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Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Welcome to a very special episode of the Nature Podcast. It is in fact our 500thshow. And that’s not even including all the Backchats, NatureFutures, and other podcast extras.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
To celebrate our half millennium we bring you – as ever – three stories looking at the latest and greatest research: floating cities, malaria free mosquitoes, and using evolution to inspire aircraft design. Plus we have a wrap up of this year’s Nobels in the News Chat.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
But that’s not all. We also have a head-scratchingly hard quiz, and a very special guest whose voice might be familiar. I’m Shamini Bundell.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
I’m Adam Levy.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And I’m Kerri Smith.
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Interviewer: Adam Levy
Hello Kerri Smith and welcome back to the Nature Podcast. Where have you been in the last few weeks, months?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Thank you, Adam Levy. I have been editing features for the print magazine and the website, not entirely to the exclusion of appearing on the podcast that one time.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Yes you did come back that one time almost immediately after you left.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I couldn’t stay away.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
This being the 500thepisode – it’s especially fitting for you to be here as I think you probably were on more episodes than anyone else I can think of.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
It seems I have no way of backing up this assertion but that seems very likely.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
How many hundreds of podcast episodes do you think you might have hosted?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Oh my gosh, into the hundreds easily.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Well, thank you for joining us for just one more in that plethora of podcasts that you’ve hosted in the past. Would you like to introduce our first piece?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I would love to. First up this week, reporter Geoff Marsh has been taking a look at a whole new way to build cities…
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Science journalist Emma Marris recently embarked upon a tropical writing mission to the lush lagoons of French Polynesia’s Tahiti.
Interviewee: Emma Marris
There’s a lot of hype about Tahiti being paradise and I was ready to be a sceptic but it is paradise. I loved it.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Emma travelled to this scenic, Pacific archipelago to hear about old plans to build the first permanent, artificial floating island.
Interviewee: Emma Marris
So seasteading started as the theoretical idea about how you could start your own country by plonking it in the middle of the ocean and then you can make up all your own rules about how to run things and it was very much a sort of a political idea about starting afresh with how to govern and then overtime it has become, as it walked closer and closer to reality, it’s expanded out to also be a concept about sustainable technologies and how do you actually build a floating island and become a lot more about science and tech along the way.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
This is the endeavour of the not-for-profit Seasteading Institute based in California. And pioneering this technology to allow societies on the high seas is crucial according to self-acclaimed ‘seavangelist’ Joe Quirk.
Interviewee: Joe Quirk
Two of the biggest problems in the world are sea level change and the lack of innovation in governments and seasteading solves both of these problems at the same time.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Joe is president of the Seasteading Institute and co-founder and managing director of their for-profit spin-off, Blue Frontiers. He sees lots of potential for what he calls blue technology: the innovative new tech that will allow societies to thrive at sea.
Interviewee: Joe Quirk
We’re going to concentrate blue technology all in one floating incubation hub so we can accelerate the technologies for sustainable floating cities of the future and once you provide this platform for scientists, they reach out to you with their own ideas.
Interviewee: Marc Collins
Sometimes I look at everything we’re doing and it’s like the Space Station
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
That’s Marc Collins, a former minister for the government of French Polynesia and also an ambassador to the Seasteading Institute and cofounder of Blue Frontiers. He’s a native Polynesian and has played a key role in securing a formal agreement for the project with the French Polynesian government. Like Joe, he’s a passionate believer in the potential of seasteading.
Interviewee: Marc Collins
Two thirds of the planet is covered in water and we’re right now spending millions and millions of dollars on space and living on Mars and doing new stations on the moon when two thirds of the planet are still inhabitable for humans, so I think we should be looking at the oceans.
Interviewee: Emma Marris
These guys are nothing if not enthusiastic and they seem to be wanting to include as many cool technologies and approaches and trendy things as possible in this project. They’re piling a lot of different angles onto this floating island idea.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
The list of scientific aims made by Joe and Marc are lofty and grand and we don’t have time to look into all of them properly here but as Joe predicted, scientists are taking interest. Take Neil Davies for example. He’s involved in coral reef research and can see real advantages to a permanent in situ station rather than a moving research vessel.
