaurs were already on there. But as time went on, we still need to figure out who was living on Antarctica. We still have fragments of bones of dinosaurs there. And Antarctica? Yeah, and it's a big continent. People, you know, they think of it, you know,

not as a continent, just, but there are mountains and things and land under the air. What does it like to spot? How do you spot a dinosaur fossil under the ice or in the mountain? Does it just bubble up like the meteorites do? They just appear at the surface? You have to dig for them? Not quite. They're not going to be frozen in ice. So we have to look for areas that have exposed rock that's underneath that ice or just are not covered in ice.

So the project I'm involved in is focused on the peninsula of Antarctica, which is the northernmost part of Antarctica and also has more or less ice and snow. So there's more rock exposed. And so me and several teams from across the United States and it, internationally, go there and look at the rocks and just see what's eroding out. And just hopefully with some luck, find some dinosaur bones. That's that part near South America? Yep. Yeah, I actually have flowers going there in the summer.

Oh, cool. Plants and stuff, remember from my trip to Antarctica. So how does the Antarctic species play into this story of dinosaur or mammalian evolution? Yeah, with the dinosaur evolution, of the fragments that we have, it's a very, somewhat of a perplexing problem. We have some dinosaurs that we typically find in the northern hemisphere. Like these anchylosaurs, your armor dinosaurs, a tooth of a hadrosaur, your duck-billed dinosaurs. And those dinosaurs are, you know, they're found somewhat all over the world, but are mostly known from like the northern hemisphere. As well as a partial tailbone of a

titanosaur was found on the peninsula. So we know we have a somewhat of a standard gondwine or southern hemisphere flavor of dinosaurs, but we also have a few oddballs making their way down there. And they naturally just crossed. There was a land bridge, right? Everything's were connected. Yeah, more or less the southern tip of South America and the peninsula were still more or less connected to each other.

And Australia, like I said, was mostly attached to Antarctica as well. Now, you know a lot about dinosaurs. How much would you like to know about dinosaurs? How fuzzy is our picture? It's getting better. I can say that. I mean, it's always going to get better. More expeditions, more science, and more techniques are definitely opening up how we study dinosaurs in the past couple of decades.

Computational methods have improved to do very large-scale questions of like how did they evolve, how fast they evolve, as well as just had better imaging. CT scanning, making 3D models, really make, really you can visualize the bones in a different way. You can see inside the bones somewhat. Interesting. And then you can share that data with other people across the world. But there's still a lot more about what these dinosaurs are doing and how they did it biologically, physiologically. But, yeah, it's a fun field.

I have a fun tweet for you coming in. It says, can you tell us anything about titanosaur brains? And if you were a dinosaur, which one would you like to be? Oh, boy. Yeah, the thing about Titanic's brains is that they're somewhat rare. Skulls are typically a rare thing to find for titanosaurs, and that's mainly because their bones and their skulls are very fragile, so they are not likely to preserve.

So knowing much about the brains of titanosaurs is very limited to how many skulls we have of them. There's only like a handful of known titanaurus. Which dinosaur I would like to be? That's a great question. I would probably choose some sort of owl. Birds are dinosaurs, technically, so that would be my answer to the question. But if it was a non-avian dinosaur, let's go with, I don't know. No, let's go with you.

Let me talk about your owl. I got about a minute left. Why would you choose an owl? They're stealth predators. They're nocturnal. I think barn owls look really cool. They really meet things with their ears and sensory information to pick up things in the dark. I think it's a really cool animal.

Okay. Wow. Yeah. That is a great, great choice. We have an owl outside of my house. I hear it every night, so I'm going to be thinking about you, Eric Orsack, author of a study in Nature, Ecology, and Evolution. He's a postdoc researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

Cool. Thank you for inviting me. You're welcome. When we come back, how all your social media apps may be revealing more than you think, how it's keeping track of where you're going, what you're doing, Do you let them do that? Do you have any control whether you can let them do that or not? We'll talk about all those issues about privacy and what you give away, what you think you give away, and what you may be giving away.

