Our Changing World

Claire Concannon hears from Dr. Brigid Ryan of the University of Auckland about the New Zealand genetic frontotemporal dementia study and speaks to some of the family members involved in this unique research study.

Frontotemporal dementia is one of the sneakiest forms of dementia, arriving with no warning signs and slowly chipping away at a person's personality, behaviour and language. It even impacts your thought process and judgement. If the disease is triggered by an unknown cause, people may not get properly diagnosed until quite late. However one unique New Zealand study into frontotemporal dementia is trying to change all this.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

What happens in brain cells to cause dementia actually occurs over a long time period. The goal of the New Zealand genetic frontotemporal dementia study, being led by Dr Brigid Ryan in the Centre for Brain Research in the University of Auckland, is to identify signals that the body is giving off in the early stages, before symptoms occur, that can be used as indicators that the person is going to develop dementia.

Known as preclinical biomarkers, the researchers won't know exactly what they are until they find them, thus, they need to run many test on participants each year - blood tests to look for microRNA changes, smell tests to check for olfactory deficits, MRI's and memory tests to look for changes in the brain structure and function.

This is where the commitment of the participants come in. This research is only possible because one New Zealand family, following the diagnosis of one of their family members with a version of frontotemporal dementia caused by a genetic mutation, have put themselves forward to be part of the study.

Claire Concannon learns from the researchers about this type of dementia, the details of the study and what they hope to find, while two of the family members involved share their thoughts and experience.

Learn more:

- You can read about the study in a piece published in the New Zealand medical journal

-Learn more about the Centre for Brain Research in this story by Dr. Victor Dieriks on his work on Parkinson's Disease…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Stories about the potential of bioengineering to transform health care. A new tracheostomy kit design that has halved the time for emergency operations and 3D bioprinting of tissues to help healing.

Stem cell infused wound dressings that promote healing, bone scaffolds that help knit breaks before dissolving naturally and clever device design to half the time of emergency life-saving procedures are all ways bioengineering is changing healthcare.

Bioengineering is paving the way for new and better healthcare, and new research projects - with 3D bioprinters at the University of Otago and tracheostomy kit design at the University of Canterbury - are looking for new ways to save lives.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ordering up organs

The over-arching goal for 3D bioprinting bioengineers, such as Dr. Jaydee Cabral and her team at Otago's Chemistry Department, is to develop 3D printed organs made of the patient's own cells for transplant. But it will be a while before they get there.

Cabral is focusing on overcoming one of the major roadblocks on the path to those new 3D printed organs - getting the vascularisation right. That means figuring out how to make the blood vessels needed to spread nutrients through the organs and take away waste material, and they are tricky to recreate. So Cabral is starting smaller, by creating a wound dressing that will promote healing for patients with chronic wounds, for example, foot ulcers in diabetic patients.

Alongside this, Mina Rajabi, a PhD student in Cabral's lab, is working on a bone healing scaffold. Instead of using metal rods or pins this scaffold will encourage the bones to knit together and grow, before naturally degrading inside the body.

Rajabi and Cabral' fill Claire Concannon in on the potential of 3D bioprinting and how to choose the right materials, add-ons and structure for what you are trying to make.

Dr. Cabral's work was funded by Health Research Council of NZ Explorer Grant and a Lottery Health Research Grant.

Designing better medical devices

When the pressure's on and someone's airway is blocked, sometimes the only solution is an emergency tracheostomy.

But it can be a time consuming procedure with many steps and the risk of complications.

Now a University of Canterbury student has designed a new, simplified version that has halved the time it takes to perform a tracheostomy

Katy Gosset talks to Student Engineer of the Year, Francis Pooke, and looks at the bigger picture of how bioengineering can transform health care…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Stories of physics research in Antarctica - into, under, and from within the ice. Claire finds out about measuring sea ice thickness and supercooling. Katy Gosset learns how scientists detect neutrinos from outer space.

