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BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Redberry. Welcome to Matt Splint. Weird science.
It's one of the regular spots here on Matt's plane. A chance to catch up on the freaky science of science and technology. But it has been a while since we visited. Matt, has there been any science over the past few weeks?
It's actually really strange that you should ask that question because I've been reading more about the possibilities that our world is a computer simulation recently. And we'll come back to that in another episode. Yeah. And it's about that kind of subjectiveness of reality.
You know, in the same way that the physics engines and games only model the parts of the universe that you currently occupy, the same could also be true of the world we live in, that the physics generating our own universe only actually generates the bits that we're using at that time. So that does make your question a little bit complicated. If you haven't asked it, the answer might be no. There hasn't been any science.
But because the places that science has made haven't existed since the last time we did a weird science episode, but by searching for science stories for today, I have actually created science. I caused the science part of the universe to be populated with stories for this episode. So I would like to personally take responsibility for everything that's mentioned in today's show. I think that's quite enough for that.
Yeah, probably. It'll be worse when we actually do an episode on it. So let's talk about bees instead. Sure.
Why not? Yeah. Lots of environmental pressure on bees declining wild populations to the point where in some countries, the efforts of hives have become a major issue over the past few years. A lot of commercial beekeepers rent out their hives to farmers to help pollinate fruit trees and that's, you know, all sorts of crops.
And criminal gangs over the last few years have moved into the industry. They've been stealing hives and renting them out to farmers, of course, not taking out looking after the hives. Now, we know that global insect populations are falling. They may be falling as much as two and a half percent a year according to a 2019 review by Francisco Sanchez Bayo and Chris Vichais, leading to the potential loss of up to 40% of global insect species.
Now, I know that there are plenty of people out there who might be happy that we aren't going to have all these creepy crawlies around, but without them pollinating the food we eat and playing a crucial role in the food chain that supports those other chains, things even society might start to collapse. I mean, this sounds unbelievable, but let me guess, technology's got to fix. That was a deliberate pause to tell you off for that joke. You know, of course, you know, there's an app for that, or at least there may be something very much along the lines of that in the future.
There are a whole bunch of projects in the works to find artificial means to pollinate trees and flowers from the food we grow. According to Wired, teams at Harvard and at Holland's Delft University of Technology, the teams are working to create different versions of robot insights. Harvard's is a water-based machine, I can't quite figure out, that can propel itself out of the water to pollinate a plant, while the Dutch team is working on a model based on the fruit fly, albeit much, much larger. And in 2018, a company called Dropcopter pollinated and avalauched in New York using drones, hexacopter-type drones.
And even the US Department of Agriculture is working on this, they're working on a robotic arm that can pollinate as if by hand, but of course, without the fatigue that human workers would experience doing the same task. How realistic are these methods? I mean, I'm guessing you'd need billions of little machines to replace the working sex currently do, or maybe billions. Trillions, quadrillions, you know, on a one-for-one basis, it may be impractical, and entomologists don't necessarily agree with the engineers in this instance.
Like you just mentioned, they say that the scale pretty much makes it simply impossible, but tests like the Dropcopter one show that we don't necessarily need to replicate insects at the scale of natural insects, or have robots at the same scale as natural insects, that's a better way to say. But realistically, in those more practical terms, it would likely require a change to the way we produce a lot of food. This kind of artificial pollination would be more effective in the kinds of high-intensity hydroponic-style vertical farming that we're seeing being developed. You know, the kind that uses converted shipping containers, grow lights, and stacked high rows of produce.
That's the kind of system that that robot arm would be perfect for, for example. Yeah. Do you think this is an inevitability? The end of insects?
I mean, I don't think it's inevitable, but there are a lot of things that we need to do to reverse it, you know, from reducing deforestation and chemical pesticide dependence, limiting the rising global temperatures. But we also need to change the way we use land, you know, look at things instead of growing crops to feed the animals. We eat growing crops that we eat, which is, you know, a far more efficient scenario. These technologies are more of that kind of worst case example.
One of the case studies that a lot of people use is those parts of Sichuan Province in China, where fruit trees have had to be pollinated by hand for the past few years because of the collapse of insect populations. And of course, Chinese institutes have also been working on a lot of methodologies for this kind of mechanical pollination as well. So there are also calls for us to eat insects as a way to save them by making them an important protein source in our diets, which I know a lot of people don't know the ideas of. But, you know, that could create the impetus we need to conserve all of these insect species.
And failing that, we could always put the DNA on file, use the robots for a while, and bring them back a little bit later on. Well, it's odd you use that example because bringing back long extinct species is one of those rare examples in biology where popular imagination and the work of scientists actually overlap. You know, we've successfully cloned animals, an achievement that's often greeted, you know, more with horror than enjoyment. And movies like the Jurassic Park franchise have led millions of people to hope that one day some ancient species can be resurrected from fragments of DNA.
