Blue Streak Science Podcast

Life on Mars! No? Yes? Maybe? Now we've learned that the Mars Rover 2020 will be looking for fossils. And JD wants them to bring a hammer and smash some rocks. 

• Science News with Chris MacAlister

• Life on Mars! Bloody life on Mars! People keep on going on about it. It may be living on Mars? Okay it isn't. But it may be living in Mars! Can we have a look? No, not yet. But it may have been living on the surface in the past. Great, have we found any signs of it yet? We've found signs of water. Brilliant, any signs of past life? Nope, not yet.
• It feels like we are so close to somewhat confidently saying that Mars had life on it at some point in the past despite the not unsubstantial fact that we have precisely zero evidence for the existence of life on Mars. Okay, maybe that is a tad unfair, but the level of evidence that we are dealing with here is akin to being somewhat confident about the tooth-fairy's existence because that incisor under your pillow mysteriously vanished in the night, only to be replaced by a coin.
• And it's not just Mars, the moons Europa and Enceladus get people excited because they possibly could contain life, but we haven't seen any direct signs of it yet; only data that doesn't rule it out. Yet despite this, there are real life Astrobiologists. There is a whole field of science and scientists dedicated to stuff that may not even exist. No wonder mystics get their knickers all in a twist! Although to be fair, they are mystic, that may just be part of one of their rituals.
• But thankfully we are dealing with scientists here so there is always hope. The quest to discover life within Mars is not only technically daunting but here is also the huge risk of interplanetary contamination to consider if we go looking for it. War of the World's only worked as a story because the Martians were invading us. Imagine how much it would have sucked if we'd have taken the common cold to Mars and wiped them out on their home planet. Apologies for the spoiler but the book's been out for 120 years, you've had your chance.
• So NASA is now attempting to go the other way. Next year their Mars 2020 rover is going to the martian Jurassic coast. They are sending a rover to a site that should have been ideal for fossilisation, an area known as the Jezero Crater. Now we do have pretty good evidence that this area contained a lake some 3.5 billion years ago, and considering that we can find the fossils of primitive life on Earth from that long ago, fingers crossed that Mars could offer us similar.
• This marks a new generation of NASA exploration with a real focus on Astrobiology. Here we could possibly answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe without compromising any life that may still be there.

 JPL NASA, Universe Today

• People often wonder what Charles Darwin would think if could see the world today and where the legacy of his work has taken us. Personally, I'd like to think that he would be more fascinated in the answers that we have discovered since his death. He'd be chuffed to bits to learn about the Morgan's sphinx moth; the moth whose existence he predicted 40 years before it was discovered. He'd be tickled pink to learn where all the energy comes from to sustain the amount of fish that live on coral reefs (as we covered earlier in the year). And we'd probably have to sit him down before we introduce him to DNA and genetics. The poor man's already died once, we wouldn't want to finish him off again so quickly.
• But there are still plenty of Darwin's enigmas that we still have not been able to solve yet. Like the "abominable mystery" as he described it, of how flowering plants, or angiosperms, suddenly bloomed into the fossil record in the early cretaceous period. 
• The first evidence we have for angiosperms is 130 million years ago. Around 112 to 94 million years ago, the angiosperms blossomed to a level of dominance that they retain today. This correlates with the rise of beetles as well so it has long been thought that the two co-evolved.
• Now, this is where I wish that we had some creationist listeners. Who knows, maybe we do and if so, good for you and get a load of this. We've changed our mind! A new fossil, a beetle preserved in amber, has been discovered in Myanmar and published in PNAS. It completely discredits the picture of the co-evolution that I mentioned, so we're scraping it, because that's how science works.
• The reason that we are scrapping it is because this preserved beetle, dubbed Angimordella burmitina, is 99 million years old and it has been caught in the act. Angimordella has been linked to the modern tumbling flower beetle family, the Mordellidae. Like it's modern ancestors it has a "humpbacked body, deflexed head, pointed abdomen, and stout hind legs," and most of the modern species feed on angiosperm pollen – which is how the researchers were able to recognise the mouthparts. And if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well then there's still some residual uncertainty at play that needs to be addressed.
• The smoking gun in this case was that the beetle was carrying 62 grains of angiosperm pollen at the time that it died. So not only is the beetle already perfectly evolved to transport pollen at this stage of history but analysis of the pollen also confirms that that was evolved to facilitate transportation via beetle. It pushes the earliest confirmed date of insect pollination back by 50 million years.

PNAS, ScienceAlert

• 160th Anniversary of the publication of "On The Origin Of Species" by Charles Darwin. 
• Drug-resistant microbes kill about 35,000 people in the U.S. per year
  • Science News, ScienceAlert, STAT
• Zero gravity made some astronauts' blood flow backwards
  • JAMA Network Open,  New Scientist
• Hayabusa 2 begins long journey home carrying Ryugu asteroid samples
  • New Scientist, Universe Today
• Incredibly Rare 'Mouse Deer' Spotted in Vietnam After Vanishing For Almost 30 Years
  •  Washington Post, Huffington Post 

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team.