The frozen continent of Antarctica is defined by its snow and ice. On land, freshwater ice sheets kilometres thick sit on top of rock. In the ocean, an area of sea ice twice the size of Australia forms each winter, to break up in summer.

Though distant and intangible to most of us, what happens to Antarctic ice has global impacts, hence researchers want to find the best ways to monitor it in a warming world.

But for others, Antarctic ice presents unique and ideal conditions to catch glimpses of elusive subatomic particles from space.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

How thick is that ice?

What happens to Antarctic sea ice affects the global climate and ocean circulation. But measuring its thickness is hard.

Not only does it change every year, but in some places, it can change every day. On top of that, it forms over a massive area, much of which is inaccessible. Added to that, radar from satellites has difficulty finding the bottom of the ice because of the salt and a soft mushy layer that confuses it.

Instead, satellites can only measure the distance between the top of the snow and ice and the water. Which is maybe only 10 - 20 cm thick, on the most volatile patch of ocean on the globe.

So, tricky to do.

Emeritus Professor Pat Langhorne started her career trying to use radar to measure sea ice thickness. But when she and colleagues discovered that the salt and 'warm' mushy layer under the ice prevented this, she put that research aside and went on to investigate other aspects of sea ice.

Now, 35 years later, she has returned to this problem.

Langhorne and her collaborators now use electromagnetic (EM) induction to identify the bottom of the ice layer by flying a torpedo like piece of equipment, called Rosie, low over the ice.

This 'EM bird' gives more accurate measurements, which can be ground-truthed by drilling holes in the ice and checking the thickness manually. Eventually the plan is to use Rosie's measurements to calibrate the satellites. And, though retired, this is what excites Langhorne, and keeps her coming in to her office at the University of Otago Physics department. 

Supercooling and crystals

But the ice in Antarctica has even more mysteries to it…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Claire Concannon learns about experiments aimed at slowing Parkinson's Disease progression. Sonia Yee explores research into our perception of emotions in a mask-filled world.

The complexity of the human brain is astounding. Billions of brain cells or neurons forming circuits, with countless connections sharing information. This allows us to perceive the world around us, form complex thoughts, respond and move.

But it also makes it difficult for us to fully understand how the brain will react when things go wrong, or when situations change.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Protein clumps and Parkinson's disease

Dr Victor Dieriks starts each day with the sound of the tissue culture hood alarm going off. This specialised enclosed bench has an air flow system that is constantly on, designed to keep the bench area as sterile as possible.

A Sir Charles Hercus Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Brain Research in the University of Auckland, Dr Dieriks' daily routine includes changing the media of the dishes containing the cells he is working with, making sure they keep growing until he is ready to do experiments with them.

He works with a type of human brain cell called pericytes, grown from Parkinson's diseased brains that have been donated to the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank.

Dr Dieriks is investigating the protein clumps that are found within brain cells in Parkinson's disease sufferers. These clumps are made up of a protein called alpha-synuclein, which under normal circumstances has a role in helping neurons communicate with one another. But when certain environmental factors trigger this protein to form clumps, it can lead to problems.

The alpha-synuclein clumps are toxic to brain cells. Over time the clumps accumulate, exceeding the repair capacity of the brain, causing neurons to die. The clumps also spread throughout the brain, and when specific neurons in a part of the brain called the substania nigra start to die off this leads to the movement dysfunction characteristic of Parkinson's disease. How fast this progresses and what the specific symptoms are varies from patient to patient.

To add further complexity, the clumps can form different shapes to which the cells react differently, and which seems to result in these differences in symptoms and disease progression…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

The return of South Island kākā to the the Ōtepoti Dunedin area has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. Claire Concannon hears about the tragedies and the triumphs, and the plans for what comes next.