We'll be right back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Last weekend, an Australian researcher pointed out on Twitter that a heat map of popular running locations released by the Fitness App Strava could reveal the locations of military installations in deserted in. areas, places around the world. And if you looked at the map for runners' activity where you normally

wouldn't expect to find young fitness-minded Westerners working out, you could uncover a number of likely military sites, including some that had not been previously disclosed. Well, it's not just Strava, though. Even if you think you're being careful about what you reveal online, the apps and the services you use may be exposing bits of data about your habits. A couple of examples. People have been given away their location by posting a geotagged image on a Craigslist ad. Snapchat's snap map feature can reveal the location of your friends. A glance at your Venmo feed can give outsiders information about your personal life. Even the patterns of which posts you like and interact with on Facebook can be used to help

draw inferences about your private world. So what's going on here? Is there anything we can do to help keep our lives more private. Joining me now is Zaneeph to Faxi. She's an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times who wrote a really interesting piece recently about the Strava case. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for inviting me. You're welcome. Also, Gavin Sheridan is an open-source intelligence specialist and also co-founder of Vis Legal. He joins me via Skype. from Dublin, Ireland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Gavin, just briefly, what happened in this Strava case? So Strava published a map showing the activity of people who contribute data to Strava's platform,

which allowed you to see all over the world where people were running or cycling and sharing their data with Strava. And you could zoom in on any part of the world to see where people are running on what kind of roots. they take, and it allows you to get this amazing kind of visualization, I guess, of people's activity. So this was really not a hack. This was not someone releasing data everyone thought was private, but people using Strava knew they were giving out this information. Precisely, yeah. It actually comes from Strava Labs. So they collect all this data from all their users, and they had this idea to create a map to allow anybody to come in and see where people are running and what kind roots people take and you know it's it's very interesting to look at it because you can see you know

where people are cycling where people are running and where people are swimming and you can can i get an idea of the kind of activities people are doing and where they do it but of course when they turned it on they didn't realize that the rest of the world would be watching them also well to some extent yeah i mean they put it out there and i guess the first thing people do in the situation is that they they zoom in on you know places that they're familiar with so people will usually you know whether it's a Google Sightlyd image or a Strava map, they'll zoom in on places that they're familiar with. So they'll look at where they live

and they look at places that they've run themselves and they'll see what other people are doing. But the problem with that essentially is that they publish it for the whole world so it means that we can see where everybody is running. Zaynip, so who's to blame here? Is it the user? Is it the company? I mean, is it the military people?

The officers were not telling their soldiers, turn this stuff off when you're running? I think this is a really interesting case that shows we're all to blame and nobody's to blame because it's very hard to predict what any piece of data will reveal, not on its own, but when it's joined with all sorts of other data.

So it might make perfect sense for somebody, say, who's running in Seattle to let this be public and they look at the heat map and they discover new routes. There might be a perfectly reasonable use case for it. But obviously, you know, you look at you zoom in in Yemen and there's this rectangle that's clearly the perimeter of something, and it's probably not somebody from Yemen

with an iPhone running, it looks like a military base. So this kind of inadvertent revelations that come from the fact that the data doesn't live by itself but gets joined with millions and millions. This has 300 trillion GPS points, and it shows more than what anybody bargained for. Yeah, but because you don't know, you write in your story, you don't know what you're bargaining for, and in fact you say the company doesn't know what it's bargaining for. In fact, I don't think Strava went out to say, let's expose the alleged CIA annex at Mogadisha Airport. Right? So this is the problem. Our privacy protections depend on this alleged informed consent.

But the companies are in no position to inform us because they don't know what the data is going to be doing out in the world. So we're not in any position to consent to what we cannot comprehend is going to happen. It's really a difficult moment. Yeah. So we really don't know what you're consenting to when you press the Yula consent. Also, the companies make their, a lot of business models depend on collecting all our data. it doesn't even make, like, even if we assume they're trying to inform us, they cannot. And very often, it's just legally. There's pages and pages stuff. We just click on, I agree, and it's not really meaningful.

