Podcast: The almost-internet, sleep deprivation, and lightning gamma-rays

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Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week: how lightning can generate gamma rays, and the science of being sleep deprived.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

And we’ll be finding out about PLATO: the internet that wasn’t. This is the Nature Podcastfor November the 23rd 2017. I’m Adam Levy.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And I’m Benjamin Thompson.

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Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

First up this week, reporter Lizzie Gibney is investigating an electrifying mystery.

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Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

In ancient Roman culture the thunder God was the king of gods. It’s not hard to see why. Thunder and lightning must have seemed terrifying and inexplicable. Well, thousands of years later and we’re still some way from explaining them and now research published in Naturethis week suggests thunder and lightning are even more incredible than we thought. Scientists in Japan have discovered that lightning can make clouds of radioactive atoms and even antimatter. To investigate I spoke first to my Naturecolleague and resident thunder storm expert, Davide Castelvecchi.

Interviewee: Davide Castelvecchi

It’s very surprising when you start looking into this to realise that there’s so many phenomena that we’re all familiar with lightning. We kind of have an idea how they work, but not really. So even the very mechanisms that cause clouds to become electrically charged are not fully understood.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

So we don’t know what causes lightning but what we do know is that enormous electric fields that accompany it can accelerate particles to close to the speed of light and during this acceleration the particles emit gamma rays: extremely high energy light. Physicist Teruaki Enoto and his colleagues decided to probe inside thunderstorms by detecting these gamma rays. The electric environment inside thunder clouds is very dangerous so the team instead used remote detectors on the ground which were originally designed to study extreme environments in space. To monitor the gamma rays the team installed four radiation detectors along the coast of Japan in an area perfect for tracking thunderstorms.

Interviewee: Teruaki Enoto

In winter very powerful thunderstorms come to the coastal area around the seas of Japan and these kinds of very powerful lightning and thunderstorms are very famous and are described in detail in text and writing. These locations seem to be an ideal laboratory to measure these kinds of special events from lightning.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

They were not disappointed. On the 6^thFebruary this year they observed lightning create an intense flash of gamma ray radiation which continued to glow for a fraction of a second. For around ten minutes after they then saw more radiation, this time at an energy characteristic of tiny particles of antimatter annihilating with matter.

Interviewee: Teruaki Enoto

When I first saw this event it seemed to be somehow mysterious but our interpretation is that these kinds of signals originate from photonuclear reactions triggered by the lightning.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

Photonuclear reactions… Nuclear reactions triggered by high energy photons of light. Teruaki and his colleagues think that the initial gamma rays were powerful enough to kick neutrons out of some atoms in the atmosphere, leaving them unstable and radioactive. Shortly after these neutrons were produced, these radioactive atoms would decay, spitting out positrons – the antimatter equivalent of electrons. These positrons annihilate with electrons in the atmosphere, creating the signal that was seen for ten minutes after the lightning.

Interviewee: Teruaki Enoto

We have, for the first time, I think, detected both the neutrons and positrons simultaneously from the lightning. So these kinds of nuclear reactions seem to be quite new for our understanding of the lightning.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

Physicists have seen radioactive isotopes being created naturally in the atmosphere before. But, says Davide, only when atoms are hit by high energy particles whizzing in from outer space.

Interviewee: Davide Castelvecchi

So we’ve known for a long time that nuclear reactions are happening in the atmosphere but this seems to be a completely new way that it’s happening. It seems like the more we look at clouds and the atmosphere, the more complicated and bizarre it appears to be and it seems like every time we make a discovery there are more questions raised so who knows where this will end.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

Teruaki’s findings tell us about the effects of storms on the atmosphere but they leave other questions unanswered. We still don’t know how lightning triggers the extreme acceleration that generates the gamma rays, a process that we understand better in black holes than we do in lightning and we still don’t know how lightning forms in the first place. Truly understanding thunderstorms is likely to be a long road says Teruaki.

Interviewee: Teruaki Enoto

Eventually we’d liked to know what is the true trigger of the lightning but our research would still be the middle of this long story of the mystery of lightning.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

That was Teruaki Enoto who's based at the University of Kyoto, as well as Naturereporter, Davide Castelvecchi. Head to nature.com/nature for Teruaki's research paper and nature.com/news for Davide's story about the research.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

The news chat is still to come, where we’ll be learning about the European Medical Agency’s relocation. First though, Shamini Bundell has graced us with her presence for the Research Highlights.

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Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

Good pals watch out for each other. Well, good chimps certainly do, making extra sure to warn their friends when a threat is approaching. Wild chimpanzees were played recorded chimp chatter in the form of alarmed or relaxed calls before researchers introduced a terrifying threat: a model snake. The wild chimps made more warning calls of their own if they’d been played relaxed sounds, implying they were taking their friends’ ignorance of danger into account. This kind of awareness could underpin the evolution of language. Look out for that in Science Advances.

