Interviewer: Adam Levy
Welcome back to the Nature Podcast– this week we find out about two neutron stars that have made waves in the physics world, and take lessons from the past, as we explore the future of work. I’m Adam Levy.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And I’m Benjamin Thompson, here on my first hosting duty. This is the Nature Podcastfor October the 17th2017.
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Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
You may have heard the announcement on Monday that a new gravitational waves signal has been spotted. The ripples in space-time came from neutron stars spiraling into each other and eventually merging. This was the first time merging neutron stars had been observed, but that was just one of many firsts that this event heralded. Adam has been finding out more…
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Gravitational waves have defined the career of astrophysicist Samaya Nissanke.
Interviewee: Samaya Nissanke
I basically started working on gravitational waves since I was an undergrad.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
And for quite some time many of her colleagues saw this as something of an unusual choice.
Interviewee: Samaya Nissanke
Senior, well-meaning folk took me aside and said, Samaya, you seem pretty smart… maybe you want to spend your time doing something with real observations about the universe. Maybe it will happen one day but not in your life time.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Fortunately for Samaya this pessimism was misplaced. In late 2015, Gravitational waves were spotted for the first time by the LIGO detectors in America. That observation came from two black holes collapsing together – something that had never been seen before. But researchers like Samaya expected that other never-seen phenomena should also be detected. For example, the collision of two neutron stars, while less massive than black holes, could still be picked up. In August this year, Samaya was at a conference in Amsterdam. She remembers that there was still a fair bit of scepticism that a neutron star merger would be seen any time soon.
Interviewee: Samaya Nissanke
Over lunch I was talking to the LIGO India head and he mentioned to me, well Samaya, in 2019, 2020, I don’t think we will have observed a binary neutron star with gravitational waves and I have to say, I did pause but I said, okay I will take my second scientific bet in my life and say that actually I disagree. I think we are going to see a binary neutron star by 2020 and literally half an hour later, this email came into my inbox saying, wow, there’s some amazing observation that was seen by LIGO Hanford and it looks like a binary neutron star.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Samaya and other gravitational wave researchers around the world sprang into action. Within a few hours comparisons between the signals from LIGO and its Italian counterpart VIRGO had pinpointed a small area of the sky that the signal must have come from, just 30 square degrees.
Interviewee: Samaya Nissanke
And so this was really, really amazing, firstly because, for instance, the very, very strong gravitational wave event that we saw two years ago, the first binary black hole observation, had a sky area of 590 squared degrees. So when we’re talking about 30 squared degrees of course that totally changes the game for electromagnetic follow up.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Electromagnetic follow up. In other words this provided the opportunity to take normal telescopes and hunt the sky for the light from the neutron star merger. Word was quickly put out to astronomers around the world, astronomers like Ryan Foley who uses the Swope telescope in Chile. Ryan had been waiting for the chance to hunt down the light emitted by gravitational wave events but even when he got this alert he’d have to wait a little bit longer.
Interviewee: Ryan Foley
To make any kind of astronomical observations we had to wait for the sun to set. During that time, which was about 10 hours, we were just preparing so that everything was as efficient as possible and so that when the sun did set all we had to do was execute.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
But even once the sun set in Chile, Ryan’s team didn’t have long to put their plan into action.
Interviewee: Ryan Foley
So there was just this short window of time where we had to get everything done and then after that you had to wait until the next night. This is something that we’d been preparing for, for a while but, it’s always different to do a fire drill and when the house is actually on fire. It was sort of a frantic but calm scenario. Somehow it all came together perfectly right at the right time.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
It was an astronomer in Ryan’s team who first spotted the tell-tale bright dot indicating the galaxy where the neutron stars had merged. They put out word to other telescopes around the world and soon every possible observation was being made of the events. So this was the first neutron star merger ever observed but it was also the first event to be detected both with gravitational waves and with light, all the way from radio waves through to gamma rays. This event teaches us a wealth of things about our universe: where heavier elements come from, as well as one origin of the gamma ray bursts that have long puzzled astronomers. When the detection was announced on Monday a whole host of papers were published in several journals, including Nature. But as well as the results detailed in these studies, the fact that we can now chase the light from gravitational wave events opens up a whole new era of observing our universe.