Our hosts today were Chris MacAlister, and me.

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!

The more you know, the more you don't know. Ain't that the truth! The more we know about the universe the more confusing and contradictory it seems to get. Nevena talks about this crisis in cosmology in today's episode of Blue Streak Science.

Oh, there's so much more than that. Join us. 

• Good dogs (there's no such thing as bad dogs)
• The Shape of Things...of everything
• Scientists speak out...no, they scream out at the top of their collective lungs on the climate crisis

• Jessica Cantlon at Carnegie Mellon University led a research team that comprehensively examined the brain development of young boys and girls. 
• Their research shows no gender difference in brain function or math ability. The results of this research are available online in the November 8 issue of the journal Science of Learning, and was funded jointly by NIH and NHS.
• Cantlon and her team conducted the first neuroimaging study to evaluate biological gender differences in math aptitude of young children.
• Her team used functional MRI to measure brain activity in 104 young children (3- to 10-years-old; 55 girls) while watching an educational video covering early math topics, like counting and addition. 
• The researchers compared scans from the boys and girls to evaluate brain similarity. 
• In addition, the team examined brain maturity by comparing the children's scans to those taken from a group of adults (63 adults; 25 women) who watched the same math videos.
• They found no difference in the brain development of girls and boys. In addition, the researchers found no difference in how boys and girls processed math skills and were equally engaged while watching educational videos. 
• Finally, boys' and girls' brain maturity were statistically equivalent when compared to either men or women in the adult group.

Neuroscience News, Pharmacy Practice

• Whether you're looking after a canine or a human there is no clear cut right way of doing things.
• There have been studies in working dogs that show negative side effects in dogs trained through corrective training rather than reinforcement training. But working dogs live very different lives from family pets, can we make the same inferences here?
• Ana Catarina Vieira de Castro and her team at the University of Porto in Portugal have looked into this exact question. They recruited about 100 dogs, half from a reinforcement based training school and half from a corrective training school and then let the animal testing begin!
• They started by bringing all of the dogs in for a training session. During the session they filmed the dogs and took saliva samples. With the saliva they can measure levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone, commonly known as the stress hormone. 
• The team found that correctionally trained dogs do show increased cortisol levels during training. The reinforcement trained dogs showed no significant change. 

• According to some newly crunched data from the Planck observatory, our universe might actually be a sphere rather than a plane.
• The focus of the observatory was to map the cosmic microwave background - a sea of light left over from the big bang.
• We know of the existence of an effect called gravitational lensing. A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) between a distant light source and an observer, that is capable of bending the light from the source as the light travels towards the observer. Such bending is due to the gravitational pull of such massive stellar bodies.
• However, with the latest calculations, astronomers seem to be observing much stronger gravitational lensing than expected.
• With a new model, researchers could explain the "extra" magnitude of lensing by factoring a shape of space-time different than what we've considered before. 
• These Planck measurements indicate that the universe is 41 times more likely to be "closed", or spherical, which would mean that if you travelled far enough in one direction, you would end up back where you started. That is because the extra lensing implies the presence of extra dark matter, which would pull the universe into a finite sphere instead of a flat sheet.
• Why some cosmologists call this a crisis is because it throws a lot of theories and models about other events in the universe down the crapper.
• For example, the model of our ever-expanding universe, scientists have had some trouble explaining some of the things that happen in real life and at the same time, not able to prove or detect others which should be happening according to our model of a flat universe. With the closed one - the number of such discrepancies increases, even if with the data used to draft this closed model, we are using the most fine measurements of the sort to present days.
• On the bright side, the Simons Observatory, will be able to measure gravitational lensing even more precisely than Planck, and it should tell us whether or not there really is a cosmological crisis.
• On the flip of this though, we'll have to live with the unknown for quite some time, as the Simons Observatory is still being built.

New Scientist, Wikipedia

• A global group of around 11,000 scientists have endorsed research that says the world is facing a climate emergency. 
• The study, in BioScience by Dr Thomas Newsome et. al. looks back over 40 years worth of evidence and pulls no punches in pointing out that governments are failing to deal with the issue and that we are cruising toward "untold human suffering".
• It also says that simply measuring global surface temperatures is an inadequate way of capturing the real dangers of an overheating world. Which is somewhat ironic considering that the study was released on the same day as satellite data confirmed that we have just had the warmest October on record. 
• But rather than just bring us bad news, this study gives us six things that could be changed immediately that would make a big difference:
• Energy: Politicians should impose carbon fees high enough to discourage the use of fossil fuels, they should end subsidies to fossil fuel companies and implement massive conservation practices while also replacing oil and gas with renewables.
• Short-lived pollutants: These include methane, hydrofluorocarbons and soot - the researchers say that limiting these has the potential to cut the short-term warming trend by 50% over the next few decades.
• Nature: Stop land clearing, restore forests, grasslands and mangroves which would all help to sequester CO2.
• Food: A big dietary shift is needed. With people eating mostly plants and consuming fewer animal products. Notice that they don't say that we have to go full vegan. I would argue that bees are more of a help than a hindrance here and they can do with all the help that they can get. Reducing food waste is also seen as critical.
• Economy: Convert the economy's reliance on carbon fuels - and change away from growing the world's gross domestic product and pursuing affluence.
• Population: The world needs to stabilise the global population which is growing by around 200,000 a day.

