In this week's news pod, we preview the COP28 climate summit with Richard Black and get the latest on a confirmed case of a new strain of swine flu in the UK. Also, we speak to the researcher discovering the capacity for language learning in babies yet to be born, and hear from a scientist who has finally got their hands on a sample from the Bennu asteroid...
In this episode
00:55 - COP28: What to expect from the climate summit
COP28: What to expect from the climate summit
Richard Black, Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit
The COP28 summit is getting underway in the United Arab Emirates. Reducing the global reliance on fossil fuels and an international fund to help in climate adaptation are top of the UN climate summit’s agenda. Speaking with Chris Smith, Richard Black is from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and he also used to be the BBC World Service’s science and environment correspondent. He’s just touched down in the UAE and signed into the COP summit...
Richard - When you rock up to the conference venue here, it looks like any other centre where you might go, I don't know, to see a concert or this kind of thing. It's a big complex of buildings. Given the climate here, which is pretty warm, there's a lot of open air space. There are various buildings that contain meeting rooms. You've got a big media centre for all the journalists; what's called a plenary room, where all the government delegates can come together - and that's quite a lot of people because it's 200 countries pretty nearly, and each of them tends to have a delegation of several people - and you've got all the things you need to sustain this. So you've got a lot of food bars. There are places where people can just sit down and use a computer, that kind of thing. This is a big one. The numbers that are being quoted by the organisers are incredible: 90,000 people in the main bit of the centre, and possibly several hundred thousand who are attending the exhibit. So those numbers do seem very high and it's gonna be interesting to see whether they're actually born out in reality. We are actually standing on, for the duration of this - as we were in Glasgow two years ago, and we always are - a little piece of United Nations territory, because for the duration of the conference, this little bit belongs to the UN, not to the UAE.
Chris - Does that mean Vladimir Putin can turn up not be arrested?
Richard - Yes, provided he can get from the airport to the venue, he absolutely could. We often see this of course, at Big UN Summits. I remember a few years ago there was a big palava about Robert Mugabe going somewhere and the question of, you know, whether he would be arrested or not, you know, these are heads of state and these are fundamentally intergovernmental negotiations. So just like the United Nations themselves, the head of every government has a right to be here.
Chris - What's on the agenda? How will this play out across the, it's nearly two weeks that the conference is going to run for what's going to be the running order and discussing what
Richard - Yeah, so these events, one way to view them is as a series of concentric circles. So inside the middle circle and you've got the government negotiations. These are the bits that governments pay most attention to. There are formal documents that they actually negotiate line by line, and they all have to agree at the end of the conference. Then outside that, if you, the next circle outside you've got lots of international organisations. The World Meteorological Organisation, for example, are launching a report today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You can have groups of universities and things like this that are all connected to the process and kind of feeding into it a bit. And then outside that you've got civil society, which is sometimes the most sort of colourful bits with organisations. I mean, Friends of the Earth I've seen today, for example, a few others who are giving their own take on what's going on and launching their own reports. So in that innermost bit where the governments sit, there are a number of key issues that really are on the table. One of them is basically the idea of having a fund into which rich countries would pay, particularly those like Britain that have a, you know, long history of carbon emissions that have caused climate change, which would go to support the poorest, most vulnerable countries who are already feeling the impacts of climate change very viscerally. Some of those impacts are huge. So a few years ago there was a hurricane in the Caribbean, for example, on the island of Dominica: infrastructure damage and so on, damage to crops and so on - that was more than two years' worth of GDP. That hurricane was made more intense by climate change. So everything that the big polluting countries have done - putting out carbon emissions - affected Dominica's economy, so the argument is why shouldn't, in that case, Dominica get some assistance. The idea's been on the table for years. Last year, actually, governments agreed that it would be set up and it looks like it could actually become a thing at this year's cop. It could actually be established, agreed. There might even be some money paid into it as well. Rishi Sunak is among the leaders who've actually said they would put some money in. What will be more interesting to a lot of people in the UK particularly and and other developed countries particularly, is what happens with regard to reducing emissions. Because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who do all the science, they've basically said that in order to keep this 1.5 Celsius limit within reach, we ought to be halving carbon dioxide emissions this decade roughly, and then bring into net zero in 2050. So it's pretty drastic emission reductions. So there's a few agreements - well, a few ideas - on the table, shall we say, that could turn into an official agreement this time. One is the idea of tripling the amount of renewable electricity generation capacity in the world by 2030. Another is doubling the rate at which we are cutting energy waste. So becoming more efficient with the way we use energy. So currently that's running about 2% a year. The idea is to try and drive it 4% a year. And there may also be some agreement on phasing down - or even phasing out - fossil fuels. Personally, I think that's a bit unlikely, but you never know.