The sun filters through trees as tūī and korimako compete for space at the sugar water feeders behind the Orokonui Ecosanctuary aviary. The giant bird cage contains three South Island kākā, waiting to be released, the hopes of many local groups resting on their feathered shoulders.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Orokonui Ecosanctuary sits in the hills just north of Dunedin city. Three hundred and seven hectares of land cleared of pests and enclosed with a predator proof fence. It is a safe space for native birds such as South Island robin, tūī, kiwi and korimako, as well as for tuatara, skinks and geckos - watched over by conservation manager Elton Smith and ranger Kelly Gough.

In 2008 six South Island kākā were released into the ecosanctuary, the beginning of a plan to re-establish a population of these birds, long lost to their ancestral Otago home. Different to North Island kākā, their South Island cousins are also found in Ulva, Codfish and Steward Islands, Waitutu and Eglington valley in Fiordland and in Kahurangi national park. The population in Orokonui Ecosanctuary has been growing since that initial release, with 49 birds counted in the latest survey, but it has also suffered some setbacks. One of which was the infamous 'year of the stoat', in 2015, when several stoats managed to get inside the fence and raided the sanctuary for a few months before they could be caught and killed.

While supplementary feeding entices them to stay around the ecosanctuary, kākā don't pay much heed to the $2.2 million predator proof fence that they fly over, and the population has also suffered losses due to 'deaths by misadventure' on the outside. But through collaboration with a group of organisations, the team at Orokonui Ecosanctuary are hoping these latest three juvenile birds that have come from the Dunedin Botanic Garden aviary will bolster the numbers, and live safe and happy lives.

The South Island kākā breeding programme at the Dunedin Botanic Garden, in its eleventh year, continues to help kākā parents in their aviary to raise new chicks, to supplement those breeding inside the ecosanctuary. Aviary curator Alisha Sherriff is currently in charge of this programme and works closely with the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital to ensure the birds are kept healthy and well, and fit for release…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Native mangroves in Aotearoa are expanding, putting them in conflict with some local communities & councils. A wade into the research about the value of mangroves & how they are managed.

Unlike many of Aotearoa's native plant species, our mangroves are actually doing great. Is that a problem, with mangroves clogging some waterways and taking over estuaries? Or is it just nature adapting, providing a great habitat for some birds and protection for our coastlines? Are mangroves the bad guys or just misunderstood?

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts

Finding footprints

Jacques de Satgé has spent three field seasons surveying for banded rail in mangroves. He has learned how to trap and GPS tag these cryptic birds. He has learned how to mark out quadrats in dense mangrove growth to survey for footprints, banded rail prey and vegetation. And he has also learned about the different properties of mud!

Jacques is part of the Human-Wildlife Interaction Research Group at Massey University, led by Associate Professor Weihong Ji. His research work is aimed at starting to fill a knowledge gap about how native birds, such as the banded rail, use mangrove habitats.

While New Zealand's mangroves don't have any obligate bird species - that is, a bird that relies solely on mangrove habitat - there is evidence that some birds do use mangroves for foraging and resting.

With hundreds of footprint surveys conducted at his four mangrove sites, coupled with GPS data from tagged banded rails, Jacques can now add what he has learned to the bigger picture of what we know about how birds use Aotearoa's temperate mangroves.

Mangrove expansion

Aotearoa's native mangroves can be found in the north half of the North Island, on the shorelines and estuaries found between Ōhiwa on the east coast and Kawhia on the west.

Mangrove is actually a term for a collection of tree species - those who can survive a twice-a-day dunking of sea water. Globally, there are many different species of tropical mangrove, and near the equator there can be mixtures of 20 to 30 species in just one stretch of coast. Right at the southern latitude limit of where mangroves can survive, in Aotearoa there is just one species of temperate mangrove (Avicennia marina subspecies australasica, known as Manawa)…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Katy Gosset finds out how researchers investigate the plant penetration powers of myrtle rust. Claire Concannon speaks with the caretaker of a tropical forest and hundreds of butterflies.