BBC Science and Environment, Smithsonian Magazine

• Broadcom Masters contest
• • The Broadcom Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public announced Tuesday that 14 year old Alaina Gassler of West Grove, Pennsylvania, has won the Samueli Foundation Prize, 
  • This is the top award in the Broadcom MASTERS, which is the nation's premier science and engineering competition for middle school students. 
  • The five winners, all girls, were chosen from 30 finalists selected from 2,348 applicants by a panel of scientists, engineers and educators. 
  • Alaina Gassler of West Grove, Pennsylvania, won the Samueli Foundation Prize, for her project reducing blind spots in cars and her exemplary performance during the Broadcom MASTERS's hands-on challenges. 
  • Rachel Bergey of Harleysville, Pennsylvania, won the Lemelson Award for Invention. 
  • • Rachel developed a trap made of tinfoil and netting for the Spotted Lanternfly, an invasive species causing damage to trees in Pennsylvania.
  • Sidor Clare, of Sandy, Utah, won the Marconi/Samueli Award for Innovation. 
  • • Sidor developed bricks that could one day be made on Mars. 
  • Alexis MacAvoy, of Hillsborough, California, won the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award for Health Advancement by designing a water filter using carbon to remove heavy metals from water.
  • Lauren Ejiaga of New Orleans, Louisiana, won the STEM Talent Award.
  • • Lauren's research focused on how current levels of ultraviolet light from the sun due to ozone depletion impacts plant growth and performance.

Email us at: [email protected]

Please visit our good friends at Science Communication Journal Club, "your hub for keeping up", home of the SciComm JC Podcast.

Remember...follow the science!

In California we've noticed that winegrape harvests have shifted to earlier and earlier due to a warmer climate over the past few decades. Along with this shift in agriculture we've also experienced extended and more catastrophic fire seasons. 

Last week the huge Kincade fire swept through Sonoma County, and threatened several towns, including a neighborhood that was incinerated only two years ago. 

In today's episode we learn of JD's experience in this "new normal" of climate change. 

• Mini black holes
• Genetically modified rice
• The California wildfires

• This is a story about a fascinating new discovery about a less extreme, extreme of the universe's extremities.
• Todd Thompson and his colleagues theorised that there may be smaller black holes existing as a part of binary star systems. Too far away to be sucking in material from the other sun, but still able to give us a clue to its presence.
• The team have detected a star that moves between positive and negative Doppler shifts and have calculated that it is orbiting a mini black hole some 3.3 times the mass of our sun.
• There is a chance that it could be a neutron star, however Todd Thompson says "I would actually be even more excited if that were true!" This is because the maximum mass calculated for a neutron star, before it turns into a black hole, is 2.6 times the mass of the Sun.  

Live Science

• In parts of Asia impoverished families must live on as little as a few bowls of rice a day. This diet can leave people lacking in vitamin A and it is a killer; a significant one.
• Vitamin A shortage kills more children than malaria and HIV and tuberculosis combined. Around 2,000 deaths per day.
• Peter Beyer, professor of cell biology at Freiburg University in Germany, and Ingo Potrykus of the Institute of Plant Sciences in Switzerland have developed a new type of rice, known as golden rice. The rice gets its golden colour from beta-carotene (the pigment that makes carrots orange). Aside from making it look pretty, the really important thing is that the body can use beta-carotene to synthesize Vitamin A. By simply changing the crop it could be possible to save thousands of lives each day.
• Golden rice was developed last century, some 20 years ago; and as yet it has not made its way to the people that it was developed to help.
• Why? Author Ed Regis has investigated this issue in his book "Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood" which was published last month.
• The core issue appears to be the fact that Golden Rice is genetically modified. Regis makes no qualms about placing the blame at the feet of organisations like Greenpeace. Greenpeace claim that Golden Rice is a hoax; a red herring to divert attention from the real issue of the crippling poverty that is creating this issue in the first place.
• Whilst Greenpeace haven't helped the situation, they also aren't the ones responsible for the complete lack of movement. That dubious honour goes to an international treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety which came into force in 2003.
• Principle 15 of this treaty states that if a product of modern biotechnology poses a possible risk to human health or the environment, measures should be taken to restrict or prevent its introduction".
• Despite this, there is now finally work being done on trying to get these crops to the people who so badly need them. Steps have been made toward approval in the US, Canada and Australia (so countries that really struggle with malnutrition.