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Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

Engineers are getting to the bottom of buckling beams. For big constructions like buildings and bridges, engineers often use beams with holes in them to save weight. While they may be lighter it seems that these Swiss cheese style supports can deform more easily than their complete counterparts. Now a study has produced a theoretical explanation for this malleable mystery. The theory suggests that this weakness holds even for shorter beams which would normally be more robust than longer beams. On the plus side, tweaking the size and spaces of the holes should help toughen up these lightweight beams. To read that whole study beam yourself over to the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

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Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

This week in Nature’s ‘Books and Arts’ section we’ve got a review of The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear. This book tells the story of the Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, also known as PLATO. PLATO was a computer based education network that connected people around the world but existed decades before the modern internet. Sharon Weinberger, who reviewed the book for Natureexplained that PLATO’s origins began all the way back in the 1950s…

Interviewee: Sharon Weinberger

So a couple of things happened in the late 1950s. One was the emergence of computers and computer science – the very beginnings of course. These are main frame computers, these sort of massive, multi-ton beasts and people were trying to think of new applications for them. The second thing that happened was the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite which prompted concerns in the United States that perhaps our educational system was falling behind.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And so scientists at the time set out to find a way to boost education using the newly available computer technology. In 1960, PLATO was born at the University of Illinois, conceived as a book with feedback. Students used individual terminals each of which was connected to a central main frame. Now these terminals kind of looked like boxy, all-in-one desktop computers and they have a small keyboard attached. Rather brilliantly, some of these keyboards are covered in a lovely wooden veneer. One of the innovations that PLATO introduced was the use of flat-panel plasma displays. These displays used orange monochrome, hence the book’s title, The Friendly Orange Glow. Looking at pictures of these terminals, they certainly look of their time. The displays show little more than text and fairly rudimentary images but they brought people together, first locally in the US and later globally, and offered a glimpse of what was to come.

Interviewee: Sharon Weinberger

I mean of course this all looks very retro and dated but you have to think about what it was doing that hadn’t happened before. If you go back a few years prior to that, no-one interacted with a computer. You went into a big room where a main frame was or a computer was with punch cards and you put something in and it crunched numbers and gave it back. This introduced a couple of ideas that were revolutionary for the time. One was time-sharing, another was interactive computing, but the other important thing – and this is what truly made PLATO revolutionary, although somewhat inadvertently – was it was networking people. The idea that emerges later of the internet, of cyberspace, this was the concept that PLATO was evolving well before its time. That is what made it so popular in creating this online community who made video games, who created online list serves or forums so they could discuss things, all of the things that today we associate with the internet, but at the time we were still decades away and here people were in the 1960s actually doing this.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

While PLATO was capable of doing lots of online things that we take for granted, ultimately we’re not using it; we’re using the internet. Now, the internet’s ancestor, known as ARPANET, was being developed at around the same time as PLATO and was linking universities in the United States. There’s perhaps an example of parallel evolution here but there was a key difference between the two that led to one succeeding.

Interviewee: Sharon Weinberger

The interesting thing about ARPANET was that the godfather of it, J. C. R. Licklider, who was this ARPA scientist and ARPA programme manager, he had written this seminal memo which he called ‘To the members of the intergalactic computer network’ and it became a very famous memo in ARPANET and later in internet lore and what he meant by the intergalactic computer network is we have to find a way to have species, computers that are speaking different languages communicate together because that was really his vision. We have to link computers together. The irony or perhaps the tragedy of PLATO was is it was essentially – it stuck so narrowly to the main frame paradigm. It wasn’t trying to link computers together, it was linking graphic terminals together essentially over phone lines and so it never overcame that barrier that ARPANET and later the internet overcame which is getting computers to speak to each other.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Although at its height PLATO had users around the world, its dogged use of relatively dumb terminals attached to a central main frame and its inability to connect with a wider network of personal computers was a stumbling block. The title of a review in Naturethis week is ‘The internet that wasn’t’ and PLATO certainly contained applications familiar to any internet user today: email, instant messaging, multi-player games and so on. It also had peripherals like the wonderfully named, Gooch Synthetic Woodwind Synthesizer. But what of its legacy? What has PLATO left us?

Interviewee: Sharon Weinberger

I am always very cautious to give someone or something credit for a revolutionary development. I think there the old phrase that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. I look at PLATO as – it wasn’t a seed that sprouted the internet. It wasn’t a seed that sprouted email or instant messaging. It was more like a branch of a very innovative tree that went in a direction that just didn’t ultimately survive. It sort of withered away.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Although its branch may have withered, lots of stories from the early world of computers hang from it and those stories are what make up this book: The Friendly Orange Glow. I asked Sharon if she’d recommend it.