Gavin, let's talk about some examples of how people can inadvertently reveal information. You have an example with people taking a selfie on the first day of their new job. Tell us what's wrong with that. So what's really interesting about the platforms that people use, so everybody who's listening would be familiar with, you know, posting a photograph to Instagram or, or, or to Facebook or other social platforms, and not just applications like Strava. And what's interesting about that is that those platforms

usually have what's called an API or an application programming interface. And what that allows people like me to do or people who are involved in software is it allows you to check those APIs, not by the person you're interested in, but by the location that you're interested in. So for example, if I'm interested in the Pentagon as a location, I could draw a circle around the Pentagon,

And then I could check social APIs like Instagrams or Facebooks or Twitters. And I could see, well, who is sharing location information from that specific location? So say within 100 meters of the center of the Pentagon, who is sharing information? And then I can aggregate that information. And I can kind of draw a picture of all the people who've ever geotied a picture or video or tweet from that location over time. And I think people sometimes, you know, if anybody who uses Instagram will often say, well, okay, I'm sharing my information, I'm taking a photograph, and I'll geo-tag it to say, hey, I'm at whatever location. And often that's some kind of social proof to say, I'm on vacation, here's an amazing location. What's also interesting about it, though, is that when you're looking at it through the data level, I can pull all those APIs at the same time, and then I can extract all the activities of all those different people who visit that location.

And that gives me a certain level of understanding of, you know, somebody on their first day at work in a company like Google or Apple might take a photograph of their, you know, their ID badge and say, hey, it's my first day. And they're going to geotag the location to that company or that location that they're at. The problem with that, to some extent, is that somebody could be watching that. And they, in theory and in practice are. And they can see all the people who take photographs at that location. And then they can understand to some extent who might be being hired by the company, because it's their first day. And you can also infer things about that. So you can say, what area does that person work in based on their LinkedIn profile?

Or where in the world are they from? Is it somebody that this company has brought in from outside the U.S.? Or is it from somewhere in the U.S.? And does that tell me or give me some intelligence about what the behavior of that company is at the moment? Wow. Does that bother you, too? Well, not only that, of course that bothers me. And, you know, it's very hard to predict the future uses.

This doesn't even bring in what artificial intelligence can influence. So, for example, when you sort of post on social media and, you know, you just post pictures on Instagram, you're probably not thinking that a machine learning algorithm could predict the onset of my depression before clinical symptoms, but they can. So when you're posting online, there's all sorts of ways that artificial intelligence can now statistically infer things about you. Just looking at, say, your Facebook likes. We have this published research that shows that just your Facebook likes can statistically

fairly reliably reveal your race, gender, your sexual orientation, substance abuse potential, whether your depressed state, your personality character. So there's all these, even if you did not disclose them. So it's not looking at your Facebook like and you join some depression help group. It's just looking at the pattern and inferring private things about you that you didn't realize you were disclosing. So there's like when you put your data out in the world, it's not just the data. you're putting out. You're letting machine intelligence, these algorithms kind of churn through it and

figure things out about you. And it's being done. And to what purpose? Why is it being that? Well, at the moment, it is mostly being done to sell us stuff and to make us click on things. But in countries like China, and maybe at some point it's plausible here too, it will be done to predict for social control, right? Who's a dissident? If you're hiring people who might be prone to unionizing. who might be prone to get pregnant in the next few years, who might be somebody that you think is going to cause your company medical expenses. There are all these ways in which it can be used to, for authoritarian purposes, social control purposes, corporate purposes. And the scary thing for me is that even if you reveal it and the sort of the consent form says that you're grisveling to the

public and it may be used to say, look at your picture, which you already know, and you're like, okay, you can look at my picture. What you can't. predict is that what that picture along with other data about you that's brought together will reveal there's just we it's moving very fast every week there are new papers and new things coming out and I think this is a moment in which there has to be a real good reason for data to be stored as a just because we we don't have a handle on what's going on do we have a Gavin do you agree I mean I totally agree I think I think Europe has you know over here in Europe

we're kind of grappling with this issue quite significantly because a new law will come into effect later this year called the General Data Protection Regulation. And it deals with these issues of privacy in a kind of a fundamental way about what you can and can't do and about the consent of people and how to consent to their data being used. And even to take on Zenev's point about what's possible

through how people publicly share it. I mean, what people don't, I think, imagine is that when you have an Instagram account and you follow a few hundred people and you have a few hundred followers and your account is public, and maybe you've posted a few hundred pictures over the past year. What machines can do with that today is extremely significant. I can take all your photographs and apply machine learning algorithm

or machine vision algorithm to it, and I can classify your photographs based on what you took photographs of. So, you know, I'm here in Dublin, and I could say, give me all the photographs of people who've taken pictures of Pines of Guinness over the past 12 months at certain locations. And then I could then pull my way through, all the photographs that person has taken over time, where they've geotag information.