Interviewee: Neil Davies
The ships are very powerful but they tend to move and so what they do less well is build up a picture of how a single part of the ocean might be changing over a long period of time. No-one’s going to have a ship and say let’s just moor it off the coast and leave it there for 20 years. That’s not what happens.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
So a fixed floating platform on a reef is an attractive concept to researchers like Neil and it could open up entirely new avenues of research.
Interviewee: Neil Davies
It’s a challenge for sure but if they’re able to build here a prototype and drive the cost down of being able to work in situ, in a marine environment, that is incredibly interesting We’re already doing some of this. We have some small platforms that are being built. French research teams have a project under way here. Through the National Science Foundation of the US, we have a small platform as well going out on the reef, because the science for coral reefs at least is driving this need to be out on the reef and to be able to do some sustained manipulations of relatively large areas in situ to see how the natural system is going to respond – not just one coral in an aquarium but the natural community of corals and algae and fish and everything else that lives in a reef which is obviously one of the most diverse, complex systems on earth.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
So certain areas of science could benefit from floating platforms like these and there’s hope that the technological challenges of forming a sustainable artificial island would spark interesting new ideas but research is far from Seasteaders’ only motivation. These platforms are potentially going to be a necessity for climate migrants. Indeed, the inhabitants of French Polynesia may be forced off their natural islands by rising sea levels.
Interviewee: Marc Collins
It really is the main driver for the support that we’re getting from the administration here – from the government. We have some very serious studies from the CNRS, the French Institute, saying that by 2100, there would be 30% of the islands of French Polynesia that would be submerged, so having this ability to say look, we have technology and obviously our goal as both frontiers and seasteading is to lower the cost of these structures to the point where they become cheaper, really, than beach front real estate. It literally could be hope for some of these island nations who are saying they literally could lose their sovereignty and their people.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Neil told me that scientists like him are ready to jump on board if and when seasteading comes to fruition but for people like Joe, this is just the start of something much bigger.
Interviewee: Joe Quirk
Certainly by 2050, I think today’s toddlers will be in their early 30s and they’ll wonder why the rest of us lived in such unsustainable and old fashioned monopoly governments when they live on such highly sustainable societies on the oceans and they will have a variety of governance options to choose among.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Here’s Emma for a final word of caution against immediately abandoning your terrestrial dwellings.
Interviewee: Emma Marris
The thing to remember is that so far everything is on paper. Right, these are exciting ideas and it’s exciting to think about and there’s a lot of potential but so far what we have is we have is a beautiful sparkling lagoon and we have architectural drawings. They haven’t broken ground yet or in this case broken sea so we’ve got to realise that it’s at early, early days.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
That was journalist Emma Marris speaking with Geoff Marsh. You also heard from UC Berkley biologist Neil Davies, and seasteaders Joe Quirk and Marc Collins. To find out more about seasteading read Emma’s feature in this week’s Nature.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
To celebrate our 500thepisode, I have actually come up with a quiz on the theme of the number 500 especially for you Kerri Smith.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Just for me, Shamini Bundell?
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Well, the people listening at home can also join in. We’re going to be starting – as is tradition – with round 1. Starting easy… what is the Roman numeral for 500?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Ooooh. Now, at the end of every BBC programme, they put the copyright in and they put the date in Roman numerals and it says MCM. Does that tell us anything? No? C is one hundred. So if it’s not C then maybe it is L or D. I reckon L is 50 and D is 500.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
One point for Kerri Smith. D is 500 and L is 50.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Just one point for each question? That is so miserly.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Yeah, I’m not even counting the points; the points will get you nothing. There are no prizes.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I’ll just make a note of them here.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Okay, next question. Who was the ruler of England 500 years ago, in the year 1517?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Oh my goodness, that’s a really tricky one because there are so many kings with the same name: it’s probably one of them. It’s probably not the latest of the Henrys but my odds are good if it’s a Henry of some description. Let’s go with Henry IV.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
You’re way too early. It is Henry VIII.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Is it the eighth?