Chris - Bit of controversy heaped on this as well, isn't there? Because we've had this allegation - refuted by the organisers - that there were plans afoot to use the convention as a way to drive oil and gas deals across countries. And indeed, I was just looking at the Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph this week, which has got a couple of Emiratis walking out the conference venue and they're saying, "we're hosting COP 28 because we think the moral high ground might have oil underneath it." <laugh> Has that been discussed? Not the Matt cartoon, obviously, the wider, the wider aspects of this?!
Richard - It's forming a lot of the, the background noise to this and the conference chair, the United Arab Emirates, they will doubtless have to address this in press conference after press conference. Personally, I'm not surprised that any government frankly would try and do deals with any other government on, on anything else. When you've got, you know, government delegations up to and including prime ministers and presidents coming, of course the temptation will be to do some sort of side deal, even if it's nothing, you know, to do with the conference agenda. The response ofSultan Al Jaber, the COP president, was that the UAE didn't need to host COP in orders to do trade deals with other countries, which is, which is probably true to be honest with you.
Chris - Have some of the present biggest emitters turned up because there was a question over whether China, for instance, would take part in Glasgow. People are saying there are many countries where their entire emissions footprint is smaller than China will increase just its emissions by in just one year. So bringing them to the table and getting them to make changes and make them at a fast enough pace has to be a priority.
Richard - Well those stories from Glasgow were all a bit misleading, to be honest. The Chinese Chinese delegation was always going to come. The question was what level the head of the delegation would be, and that's the same here. So neither Xi Jinping nor Joe Biden are gonna come here, but there will still be a big Chinese delegation and a big American delegation.
08:34 - New swine flu strain confirmed in the UK
New swine flu strain confirmed in the UK
Ed Hutchinson, University of Glasgow
Health officials are investigating the first confirmed case of a new strain of swine flu in the UK. The A(H1N2)v infection was detected in a routine flu screening test at a GP surgery in North Yorkshire. Health protection teams are currently investigating, so what do we know so far? Chris Smith put in a call to one of the UK’s leading experts on flu viruses...
Ed - I'm Ed Hutchinson. I'm a virologist at the MRC University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research. Influenza grows in lots of different types of animals and humans are just one of them. And viruses more than any other infectious disease really have an intimate relationship with their hosts. They're trying to take them over, make them into factories for making more viruses, and that means they have to be really good at growing in one particular host species only. That means that when you catch influenza, you've normally caught it off another human who has an influenza in them, which is good at growing in humans. Very occasionally, a virus can get from one species and infect another species. So if a virus from a pig gets into a human, it might infect the human causing what we call a spillover infection. And that may or may not make the person sick, but it's unlikely to replicate enough to go further. What seems to have happened in this particular case is that someone has been infected with an influenza virus from pigs. They developed a fairly mild illness and thankfully they apparently have fully recovered from that. But whilst they're ill, they went to their GP and they were swabbed. So this is an example of a virus which has jumped into a human. What we don't yet know is whether it's going to be good at jumping from a human into other humans. Most of the time, viruses from animals are not good at jumping from humans into other humans. Very occasionally they do get better at it, and that would be a concerning situation. So that's what people are now closely monitoring to try and work out whether there's any evidence of those further jumps from humans to humans happening.
Chris - Can the genetic code tell us anything? When Covid was rampaging around the planet, there was enormous effort, energy, and investment put into reading its genetics, and that was revealing about a lot about where these viruses were coming from, how they were evolving and so on. Can we do the same for this flu case?
Ed - Absolutely, and for two ways in which we can do it. The first is to figure out where this virus has come from. And the way we do that is basically to build a family tree of the virus. Just like your genes are going to be more similar to those in your immediate family than to people who are only distantly related to, the genes of viruses in swine are more closely related to those of other pig viruses than to human viruses. The other thing we can do is we can look for genetic changes in the virus which suggests that it might be adapting and getting better to growing humans. And influenza is unusual in among viruses in that it can quite readily swap some of its genes between viruses. They get into the same cell, they can breed with each other. So although there's no evidence of this happening yet we'd be particularly concerned if we saw any evidence that one of these swine viruses, which has jumped into humans, has started to swap genes with the human viruses already in humans 'cause that that could accelerate a virus getting used to growing in humans.