Interviewee: Samaya Nissanke
I think it’s a game changer in the sense that we have now opened up all our senses.
Interviewee: Ryan Foley
For millennia human kind has been looking at the universe and then just with the advance of LIGO have we been able to hear the universe and with this event it’s the first time we’ve been able to see and hear the same thing at the same time and so it’s really just, it’s a new outlook on the universe and it’s incredibly exciting.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
That was Ryan Foley who’s based at the University of California Santa Cruz. You also heard from Samaya Nissanke who’s at Rad-bowed University in the Netherlands, and is also a member of the VIRGO collaboration. To find out more about the event, which involved hundreds of researchers, make sure to read Nature’s in depth news story. That’s at nature.com/news.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Next up we’ve got Shamini Bundell with this week’s Research Highlights…
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Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Ammonia is normally pretty bad for cells. It’s a bi-product of the breakdown of amino acids and is usually excreted from the body after being turned into urea by the liver. Tumors, however, often have trouble getting rid of their waste ammonia since many of them don’t have the blood vessels needed to tap into the excretory system. Unfortunately, rather than letting the buildup of toxic ammonia get then down, some cancer cells have been found to be metabolizing it instead. Researchers discovered that breast cancer cells can use ammonia to build new amino acids, successfully recycling the toxic waste into a food source. Consume more on that over at Science.
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Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
A study of ancient coal deposits has shown that dinosaur poo had a big impact on prehistoric ecosystems. It looks like the evolution of large herbivores like Sauropod dinosaurs changed the number of vital nutrients that were available to prehistoric plants. Coal laid down in the Crustaceous Period after the appearance of giant long-necked plant-eaters contains more key nutrients than coal from before large herbivores arrived. The nutrients were also more widely distributed, presumably because of wandering dinosaurs defecating far away from where they ate. That’s all very well for Cretaceous creatures but it might also suggest that the ongoing disappearance of large herbivores such as elephants could impoverish modern ecosystems. Digest that further in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
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Interviewer: Adam Levy
This week, Natureis running a special on the Future of Work. To find out what this future might actually entail, Benjamin spoke to two researchers, looking at it from rather different angles…
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Could a robot take your job? As technology advances there’s a risk that many people will be left out of work. It’s easy to imagine the impact that self-driving vans and trucks could have on many vocations, but not only that, back in February Naturereported on an AI that was able to identify skin cancers at least as well as a dermatologist. But this isn’t the first time the nature of work has been turned on its head. Britain’s industrial revolution began in the second half of the 18thcentury and saw a massive shift in manufacturing practices and the way that labour forces were structured. According to Bob Allen, an historian at New York University, Abu Dhabi, the earliest people affected were spinners: workers who took raw cotton or wool fibres and span them into yarn.
Interviewee: Bob Allen
There were many, many people employed in the pre-industrial economy as spinners because the hand processes with the spinning wheel were very inefficient.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
The introduction of machines like the Spinning Jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, revolutionised the process of making cotton allowing operators to produce multiple spindles of thread at once. This automation quickly eliminated the hand spinning of cotton making many women unemployed and raising poverty rates. Needless to say, this made many workers very unhappy.
Interviewee: Bob Allen
They rioted, they burned down mills and destroyed the equipment, so yes, the workers resorted to direct action to try to stop mechanisation.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
The government at the time didn’t take too kindly to attempts to stop the march of progress and suppressed its opposition with force. Despite these conflicts though, output levels soared.
Interviewee: Bob Allen
Productivity shot up by a factor of twenty, thirty, forty times but what happened was, so there were new jobs created in the cotton spinning industry in Britain as it was mechanised but a number of new jobs created was much less than the number of jobs that were lost and in addition it’s important to recognise that the ramifications and the job losses were not confined just to Britain. Machines greatly increased productivity so that British production rose and exports rose but they caused widespread unemployment across Asia and the Middle East.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
But is widespread automation related unemployment something the world needs to brace itself for in the 21stcentury? Sabine Hauert from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory isn’t so sure.