I could look through who they follow and who follows them and look at the interconnectedness of their social graph and figure out something about that person and about who they are and about what they're interested in, about how old they are. Without that person necessarily believing that the information is possibly to be derived

from what they've shared, they're not necessarily understanding how, you know, what they think might be relatively inane or innocuous information, can be kind of extrapolated. And I think it's a serious concern that people are not really aware of this. But what I hear what Zainip

and you are saying is that this information can be weaponized. Absolutely. And your mental model of what you're doing is you're just sharing on Instagram with a couple hundred people. And that's your mental model. But that's not the reality. That information is being collected for a reason.

At the moment, it's mostly to profile you for corporate things. But history tells us this is such a tempting political target to profile people, and it's already being used to sort of decide who to hire and decides what to do. It gets scarier. These algorithms that do all this discernment that are developing so fast, we don't even really understand how they're doing it.

So we don't, the way they work, you know, they sort of classify things and let's say they pick users that the company is about to hire and says, oh, these people are prone to depression, and these people are not. But we don't really know what piece of data came together with what other piece of data. So it's not like you can say, okay, now let's go pull out, say, the Instagram color profile and then it won't be able to do it because we don't understand how the classification is being done. So not only can we not foresee future users, we can't even decide which piece of data to hold back that's going to provide the critical threshold

for classification because the machines are doing it on their own without our understanding of what exactly they're doing. It's really potent and powerful. I hear you. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio. International. Talking about your privacy with Gavin Sheridan and Zanip Tefecki. This is scary stuff. It is. I mean, and now we have facial recognition everywhere.

Absolutely. Right. We have from photos that you post from being in the street, your picture is taken 100 times a day. So you put all this stuff together. Do you just throw up your hands and say privacy? I don't think so. So for one thing, I want to say, even if you cover your face, these machine learning algorithms can recognize your gait, how you walk. So they're really powerful. But there was a time in which we had lead in paint, right? We had every, and we didn't have seatbelts

and cars, and it might have seemed crazy to say that we would not have lead and paid, and we wouldn't use asbestos and all of those things. So I actually am quite hopeful that we have just begun. And there are technical ways in which we can have all the conveniences and the nice things that all this data gives because obviously it's not all downside, right? If you look at Strava's heat map and you're a runner and you find new paths, so there's all these positive things. There are technical ways in which we could collect some data and encrypted in particular ways and bring it together in very particular way so that we have conveniences in the power without this kind of individual identification. The problem is at the moment Silicon Valley is

basically minting money with the current collect everything and do whatever you want model. So they're not really incentivized to provide us with these services without the surveillance. But doesn't the Facebook problem that just occurred? Doesn't that give them a little bit of a hint? There's a problem with... I think there is a problem, but when you're half a trillion dollar company with your stock going up all the time, the hint isn't overriding the incentive. So the reason I'm hopeful is that if we change the incentive structure, I think we have

the resources and the technical means to keep a huge amount of the benefits. and just not do things this way. Gavin, do you agree? Is there hope for us? I think there is. I think there's also an awful lot of interesting technologies coming as well that will cause us more problems. So for example, the inter-splicing of photographs

on top of videos. So for example, you've posted a photograph on Instagram of yourself. That picture is then put on a video to make it look like you're in a video that you're not actually in. And it looks very realistic. It looks like that it's you in the video,

but it's not you in the video. And that kind of technique is already being used online. But I think overall, there's kind of a couple of questions here. One is a question to the platforms like Facebook and Facebook and Google and other platforms is how transparent and kind of open are they being about the algorithms that they're using and how those algorithms are being applied? I think that's a really important question for anybody who's using social media at all.