The Guardian

JD goes on a well-deserved rant about fleeing a wildfire. However, the circumstances and ultimate result were very different this go 'round.

• Origin of modern humans 'traced to Botswana'
  • A study published in Nature last week utilized mitochondrial DNA to reach the conclusion that modern humans originated in northern Botswana.
  • However, many anthropologists are saying "not so fast". 
  • Problem is, mDNA is just one line of evidence.
  • Being mDNA also means that it is a small fraction of the human genome
  • They could very well be on to something here, but it's way to early to draw conclusions.
  • Perhaps we could state it as, "mDNA study suggests origin of modern humans may be northern Botswana"
  • BBC Science and Environment, The Conversation
•  Electric cars could charge in 10 minutes with a new kind of battery
  • A new type of lithium car battery may be able to power a drive of 320-kilometres with just a 10 minutes charge
  • To accomplish this fast charge the battery temperature must be raised to 60 °C during the recharge. 
  • High-rate charging usually results in one of the batteries electrodes getting coated with lithium blocking the flow of energy and eventually killing the battery. But this pre-heating protocol allows the battery to fast charge will no ill effects. 
  • This could be on our roads in as little as 2 to 3 years. 
  • New Scientist, Nature, The Guardian
•  There's No Evidence Cannabis Treats Anxiety or Depression
  • Wayne Hall at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues evaluated all the published and unpublished research between 1980 and 2018 on the use of cannabinoids to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD, and psychosis.
  • They found little evidence that medicinal cannabinoids helped to treat either the overall disorders or their individual symptoms. 
  • In one study of 24 people, THC actually made symptoms of psychosis worse.
  • 83 studies, total of 3000 participants
  • Only 40 studies were randomised controlled trials, the gold standard for medical evidence.
  •  The Lancet Psychiatry, Live Science, New Scientist
• A Man Kept Getting Drunk Without Using Alcohol. How?
  • 46 year old man
  • Became prone to falls, aggressive behavior, and "brain fog"
  • Arrested for driving while intoxicated, but insisted that he didn't drink at all…that he doesn't drink
  • People were convinced that he was tipping the bottle in secret
  • Instead, he was experiencing Auto-brewery Syndrome
  • Stool samples revealed abnormally high levels of Saccharomyces boulardii and Saccharomyces cerevisiae
  • Further had the patient eat some carbs and the yeast converted those carbs to alcohol, which was detected in a blood test at 0.05%.
  • Treatment and close monitoring for two months seemed to do the trick, though he did have a relapse when he ate some unauthorized pizza and sugary soda
  • The good news is that his gut flora seem to be back in balance and he can enjoy carbs and all that good stuff.
  • BMJ Open Gastroenterology, Live Science

That concludes this episode of the Blue Streak Science Podcast.

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team.

Our hosts today were Chris MacAlister, and me.

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!

• A new land speed record
• Are we alone? Are we intelligent life?
• A brainless blob

• The US House of Representatives' science committee has advanced bills promoting scientific integrity policies with bipartisan support.
• The Scientific Integrity Act would codify principles of scientific integrity for federal agencies that fund, conduct or oversee scientific research.
• If adopted into law, the bill would require the head of each agency would have to develop, adopt and enforce their own policy for dispute resolution and integrity code and submit it both to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and to Congress.
• The agencies would also be required to appoint a scientific integrity officer, who would be charged with posting annual reports on the agency's misconduct record.
• It would prevent agency officials from interfering with scientific research, including through putting their thumbs on the scale of findings or blocking the distribution of data or public communications. 
• The measure would give scientists the right to review information their agencies distribute about their work to correct any technical inaccuracies.
• Federal scientists would be free to talk to the media if contacted, and agencies would be required to offer scientists the option to respond directly to press inquiries about their work.

• Cataglyphis bombycina, the Saharan Silver Ant lives in a desert, a very hot desert. The ground temperature can regularly reach 60oC (140F).
• Whilst the coast is clear the use their impressive speed to scavenge for anything that has fallen victim to the intense heat.
• This record had been suspected for some time. An estimate was made in 1983 that they may be able to travel at around 1 meter per second.
• An estimate is all that has remained for nearly 40 years until Sarah Pfeffer and her team at Ulm University in Germany came along armed with high speed cameras. Whilst the ants did fall shy of the 1 meter per second estimate at 85.5 cm per second they weren't all that far off.
• Pfeffer has posted her findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology where she also reveals that the ants unusually short legs take up to 40 steps per second. Not only are their legs unusually short but the ants move them in an unusual pattern too, although it seems likely that this has less to do with generating speed and more to do with efficiently moving over the sandy ground.