Chris - Indeed, it is human flu season right now, isn't it? So that, I suppose the odds of that happening are higher. What would be the implications of that if we did end up with a baby virus that had the best of both, it looked like this pig virus, but had the ability to grow and spread well, like a human flu virus? What would be the implication?
Ed - So the reason people are monitoring this very carefully is that the worst case scenario - and, to be clear, there's no evidence yet that we are there or heading that direction - but the worst case scenario is that you have a new human virus and a new human virus will cause a pandemic. So by paying close attention to this now, we can figure out what's going on. We can trace contact to people who may have been exposed to virus, if there is a virus that's spreading, and make sure it doesn't spread further.
Chris - So how will the public health team who are looking into this case be pursuing it? What will be their main priorities and what are they gonna be hoping to learn or reassure themselves of?
Ed - So I think the three main questions are how did this virus get from a pig into a human? Because this is not something you can get from eating pork, for example, this is a respiratory virus, so you have to be fairly close to a a pig, which is snuffling away. So it needs to be clear how that transmission takes place. It needs to be clear whether anyone else particularly in the area has also picked up viruses related to this or whether this is really just an isolated case. And it needs to be established whether any of the contacts of this person have the infection as well. So is there any evidence of transmission, not just from a pig to a human, but from human to human transmission? Hopefully what we'll find is this was just an isolated one-off case. But if we find that the virus is infecting a number of people or even spreading between people, then it will be important to try and make sure that it doesn't spread any further than it already has.
14:23 - Babies learn language before they are even born
Babies learn language before they are even born
Judit Gervain, University of Padua
But first, a team of researchers has found that babies start learning the language spoken by their mums before they're even born. Scientists suspected that newborns could recognise their mum’s voice at birth, and that they appeared to prefer hearing their mother’s “native language”, but now, with the help of recordings of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and speaking with Chris Smith, Judit Gervain, from the University of Padua in Italy, has found that language learning probably really has been happening since about 24 weeks of development…
Judit - It is challenging to test newborn infants. So first of all, I have to say, when I, when I talk about newborns, I really mean babies between zero and five days old. So while they're still at the hospital, indeed, this study was conducted in Paris. So we are collaborating or we were collaborating at the time with the hospital. And so each morning we went to the ward. We visited each family and proposed to the parents the study. Most parents were quite enthusiastic, and so we were lucky enough to recruit a nice large group of 47 newborns. And we showed up in their room with our equipment and a little stretchy cap that we would place on the baby's head. This is the cap that contained the sensors, which allowed us to measure baby's brain responses. And we presented the sounds in their native language, French - so these were babies of mums who spoke French during pregnancy - as well as two unfamiliar languages, Spanish and English.
Chris - What sounds did you play them?
Judit - We decided to play them sentences from "Goldilocks in the three bears". So they were just simply sentences repeated several times in English, in Spanish, and in French. We also measured their brain activity before presenting the sounds in silence. And after presenting the sounds.
Chris - And what did you see?
Judit - So we were lucky enough to actually find these results. We almost sort of couldn't believe it was too good to be true, but what we found was that those babies who heard French as the last language, in the silence period following the presentation of the sentences showed an increased response. And not only increased, but also brain response that was more structured and more similar to the brain responses during the presentation of the sound. Even though there were no sounds anymore, it was pure silence. So it's as if their brains went on processing these sounds, extracting something from it, learning from it. This wasn't the case for the two other languages. And so we hypothesised that they hooked onto French because that's the language they heard before. So it was familiar for their brains and they were able to learn more from it.
Chris - And your view or deduction, presumably, is that you saw those enhanced responses to the native language because the babies had much more experience, albeit in utero, of having been exposed to those sorts of patterns of sounds through transmission from their mum's voice when they were developing inside?
Judit - That's exactly right. So indeed we do assume that that is because they heard several weeks, several months of French already by the time they're born. And so they're familiar with the rhythm, the intonation, the sort of sound patterns.
Chris - So what are the implications of this then? Do mums and dads who play Beethoven to their pregnant belly have a point, or should we not worry about this?