Though with a bit of luck, not the Velociraptors, unless we can clone Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill and Chris Pratt to help us control them. But two of the most high-profile labs trying to bring back extinct species are the start-up colossal, which wants to bring back the William Ameth and the Tiger Lab at the University of Melbourne, which wants to bring back the farm more recently eradicated, Tasmanian Tiger. But a new paper from researchers at the University of Copenhagen suggests that there may be limits to what we can actually bring back. Why is that?
Is it because of how old the samples are maybe? Well, not necessarily. I mean, the Danish research team was working to bring back a more recently deceased species, the Christmas Island Rat, which died out, I think, sometime in the 20th century. The Danish team managed to recover about 95% of the rats at genome.
And using the similar Norwegian brown rat, they assembled a kind of assembly guide for all these genes. They employed CRISPR techniques to recreate the defunct rodent, but it turns out that the missing 5% is really important because there's no way to recover all the information and resurrect all of those missing genes. And in any genetic sample, there is going to be some missing information. So you can't always look to that handbook species, like the Norwegian brown rat in this instance.
In the Christmas Island rat, the researchers found that the missing genes would control parts of the rats immune response as well as its sense of smell. Important things. Couldn't you simply replace them with ones from the brown rat that you mentioned? I mean, you can.
And that brings it back to the reason for recreating that species in the first place. So the Christmas Island rat in the Norwegian brown diverged a species around 2.6 million years ago, which is not long in evolutionary terms, but more than long enough for those species to be shaped by their habitat. So if your goal was to reintroduce the species in its native environment, it might no longer have the genetic skills to thrive. Its sense of smell might not be geared to finding food or detecting predators on Christmas Island.
And it may not have suitable immune protections, but it will have those of the Norwegian brown rat and not the ones it needs for its environment. Does anybody really want to bring back a rat, though? No, I mean, it's really not about the rat. The team chose a test subject that would be relatively easy to re-sequence.
So it's a kind of proof of concept. One of the lead researchers, Tom Gilbert, commented to the science news websites that you can use the techniques to figure out what you will get and what you won't get when you try to bring back a given species. And you can use that information to decide whether it's worth resurrecting it. The animals you get, they're not going to be exactly the species that died out, but it might be close enough for it to be a worthwhile project.
However, if we put that in a Jurassic Park context, knowing that the Velociraptor has cockatoo jeans might not be too much of a solace when it's knowing on your leg. OK, I think we've got time for another quick one, just before the break. Yeah, so this is more of a food security story. The global economy, obviously, is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, and food prices worldwide are at some of the highest levels that we've seen for decades.
Now, that's not just down to the coronavirus, extreme weather conditions have caused crop failures or small harvests. And this has been further exacerbated, of course, by the current Ukraine crisis, because Ukraine and Russia are both major grain exporters. So there's a lot of uncertainty about the status of shipments coming out of the country. And I found this story on the New Scientist, by the way, it's not on some crazy anti-climate change site or something like that.
But one way to potentially reduce or even avoid that food shock and to limit some of that food press inflation might be to relax laws relating to the presence of biofuels in petrol and diesel. The US, yeah, and the EU and plenty of other countries have laws that govern how much bio or renewable source fuel has to be added to any sort of fossil fuel mix. And how significant is that biofuel requirement? Well, Michael Kaim, the University of Bonn in Germany, makes the point that the US diverts a third of its maize production into biofuels.
So that's equivalent to about 90 million tonnes. And that's almost double the combined 50 million tonnes that Ukraine and Russia export. In the EU, about 7% of maize and grain production are turned into ethanol for biofuel. So all in all, Kaim assumes that 10% or estimates rather that 10% of the world's grain output is actually turned into biofuel.
Recently, the Czech Republic has already ended its biofuel mandate in an effort to reduce pressure and food prices in the country. And because biofuel production is largely driven by subsidies and the percentage of ethanol blended with petrol tends to be quite low, it's unlikely that it would have a major impact on those already rising oil prices or substantially alter the supply of fuel that gets to the fuel pumps. Is there an environmental cost to this? Well, firstly, it would be probably a temporary measure.
So governments could resume their programs once the food supply and prices have stabilized. But secondly, a lot of experts disagree that blending biofuels with fossil fuels has much of a positive environmental impact. A report in the UK back in 2017 recommended burning waste rather than growing food to make biofuels. It noted that current practices divert potential food from global markets and subsidies encourage the use of low performing or exhausted land to produce the crops.