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
It is the famous Henry VI. Henry was a good choice. There were a lot of Henrys in England. Okay, last question is multiple choice in this round. What does the ‘http’ status code, 500, signify? Don’t worry, it is multiple choice. It is either ‘a) internal server error’, ‘b) not found’, or ‘c) multiple choices’.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I see what you’ve done there but I don’t think it can be the nested option. That’s just far too neat. Let’s go for the first one: internal server error.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
That is correct. 500 is internal server error.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Yes!
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
That was an amazing first round there for Kerri Smith, apart from English royalty of course. There will be another chance later in the show to get even more meaningless points. Now, though, we’re going to go back to the science. Ewen Callaway’s been taking a look at two new approaches to fight back against the world’s deadliest animal.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
Each year, malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Going after the mosquitoes that transmit the malaria parasite is one of the best ways to combat the disease. Insecticide treated bed nets have helped cut malaria deaths by nearly half since 2000, but researchers are keen to develop new weapons against malaria that don’t need constant use to work. One approach is to release genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild. George Dimopolous at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, tested one kind of GM mosquito in his lab and found some pretty promising results. I called him up to find out more.
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
So the goal here is to spread a mosquito that is incapable of transmitting the disease. The goal is not to eliminate the mosquito which is something that other transgenic approaches has focused on.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
So here you’re looking at the possibility of releasing GM mosquitoes that won’t transmit malaria, but what kind of genetic modification are we actually talking about?
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
We have not introduced any foreign genes into the genome of these genetically modified mosquitoes. We have only changed its own genes a little bit.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
This genetic change that you made to the mosquitoes – what does it do?
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
Well it turns on the mosquito’s immune response against the malaria parasite at an earlier stage after the mosquito has ingested the blood that contains the parasite.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
You’ve basically genetically modified mosquitoes so that they can’t become infected with the malaria parasite – is that the idea?
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
That’s the idea, exactly.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
That sounds great. Presumably you’re doing this work in the laboratory? Is there reason to think these genetically modified mosquitoes your lab made – how would they fair in the wild where malaria spreads?
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
So we have spent significant time on focusing on how fit these genetically modified mosquitoes are and how competitive they are and we couldn’t notice any significant difference in their fitness compared to the wild mosquito.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
And does that mean if you released one of these mosquitoes or a number of them into the population, would they have success in spreading, and mating with unmodified mosquitoes and having offspring that have this genetic change?
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
So that was the highlight of our recent study where we showed that in a caged population, starting off with an equal number of wild type mosquitoes and genetically modified mosquitoes, these genetically modified mosquitoes would prevail already after one generation and that would persist over ten generations. Then we decided to look into why that is happening and we realised that it related to mating. We showed that the genetically modified males preferred to mate with wild type females. We also showed a weaker preference of wild type males towards genetically modified females, so, this pattern of mate preference would favour the spread of the transgene.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
So that would hopefully mean that malaria resistance spreads through wild mosquitoes – right?
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
That’s right, and what we showed in our study was that this mate preference related to a change in the mosquito microbiota and what we think this change in microbiota is doing, it is making the mosquito smell somewhat differently, and this smell, if you want, is important for attraction during mate choice.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
How do you see this strategy fitting in with everything else that people are talking about to try and control malaria?
Interviewee: George Dimopolous
None of the existing or future malaria control strategies will represent the silver bullet for malaria control. Malaria is not going to become eliminated using one single strategy but we can only achieve that elimination through intelligent combinations of multiple strategies.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
That was George Dimopolous at Johns Hopkins University. And there are already multiple strategies to fight malaria using genetics. In fact, a team led by George’s colleague, Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, just published his own approach. Instead of altering the genomes of mosquitoes, they inserted anti-malaria genes into bacteria that can live inside the mosquitoes’ guts, called Serratia. These bacteria, and their anti-malaria genes spread from parent to offspring. And Marcelo told me…
Interviewee: Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena
That proved to be very effective, so the genetically modified Serratia were able to inhibit parasite development by more than 90%.
Interviewer: Ewen Callaway
These two papers are part of a bigger push to use genetic modifications to fight malaria. Malaria has been killing humans for tens of thousands of years. Is the end finally in sight? Marcelo says that new approaches like the ones that he and George are developing might mean that we are on the brink of defeating this disease once and for all.