Judit - Right. so definitely it is the case that foetuses learn, and they learn a lot more about sound than what we usually think. At the same time our evolution or our biology set us up in this very specific way such that mums anyway talk. So it's not only speech that they address specifically to the foetus, to their belly, but everything that mom says, right? So if she goes about shopping or talking to the neighbours or coworkers or family or friends she would just spontaneously produce enough speech, enough language for the baby to learn. So essentially, parents can't get this wrong. Simply by going about their daily routine, they provide sufficient and very relevant input for their babies to learn from.
Chris - Presumably what you now need to do is follow up and see if there is a retained difference in these babies that have been exposed to one language, and that's translating into enhanced abilities later in life because of that prior patterning of exposure early?
Judit - That's exactly right. So we are following these babies up. We tested the same cohort at six months, and we are still following them up at 24 months, both looking at their brain activity as well as their linguistic developments. So we are trying to relate this very early brain activity to later language development. The important thing here is that this is not so much a boost or an enhancement. This is something natural that happens to every child, right? So every child gets this, the, the input speech by mum that allows them to start to tune into their native language. And so at birth, we can already talk about a native language in this sense. So the baby of course, cannot speak French yet or any of the other languages, but at least the baby can recognise this as being familiar. And so there is an advantage for the native language, the language heard prenatally.
20:09 - Scientists begin to study Bennu asteroid samples
Scientists begin to study Bennu asteroid samples
Sara Russell, Natural History Museum
Fragments from the asteroid that has been described as “the most dangerous rock in the Solar System” have arrived in the UK for study. The tiny pieces of rock and dust from the object known as Bennu will be subjected to testing by researchers at the Natural History Museum, and the Open, Manchester and Oxford universities. Chris Smith spoke to Sara Russell, a professor of planetary sciences and leader of the Planetary Materials Group at the Natural History Museum.
Sara - What we actually have in London is two glass slides stuck to each other, which have got a little kind of depression in them. And inside this little depression is a teaspoonful of a black powder. It sort of looks like sugar. If sugar was black, this is what it would look like. And yeah, it's just the most exciting thing that I've seen because we've been waiting for this for a long time. <Laugh>,
Chris - How did it get to you?
Sara - So this is an asteroid from NASA's Osiris-Rex mission, which has been a long time in the planning, but it actually launched in 2016 from Cape Canaveral. So I was there with my family. We watched this rocket blast off into space; didn't see it for seven years until September this year, when the spacecraft returned from the asteroid, it had been visiting which asteroid, Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid. So it had collected a piece of the surface of the asteroid and then made its way eventually back to Earth. And the spacecraft dropped the container at the top of the atmosphere where it landed in Utah. The spacecraft has now gone off to explore some other asteroids.
Chris - It's dubbed the most dangerous asteroid in the solar system at the moment. Isn't it Bennu? Why has it got such a bad rep?
Sara - <Laugh>. Yeah; well, so Bennu is what's called a near-Earth asteroid, which means it orbits the sun in a similar path to that of the Earth. And every so often it gets really close to Earth and there's a chance that in 200 years or so it might even impact the Earth. But the odds of that happening are actually really, really small. But the probability of that happening, as well as its size mean that, yeah, it has been dubbed the most dangerous object in the solar system. So one of the aims of the mission was to learn more about its precise orbit so we can work out exactly what its path would be in the future and also bring this material back to earth so we can learn more about the properties of the material. So if we ever do need to deflect it away from earth, we know what we're dealing with
Chris - And what are we dealing with. What can you tell from your initial looking at this?
Sara - It's exceeded our wildest dreams. So one of the things we've discovered so far is that it contains loads of carbon. It contains several per cent carbon, which is mostly in the form of organic material. And that's really exciting 'cause it's possible that asteroids like Bennu have pelted the early Earth and brought down all the nutrients that were needed for life to flourish. And we also know so far that it also contains loads of water. So the most abundant mineral in it is a kind of clay mineral that can suck up water inside its structure. We're really interested in finding out, you know, where all this water came from. And that will tell us something about how water moves around the solar system. It may eventually tell us how we got to be on this habitable watery planet.
Chris - How do you actually work with it and how do you make sure that you don't accidentally introduce Earth to it?
Sara - Yeah, so that's one of the big challenges of dealing with this sample. So we do have other bits of asteroid on earth in the form of meteorites, but they've all been in contact with the Earth's atmosphere. So, to various degrees, they're slightly contaminated. So this one of the things that makes this sample return material really, really special. And so, so far it has not been in contact with the Earth's atmosphere at all. So we keep it in a nitrogen box and we handle it by putting our hands into these big thick rubber gloves which go into the box and then we can manipulate it that way.