And those in turn require more energy in terms of fertilizers and pesticides in order to grow these viable subsidized crops. So you can actually end up producing more emissions than you were trying to save in the first place. Not to mention that it provides a kind of a sought to the fossil fuel industry. And it helps to maintain demand because you have this idea that there's this renewable component rather than diverting consumers towards better sources of renewable energy.
So yeah, for the time being food not fuel could be the way to go. Interesting. OK, let's take a short break then. And when we come back, content filters, cancer crushing games and boots with microphones.
That's all coming after the break here on Matt Spleen on BFM 89.9. Beyond frivolous mishmash, BFM 89.9. BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Redberry.
This is Matt Spleen. Welcome back. Now, one of the trails at the end of the last segment was for cancer crushing games. What's all this about?
Well, yeah, it's an app called Genigma. And genuinely, I think they missed a beat by not calling it cancer crush because I think that might have helped them to get more downloads. The app is the branch art of the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Basel and lots of DNA and Genome stuff this week. Playing it helps the team to model the position of fragments of DNA and cancer cell lines.
They have a super computer doing the modeling. The idea of the app is for the general public to play the DNA based game. And the team can then compare the crowdsourced results to those at the computer simulation. So it's kind of a control.
I'll be honest, the game itself is kind of baffling. It's a strategy puzzler where you move parts of the cells around and you try to gain the maximum score. But there are also other layers to it like building a team of scientists that I don't quite get. I guess they're trying to create that sense of reward, but honestly, moving the parts of the cell around is fun enough on its own.
Yeah, so download Genigma and get cracking a few minutes of fun. And you may also be helping scientists to better understand breast cancer and eventually defeat it. Do you want to hear about content filters? That's the best transition I think you've ever given me in the whole time we've been recording.
OK, good. I know. That's what it's always been. Yeah, slickness.
That's me in a box. Come on, then let's hear about it. All right, let's see the box. Google Jigsaw is a technology incubator.
And by alphabet, it evolved from the Google Ideas platform. Now part of its remit is to look at ways to reduce online threats. And to that end, it's just announced the release of a new tool called the Harassment Manager. Now initially, this will be trialled with the Thompson Reuters Foundation.
And it will monitor the threats and abuse that its journalists receive on platforms like Twitter, something that a lot of journalists do experience online. It's been built on Jigsaw's perspective API. And as I understand it, it's essentially a content sorting tool that works in bulk, rather than something that's AI based and looks for keywords. So it will be able to filter out potentially abusive or threatening messages, as well as mute or block harassing accounts.
One kind of tool that I like a lot is that it will even blur some of those abusive messages out so that the recipient doesn't have to see them. They can just pull that straight to an admin. Yeah, exactly. And the manager also enables reports of threatening messages to be printed off.
So you can then forward them to your employer or wear relevant to law enforcement if you think that sufficient calls for a legal case. Is this just for just? In this phase, yes, that's how it's being tested. But anyone who has a public profile might find this useful, not just for abuse, but for broader content management and moderation as well.
Unfortunately, it's not at this point a standalone tool. So that means it's probably going to be more useful to big organizations because they can take the code and build it into their systems and plug it into third party APIs like Twitter. The tests are scheduled to take place in June. So let's hope that they're successful and that we have one more tool that keeps the trolls safely hidden under their bridges.
And, you know, but there are tools that are maybe more used to the general public. And this is the announcement this week of Instagram's live, Insta live stream as, well, let me do that again. Something that might be a bit more used to the general public is a new feature that Instagram has announced. It's finally added a moderator feature for its Insta live streams.
Isn't Instagram a little bit behind with this though? Totally. I mean, platforms like YouTube and Twitch have had this functionality for a while as has InstaSister company Facebook. And as with any kind of stream, you know, things can quickly go off the rails when the haters descend or arguments break out amongst commenters.
So the ability to turn off comments for some users or disconnect and bang them can be crucial. And that's very hard, of course, if you're the one who's doing the streaming. The new functionality allows you to add a moderator when you start a live session. And that moderator will be able to filter out any unwanted participants.
With the company looking to expand the ability of content creators to monetize those live streams, this edition is, you know, it's long, long overdue. Yeah. I've noticed we haven't had any AI on the show yet. Yeah, that's really unusual, isn't it?
But I think I'm going to skip AI this episode and head straight for space. This is a report from Wired Magazine that, and by the way, the sources for all today's stories and the transcripts can be found on the culture website. But on the basis of this story, I think we should abandon the race to get to Mars and concentrate on going to Mercury instead. Why don't we go over this?
Yeah. After all, you know, on Mars, there's nothing except some red dirt and the remains of Matt Damon's potatoes. Nobody wants to see Matt Damon's potatoes. Isn't Mercury a bit too close to the sun to travel to though?