Interviewee: Sharon Weinberger

I would definitely recommend it for anyone interested in the history of computer science because it’s an important story. Most stories about the history of computer science are about revolutionaries who succeed. This, in a way, is about revolutionaries who in a larger sense don’t succeed and so there are many important lessons. It’s an incredibly well researched book. It’s on a subject that I thought I knew a lot about but I learned a lot of things that were new. I think for people who aren’t interested in the history of computer science, they would have a harder time connecting with the book because, again, it’s not about a development that succeeded, it’s about one that shut down.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

That was Sharon Weinberger, Executive Editor for News at Foreign Policy Magazine. You can read her review of The Friendly Orange Glowover at nature.com/booksandarts.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. The conference first began 8 years ago on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and looks at research that may break down walls in the future. The event featured 15 talks from researchers across the world and covered subjects ranging from new approaches for energy storage to the economics of tackling poverty. I was hosting the Falling Walls live stream, but I also got a chance to meet some of the researchers at the conference. One was Falling Walls speaker, Yuval Nir, who’s recently had a paper in Nature Medicine. Yuval is working on the science of sleep. In particular, he’s looking to understand what’s happening to our neurons when we’re tired…

Interviewee: Yuval Nir

So we all know those moments where we’re presented with a stimulus and typically will respond quickly but when we’re tired we’ll have those moments when we are presented with a stimulus and it could literally take us a few seconds to react.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

What have you been able to find out so far about what’s underpinning these lapses?

Interviewee: Yuval Nir

So most of the research so far, before our study, was using non-invasive functional imaging and that’s quite a coarse measure of brain activity and we were able to make use of very unique situations where epilepsy patients are planted with an array of electrodes to understand where their seizures are starting from and we were able to look at what is happening with their brain activity all the way down to activity of individual neurons. What we found was that when the person lapses, the neuron lapses and there are two interesting additional results. One is, this is already affecting the way we see the world. For example, if a pedestrian runs into the road late at night when we’re driving and we’re tired, it’s not like we see the person in the same way and we react slower. I think our results suggest that we already see that person in a slower way which is, I think, sort of a new concept. The second interesting result is that exactly when we saw these neurons slowing down their response, we also saw slow waves in the local electrical fields of the brain and these waves we typically see them during full-fledged sleep. But now we were seeing them in the same regions when neurons were slowing down, when people were wide awake with open eyes. So it’s as if sleep-like processes are invading the activity of the brain when we get tired.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

Some of this still sounds, I suppose, quite intuitive to me. What you just described sounds – you know, people say, I felt half asleep.

Interviewee: Yuval Nir

I think one of the interesting things is that a lot of these processes are happening in a very selective or local manner. So we can all imagine a moment where we’re very tired and we almost fall into this micro-sleep but now I think we’re starting to realise there’s something that occurs sooner before we even start closing our eyes is that specific regions of the brain, they’re so desperate for sleep, that each one in turn catches a moment of this sleep like state and it goes largely unnoticed when you measure things from outside the brain but even when we’re still awake with open eyes, these local patterns of sleep are starting to affect our brain activity.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

Now, is this interesting just because we’re interested in finding out how this works or does it have some kind of application? Could this somehow help people who end up being sleep deprived?

Interviewee: Yuval Nir

Sleep deprivation is a really serious issue for a society beyond basic research. It’s estimated that about 20% of car accidents and near crashes are related to driver fatigue. It’s comparable to drunk driving but, consider that we don’t have any laws against driving when you’re tired. There are many professions when sleep deprivation can lead to disasters and I think what we’d like to do with time is to use our recent findings to develop measures of when these local sleep waves are rising and have hit a certain threshold so we can alarm people before they fall asleep and keep them out of danger.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

That was Yuval Nir from the Tel Aviv University who I spoke with at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin. To read Yuval's recent Nature Medicinepaper, head over to nature.com/nm, and for more on Falling Walls go to falling-walls.com

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Time now for this week’s News Chat, and I’m joined on the line by Alison Abbott, Senior European Correspondent here at Nature. Hi Alison:

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

Hi Benjamin.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

So our first story today then – we’re going to talk about the European Medicines Agency which has made a decision which has been rather a long time coming. But before we talk about what that decision was, maybe you could tell us what is the European Medicines Agency and what does it do?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

So the European Medicines Agency is for Europe what the FDA is for North America and that is it’s responsible for determining the safety and efficacy of drugs and other therapies and then licensing them for marketing and it also monitors adverse effects of drugs that are already on the market and I guess for me at least one of the most important things it’s doing at the moment is controlling the development of regulations of these new advanced therapies like regenerative medicine, biological molecules, stem cells or cells that have been genetically manipulated. These regulations are complicated and they need to be identical in all countries and that’s why you really want to have European Agency.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

So currently the Agency’s headquarters is here in London but given all that’s coming up in the next couple of years and Brexit, that’s going to be changing rather soon, so what’s happened over the past few days.

