Animals, astronauts, and an ancient ice bird

Monarch butterflies are something of an iconic butterfly species - think orange wings with large, regular black stripes and some white dots around the edges. They are famous for migrating en masse from the US and Canada to Southern California and Mexico for the winter. Those colourful wings signal more than just beauty - Monarchs are actually very, very poisonous, if even a human ate enough of them they would get very sick. But unlike most other toxic species, the monarch doesn’t make its own poison, as Phil Sansom found out earlier this year...

Anurag - The monarchs are the quintessential example of a butterfly that gets its poisons from its food. The monarch caterpillar feeds on the milkweed leaves and the milkweed leaves are producing poisons called cardiac glycosides

Phil - Cardiac glycosides, you said?

Anurag - Yeah - they bind to a universal animal enzyme and they stop it from functioning, which is what makes them poisonous to most animals.

Phil - What's the enzyme?

Anurag - The enzyme is the sodium-potassium pump and every animal cell, whether it's our human bodies or an insect’s body, uses this enzyme to shuttle salts across the cell membrane - it's a very critical cellular function. And without that, basically, the cell starts to have either too much salt inside or not enough, which basically causes the system to crash.

Phil - Sounds like a nasty poison!

Anurag - Nasty poison - and very general in the sense that all animals use these pumps so it's going to be very poisonous.

Phil - I just have to ask, you said they were called cardiac though. That means heart, right?

Anurag - Great question yeah. The name cardiac glycoside comes from the fact that these compounds have been used historically in traditional cultures to treat congestive heart failure. There've been several really interesting intersections of societal happenings with cardiac glycosides. And one of them is that Vincent van Gogh, as I assume all the listeners will know, in the last two years of his life and in his paintings, they took a turn. His paintings started having much more yellow, and halos around the lights that are so famous in starry night or in the sunflower paintings. Van Gogh was being treated for epilepsy at the time with extracts of the foxglove plant, which have cardiac glycosides. What we now know is that a side effect of too much of this medicine is yellow vision and seeing halos around bright objects.

Phil - That's amazing. Now I assume the monarch butterflies aren't having their cells unable to take salts in and out, and they're not getting their heart conditions treated. How do they not have all this stuff happen to them?

Anurag - The monarch butterfly has three specific mutations that we're aware of in the genes that code for its sodium potassium pump. Quite remarkably, those three single base pair changes alter the physical structure of that pump, making it about 200 times less likely that a cardiac glycoside will bind and stop that pump from functioning.

Phil - But then the butterflies and the caterpillars go beyond that don't they? Because you said that they actually not only get resistant to the poison, but start to use it themselves.

Phil - Absolutely. Yeah. I think one of the most fascinating things about monarch butterflies is they are themselves poisonous and they advertise it with that highly contrasting orange, black and white coloration. The monarch brings those compounds into its body, packs them away in its wings primarily, and that gets used then as the monarch's defense against predators like birds.

Phil - You know, it all sounds like a lot of effort to go through when you could just eat a plant that's not poisonous.

Anurag - No question - it's a lot of effort! But one of the consequences is you've got that resource largely to yourself. You know, one of the axioms in nature is that specialisation is beneficial. A jack of all trades is master of none. But we can't really think of it just as the Monarch butterfly deciding to specialise in eating the milkweed. What really more likely happened is that the monarch butterfly ancestor made initial steps towards feeding and specialising on milkweed. In response to that, the milkweed reciprocally evolved a host of defences to try to push the monarchs away. We call that coevolution when two species are going back and forth, evolving in response to each other.

Another one of the side effects of the pandemic has been having university students off campus, and despite Zoom calls and Skype, it’s not quite the same thing as getting to wander round the buildings and explore. Back in May one group decided to have a go at making online uni more immersive using virtual reality - that’s right, they built a 3D virtual environment of the University of Lincoln, and if you happen to have a headset, you can look around and explore as BBC presenter Chris Berrow heard from Chris Headleand...

