What science has in store for 2024
Happy new year from The Naked Scientists! In this week’s show, we’re going to look ahead to what 2024 has in store - scientifically speaking - in a number of key areas in the months ahead.
In this episode
00:45 - What are the public health concerns for 2024?
What are the public health concerns for 2024?
Linda Bauld, University of Edinburgh
What are some of some of the biggest health problems that policy-makers are likely to confront in 2024, and what can we do about them? I've been speaking to Linda Bauld who is the Bruce and John Usher Chair in Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and Chief Social Policy Adviser to the Scottish Government. I began by asking her what she made of what has been dubbed ‘the vaping pandemic’...
Linda - I am surprised to some degree in terms of the rise of the use of these products amongst young people and people who don't smoke. And the reason, or the biggest explanation for that from my perspective, is actually the market. It's product innovation. So in countries where these products are legal and there's many countries that have banned them around the world, the manufacturers came up with disposable vapes really over the last couple of years. They're very cheap, they're accessible, they're marketed to young people and that's what's driving the uptake.
Chris - Do we have any data yet though, on the potential health harms of vaping? Because many of the advocates for vaping have based their arguments around the fact that compared with smoking, it is much better for you, but compared with never smoking, I don't suppose we actually have that data. Or do we?
Linda - No. Well we have different kinds of data. So we know the relative risks from well conducted studies that have been done in terms of short-term exposures. We also have basic science research where we do have real concerns. So cell line and rodent studies that certainly show there are respiratory effects. There are cardiovascular effects and there may be carcinogenic cancer risks associated with it. But that's what we call preclinical research. So we don't know whether it will translate into humans and those kinds of early studies don't always translate to humans, but there's certainly markers there. We also know that for people, for example, who have asthma or other respiratory conditions that might make them more sensitive to vaping, we have had some really unfortunate cases. And then finally we know that the market is not regulated and there are illicit vapes. And if things get into the vapes that are really health harming as we saw with what we call the EVALI outbreak in the USA with vitamin E acetate, then actually these devices could be really harmful.
Chris - How are we going to get the genie back in the bottle?
Linda - Youth vaping rates vary around the world and, if you can regulate, you can reduce use, and we've got really good evidence of this from other things like smoking. I mean one of the biggest drivers is price. So if you make these devices, particularly disposables, much more expensive, young people are not going to be able to afford them. Young people are very price sensitive. Restricting marketing would certainly deter some youth use. And so I really am confident that you're going to see more action on this. However, we don't want to put the genie completely back into the bottle because of the trials that I and others have done that show that for people who are heavily dependent on smoking, actually these devices can help them quit. So it's a very, very tricky balance to strike.
Chris - Moving on to Covid pandemics, the Covid inquiry and so on. What sorts of things have governments, both the UK government, also the devolved administrations, you're in Scotland for example. What sorts of things have been changed and are now in place to make sure that if we do have disease X starting tomorrow, we will be more agile?
Linda - So the first one is to do with the workforce and readiness. So I think there's startup teams or, or mechanisms to pull people into a response very quickly, well above what we'd normally do in health protection. So in the government, in the Scottish government, in the UK government as I say, it's having the right people and also getting the right kind of scientific advice. Because you could argue that it was too narrow in the UK. So that's the first thing. The second thing is we've retained or we're trying to retain, although I'm concerned about this, some of the testing infrastructure. So that really needs to continue to be resourced. Things like PPE, I think. I don't know if how that was done is still in the news headlines, isn't it in the UK, but procurement roots and that kind of thing. Those are certainly things that are part of our preparedness. And then scientifically, in terms of vaccine development therapeutics, I think there are models and pathways that we would be able to follow.
Chris - So some good news there. That's a nice Christmas present. What about a less nice Christmas present, which is that obesity levels have continued to climb, not just in our countries, but across the world. What's the thinking in policy terms around this? Because obviously this is, some argue, going to knock COVID into next week in terms of its morbidity and mortality impact. The fact that maybe half the world population is now obese or about to be.
Linda - The problem with the pandemic, and it's not just because of the pandemic, but there are a lot of health issues which we basically ignored. And you can see the strain on the health service. And obesity is perhaps one of the best examples. I was looking at a chart in relation to the different health risks that we face for Scotland and where we are in comparison to some of the aspirations politicians set in Scotland. It was to reduce childhood obesity by half by 2030. I mean, we're so far off that target, it's actually difficult to describe how far off we are. We've had announcements about action, but governments have repeatedly delayed the kinds of action that we need to take on this. And the positive developments around weight loss drugs, for example, most people will have heard of some of those that have been developed, they're not going to tackle this problem. We can't treat our way out of the obesity epidemic. There needs to be population level measures.