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

Well of course you can’t have a European Agency based in a country that is not a member of the European Union so on Monday this week the European Union member states voted on where the EMA should go and it was a secret ballot, three rounds, very tense, and Amsterdam won this week.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

So who else was involved then? Presumably lots of large cities throughout Europe wanted this big agency to be there?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

It’s more a question of who didn’t apply. I think there were only three or four small countries in the Baltics, for example, who didn’t put in an application. The applications were of course, of varying quality. It was also accompanied, interestingly, by a survey that had been done of the existing EMA staff in London to ask if it went to country X, how many of you would go. Amsterdam happily turned out to be the most popular anyway. But another hot favourite was Bratislava in Slovakia and that was a favourite because its technical proposal was very good and also it doesn’t yet have any European Union Agencies so it was more or less its turn. How many people wanted to go to Bratislava? Only 14% would have gone.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

It seems to me that Amsterdam might be a good choice. It has a big international airport. It’s relatively central in Europe. How pleased is everyone with this decision?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

Very pleased I think but to be honest I think they would have been equally pleased if they’d have gone to Milan. I mean, Milan was also a very popular destination with the staff. Nearly 70% would have gone had it been trans-located there.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

So the decision’s been made then and we’re here, what, in November 2017. What happens next? How quickly does the EMA move to Amsterdam? Everybody’s got a plan for the building that’s going to house it – Amsterdam too. Now what’s going to happen is they have to build the building and build the security for the big databases where all of this very sensitive information can be kept. That was all part of the bid, to show that they could keep this digital data confidential. Uprooting an agency that’s been in place now for quite some time and moving it hundreds of miles to a different country is going to create a lot of headaches just in terms of paperwork as well I suppose. What are the feelings there? Is it going to slow down regulation processes in any way?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

What the EMA said in advance of the vote was that for each country it gave an estimate. For Amsterdam it gave an estimate that there would be some initial slowing down of regulatory approval, then there would be public health initiatives that would have to be slowed down but that within two or three years everything should be back in full swing.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Alright then Alison. Let’s move onto our second story this week. And this is one from a couple of researchers who have developed a programme called Seek & Blastn. Perhaps you could tell us what is Seek & Blastn?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

Well Blastn is a database of nucleotide sequences that researchers have been feeding for the last ten years and Seek & Blastn is a software which will actually pull out small nucleotide sequences from any published paper or from any manuscript and compare it with known sequences in Blastn.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

How did Seek & Blastn come about?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

The original idea I think came from Jennifer Byrne who’s a cancer researcher in Australia and she had noticed some problems with papers looking at a gene that she knew from inside out because I think she was one of the first to describe it. And these papers seemed to be saying similar things using different methods. Anyway, it all had a very bad feeling to it and examining these papers in detail she realised that the nucleotide sequences used couldn’t match the gene that they were supposed to be targeting.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

So she came up with the system to try and be able to automatically check things then?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

She teamed up then withCyril Labbé who’s a computer scientist at the University of Grenoble in France so that together they could actually get a software system that could automatically lift such sequences from any published paper and compare them to Blastn to check for mismatch.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And what have they found so far then?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

It’s a working progress but they reckon to have identified at least ninety problematic papers. Not to say all of them are fraud or any of them are fraud actually but just to say that they, in any case, seem to be wrong.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Who else could use Seek & Blastn and what could they use it for?

Interviewee: Alison Abbott

Publishers of course could use it if they were of a mind to look through everything they have published in the past and identify problems in the way that Jennifer and Cyril have done so but I think there’s another way that it could be used very, very helpfully and this is by journals, reviewers, or journal editors when they’re actually deciding whether to accept a paper or not and they have to look to see if the experimental design is correct and to have this tool where they could just simply scan the paper with this software and just allow the software to highlight any possible errors in the nucleotide system would be really neat.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Nice one, Alison, thanks for the update. For all the latest science news, head over to nature.com/news.

Interviewer: Adam Levy

So that’s it for this week. But before we go, there’s just time to tell you about one of our sister shows. The Nature Middle East Podcastis packed full of research from the region. Give it a listen over on Soundcloud, iTunes, or wherever you normally get your podcasts. I’m Adam Levy.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And I’m Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening, team. See you all next time.

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