Chris - And what sorts of tests are you doing? I, I know you're, you're giving some details about the composition and things, but many laboratories could do that. So what special extra pizazz is <laugh> your skill at the Natural History Museum going to bring to this party?
Sara - Yeah, so we really specialise in mineralogy. So we're going to really kind of dig into what minerals this asteroid is made of. So we've got some special techniques. So for example, we've got one technique called X-ray diffraction that fires a beam of X-rays at the sample. And then the interaction of the minerals with the X-rays deflects them in different directions. And by measuring that, we can find out exactly which crystals we are dealing with. So we're going to do that. We're going to do CT scanning. So that's the same sort of piece of equipment that you have in hospitals to look inside humans. We can also use that to look inside the sample and see what its structure is like. And we'll also use electron microscopes to look in really fine detail what it looks like and also find out what its chemical composition is that way.
Chris - And I know you're saying that by CT scanning it, you get some clues as to the structure. Does that tell you anything about the structure of the thing it came from? Because that at the end of the day is one of the things you said was a goal here to try and understand more about the parent body and the risk it might pose. But does that tell us anything more about Yeah. What it was doing out there in the solar system right back early in history?
Sara - Absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly the aim of this work. So, one of the great things about this mission is that we've got this sort of big scale information from the spacecraft going to the asteroid and taking pictures and taking measurements of the whole asteroid and looking at its surface in detail. We also have the opportunity to look at this really fine scale information about what these little bits of dust look like and we can try and link the two to each other. One of the things we found when we looked at the surface of the asteroid was that it, there are actually several different kinds of rocks on the surface, which suggests it's actually a kind of rubble pile made up of different boulders, some of which might have come from other asteroids! So it might be that we can actually sample loads of different asteroids by looking at our little grains one by one.
Chris - How long is this gonna take you, Sara?
Sara - <Laugh>? The rest of my career, Chris <laugh>. But so each grain can take us weeks to properly characterise. So it's gonna be a long haul. We'll get the first results out next year. And the mission officially, this kind of analysis stage of the mission lasts for two years. So it lasts until 2025. So, we'll be going all guns ahead until then for sure.
Chris - Are you tempted on April the first to ring up NASA and say, "I've got a bit of bad news... I've dropped it!"
Sara - <Laugh>. I am now <laugh>. No, that would just be too awful. That's honestly my worst nightmare. Every time I touch it I sort of fear I'm gonna have some spasm or something and our whole sample will be lost. So that's is just too close to the bone to even joke about!
27:16 - Why does my nose run when it's cold?
Why does my nose run when it's cold?
Charlene - Hi naked scientists. My name is Charlene, and my question for you is, why is my nose constantly running in cold weather? What is the physiological benefit of this? Thank you.
Rhys - It's an excellent question, Charlene, and I'm sure one that many of us can empathise with as colder temperatures begin to bite in the Northern Hemisphere in a bit. To answer it, we've enlisted the help of Neil De Zoysa, who's a consultant, ear, nose, and throat surgeon.
Neil - We need to have moist air in order to pull oxygen out of the air in our lungs, and our nose makes mucus in order to do that. In cold weather, the air is less moist, so the nose needs to compensate for that, and cold air in general is an irritant to the nose, so we make more mucus as a direct a response to it.
Rhys - So that's the reason why our noses run in cold weather. But what might the physiological benefits be?
Neil - It's an adaptive response to make the air more efficient for us to breathe in. The mucus contains antibodies, so it helps us fight infections. The other reason we get more infections in cold weather is because the lining of our nose has little hair cells in it, and they're less efficient in cold weather, so infections can build up within the nose.
Rhys - Fascinating stuff. That was the ear, nose and throat surgeon, Neil De Zoysa. My thanks to him and to all of you who got in touch with us on our forum to offer your thoughts on the role that mucus plays in helping fight infections. Next time we'll be heading into space to answer this question from listener. David,
David - What are black holes made of? Would it be based on subatomic particles?
Rhys - Thank you, David. My colleague James Tytko will be taking on this one next week. If you'd like to hazard a guess or you have a question of your own, please email us. That's chris@thenakedscientist.com, or send us your thoughts on our forum...
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