Interviewee: Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena
We have made quite substantial progress over the last decade or so. The number of cases, the number of deaths, dropped significantly and I am optimistic that if we can implement those new tools that are being devised, we will be able to contain the disease and eventually eradicate it.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
That was Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena and George Dimopolous speaking with reporter Ewen Callaway. Both their studies are out in Science. Give them a read at sciencemag.org.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Stay tuned for the News Chat where we’ll be giving you the low-down on this year’s Nobel Prizes. But now it’s time for this week’s Research Highlights. You may have noticed the exceptionally high quality of puns in the Research Highlights in recent weeks. That’s thanks to the expert writing of Nature’s very own Associate Research Highlights Editor, Emily Banham. And now she joins us in the studio to bring us two of the best bits of research from the last week.
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Interviewer: Emily Banham
They say rules are made to be broken but I bet you wouldn’t dare to break the second law of photochemistry. This law says that in light driven chemical reactions, one photon reacts with one molecule, but now, a team of photon-fixated physicists have shone a light on a potential loop hole. They believe that a photon could react with multiple molecules if the light is trapped by mirrors. No, not in your fairground, funhouse mirror room. This is an optical cavity where a photon would bounce around triggering reactions with all the molecules inside. This principle could illuminate new ways to harness solar energy. Enlighten yourself over at Physical Review Letters.
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Interviewer: Emily Banham
Now for adventures on the high seas and the tsunami that has made waves among hundreds of marine critters. A deluge of debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan has been harbouring stowaways. Nearly 300 marine species were found clinging to the wreckage of boats and buoys that had floated across the pacific ocean to the coast of North America. One of the castaways, a barred knifejaw fish, survived two years at sea after commandeering an unmanned fishing boat, and even 6 years after the big wave, an object washed up carrying sea anemones and barnacles. So far, however, the daring drifters haven’t successfully settled in to their new ports. For more on this, paddle over to Science.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Okay, it’s now time now for the second round of our 500 themed quiz. Are you excited Kerri Smith?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
So excited.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
This round is called ‘bigger or smaller’.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I’m smaller.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
You’re smaller than many things but in this quiz, these things are either bigger or smaller than 500 of a particular unit. First question, bit biological here… A human hair: is it bigger or smaller in width than 500 micrometres.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I reckon it’s in the hundreds but not 500. It’s smaller.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
You’re correct. It’s usually about a hundred but definitely less than 200. Okay, we’re going to go a little bit bigger now – quite a lot bigger. The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa – do you think it’s taller or shorter than 500 metres?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
500 metres? Half a kilometre? Can you imagine how long it takes to walk that far? I can almost not conceptualise how it can be taller than 500 but it is pretty tall. It’s taller, bigger.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
It is.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
No it isn’t.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
828 metres.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Oh my god.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
We’re going even bigger. We’re going into space now. The distance from the earth to the sun is known as one astronomical unit but is it more or less than 500 million kilometres?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I was having trouble conceptualising that building – scratch that. I’m fine with that now but I definitely can’t conceptualise one astronomical unit. 500 million kilometres – no, it’s not that far.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Correct – it’s only 150 million kilometres.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
A short walk.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
That was actually very impressive Kerri. I think you’ve done better than I would have done. We are almost halfway through the 500 themed quiz. There will be more questions later but now it’s time to hand over to reporter Lizzie Gibney who’s been finding out how super computers are helping aircraft wing design reach new heights.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
The body of every living creature has been meticulously honed by natural selection. Take a bird’s wing. Any tiny change that gives a bird an advantage, for example, better lift or lower weight, is likely to propagate in successive generations and over time this process optimises the wing’s structure. Human designers, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of millions of years, but they can still take a leaf out of nature’s book by creating computer-based methods of optimisation. Neils Aage and his colleagues have used a supercomputer to calculate the best possible internal structure for an aircraft wing, one that’s still stiff, but also as light as possible. Their methods mirror evolution and their radical new wing design has some surprising parallels with nature. To find out more, I gave Neils a call and started by asking him what techniques engineers had to rely on when they first started out designing wings.