You definitely need plenty of sunblock. And yes, the atmosphere is extremely thin. It does get battered by solar winds. Date and temperatures can reach anywhere in excess of 400 degrees centigrade.
So, you know, you're going to want to keep your water in a vacuum flask to stop it evaporating. It can get down as low as 150 degrees centigrade at night. So, you know, you're going to have to keep your socks on in bed. But on the plus side, the planet may be covered in diamonds, which, yes, which makes a lot of those deprivation seem a bit more worthwhile.
There's a lot of graphite on Mercury. And according to new findings by Kevin Cannon, a geologist at the Colorado School of Mines, that graphite may have been turned into diamonds. I'm guessing he hasn't been there yet. No, bus services have been halted since the start of the pandemic, you know, down.
But Cannon believes that asteroids and meteors crashing into the planet may have crushed into the planet with enough force to compact some of that graphite into diamonds. He thinks that this probably happened during the late heavy bombardment, a period about four billion years ago, where it's surmised that the inner planets of our solar system were, you know, battered by asteroids. Our moon bears those scars to this day. And Mercury is thought to have been hit by about twice as many asteroids during that period as the moon.
So during the early period of our solar system, many of the planets had oceans of magma. But Mercury is thought to have had a layer of graphite floating on top of the magma oceans, perhaps up to 100 metres thick. Cannon's modelling suggests that the impact of the asteroids over billions of years could have turned 30 to 60 percent of that surface into what he calls shock diamonds, which is definitely an improvement on blood diamonds. I reckon it's time to give up this show, mate, and start a space mining company.
Well, Cannon estimates that there could be as much as 16 quadrillion tons of diamonds on the planet. Yeah, I know it's a bounty, but it's actually the kind of supply that's likely to drive market prices down a little bit. In reality, though, he thinks those shock diamonds are likely to be fairly impure. They're going to be full of graphite and other debris from the impact.
So you probably wouldn't want to mount one in a ring. It's not going to, you know, polish up all shiny. But Cannon thinks that diamonds could be much more common on other planets than we previously thought they might be. He theorises that on some exoplanets that have even more carbon than Mercury does, you could end up with a surface layer of diamonds followed by a layer of graphite, followed by a further layer of diamonds.
So no, I don't think it's time to start that space mining company just yet, partly because, you know, you can get to Mercury in about four months, but it's much more complicated and time consuming to actually safely land on the planet's surface. So it's back to Mars, then, and Matt Damon's potatoes? Well, it's not all bad news, apart from the potatoes. Researchers at the United Arab Emirates University have come up with a simple way for astronauts to find their feet on the planet.
So astronauts on the moon were found to be quite clumsy, partly because the thickness of their boots made it very difficult to get any feedback about what they were trading on. According to the new scientist piece, I saw this from the Apollo astronauts suffered about 27 falls on the moon. The UAE team has previously tried to outfit boots with a variety of hat-tech sensors that can give feedback to the wearer, which, of course, makes the boots a lot more complex and potentially more fragile. But now they're working on a prototype that uses simple microphones instead.
The mics on the outside of the boot would feed the sound of their steps back into the wearer's head. Is sound really that important to our vestibular system? Well, it turns out that it is. The team conducted these tests with and without sound.
They asked 14 participants to march on the test, march on the spot rather while blindfolded, which is a common vestibular test. On average, they moved around 20 centimeters from their starting point when they could hear their own steps. When given noise-cancelling headphones, still blindfolded, of course, that drifted to around 37 centimeters from the starting point. Now, the team has created a mic-duck prototype, but they want to get their hands on an actual spacesuit to see how well it would work.
Of course, it still won't make any difference to the next generation of spacewalkers who are heading to the moon, because the lack of atmosphere on the moon means that there isn't any sound for the microphones to pick up. But of course on Mars there is. So we forget how many of our senses are engaged when we walk, and if you're on Mars and spending a lot of time in a spacesuit, this could be a simple and effective way to replace some of the sensory information that the suit removes. I know it's not as dramatic as shop diamonds, but it might turn out to have more practical uses.
I don't know. I think that's an interesting way to wrap up the show. Noisy feet, don't you? Noisy feet, yeah, and also because I haven't got any space in my house for 16 quadrillion tons of diamonds at night.
I've got plenty of space under the stairs, mate. Don't worry about that. Thanks very much for that, Matt. Thank you, pleasure.
Okay, that's all the time we have for today, but if you can find Matt on Instagram and Twitter at culturematte, you can also head over to culturepop.com for transcripts of these shows and information about CulturePop and its consulting services. And if you did miss any part of the show, we recommend you download the app. The BFM app, so you can have a listen back to it there. It's available in the Apple App Store or Google Play.
My name is Rick Brebery for BFM 89.9, the Business Stitch. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, the Business Station.