Interviewee: Sabine Hauert
The main challenge really comes from the fact that we’re trying to predict the future, right? Some say that robots and AI are going to increase productivity and as a result we will have more jobs overall. Some say that they’ll replace 40% of jobs over time. I think the key here is that we don’t know and we need better data.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
According to Sabine, even understanding the impacts of robots today is a challenge.
Interviewee: Sabine Hauert
If you look at the data from the International Federation of Robots, they tell us that from 2010 to 2015, 60,000 robots in the automotive sector created something like 230,000 jobs. So, overall net positive impact, but another study from MIT also looking at data showed that one robot displaced 5.6 workers in the automotive sector in the US – in a local community. So what you can see is that even though there is clearly for people an impact at a local level, there might be an overall positive impact and I think we’re at the stage where we don’t know what way that will go. What we’re missing is figuring out how to explain this problem because it’s very dramatic to say someone has lost their job and it’s very important to figure out how to help them, how to make sure they’re retrained and to make sure that they can live a good life.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And training and retraining is clearly important. In the UK a recent government document predicts that within 20 years 90% of all jobs will require some elements of digital skills. As we learned from Bob, not everyone in the 18thCentury benefitted from automation so what needs to be addressed to make sure that everyone does in the future?
Interviewee: Sabine Hauert
We realise there is a concern, there is a concern from the public that the benefits won’t be shared and it’s not just monetary benefits, it’s also access to these technologies that could make your working life better. Profoundly what this is is a societal question, right? How do you make sure that everyone has access to the same level of education, has access to the technology, and how do we make sure that the wealth is not concentrated by just a few people? And I’m hoping that as a society we can answer these questions. To a certain extent they have nothing to do with technology and they’re the same discussions we’ve been having for a very long time.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
That was Sabine Hauert there. You also heard from Bob Allen whose Comment article can be found at nature.com/news.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Time now for this week’s News Chat and Nature’s senior reporter Lizzie Gibney joins us in the studio. Hi Lizzie.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
Hi Adam.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Now, first up this week it’s looking somewhat likely that a gene therapy might be approved in America.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
That’s right. So, this is a bunch of advisors to the Food and Drug Administration so this is not an actual approval yet but it’s some advisors who have given their guidance saying this therapy should be approved. So, it’s likely that the FDA might follow suit.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
And what is this therapy actually hoping to do?
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
So it’s hoping to treat a form of hereditary blindness. So, that’s people who have got two mutated copies of this particular gene and that gene stops your eye’s ability to respond to light and it eventually leads to destruction of some photo receptors in your retina.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
And presumably if they’ve got to this stage it’s already been tested to some extent in humans.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
Absolutely, so this follows a controlled trial of 31 people. And they gave them this treatment and then they looked at their ability to navigate around a specialised obstacle course. And they found that over the course of a year which was as long as the study lasted, there was significant improvement in their ability to go around that course.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
This wouldn’t be the first gene therapy approved by the FDA though would it?