Interviewee: Neils Aage
First of all it’s always been a complicated matter, doing this. In the early years it was a lot of trial and error, so producing real life replicas and testing them in situation. And then recently, or actually for the past 50 years, they have been using more and more computational methods to do the design and analysis.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And people have recently started to use optimisation programmes a bit like yours but just talk me through generally how they came into the design process.
Interviewee: Neils Aage
Well they’ve been using them quite heavily I would say for the past 20 years or so. So that would be like if you think of taking out one rib, supporting structure, which is a slender 2D type structure at the leading and trailing edge of the wings and then they would have applied the optimisation scheme to figure out the optimal material distribution within that rib alone, based on the loading conditions from the aerodynamics.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And so you wanted to do something similar, but not for individual components but for the wing as a whole?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
Yes, which means that you will get the interplay of all different components at once and of course we have shown that that leads to novel designs which you could not have obtained by doing this single component, one at a time, analysis.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And talk me through how this optimisation works then. What constraints are you working within? Presumably planes can only fly with certain shaped wings, for instance. What are you factoring in to your equations?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
So we start out with airfoil that has been optimised for minimum drag and good lift properties; we fix the outer skin of the whole wing structure and then we remove everything from the inside. We then ask every point in space if it should be material or void, such that we will end up with a structure that is as stiff as possible and here by stiff I mean a structure that produces the least deformations when subjected to the loads.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
But then the idea is also to be as light as possible.
Interviewee: Neils Aage
Of course, so the constraint is that of course it should be able to withstand the loading but it should also minimise the material used for producing it.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And so how does your version of optimisation work then? Is it a kind of supercharged trial and error?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
No, it’ definitely not trial and error. It’s deterministic and based on regular mathematics. So what we do is the whole 3D domain is cut into smaller voxels. A voxel you can think is like a 3D version of a pixel, or very small Lego bricks. Each of these voxels, and in this example we have more than a billion of them, is then given a design variable. Over an iterative process we then repeatedly perform a structural analysis, so we figure out where in the internal structure is the material heavily loaded? If it is heavily loaded there should be more material. If it’s not carrying any load we can remove material and through a couple of hundred iterations we end up with a final design.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And so your final design is as stiff as possible but as light as possible.
Interviewee: Neils Aage
Exactly.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And were you surprised by what your algorithm produced in terms of what the inside of this wing looked like?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
Very much so. So the designs that we observed from our optimisation method are very organic looking, meaning that there are not many straight lines, everything is curved, and have an extreme amount of similarities to, for example, bird bone structures. So you have these components that fan out, for example, in the flat region and they are very similar to how feathers are situated on bird bones.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And what difference does it make in terms of the overall weight of the wing?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
Well the difference it makes, it means that we can obtain the same stiffness properties as conventional aircraft wing structures but using less material which both reduces fuel consumption and the material used for constructing the structure.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And how practical is it to be able to apply your process to design generally in industry?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
So the approach itself is highly applicable, but if you look at our example, it’s the 30 metre wing structure which, with the details we have and the complex geometry, would have to be 3D printed. Currently they do not exist, large metal 3D printers, so what you can use right now is you can look at our designs and like what we did, pick out some of the main trends in the design and use that in the next generation of aircrafts.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
What other kind of structures can you use this optimisation programme to improve?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
We can of course use it to look at high rise buildings, bridges, power masts and other complex structures like that. Let’s say that we were to build a high rise building in a site where earthquakes are prone to happen. Then you need to design these structures such that it can withstand the dynamics of the earthquake while maintaining a stiffness constraint so to minimise the impact of the earthquake and still maintaining structural integrity.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
So if we have these structures that look a bit like bird bones – but kind of like wing bones – in the aeroplane wing – does that mean that it’s a similar process going on, that this optimisation is in some way a bit like natural selection?