Chris - And what should those look like?
Linda - The food environment needs to change, but it's really complex. If you go back to the second World War where we had to ask farmers and producers to produce much more from less space and, and fewer resources. And we're still overproducing the wrong kinds of food. So that's a complex thing. But the other things we need to do in terms of changing the food environment are trying to shift towards selling healthier products to people, making those more affordable and accessible. The UK government has delayed repeatedly restricting television advertising on junk foods, putting legislation around price promotions, those big packets of crisps. Three for the price of two. Interestingly, Latin America actually, because their obesity challenges are even greater than ours, some Latin American countries actually have been more ambitious and are starting to take that kind of action. But it's going to take decades.
Chris - It's almost that we've created an environment in which it's impossible not to get fat. Fast food is on every street corner. Supermarket aisles are crammed with impulse buys. One wonders if the only solution is to go back to a point where there just wasn't this abundance. But then you take away public choice.
Linda - People who have less money in their pocket in the UK are far more likely to be overweight and obese. So what causes those differences? It's because the really unhealthy products are often the cheapest people expect to consume those kinds of food. Their friends and family are. And there's some arguments that they're kind of addictive to some of these foods. So we've changed the way we're wired to want to consume them. It's different from smoking or vaping. We are going to have to work with manufacturers, with retailers, with producers so they can reformulate and change the food supply over the longer term.
08:07 - What could 2024 hold for AI?
What could 2024 hold for AI?
Michael Wooldridge, University of Oxford
Artificial intelligence was rarely off the front page in 2023; it seems to have impacted on every aspect of our lives. Many are worried about its impacts. So what will the hear ahead hold in this area? Professor Michael Wooldridge is an AI specialist from the department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and also delivered last year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on the topic...
Michael - If I look at my field, there are various sort of watershed years in technology, but very often you don't realise they're watershed years until sometime later. There's the transistor being invented in the 1960s, and then you've got the microprocessor technology in the 1970s. Then fast forward to the worldwide web in the late 90s and the empires that are created there are Google and Amazon. In the smartphone era, the mobile era, you've got Facebook and Twitter. They're basically the empires that are created on the back of that. And what's happened this year is that one of those speculative bets, the bet on large language model, turns out to be the one that is surprisingly successful. So what we're seeing now is OpenAIs, ChatGPTs is the tool that takes off. Now we're seeing everybody else scramble to catch up.
Chris - How's that Counteroffensive going to play out? Are Google slash Microsoft so big that rather than seeing, as you described about these watershed moments in the evolution of technology, new frontrunners emerge. Well, the new front runners here are old runners that have got a new song to sing. So is that going to be the status quo or are we going to see whole new ways of doing this burst onto the scene and gazump them?
Michael - With respect to the Googles and the Microsofts, there is a certain element of just not losing ground. I mean, they're desperate to maintain their market position and not have a new, like it was in 1998 or so, the Google that suddenly takes over from Alta Vista and, and the other search companies whose names I can't remember anymore.
Chris - Well Yahoo of course, still a player. But yes, I was going to go down that line and say that web search was immediately the big driving factor. And quite quickly one front ran a Google emerged and has dominated. At one point accounting for into the 90s of percentage of all the search that was being done on the web around the world. Are we going to see AI technologies go the same way where there is this sort of competition survival of the fittest, one of them emerges. Or are we just going to see mass competition? Everyone continues to use and deploy their own in-house forms of this?
Michael - Difficult to know, but what's remarkable is that ChatGPT has just become the generic name for these things, right? I mean it's like the Hoover of the large language model world. And that I think is a huge advantage that OpenAI already has. They've got the brand out there, they managed to land that. So it's their, at the moment, it's their game to lose. I think.
Chris - What about the issue of it's a closed black box. We've no idea what goes on inside it versus open source. Some people are actually making the workings, the mechanisms of their platforms, available for people to look at, tinker with and so on, which they say makes it more transparent. How's that likely to play out? Do you think that that might be the panacea where people say, 'to give consumer confidence, we will have an open source approach to this', so that people can see how it works and they can be involved in its architecture and its evolution?