From the lab to lockdown, stories of caring for the forest.

The destructive plant fungus myrtle rust is continuing its march across Aotearoa. Katy Gosset speaks to researchers studying its plant penetration powers in an effort to combat it.

Then, a visit to a balmy tropical forest in Dunedin with an essential worker who is caring for all the living things inside it.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts

Fighting the plant pandemic

Since it was first found in Aotearoa in 2017, the invasive fungus myrtle rust has been spreading throughout the country, infecting native plants in the myrtle family - including pōhutukawa, rātā and mānuka.

Attacking the young leaves, shoot tips and young stems - myrtle rust results in deformed growth, affects flowers and fruiting, and can kill the plant.

Figuring out how to slow or stop this destructive fungus is what drives PhD student Sarah Sale. She wants to better understand the forces it uses to penetrate plants. To do this, she and her colleagues have gone to the microscale, and are using a unique device to do this.

The team is part of the Government's Beyond Myrtle Rust campaign and Katy Gosset visited them in the lab.

Unusually essential

When thinking about 'essential workers' Dr. Tony Stumbo's role is probably not the first that springs to mind. But the Tūhura and Living Environments Coordinator at the Otago Museum has an important job during lockdown - looking after the living things in the museum's tropical forest.

The tropical forest is a three-story enclosed space kept at an average temperature of 27oC. It is hot, humid, full of lush plants, and home to a terrapin (Shelly), as well as different species of birds, spiders and insects.

It is also a butterfly house. Each week hundreds of butterfly pupae are shipped to the museum from the Philippines or Costa Rica, to hatch in the quarantine room, before being released into the forest.

During lockdown, the careful protocols and checks that are involved in importing live, non-native species must continue, as well as the care of the pupae themselves. Tony explains his daily routine to make sure the plants, animals and butterflies are all being looked after.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Two stories of looking to the skies. Claire Concannon joins a hunt for planets outside of our solar system. Katy Gosset reveals the results of the annual New Zealand Garden Birds Survey.

This week, Our Changing World looks to the skies. We start by gazing out to space, exploring how scientists find planets outside of our solar system, and what they hope to learn. Closer to home (just outside the window, in fact) we find out about an annual survey taking place in New Zealanders' backyards, one we can all get involved in!

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts

Looking for planets

We all learn about our solar system in school - the sun, our closest star, and its family of eight planets. The beautiful clear New Zealand skies reveal many, many more stars within our own galaxy - do they have a planet orbiting them? Their own planetary systems? And what can we learn from them about our own?

Since the first exoplanets (extra solar planets - planets outside of our solar system, going around other stars) were discovered in the 1990's, scientists have been trying to get a clearer picture of the diversity of planets that are out there, to learn more about how planets and planetary systems form.

But finding exoplanets is hard. Compared to stars, they are small, dim objects in the sky. In Aotearoa New Zealand the MOA project - Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics - has identified dozens of exoplanets since the telescope's 'first light' in 2006. The project uses gravitational microlensing to do this, whereby light from a distant star is magnified by something passing between it and the earth, giving a light signature that astronomers can analyse and interpret.

Claire Concannon speaks to Dr. Nicholas Rattenbury of the University of Auckland to learn how this works, what scientists are finding, and what the future of this area of astronomy will be.

The New Zealand Garden Birds Survey

In winter 2021 New Zealanders counted more than 260,000 birds across 133 species, in just over a week, providing key data that will be used to assess the state of the country's bird population.

Running since 2007, the latest results from the New Zealand Garden Bird Survey show more sightings of fantail, or pīwakawaka, tūī, and kererū since 2009.

Meanwhile the silvereye population, which had been declining, appears to have stabilised.

But the survey, based on one first conducted in Britain, only exists because thousands of citizen scientists take to their gardens every year to help count the birds.

Katy Gosset joins them and finds the project also brings other benefits for participants.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

This week, how information flows in the cell from DNA to proteins, and how scientists have tapped into this to enable a new way to make vaccines using messenger RNA.