New Scientist, Nature

• This paper outlines the fact that human intelligence required a lot of other evolutionary developments to come into existence. By multiplying the probabilities of each individual evolutionary step we get the overall probability of intelligence as the ultimate evolutionary development to occur. The roughly estimated odds become one in 100 trillion.
• However, there is a part from that article which according to me is intrinsically flawed. The article assumes the only probable type of intelligence is human intelligence. On this podcast, we have discussed before that the human centric intelligence is probably a significant bias introduced by scientists looking for an intelligence similar to ours.
• I personally have the same problem with us looking for life elsewhere than Earth. We operate under the same presumption that life can only exist based on carbon, RNA or DNA and metabolic processes similar to what we can observe on Earth. We do that because we can't rationally imagine other types of life-forms and respectively can't go look for them. 
• We know that it's definitely possible for life to have evolved based on silicon. But we have no idea how this life would have evolved, given that silicon has very similar properties to carbon but also being a different element it might have led to different molecular structure of life and hence evolution.
• It might be completely impossible for us to detect life, and by extension intelligence, elsewhere outside of our planet if we focus entirely on looking for life or intelligence of the same type as the earthly ones. And yes human type of intelligence may well be one in a trillion flukes of evolution, but that doesn't mean that intelligence altogether is not common in the universe.

• So, this story comes to us from Smithsonian.com where it is entitled "Paris Zoo Unveils Bizarre, Brainless 'Blob' Capable of Learning—and Eating Oatmeal". And in its most basic form this story is about a zoo opening a new exhibit. And rather than calling this creature by its real name, they have dubbed it "the blob" in honour of a 1950's grabe B horror flick.
• As a zoology graduate I was always going to be all over this story, however this creature is not an animal. And I use the word creature intentionally as it's not a plant or fungus either. But it is one of the most fascinating creatures on this planet. It's actually called a slime mould (Physarum polycephalum) and if a zoo offered to show you a creature that looks like someone has sneezed on a log then you'd probably not be too keen to check it out. 
• Personally, I would go and check it out. Not because it is an impressive visual spectacle but more as an acknowledgment of what it is. You can go and see a decent painting anywhere but people flock to see the Mona Lisa because of the meaning that it carries and this is what slime moulds are like or me, sort of. So if you're already at the Louvre, why not jump on the Metro to take you 9km to the zoo too?
• So why am I waxing lyrical about slime moulds? Firstly, they are an evolutionary odd-ball, formally classified as a "what the hell is that?" or to give it its proper scientific title a Protist.
• It's not just their classification that is weird. They are amoeboid, singled celled creatures, but they can grow to be meters in size. They contain multiple nuceli within the single cell. Whilst they can spread in a mould like fashion, they can also locomote and they travel woodland floors hunting microbes and fungal spores. The zoo raised theirs on oatmeal. And whilst there are people struggling to cope with the fact that humans can have multiple genders, slime moulds have 720 sexes!
• Whilst all of these things are interesting, my favourite thing about slime mould is that it is intelligent. It doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have brain cells, it is a cell!
• Slime moulds can solve mazes and this is still at the basic end of what they can do.
• They aren't great fans of light, preferring dark, damp areas. Back in 2006, at the University of Southampton, a robot was built and provided with a slime mould pilot. The mould was able to drive the robot away from light to hide in shaded areas.
• In fact, slime moulds are so intelligent that humans are starting to turn to them for wisdom. In 2010 researchers from the University of Oxford and Hokkaido University in Japan found that slime mould formed networks amazingly similar to the Tokyo transit system when linking up oat flakes positioned like surrounding cities. Let's just focus on that for a second. A mould has managed to recreate a complex and efficient transport system designed by professional, qualified humans!
• It's slime moulds ability to exhibit this decentralised intelligence that are making them a case study for people looking to develop intelligence systems that could be used in things like autonomous cars.

 ScienceAlert, Smithsonian

Can you keep up with our crack team of quiz masters?

Shout out to Abby Tabor, one of the early guests of Blue Streak Science, and now doing some brilliant work with the NASA Ames Research Center.

Abby hosts NASA in Silicon Valley Live on YouTube. 

Check it out!

That concludes this episode of the Blue Streak Science Podcast.

[email protected]

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team.

Our hosts today were Nevena Hristozova, and Chris MacAlister.

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!

As science news went this week, it was all over the map. Continuing from last week's Nobel Prizes, we moved to Pleistocene food storage, and a green milestone for the UK.

• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Prehistoric Cans of Soup
• Good news from the UK regarding energy consumption

• Science Nobels are traditionally awarded to 3 people and the 3 people accepting this award are Stanley Whittingham of the State University of New York in Binghamton; John Goodenough of the University of Texas in Austin; and Akira Yoshino of Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo. 
• Stanley Whittingham was the first person to show that the concept of a Lithium battery could work.
• John Goodenough realised that the problem with Whittingham's battery was the materials that he was using. By switching the materials around he managed to create a lithium ion battery that was almost twice as powerful as Whittinghams. Despite the improvement, the battery still wasn't commercially viable as it was still liable to overheating and would not cope with many recharges.
• The final leg of our story lays with Akira Yoshino. By substituting the use of pure lithium within the battery with lithium ions he made the batteries safer and more durable without compromising on the power output. His work was the final step that allowed lithium ion batteries to become marketable.