Interviewee: Neils Aage
Very much so. I mean, nature has been optimising itself using trial and error, meaning it has constructed a design; the species have been out flying and then the next generation will have improved on that. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We come up with an initial design – in this case nothing – and then we improve on that iteratively. So it’s not just the result that has many similarities to nature, but the process itself has equally many similarities to nature’s own evolution.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
That was Niels Aage at the Technical University of Denmark talking to Lizzie Gibney about his paper. You can peruse it at nature.com/nature, along with a News and Views article. It’s almost time for this week’s Nobels News Chat, but before we get to that, I can see that Shamini is practically bursting with yet more 500 themed questions that she is desperate to ask Kerri. Go ahead Shamini.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
I am indeed. There’s only two in this round and it’s about two famous scientists from 500 years ago, in the 1500s. I’m going to give you a fact about them, and I’m also going to give you five words that are associated with them but you can jump in at any time if you think you know who it is I’m talking about. First: name this person who died in 1519. Your five worlds are: anatomy, flight…
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Leonardo Da Vinci.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Correct. You look so smug.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I mean I only know two scientists from about this time period.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Oh I wonder if the other one is the other one that you know.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Could be.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Okay, name this person who died in 1543, shortly after publishing a revolutionary book…
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Copernicus.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
[Laughter]I didn’t even get a chance to give you my words.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
It’s my other favourite scientist from the early 1500s.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
That round was too easy. I’m disappointed. You just wait for round 4.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
I know I haven’t been answering so far, but I’d just like to let you both know that in my head, I’ve got 100% right.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Well done.
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Interviewer: Adam Levy
Time now for this week’s News Chat and it’s a special News Chat because of course this week was the week of the Nobel Prizes. To break it down for us we have Richard van Noorden in the studio. Hi Richard.
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Hi Adam.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Now, first up there have been a few things which have changed but notably the prize money changed this year.
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Yeah, it’s gone up to 9 million Swedish Krona, up from 8 million last year, 1.8 million dollars that is, so more money for the winners. But, lots of things haven’t changed about the Nobel Prizes as you say. Yes the prizes this year went to nine men which continues the pattern of men overwhelmingly being awarded Nobels and there’s a lot of bald heads on display in our shots of the Nobel winners this year.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Working out the probability of picking nine men at random from the general population – it’s about one in 912 – but that wasn’t actually the only unusually high representation in this year’s Nobels. There were a lot of Americans; I think 7 out of 9.
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Yeah, exactly. So the Physiology and Medicine prize which was announced first this week went to three Americans: Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbach, at Brandeis Universityin Waltham, Massachusetts and Michael Young at Rockefeller University in New York City. I don’t think anyone can argue with the prize they got, which was for unpicking the workings of the circadian clock – the daily rhythms of ourselves. So what they did in the 1980s, working in fruit flies – a great example of how fruit fly research can be so useful and can lead to unexpected discoveries – they found a gene that encodes a protein that builds up each night and is broken down the following day and that was one of the first indications that there are such genes in the proteins. It turns out to be in all of our cells, and nowadays we know that the links between these internal clocks and our health are so pervasive that some people say medical school should focus more on chronobiology – the idea that different cells, different parts of metabolism peak and trough at different times during the day and night.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
How did the winners of this prize react to their win? Were they surprised?
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Well they are usually stunned and these ones were stunned too. Young said, I go and pick up my shoes and then I pick up my socks and then I realise I need to put my pants on first. Great quote and Rosbach was silent and then said, ‘are you kidding me?’.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Well that prize may have been surprising at least to the winners. One prize which was perhaps one of the least surprising in recent memory was the prize awarded for Physics this year which went to LIGO.
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Everyone was expecting this one and every reporter had already written their story. It went to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish for their work on LIGO, the American Observatory which detected gravitational waves, which vindicated the predictions that gravitational waves exist made by Albert Einstein all the way back in 1916. It essentially follows from his theory of relativity and also essentially opened up a new way to listen to the universe because these gravitational waves, these ripples in space time, are emitted by violent cataclysmic events like colliding black holes and colliding neutron stars. And now, using detectors such as at LIGO we can listen to these vibrations in space time that are coming out and hitting us on earth.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Of course a project like LIGO actually involves hundreds of people. Is it difficult in these cases to pick just three names?