For hundreds of years humans have triggered the immune system on purpose, in advance, to prepare it for deadly invaders. Smallpox, measles, typhoid, and today, Covid-19.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts

We can trace the history of vaccination back to early days of smallpox inoculation - to China & India in the 1500s (maybe much earlier). They scratched matter from smallpox sores into the arms of people in an attempt to prevent future fatal infections. It was basic, but it was the start of a science saving millions of lives today. Over the years, vaccine technology has become more refined, and now, we have added one more way of making vaccines, using messenger RNA.

Information flow in the cell goes in one direction - from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA) to protein. The genes in our DNA encode instructions to build the protein machines that make our cells function. DNA is the store of this information and is kept in a small compartment called the nucleus. The ribosomes, the cellular machinery that makes proteins, are found in the main part of the cell - the cytoplasm. Messenger RNA then is the intermediary, it is a temporary copy of genes from the DNA, which can move to the cytoplasm to be translated into a protein.

While previous vaccines have directly used dead or crippled virus or bacteria - or viral or bacterial proteins or toxins - to trigger an immune response, mRNA vaccines work on an elegant system of sending in a message containing instructions for the cell to make a specific protein. Once the cell makes this protein some of it is presented on the outside of its cell membrane for the scanning immune system cells to test. Once it is recognised as foreign it triggers an immune response - antibodies against the protein are created, meaning the immune system is primed and ready to go should infection ever occur.

When Pfizer BioNTech announced in November 2020 that their new mRNA vaccine against Covid-19 infection had shown success in its Phase 3 clinical trial it was certainly big news for a world gripped in a pandemic, but also a leap forward for this field of research. The Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna are the first mRNA vaccines to be approved for public use…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

How do you find a tiny robin in a whole lot of forest? Researchers have been tracking the movements of forty North Island robins, or toutouwai, that have been reintroduced to a large reserve area near Palmerston North. Claire Concannon finds out how these Massey University researchers monitor them, and what they are learning.

The sound of static crackles in the damp bush. It's a common background noise for many bird conservation researchers following the birds they are busy trying to save. 'You start dreaming about it' says Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Zoe Stone, as she walks through the Turitea Reserve holding an aerial, with a receiver slung across her chest.

Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts

Zoe is tracking the movements of the forty toutouwai, or North Island Robins, that sing and peck their way through life in a 4000 hectare area of bush on the outskirts of Palmerston North. The toutouwai came from Bushy Park Tarapuruhi Forest Sanctuary near Whanganui and have been re-introduced to the area through a collective effort involving Palmerston North City Council, the Rangitāne o Manawatū iwi and researchers from Massey University, including Zoe and her colleague Professor Doug Armstrong.

While toutouwai do very well in fenced predator free reserves and offshore islands, re-introductions on the mainland have not had the same success.

But that's all about to change. After decades of work on predator-trapping, bird behaviour and tree flowering and seeding, conservationists are moving towards re-introducing native birds back into mainland forests. This toutouwai translocation is the ideal opportunity for researchers to gain helpful insights towards that goal.

They want to know what happens when you bring birds back to a large area like Turitea. Do they stay close to the release site? Or do they disperse more widely? What kind of area needs to be controlled for predators to keep them safe? How do they react to 'edges' like farmland? 

Each toutouwai has been fitted with a transmitter that broadcasts a signal on different radiowave frequencies. These signals can be detected by flying an aerial-equipped drone over the forest, or, the traditional way, by Zoe hiking through the bush and scanning for birds.

Zoe & Doug hope that what they learn will inform future bird re-introductions, and help with the overall larger goal of getting More Birds in the Bush.

To learn more:

Watch the Palmerston North City Council video Robins Return about the toutouwai translocation.

Zoe spoke with Karyn Hay about toutouwai for the Lately show in July 2021…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details