Why are they seeing the things that they see in their feed? Why are they getting suggested things? Why are ads being targeted the way they are at that person? You're saying we should be asking these questions. I think it's going to be a combination of things in the future. I think it's like we're in year zero of social media. We think it's been around for a long time, but actually we're at the very start. And I think one thing is how do we kind of interrogate the platforms that we're using to oblige them, perhaps, to tell us what they know about us?

And that's one thing that the GDPR in Europe is going to kind of cause some problems to the social platforms about. but also whether to some extent regulation is inevitable or not about what these social platforms allow to do with our data. I think that that's kind of the question for the next five years is how will the platforms be proactive about telling us what they're doing in real time, not just retrospectively, but also how will legislature deal with us? All right, we've run out of time, Gavin Sheridan,

also co-founder of Vislegal and Dubbin. and Zainip Tufaxi, Associate Professor in School of Information, Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for inviting us. You're welcome. Take a break. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. Huntington's disease is a devastating neurological disorder caused by a genetic mutation. If you have the gene for Huntington's, your chance of having the disease is 100%. But even though the gene is there since birth, the symptoms of Huntington's disease don't start showing up until later in life. Why is that? My next guest also found this curious. Why do people with a genetic mutation only show signs of illness decades after they are born? Well, using a technique for growing human embryos from stem cells in the lab, he discovered that even before people with Huntington's disease show outward signs of the disease.

disease, the mutation makes invisible changes much sooner in the earliest stages of embryonic development. Dr. Ali Brevuno, I'm sorry, professor of molecular embryology and stem cell biology at Rockefeller University is with us today. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Now, you were able to see what the Huntington's mutation was doing in the embryo by using the CRISPR tool, right?

What did you do? Exactly. So as you mentioned correctly, Huntington is a disease that is due to a mutation in a single gene, one of the two copies that we have for every single gene. And it really represents an insertion of DNA. And it creates, with 100% penetrance, all the symptoms that the patients go to the doctor for, which includes jerky movement and ultimately loss of brain neurons and dementia. So I'm an embryologist at the Rockefeller University.

My job is to try to figure out how do you generate all the structures from a single fertilized egg, and that includes, of course, the formation of the brain. We were a little bit surprised by the fact that the protein that's expressed in the first cell actually manifests its mutant effect late in life when people are in the middle age. And so I wanted to ask if we can find the origins of it, and yes, we did use CRISPRC-C-9 in human embryonic stem cells. to model the disease, and we came up with the discoveries that were recently published. And your discoveries, you looked at two otherwise identical embryos,

and what was different about the one with Huntington's? So we noticed very quickly that as neurons emerge and differentiate, there is some serious abnormalities in the two lines that are otherwise identical genetically, except for that one mutation, and that generated giant-inflated neurons that we have never seen before. Usually, as you know, a neuron has a single nuclear use and axon and dendrite and projections to establish circuitry. In this particular case, while the normal non-HD, not Huntington line displayed normal neurons, in every single one of the lines that were mutated for Huntington, we discovered this giant multinuclated neurons. And amazingly, the number of neurons at normal neurons was going up, the worst the DNA insertion was.

In other words, the longer the DNA insertion, the more frequent those multinucated neurons were. So even though you can see the beginnings right there in the embryo, does it give you any clue to why it doesn't manifest? It takes decades for itself to manifest itself? Well, I think for the first time we're witnessing the origin of the disease. And so it's a little bit like this giant dominoes that you probably see in TV or in Southeast Asia. TV mostly where you generate this labyrinths of dominoes and then you push the first one and then sometimes few minutes later the last one falls and it unveils a pattern and maybe a

flower or a leaf or something like that. We think the same thing is happening here in Huntington and the first symptoms occur very, very early during development. This is when the first domino is pushed and then the last one falls decades after birth and creates the symptoms that is recognized at the disease and of course there are consequences about this discovery. I think. One of the most important one is what we're doing probably in clinic right now is that we're treating the symptoms of the disease and not the cause. And if we were to be serious about attacking the cause, we should probably intervene much, much earlier, perhaps as early as during embryological time. Are you saying you could do something while the person

was still in an embryo stage? Intervene right there? Well, hopefully as soon as possible. As you know, Huntington patients also have access to IVF. So you can go to an in-neutral fertilization clinic and generate fertilized embryos and eliminate by the DNA sequencing those that carry the mutation and implant those that do not have the mutation. And this is usually what is done in families that actually can afford this kind of treatment because, as you know, IVF is still not covered by insurance, is not publicly funded, and it requires private fund to execute this kind of intervention.