Michael - The open source large language model world has a very, very powerful advocate in the form of Yann LeCunn, who's I think head of AI at Facebook Research. And he very, very passionately believes that the open models are the way forward. But open is quite a complicated story with respect to large language models. Firstly, there's the training data, the stuff that goes into it, how the data that you use to actually build these models. And ideally we would like to be able to see that data. For example, I would quite like to know the data that was used to train ChatGPT that relates to me. And there is some training data in there, I know that, because it can answer questions about me. Then there's actually the code that was used with that training data to build the model. And ideally we would like to be able to see that. But then finally there's also what's called the runtime version of it, which is once you've trained the model, the version that you actually see. But also there are all the processes. So for example, exactly what process did these companies use in order to decide what data went into the model. How did they screen that data? And also we'd like to know how these things are tested and even the advocates of open source very often aren't particularly keen on opening up all of those different elements. So it's quite a complicated story. And open doesn't necessarily mean as open as we might like
Chris - When we're speaking about training data. One of the things that I think a bit predictably, actually, has surfaced has been people, maybe quite rightly, saying 'it's obvious that you've used my copyright, my intellectual property to train your system.' So what's likely to emerge as the solution there, if we are feeding the entire world wide web into these models and therefore the fruits of everyone's labours is being used to inform how they work and someone ultimately is making money out of it. I could say, 'well, I want a slice of that pie.'
Michael - With respect to books. Books get pirated. And it was a source of great frustration to me that my textbook that I wrote, the very first link that you found when you searched for it was to a pirated version. The difficulty here is works like that seem to have been ingested either knowingly or unknowingly. And the jury's a little bit out on whether the extent to which it was knowingly or unknowingly done. And they are therefore sort of implicitly there, but current copyright law wasn't really designed to deal with issues like this. So has my book actually been copied or not in a conventional sense? Is it a derivative work? Not in a conventional sense. And if a model is trained on the other side of the planet, then how does copyright law work there? So these are difficult issues. The companies that develop these models claim that this is a fair use, but this is one of those situations where I think we're gonna see things played out in the courts and we will have to wait for the courts to make their rulings. The difficulty is courts don't move quickly and the technology is moving very, very, very quickly. So, in the meantime there's going to be a lot of people that are very, very anxious about this.
Chris - You've just given the Christmas lectures this year on this very topic of artificial intelligence and its inexorable march forward. It's for a young audience. What do they make of it?
Michael - We try to do as responsible a job as we can about them getting excited about the beneficial applications. So, For example, we saw some really wonderful examples of how AI is used in healthcare, but in the final lecture, we address the issues and we touch on this issue. For example, in the section on arts, the issue of copyrights touched on there. But we raise the concerns that people have concerns about misinformation and we go to the really, really big ones. Questions about existential risk and so on, we try to address those as well. But the lectures are designed to give this audience who are going to be the first generation in history that are going to enter adulthood in the age of AI. We try to do as good a job as possible about educating them about what the technology is so they're not under any illusion that there's a mind on the other side of the screen, what the technology means, and what the risks are as well as the potential beneficial applications.
16:16 - Why do we want to return to the Moon in 2024?
Why do we want to return to the Moon in 2024?
David Whitehouse
The year ahead looks set to be very exciting in the realm of space travel, with the Artemis 2 mission set to make a lunar flyby - our first in many decades. I've been speaking to the space scientist, author and former BBC editor, David Whitehouse.
David - Artemis II is a spectacular mission because, for the first time in many decades, we are actually going somewhere in space. They have to actually start stacking the rocket and preparing it as early as February. It's a year-long campaign as part of proving the capsule so that the capsule is ready for when it's part of a landing mission a bit later on.
Chris - Why is everyone so interested in the Moon? Why does this matter? Is it pushing the technology, is it the opportunities that people foresee there? Why are they doing this?
David - There are many reasons to go to the Moon. It's something that brings the youngsters into science and technology and that's important because we are living, going to be living, in a century of science and technology. But of course there's the development of the technology, there's the spending of the money which is spent in companies, in firms, in developing services. And of course there is going to the Moon and understanding the Moon, living in space, as part of living further in space than living on the Space Station. They're also preparing for a mission to Mars because it was interesting to note that in a recent press conference with the crew of Artemis II, NASA was prefacing, every time it said about going to the moon, 'this is part of our mission to Mars'. So this is part of a longer term plan.
Chris - Who is funding this? And what's the role for private companies? They are, to my mind, increasingly playing a bigger and bigger role in space activities, aren't they?
David - They are indeed. NASA is funding most of this, although there is part of it being funded by SpaceX with a lot of NASA money. NASA has got to have cutbacks. It takes all year for people at NASA to work out the budget for the next year or the next two years. It's a full-time job for so many people and they've worked out for this year it's $27.2 billion and next year it's 27.7. But then along comes the Fiscal Responsibility Act which says you've got to cut 10% off that. So they're going to have to lose a few billion from something that they had carefully crafted and that might affect Artemis. The problem with this is, and this is going to be a big story this year, is that I understand the bureaucrats at NASA want to take that cutback from the science budget and not Artemis. That's going to cause a big row among the scientists. This is going to be an exciting year for NASA with Artemis, an exciting year for Elon Musk testing his spaceship and developing the way to land on the moon, but the money is very, very tight.