Science, HuffPo Science

• There is now evidence from the Pleistocene Epoch that our ancestors employed a novel method for preserving nutritious fats and proteins
• Fossil evidence they looked at was over 400,000 years old
• The findings show that these paleolithic humans didn't eat everything immediately after making a kill
• In most of these cases the prey were Persian fallow deer
• The researchers examined more than 80,000 bones collected from this cave called Quesem Cave, near Tel Aviv
• The leg bones brought back to the cave often showed cut marks which were different than the butchering marks
• The researchers suspect these cut marks were made later to remove dried skin which was wrapped around the bones to aid in preservation
• According to lead author Ruth Blasco of Tel Aviv University, "We discovered that preserving the bone along with the skin for a period that could last for many weeks enabled early humans to break the bone when necessary and eat the still nutritious bone marrow"
• This bone marrow preservation strategy demonstrates the cognitive ability of these Pleistocene humans to plan for future needs, using a method which helps to reduce energy expenditures to achieve the required caloric intake necessary for survival. 

Live Science, Science Advances

• The UK has just had its first ever annual quarter where more of the country's energy was generated by renewable sources, rather than from fossil fuels. 
• The figures came from a study by climate website Carbon Brief
• Over the period, 40% of electricity generation came from renewables. With half from wind farms and the rest from biomass, solar and hydropower. By comparison, gas power stations provided 38 per cent of electricity, with coal supplying just 1 per cent. Nuclear's share was around 20 per cent.
• The figures are provisional though. The Carbon Brief figures are based on a preliminary analysis of government and industry data.

New Scientist

1. Title: Alexei Leonov: First person to walk in space dies aged 85

Sources: BBC World

1. Title: Cows painted with zebra stripes repel flies

Sources: The Guardian

1. Title: A supermassive black hole shredded a star and was caught in the act

Sources: Science News

That concludes this episode of the Blue Streak Science Podcast.

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team.

Our hosts today were Chris MacAlister, and me.

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!

• We have negative results
• The war on science
• Some yummy primordial soup
• And it's Nobel Prize week!

• Devang Mehta spent 4 years attempting to use CRISPR gene-editing technology to establish viral resistance in cassava, a tropical root crop and staple food for almost a billion people. What he ended up demonstrating was an increased level of viral resistance to CRISPR.
• The methodology of this work was considered solid in peer review, but it soon became clear that there was precious little interest from potential publishers. 
• Now, you may think that Mahta's position is simply a case of sour grapes, and it may be, but regardless of motivations, he backs up his position with evidence.
• Mehta cites a 2012 paper by Daniele Fanelli. This paper was a review of over 4000 published papers. It found that between 1990 and 2007 the proportion of papers that confirmed positive results to hypotheses increased by 22%, resulting in positive result rate of more than 85%. She concluded that scientific objectivity in published papers was declining.
• Publication is the lifeblood of academic research science. Funding is very closely linked to the prestige of publishing. So how can we ensure that science remains honest and impartial when the very foundations that sustain it demonstrate hefty prejudice?
• Aside from the dangers of feeding a positive feedback loop into theories and stifling contradictory evidence. There is also a more practical danger from this.
• If no one is interested in sharing the knowledge of failure, then how many more people will have to waste their time and limited resources repeating the failed experiments of others? 

Nature

• Nonpartisan taskforce of former government officials was formed at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, 
• co-chaired by Christine Todd Whitman, former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, who is a Republican, and former governor of New Jersey, and Preet Bahara, former United States Attorney
• The group is called the National Task Force on Rule of Law and Democracy.
• They report "almost weekly violations" of previous criteria
• According to Christine Todd Whitman: "Politics is driving decisions and has been for some time,"Right now, any finding that seems to be restricting business, especially the energy industry, appears to be destined for elimination.
• The Hurricane/sharpie incident is not the only time
  • At the Department of Agriculture economists published research showing that Trump's trade policies would be harmful to farmers. Those economists were relocated
  • A climate scientist published a science of the impact of global warming on communities in the Arctic, which earned that scientist a reassignment. 
• According to the task force
  • Advisory boards at the EPA have been shuffled and stuffed with more industry representatives
  • EPA leadership ordered scientists reverse their scientific research which showed that protecting wetlands from pollution conferred an economic benefit
  • At the same time this EPA leadership quashed a study which showed a particular toxic chemical in water was a much greater threat than previously known
• The task force states this problem has ballooned under the Trump administration due to the influence of special interests, and the appointment of unqualified cronies
• What do we do about this?
  • The report recommends new scientific integrity standards
  • New rules to discourage suppression or manipulation of scientific research
  • Better public access to government research
• Would that deter THIS administration? 
• What we need is new leadership before we can even begin to think about crafting and implementing those changes.
• And the best way to do that?
  • An overwhelming showing at the polls in November 2020