And so it's not accessible to everybody. That would be, of course, the best way to go if one could do it. But for the majority of the people with a disease in the world or in the U.S., and I know that in the U.S. is one in 10,000 Americans suffer from this disease. For those who cannot afford that kind of technology, I think the sooner the intervention, the better. And yes, there are cases where one can intervene. been relatively quickly. We still can let a couple of dominoes fall, but we cannot let go through

all the way to the last one. So anywhere as early as possible, the better of them. Do you think it could be, are you talking about genetic intervention, or what kind of intervention as quickly as possible? So I think both gene therapy and drugs are on the table. So gene therapy, we're now starting to see what is the consequences at the genetic level, at the global level when these neurons have so many different sets of DNA because they have so many nuclei. Some of them can go up to 12 nuclei. It looks a little bit like birthday balloons that you take to somebody's house and they're attached by the string. And that means that the chromosomes are still connected among these different nucleus.

Any intervention that helps resolve this conflict between the chromosomes of different nuclei will be a good start as far as we're concerned. and yes, gene therapy is probably one of the easiest approach, but I do not exclude the possibility of doing drug screens in the embryos that we have generated to find the one that rescues these multineuclid neurons back to normal. Thank you very much. Very interesting, Dr. Ali Brevanlo, Professor of Molecular Embryology and Stemcell Biology at Rockefeller University. Thank you and good luck to you.

Thank you very, very much. I will need some. Talk to you soon. Bye. The naked mole rat has been boggling the minds of scientists for many years now. What it lacks in conventional cuteness, it makes up for it with a whole bunch of superpowers like, let me tell you about them. It can survive for 18 minutes without oxygen.

It's practically immune to cancer. And its most notable characteristic, it can live longer than any animal its size, up to 30 years or more. And now scientists have discovered one more thing. about the naked mole rat's abnormally long life, its chance of dying does not increase over time. You heard me correctly. Joining me to explain what this all means is my guest,

Dr. Rochelle Buffenstein. She's a comparative biologist and senior principal investigator at Calico Labs in San Francisco. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. This doesn't mean that the naked mole rat is immortal, does it? No, absolutely.

not. It means that its chance of dying, if it were one year of age or 30 years of age, is exactly the same. So unlike the laws of Gumpurz, who was a mathematician in the early 1800s, who discovered that humans show a doubled risk of dying every eight years beyond the age of about 35 to 40. And so you know that a 20-year-old has a much greater chance of surviving for the next 30 years than, say, a 50-year-old has. Based on his life tables that he did on British people living in various cities, he came up with a law called the Gompertsian law of mortality, which has basically been replicated in horses, dogs, sheep, mice, every other species that has been looked at to date. And so we started looking at studies on Naked Morats based on 30-odd years'

worth of data that we've collected. And my colleague Graham Ruby, who's a bioinformatics computer a scientist took these data and really analyzed them very rigorously in terms of the Gumpurzian relationships and showed that Moritz showed the same risk of dying if they were two years of age or if they were 30 years of age. There was no change, which was remarkable. You know that to lay people, that make no sense, right? I mean, you get older and older, your chance of dying is no greater when you're older than when you were younger. And yet the naked mole rat does not live forever. No, but its death is random.

It's almost like radioactive decay. It's a stochastic mechanism rather than that kind of phenomena. It's almost like the elves and Lord of the Rings, which in the various fights they had landed up all dying almost at the same time, not because they were old, but because of the conditions in which they were encountering battles and the likes thereof. So how do you attribute this statistical anomaly to the naked mole rat? Why is it defy the Gompert's mortality law

when everything else has to tow to it, cowtow to it? I think a lot of their basic biology contributes to the fact that they live in an environment, which may lend itself to really harsh conditions that they have to survive, otherwise the species would become extinct. And they have some strange behavioral patterns in that they use social. They restrict breeding to one female in the colony and a few males in the colony. They live in a desert environment where food is really hard to find, but they're nevertheless protected from a whole range of things that would influence more talented. in the wild. So what is the expected life of a newborn naked moll rat?