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Yes, well, Weiss himself said that he viewed it more as a thing that encompassed the work of about a thousand people. The breakthrough prize, these larger 3 million dollar prizes that are awarded every year, that’s already gone to the LIGO team. It went to all of the people on the LIGO team so there’s definitely an argument here that this exposes the shortcomings of the Nobel. Alfred Nobel’s will says that the prize can only be awarded to no more than three people and the committee have rigidly stuck to that, so many people maybe could have got this prize but it’s also the case for perhaps the Higgs Boson and many other prizes. In this prize in particular there were three main co-founders of LIGO – Weiss, Thorne and Ronald Drever – and unfortunately Drever died on the 7thMarch this year and I’m sure he would have received the Nobel had he been alive.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
You mention that a lot of the reporters had their stories ready but credit should go to our reporter Davide Castelvecchi who had his story ready this time last year because there was a possibility they might sneak in last year.
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Yeah, many people though they would win last year because the detector picked up these gravitational ripples from black holes in September 2015. It wasn’t publically announced until February 2016 but there was still time from then until October for the Nobel committee to recognise it. But they decided to wait a year and since then we’ve now seen four gravitational wave detections: three from LIGO and a fourth one with LIGO and with Virgo, a European detector. And we’re all excitedly awaiting rumours of another type of gravitational wave detectors which is rumoured has been seen from colliding neutron stars, not black holes. That one is exciting because telescopes are rumoured to have seen the radiation coming out of that collision as well, so you’re seeing it in multi-modes, not just listening to the waves, we’re seeing the radiation as well. That is widely rumoured and indeed, Ray Weiss himself may have let slip that it’s happened because in his press briefing he said, ‘well, we’ve seen black holes and we’ve seen neutron stars and we’re looking for some other things’… but it hasn’t been announced yet. It’s known that telescopes have been looking at something so we’re all waiting for that to happen so watch this space, I say, on that one.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Let’s move on now to the last three of our nine men. These three won the Chemistry Nobel Prize which at the time of recording was just announced, I guess about an hour ago.
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Was this a surprise win? It doesn’t sound necessarily like the most obvious choice for chemistry.
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
Well I have sympathies for Chemistry. I did chemistry and I think this is a solidly chemical technique. You are getting the atomic molecular structure of biomolecules and that is chemical biology really, because you are seeing down to the details of atoms and molecules, how the Zika Virus or protein complexes work and where things dock. And that is essentially the chemistry of biomolecules.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Of course before every prize we try to predict what the prize might go to. Was this in our shortlist of things that chemistry might be awarded to?
Interviewee: Richard van Noorden
It’s definitely been up there and our reporter Ewen Callaway actually wrote a big news feature two years ago entitled ‘The revolution will not be crystallised’ in which he explained all about cryo-EM and how it’s taking over labs. So I think everyone knows it’s been transformative. We’re still waiting for a Nobel Prize for lithium ion batteries. No Nobel Prize this year for CRISPR gene-editing which many though might come in Chemistry or Physiology and Medicine. So those are going to remain on people’s lists next year.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Richard, thank you very much for joining us. To find out more about the Nobel Prizes, especially Chemistry where we guarantee we will have quotes, do check nature.com/news for our news stories.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
That’s almost it for this week’s show, but Kerri we can’t let you leave us without one final quiz question.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
How can there be more questions?
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
It’s maths.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Oh god.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
This is going to be a tough as well. It’s going to be really tough.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I’m ready.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
What is 22.36 times 22.36?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I just think if there was a theme for this episode that I could riff off or like something to make this answer obvious; I’d just be doing so much better than I currently am. I mean… 500?
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Mmmm, technically it’s 499.9696.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I rounded up.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Okay, you know what, you were pretty close. Kerri Smith you are the quiz winner!
Interviewer: Adam Levy
I actually knew the answer to that one as well.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Fact check.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Can we share the prize?
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
You can both have a 50% share of the imaginary prize, and if any of our listeners did as well as Adam imagines that he did, you can get in touch to let us know and maybe claim your share of the prize. You can reach us by email: podcast@nature.com, or on twitter @NaturePodcast. Or get in touch with us directly: I’m @SBundell.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
I’m @ClimateAdam
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And I’m @minikerri
Interviewer: Adam Levy
That’s all we have time for, for this week’s show. But we’re also releasing a special episode that looks back at some of our favourite Nature Podcastpieces of all time. It’ll be a bumper compilation episode out later this week. Until then, I’m Adam Levy.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
I’m Shamini Bundell.Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And I’m Kerri Smith.
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