The Guardian

• RNA world theory supports the position that early genetics only existed in RNA, with DNA joining the party further into the future.
• This theory has been provided a boost thanks to the work of Thomas Carell et. al., published in Science last week. Carell and his team have managed to synthesize all 4 of the RNA nucleobases in conditions that are feasibly consistent with each other.
• Although, that's not to say that these conditions are straightforward. But they are summarised quite nicely by Davide Castelvecchi writing about the study in Nature.
• The process requires two ponds and some seasons. You start off with simple molecules in a nice hot pool of water, your classic primordial soup scenario. But then, you cool your soup and let it dry out, forming a residue of crystals. A rinse, or downpour of water washes away some soluble molecules and this paves the way for further reaction to occur. Follow this up with a final mix up and you start to see you nucleobases appear.
• Of course, we can never know whether this is how nucleobases first formed but that isn't really the point. By showing that this can be done makes the argument that it did occur spontaneously, and possibly even here on Earth, even more compelling.
• dingly lucky event, but one that is likely to happen on many other planets

Nature

Two Americans and a British scientist have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability."

William G. Kaelin Jr. of Harvard University, Gregg L. Semenza of Johns Hopkins University, and Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe at the Francis Crick Institute in Britain and Oxford University

They identified the molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying oxygen levels.

This morning the The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to James Peebles of Princeton University, and he gets "half" the award. 

The other half will be shared by Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and Didier Queloz who is at both the University of Geneva and the University of Cambridge

In particular, Peebles award was for "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology," 

Mayor's and Queloz's was "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star,"

More Nobel Prizes coming all week long.

We'll keep you posted on Twitter and in next week's episode.

That concludes this episode of the Blue Streak Science Podcast.

If you have any suggestions or comments email us at [email protected]

You can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or any other podcast player of your choice.  

If you have an iOS device like an iPhone or an iPad you can get the Blue Streak Science app from the App Store. 

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team.

Our hosts today were Chris MacAlister, and me

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!

• Giant Planets
• Bad news for the vapers
• Planet Nine from Outer Space
• Some really old bugs

• Scientists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain have discovered a planet almost half the size of Jupiter orbiting a star much smaller than our Sun.
• They used the so called radial velocity method – if a star is orbited by an object like a planet, due to the gravity of that object it will also wobble in space as the two bodies – the planet and the star will have their gravity forces working in opposite directions of each other.
• However, the ratio of the planet to star size was so big, that they originally thought that it's a system of two stars orbiting each other that they are detecting.
• Usually planets form gradually when a mass of material due to its gravity collects more and more materials, dust and debris from interstellar collisions and by doing so forms its own core.
• This one, however, is so big that it's impossible for it to have formed in this way, according to the principal investigators of the project, Juan Carlos Morales.
• The alternative hypothesis is that a disk of gas spontaneously collapses to form the core of a planet all at once.
• Apparently this is the first time astronomers are able to observe a planet which must have followed that pattern of development.

BBC Science and Environment, New Scientist

• In August of 2017 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it was investigating 94 possible cases of "severe lung illness associated with vaping" in teens and young adults.
• The CDC have now announced 805 confirmed or probable cases across 46 U.S. states. This includes 12 fatalities.
• Whilst patients report symptoms such as shortness of breath, coughs, chest pain, nausea, vomiting, fever and weight loss. The cause of the illness remains a complete mystery. There are some possible links to certain chemicals but that's about the best that we have.
• There appears to be a high correlation with patients vaping cannabis products and there are concerns that black market vaping products can also contain cannabis oils.
• The CDC recommend that people consider not using e-cigarettes while the investigation is ongoing. They also say that e-cigarettes should not be used by youths, young adults, pregnant women or adults who don't already use tobacco products. And, do not buy e-cigarette products off the street or modify the products or add substances that aren't intended for vaping by the manufacturer.

Live Science

• Scientists are exploring a new hypothesis that Planet Nine may not exist, that it is not a planet at all.
• Since it is so far from the Sun a planet is very hard to detect and it will receive very little light from the sun, and reflect very little light to be detected. A black hole won't be easier to detect.
• However, the scientists who propose this alternative hypothesis will sieve through the data from the Earth-orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to try and test for it.

Science

• Raphael Baumgartner at the University of New South Wales in Australia and his colleagues now have oldest credible fossil claim of around 3.48 billion years old.
• Their rocks came from Western Australia from a site known as the Dresser formation. It contains layered structures called stromatolites which are known to form when microbes grow into thin layers. 
• So how do you get credibility for such a precious artifact? You drill a hole into it. Inside, they discovered "exceptionally preserved organic matter" according to Baumgartner. There are even structures consistent with those seen in biofilms.
• Further validation came in the form of various chemical analyses which suggest that there was organic matter that had originated from living organisms.

New Scientist

Fact Checking Greta

That concludes this episode of the Blue Streak Science Podcast.