That's a trick question because a newborn moll rat has quite a high incidence of dying in the first couple of weeks of life. Oh, I didn't know that. They get eaten by their parents, not a very nice phenomena, or they might not get sufficient milk. And after their first, they've been survived three months, they pretty much have the same risk of dying as a 20-year-old animal. They seem to have, it's from three months to 30 years or so that we see no change in mortality rate. But they do, in their first couple of weeks, maybe go through survival of the fittest, and then the rest that survive are going to do well.

This is Science Friday from PRI Public Radio International, talking with Dr. Rochelle Buffenstein of Calico about the life expectancy of the naked mole rat. You had been studying them for some time, your entire career, is that correct? I've been studying them almost my entire career in between other studies. I've worked on multiple species, and including humans, but I constantly come back to the naked moor rats. I collected them while I was a student in South Africa in 1980, and I've been fortunate enough to have my colony of Morat's move with me to various places with every job that I've taken on here. So what do you find so fascinating about them?

Is it just that their longevity, or you must find something really intriguing? Initially, I was more interested in how they control their vitamin D metabolism, given that they live permanently in the dark. And we know that vitamin D is so integral for cell proliferation, for bone and all those kind of things. And with every study, it came apparent that the animals are sort of defying the dogmas and doing things differently. I got fascinated by the fact that they are very resistant to cancer. We've had only five incidences of cancer in more than 30 years of looking to see what animals are dying from and things like that. So we've been fascinated by all sorts of aspects of their biology, and they continue to intrigue us.

If I were to meet them when they could mull rat, would I think it was cute? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You do that. You may have to answer that question. I'm guessing that you do then. I think each animal has its own kind of personality, and yes, I agree they're not the best-looking animals, but when you spend time with them, they really are very cute. So then what more would you like to know? You've been studying them for decades.

What would you like to know more about them? Well, I'm really hooked up on why they are able to beat the odds and not get cancer and not get Alzheimer's and not get sort of all the diseases that we associate with aging. And I'm very intrigued in trying to get a handle on the mechanisms they employ that protect them and enable them to live very healthy lives for as long as they do. I would think that people would be throwing money at you to study this for those very same reasons. Well, there are a lot of people who are very interested in the biology of the Naked Morat and its role in aging. And Calico has got very interested in these animals and recognized that they're a model of exceptional biogerontological interest.

So I think we're at the right place to really get to the answer of why they age so well. Do you have any clues, any hints genetically, or do they have a good diet? I mean, do you have any hints about, you know, what direction to go? The answer is going to be everything. My guess is that whatever your weakest link is in the system, that's what's going to do you in. But Graham Ruby, the first author on this paper, is studying the genetics of these animals, looking at genetic variability and genomic integrity. I think that's a very big player in their extreme longevity.

Other aspects of their basic biology are more at the molecular biology. What are the mechanisms that help them prevent protein aggregation diseases like Alzheimer's and other things like that? So we're really trying to delve into cellular and molecular mechanisms to get a good handle on what it is that enables these animals. to live as long and as healthy as they do. Well, when you guys come up with the answer where you come back on and tell us more about it? Yeah, happy to do so.

We're rooting for you because, you know, we all want to extend that life and find out it's our second favorite animal on the program. So I want you to come on and talk about it. What's your first? Tartagrades. We'll talk more about Tartagrades. And, of course, we always think about cephalopods. So Cephalop that class of animal. We have Cephalopod Week and that kind of thing.

We could add the naked. We're adding the naked mole rat right in there with the rest of them. That's good to know. Okay, Dr. Rochelle Buffenstein, senior principal investigator at Calico Labs in San Francisco. PJ Leiderman composed our theme music. And, of course, you can hear us any time during the week. Amazon and Google Home, you know, every day is Science Friday, all on social media. And just a reminder about a Science Friday book club, we are still reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. and you can call us and get on our voicemail,

567243-24-3-24-5-6. Let us know what you think of the book. And we have a book club newsletter, additional reading, and more on our website, sciencefriady.com slash book club. If you only have seen the movie and you have never read the book, they are two totally different things

and it's a case where the movie is so much, the book is so much better than the movie. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.