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
No, that’s right. So there was another gene therapy that was approved in August and that was a case of taking out people’s immune cells and re-engineering them and putting them back into the body. This kind of gene therapy though is what everybody classically thought of as gene therapy. So this is the first example of the therapy actually replacing or compensating for a gene that’s missing in that person.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
But gene therapy is a type of therapy that there’s been some hesitance about historically.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
People have been thinking about gene therapy for decades and I guess for about 20 years it’s struggled because of a few failures to get going, a few real problems, like there was a death of a young patient once in a clinical trial. So it really struggled to get out the blocks. But now in the last few years we’ve seen a couple of much more promising trials in this area. And investors are starting to come back. A lot of young researchers are starting to get involved in the field again so it feels like it might be on the brink of resurgence.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
There’s been a lot of talk about gene editing human embryos recently. This, unlike that, would not mean anything could be passed on to future generations.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
Absolutely not, no. So this is not an edit to the germ-line so it’s not something that could be passed on. It’s just in that individual’s genes and actually one of the issues is they don’t yet know how long the effect will last. So the way it works is a virus actually forces the gene into the person’s cells but they don’t know how long they will continue to express that gene that they are otherwise missing.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Let’s move onto our second story which I feel has a special significance for Lizzie because only a couple of weeks ago in our 500thshow special, you recounted your podcast piece about AlphaGo, the computer that mastered Go. Well, now they’re back and they’ve done something even more impressive.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
Yes, this is, it’s technically called AlphaGo Zero. It’s basically a super duper version of AlphaGo. So, this is a version which is better than all of the previous ones. They now have, the original beat the European champion then the next one beat the world expert. Then they’ve got the most recent one which is called Alpha Go Master which beat the world champion and is definitely the very best out there. Until now. This one’s called AlphaGo Zero and it’s not just interesting for Go aficionados. It’s interesting for people in AI because what they have done is stripped out the human data element of it. So how all the previous versions learned is they got a kick start by studying expert games and then they went from there to improve by playing themselves. This version just starts completely from scratch. So it starts off with random games and plays itself and over time and also a lot more quickly than previous versions, it got up to the level – it passed through all the levels of all the previous versions until now it is the very best out there.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
So it’s the very best out there just by teaching itself how t play this board game.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
Exactly, so what is also quite interesting about this is it’s a much simpler programme so this is able to learn a lot faster and get to being a lot better more quickly.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
So they mastered go now several times. Are they going to carry on making new pieces of software which are better and better?
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
That’s actually a question that I need to go back to them on because I don’t know yet if this is the end of the line for Go. It’s such a good way of testing out their programmes and actually because what they’re doing is obviously not just trying to get amazing at Go. They’ve done that now. If that’s what they were trying to do they’d have stopped a while ago. What they’re trying to do is work towards the most general Artificial Intelligence they can and there are lots of different paths to doing that. This particular idea that they’re employing in Alpha Go Zero is to get rid of human input because if we try to apply Artificial Intelligence in the real world there may be many situations where we don’t have reams of big data to learn from or the data that we have isn’t perhaps quite suitable. In that case, a computer that can just learn from scratch by playing itself in a way is going to be much more useful.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
What kind of things are we actually talking about? Presumably when we say the real world, we don’t mean other board games.
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
No these would be things like – problems like protein folding to figure out how a particular structure will fold. There are other problems as well where you’re either working towards an optimum, so for instance in terms of energy consumption, or where you’re looking for new material, say, and there are so many different possible options out there which like the Go board, there are so many combinations that it would be impossible to just brute force attack it and work your way through all of them but instead you generate this intelligent way of searching through all of those possible options.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Has this piece of software that’s learnt to play Go taught Go players any new tactics? Has it come up with anything new itself?
Interviewee: Lizzie Gibney
It has actually. So the way in which it learnt – because all the time it was playing against itself and it started off like a beginner. Both sides were a beginner so they played in a very human, beginner way, very naively and then quite quickly, after about three days it got to the master, expert level, and then after 40 days it’s this superhuman level and some of the strategies, it’s recreated ones which humans have spent thousands of years coming up with. So, on one hand it’s quite nice to say that we haven’t been playing Go completely wrong the whole time and there are some really great strategies there but on the other hand it’s also in some ways opened up options because Go is a very traditional game. There are lots of proverbs and learned knowledge from the great masters that go into how people play. And actually AlphaGo, and the more recent version, AlphaGo Zero have shown that these are not strategies that you have to stick to – that you can break the mould a little bit – and it’s come up with some whole new plays that people hadn’t thought of before.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Lizzie, thanks a lot for joining us. For more on those two stories head to nature.com/news.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
So that’s it for this week, thanks for listening team. We’re back again next week for more great stories from the world of science. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter. We’re @naturepodcast. And if you enjoyed the show, be sure to tell a friend or leave us some stars in a relevant place. I’m Benjamin Thompson.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
And I’m Adam Levy . See you next time.
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