Chris H - So this all started really as we were trying to create like a virtual meeting room space and because we wanted to use this for university research projects and even actually embedding some research experimentation in there, we tried to base it off a university building. Literally just as we got to the point where we were starting this project, we noticed that there was a lot of stuff coming up on Twitter about people missing being on campus because of lockdown just kicking in. And university is a weird engagement, right? You move there, it becomes your home, it becomes a big part of your life. And suddenly all these people have been told that they basically couldn't socialise with their friends, couldn't, you know, mingle with their kind of extended family and university's a lot more than its buildings. It's a lot more than its campus. It's a community. It's the research. It's the ethos of the environment. The buildings are really closely linked to a lot of those memories as well.

Chris B - You know, you can get bogged down in doing every single metre of every single corner and then making sure that the walls are round here instead of there being a straight line. How kind of liberal were you when it came to the actual designing of the campus?

Chris H - We want to make sure that all the buildings were actually recognisable as the building they were supposed to be. But if you learn to navigate this, you can also navigate in the campus, you can get a sense of where you are. Everyone has their favorite bit of campus, you know, and if we try to do things too accurately, you know, things change quite often. We're quite dynamic. We're quite an agile university and I literally just couldn't keep up to date with the minor tweaks that we make as we go along.

Chris B - The one question that my wife who actually went to the university said I had to ask you was, did you include the swans? Because swans are such, apparently a huge part of going to Lincoln University.

Chris H - Yeah. We are super into our waterfowl at Lincoln. Everything is Swan something, you know, our bar is the Swan. There’s mythology around these swans, there’s swan watching, you know you’re not really a University of Lincoln student unless at some point you have been chased by a swan. I mean even our mascot is Swanny. We really wanted to get swans in there, but I am not a free-form modeller and I am not an animator, and I couldn’t not find anything that didn’t look like a really ugly swan. I couldn't find anything that matched the rest of our assets. And I thought this is just not gonna work. So I couldn't get anything like that in version one. But fortunately one of my colleagues from the school of media, Graham Cooper, has created this absolutely fantastic swaggering swan. It struts, it swaggers, it's got this kind of like funky attack mode. We're hoping he's going to go out there in the next update.

Have you played enough today? We all know we should try and move our bodies a bit and eat some vegetables for our health, but for some researchers, it’s also really important that we try and introduce some playfulness into our lives where we can. And playing is not just for kids, as Katie Haylor heard from Stuart Brown of the National Institute for Play in California back in September…

Stuart - Though we are capable of imagination and imaginary play as adults, the drive to play and the percentage of time one, in adulthood, plays is less than obviously than when we were children. But the wiring of the brain to respond to play signaling occurs throughout life. It's different in various ages and cultures and genders and so on, but it's there. So that the ability to respond to playful stimuli is a part of being human through our life cycle.

Katie - So what constitutes play as an adult? Is it having a giggle, relaxing, doing a hobby?

Stuart - I like to think of the best way to define play for adults and really for children too, is as a state of being in which what you are doing and what you are experiencing is voluntary. It's fun. It gives you a sense of freedom from anxiety about the time pressure or the outcome. It's something you want to engage in again, it can be highly varied. The individual response to playful stimuli can be gardening, reading a novel, climbing a mountain, going to a pub and having fun with your buddies. You know, there are all kinds of phenomena that constitute true and or real play, but it is essentially a state of being that is different from all others. And that's not a common way of thinking of play. We think of it as a little nonsensical, it's purposeless or appears purposeless. It's not as important as real responsibility. And yet, when I look at the phenomenon of severe play deprivation, it has a profile amongst adults and children that indicates it's a necessity for being fully human.

If you look at the long developmental evolutionary history of play itself and look at, you know, reptiles who don't play as frequently, or as vigorously as mammalian and bird species, you find a mosaic of play that is highly varied. Just like there's a mosaic of sleep that's highly varied. But you still see play occurring in the more complicated, more intelligent species. And it occurs and can be defined as a separate form of behaviour from all others.

Katie - I appreciate we live in a complex world, made up of complex societies, but do you think there's enough play around?

Stuart - It depends on the circumstances. You know, I think right now with the COVID-19 shelter at home, I think it's tough. No youth sports, no adult gatherings that are festive, you know. I think it's tough to play enough. And I think that we're gonna see some consequences from that.

Katie - Do you have any suggestions as to how people can build play into their lives? Because as you were talking, I was just wondering if it would be appropriate to kind of build play somehow into the work environment?