If you have any suggestions or comments email us at [email protected]

You can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or any other podcast player of your choice.  

If you have an iOS device like an iPhone or an iPad you can get the Blue Streak Science app from the App Store. 

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team.

Our hosts today were Nevena Hristozova, and Chris MacAlister.

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!

• New ideas on why we move around on two feet instead of four
• A story about a missing link I bet you didn't even know was missing
• Climate activist Greta Thunberg delivers a powerful and critically important speech at the United Nations

New Scientist

Live Science

United Nations Global Climate Action Summit

Greta Thunberg's speech:

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

"Thank you."

That concludes this episode of the Blue Streak Science Podcast.

If you have any suggestions or comments email us at [email protected]

You can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or any other podcast player of your choice.  

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team.

Our hosts today were Chris MacAlister, and me.

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!

• Scientist who can't agree
• Were humans really in Europe 210,000 years ago? Really?
• And if you think that's bananas then you'll love the first story
• World experienced hottest June on record in 2019, says US agency
• Massive, Human-Size Jellyfish Stuns Divers Off the Coast of England
• Ebola Outbreak in Congo Is Declared a Global Health Emergency

Fifty years since Apollo 11 first brought humankind to the Moon? No, it doesn't seem like yesterday. It's been way too long since we've left the comfort and safety of Earth orbit. Let's go back to the Moon and beyond!

• A recent visit to an asteroid
• Why catching a cold may not be such a bad thing after all
• And a not-so-recent visit to the moon

Science News, The New York Times, Science

• It was only a few years ago that we were getting so excited by NASA's Rosetta mission which orbited a comet, and its Philae lander which (kind of) successfully landed on it.
• As if this isn't impressive enough, Haybusba-2 is basically showboating now because it's not just gone down to the asteroid once, it's now done it twice! 
• On its first landing (in February) it collected some surface material; and this was pretty much the best that could be hoped for since the asteroid turned out to be much rockier than anyone had thought back when they were planning the mission.
• The people at JAXA know how to deal with stubborn space rock. In April, the spacecraft dropped a two-kilogram copper cylinder from about 500 meters above the surface to blast an artificial crater about 10 meters wide and 2 meters deep into its surface.
• This operation released material from deep within the asteroid. The team back on Earth watched where this debris settled and then sent Hayabusa down to pick some up.
• Hayabusa-2 will leave Ryugu in November (which I daresay will be a significant relief to Ryugu) and is due to return to Earth in 2020. At this point the coverage of this story in Science News says "That's when the team will confirm that the spacecraft successfully collected the dust."

Live Science

• A group of researchers have just published a paper in the journal Clinical Cancer Research which reports that cancer is vulnerable when exposed to a cold virus. 
• Whilst there are many, many forms of cancer there are even more pathogens that cause common colds. This is precisely why you never build immunity to colds, because you're not just dealing with one disease. 
• This study falls firmly into the small but promising category. It only involves 15 patients who were all suffering from bowel cancer. It this won't sound pretty but these patients were delivered a sizeable dose of common cold, in the form of Coxsackievirus-A21.
• This hour long viral jacuzzi was delivered and repeated for each patient before they were taken into surgery to have and remaining tumour removed.
• Why did they find? There was evidence that the tumours had been damaged by the virus in all the patients, but in one lucky patient the tumour had been completely destroyed!
• So what's going on? One of the problems with cancer is its ability to sidestep the immune system (since it is made up of your body's own cells). The Coxsackievirus damages cells which then coaxes the immune system into action, removing any compromised cells, cancer or otherwise.
• The biomechanics of this leave the cancer cells more vulnerable to this virus than healthy cells, which turns Coxsachievirus into a type of magic bullet.
• What is exciting about this study is that it's not just an idea, this is evidence of the treatment working in practice. What's more, it's not using some sophisticated bespoke designer virus, this is a wild strain common cold virus that is already kicking around and could theoretically work on any human with no tweaking needed. 

The Conversation, The Conversation(2)

• Earliest modern human found outside Africa
  • BBC Science and Environment, New Scientist, Science
• An ancient bird found encased in amber had a bizarrely long toe
  • Sources: Science News, The New York Times, Science
• Southern right whale moms and calves may whisper to evade orcas
  • Science News, New Scientist
• Cats in Australia Kill Over 2 Billion Wild Animals Each Year
  • Nature GeoScience, Live Science
• French healthcare will stop paying for homeopathic treatment in 2021
  • New Scientist

That concludes this episode of the Blue Streak Science Podcast.

If you have any suggestions or comments email us at [email protected]

You can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or any other podcast player of your choice.  

If you have an iOS device like an iPhone or an iPad you can get the Blue Streak Science app from the App Store. 

This show is produced by the Blue Streak Science team, and edited by Pro Podcast Solutions.

Our hosts today were Chris MacAlister and me.

I'm JD Goodwin.  

Thank you for joining us. 

And remember…follow the science!