Stuart - No, I think it's very possible to build play into the work environment. I think it's very possible for an individual to recognise that they need it, and for them to find something in their day, that gives them a sense of freedom and a sense of fun and a sense of not relying on outcome. So that people realise that just like hand washing and good nutrition are important, so too is finding for yourself moments, even when you're stressed, that are playful. Whether it's music or dance or, you know, imaginary fantasies, it is an important element of personal health.

Have you ever thought about where the metals in your phone come from? Or in electric cars? Cobalt is one of nature’s 118 chemical elements, and for centuries it’s been valued for its distinctive blue colour, but more recently it’s become a vital ingredient in the production of re-chargeable batteries. It’s mainly been extracted from ore quarried or mined on land, a process which can be environmentally damaging and disruptive for the communities who live nearby. But what if there was a different source of cobalt, and other metals, we need for electric car batteries? Well there is, but it’s deep down in the ocean and, as you might expect, plans to mine for it there are not without controversy. Some of the ocean reserves are in what’s known as the Clarion–Clipperton Fracture Zone - the CCZ - an area that’s about as big as Europe four thousand metres below sea level in the Pacific, as Eva Higginbotham heard earlier this year...

Eva - Despite being miles away from civilization, the CCZ has been an area of great interest for two key groups. Those who see it as a great resource opportunity, and those who feel it should be protected. Now, this is because the seabed in the CCZ is absolutely littered with polymetallic nodules, these strange potato-shaped lumps that are jam-packed with various metals, including cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese. I spoke to Gerard Barron, the CEO of Deep Green, a deep sea mining company, focused on these nodules.

Gerard - A lot of people don't think about what goes into the battery that's in your mobile phone, or all the electric vehicle batteries that are going to be driving around our roads. But those batteries are made up of metals like cobalt. And in the case of cars, they're made up of nickel and cobalt and copper. And if you think about our desire to move away from fossil fuels, that means we're going to need hundreds, in fact billions, of tons of metals that are required for the green transition. So today all of these metals come from terrestrial known landmines, and a lot of people are shocked when they realise just what an environmentally unfriendly process mining has always been

Eva - Gerard's company Deep Green recently showed some research arguing that the damage we do to the environment by traditional land mining to get these metals was greater than the damage we would do to the deep ocean through the use of their machines, which they call gentle giants, essentially like plows that would run along the sea bed scooping up the nodules. The thing is, a lot of ocean conservation advocates and environmental scientists have disputed that conclusion. Here's Professor Alex Rogers of Rev Ocean.

Alex - The risk lies in the fact that we know so little about the deep ocean, both in terms of what lives down there, but also in terms of the way it actually works. What we understand so far, because of the relatively low supply of food into the deep ocean and the low temperatures, things happen very, very slowly. So animals grow and live for a very, very long time. If the ecosystems of which these animals are a part of are damaged, then recovery doesn't take place for decades or even hundreds or thousands of years, if it occurs at all

Eva - But what is living so far below sea level anyway? According to Gerard, not much.

Gerard - There's not much food down there, which means there's not much life down there. And in fact, most of the life that is in the area is very small organisms that live in the muck. So you don't find plants. You don't find coral reefs. You don't find lots of animals moving about.

Eva - On balance, companies like Deep Greens see the ecological impact of deep sea mining as the lesser of two evils when compared to terrestrial mining. But Alex and many other ocean scientists strongly disagree.

Alex - I think that's an incredibly dangerous argument to get into. You know, if you start to sort of toss up valuations of one form of life versus another, I think you get into very, very risky territory. I mean, this life is down there not doing nothing. It's very difficult to simply discard all that diversity of life that occurs in the deep ocean on the grounds that well, we don't see it every day. It's not an argument that I think is a valid one, particularly given our lack of knowledge of the deep ocean at the moment.

Eva - There's also the wider impact on life that lives above the seabed. Mining activities will stir up large plumes of sediment into the water, which will go several hundred metres above the sea floor. The wastewater and sediment produced from the mining will be dropped back in the ocean at an as yet undetermined depth, which is bound to interrupt life all the way down. There's also the fact that all this mining would be very noisy, which would throw off animals like whales that use echolocation to find their way around. It seems clear that deep sea mining for polymetallic nodules would be an absolute catastrophe for the deep sea ecosystem, but Gerard would argue, but that is a price we should be willing to pay.

Gerard - Waiting is not an option. It is irresponsible to suggest we should wait another 10 years while we learn more because climate change is real. One of the most impactful factors of climate change comes as a result of burning fossil fuels. And if, as our study found, that actually the increased metal production on land that will be necessary to meet the demands of the green transition releases gigatons more of CO2 emissions, then that's a really dumb thing to be doing. What we should be doing is continuing to research. We should be continuing to learn. And then we should be with the knowledge that we gather, make informed, intelligent decisions.

Eva - Many people I spoke to, including Alex, suggested that this was a bit of a false choice. That is to say, we don't have to choose either environmentally damaging land mining or environmentally damaging ocean mining. There's a lot of research at the moment trying to make batteries and other goods important for renewable energy without using these metals. Ultimately, most ocean conservationists are calling for a ban on deep sea mining of at least 10 years while research into impacts continue.

Here in Europe it is dark and cold, and thanks to having switched back to regular time from Daylight Saving Time back in October, it’s even darker in the evenings than otherwise. But where did Daylight Saving Time come from, and is it still a good idea? Eva Higginbotham tried to answer this question back in November...

Eva - Here in Europe the clocks have recently gone back, causing - as usual - much confusion. And it’s not just humans that are missing their appointments; in the words of a Facebook friend, “how do you explain to a cat who routinely gets fed at 4pm that the clocks went back and he is screaming at me an hour early?”

The process of switching back and forth to daylight saving time - or daylight savings time, as most call it - feels unnatural. Why then do we do it?

The concept comes rather surprisingly from Benjamin Franklin, who, on holiday to Paris, saw the locals sleeping in through the early summer mornings and staying up after dark - and wondered whether they couldn’t just shift their schedules to save on candles. It was a bit of a joke - he suggested using cannons to wake everyone up - but by World War 2 many countries had adopted it and it’s stayed with us almost ever since.

For countries farther from the equator, with more pronounced seasons, the idea makes theoretical sense. If you wake up around 6,7,8 am to go to work, you’ll catch the full day’s worth of sun in winter, but miss the sunrise in summer. May as well put the clocks back, make the sunrise effectively happen ‘later’, and catch more daylight.

To understand how it works in practice, though, you’re getting into the complex world of the body clock. Our bodies run on a close to 24-hour rhythm, raising our temperature and blood pressure when it’s time to wake up, controlling our hormone levels throughout the day, releasing melatonin that helps us sleep at night. Each cell has its own clock, which keeps time by a ‘master clock’ in the underside of the brain. And the master clock sets its time by the sunlight.

But - every person is different. The reason you get some being morning larks and some being night owls is because people’s body clocks synchronise with the light differently. You can get data on this by looking at the times people wake up on their days off work - and data from Americans shows that three quarters would prefer to wake up and sleep later. Daylight saving time then moves the official time in the opposite direction to what they’d prefer - increasing what’s called their ‘social jet lag’, and bringing in all sorts of health problems.

So night owls don’t like the new times. Farmers generally don’t like the change, because they wake up with the sun anyway. And whenever people are surveyed on the issue, it’s usually a minority saying they think it’s worth the hassle.

But, does it save energy on lighting houses, as Ben Franklin suggested? There’s evidence from Australia and the USA that reductions in energy demand for lighting were matched by increased demand for air conditioning during the longer daytime. In the words of the University of Washington’s Hendrik Wolff, “everywhere there is air conditioning, our evidence suggests that daylight saving is a loser.”

There’s counter arguments though that the extra light is just good for us. People spend more time outdoors; the roads are lighter for the evening rush hour; and there’s less crime because of the light. In response, others propose: well if it’s so good in summer, why not year round? Perennial daylight saving time - effectively moving your country one time zone to the east.

But that proposition also causes arguments, as it would mean that in the winter, school children and workers would likely be starting their days in pitch darkness, and lots of circadian rhythm experts warn that that would cause harm too.

So, the debate continues, but for now, it seems opinion will keep flip flopping on whether it’s worth making the switch. Which seems pretty appropriate, actually