Chris - Elon Musk has also got Arianespace, the French, first commercial space launch company - they're snapping at his heels because they are trying to recoup some of the satellite market because Musk has kind of cornered the market there at the moment.
David - He certainly has. In the 90's and the 00's, Arianespace, the European backed launch company, had it all its own way. But along comes Elon Musk with his Falcon series of rockets and starts taking away the market. It's interesting that I think the biggest customer for Ariane 6 over the next few years, when and if it does fly, is Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk's competitor, who's also wanting to put up over 3000 small satellites to improve global broadband access, global internet access. Now, Bezos couldn't really go to Elon Musk, but he's gone to Ariane 6 - the new rocket that Arianespace is building. It's supposed to be better performing, a lot cheaper, and able to fly a lot more missions. The problem is all with the money because there are rumours that Ariane 6 is not going to be cheaper than Ariane 5, and if it doesn't get the launch rate that it should, then Arianespace is going to be a problem. For instance, Ariane 5 cost about 150 million euros to launch. For Ariane 6, they want to cut that in half to 75 million. The problem is you can buy a Falcon 9 launch from Elon Musk for just over $60 million, so they've really got to work harder than they planned at the moment. The amazing thing is that Arianespace may go back to the European Space Agency and say, in order to keep Europe in the space satellite launching business, we need more money from you.
Chris - Haven't Boeing been muscling in on the act a bit? They've got their Starliner?
David - Many years ago, when NASA's space shuttle retired, they only had the Russians to take astronauts to and from the Space Station. That was politically untenable. It was also only one route to and from the Space Station, so it was also very hazardous as well. They put out contracts to Elon Musk to develop his Dragon capsule, and he put out contracts to Boeing to develop their Starliner. Now Elon Musk's capsule works very well and he's now a regular part of taking crew to and from the Space Station. The Starliner from Boeing has had many problems along the way. It looks more like the Apollo capsule of 50 years ago; obviously it's much more technical, but it's more complicated. They've had various failures on the way. They've docked it with the Space Station automatically on one occasion, and in April they're going to put people onboard. There's going to be a crew of two which are going to go and dock with the Space Station and I think spend a couple of weeks there and then come down again. That's important because not only does it give the United States two routes to and from the Space Station, but it also develops a whole load of technology which could be used elsewhere in the space programme. It's important that Boeing, after many technical problems in developing this capsule, failures and delays - I mean, this thing should have flown four or five years ago - eventually, if they do get it to the Space Station with crew onboard, that'll be a major hurdle. This year, for the Americans, the human in space is vital. This is a crucial year for people travelling in space, not only with Artemis II and the development of Artemis III, the landing on the Moon, but also Boeing sending their Starliner into space.
22:54 - What might palaeontology unearth in 2024?
What might palaeontology unearth in 2024?
Emma Pomeroy, University of Cambridge
What might the field of archaeology be digging up in 2024? Emma Pomeroy is from the University of Cambridge's department of archaeology and is an expert on our Neanderthal relatives, who lived alongside modern humans for more than half a million years before they finally disappeared about 40,000 years ago. She’s been working at a remarkable site in northern Iraqi Kurdistan…
Emma - This year has been busy, as ever. We've been back in the field at Shanidar Cave which is an important site, mainly known for Neanderthal behaviour and also Neanderthal remains that were discovered there. It's a very large cave, actually. Sometimes when we say cave you think it's going to be small and somewhere you have to almost crawl into, but actually it's a very large, open-mouthed cave, South facing, so probably made quite nice living conditions. It's in the foothills of the Bradost mountains, so it is not a high altitude but there's quite an interesting landscape in terms of the steep hills and valleys, a large river nearby. You get quite strong seasonal fluctuations, really very hot in the summer, lovely temperatures for us at least in the 20's in the Spring and in the Autumn, and then sometimes even snow in the Winter. And a mixed habitat, really. Over the Summer you've got temperatures in the 40's so all the grass and things like that become very dried out. But certainly, in the Spring, it's really remarkable and actually the display of flowers in the spring is really, truly amazing.
Chris - It's obvious to see why it would've drawn people, but were there people there all year round given those circumstances?
Emma - The data we have, we're not sure, but it's something that we're trying to delve into more, to understand. Were they there all year round? Are they using this in particular parts of the year and perhaps moving around the landscape to other places when climates are less favourable?
Chris - Would you get a handle on that sort of resolution? Because I presume - I'm not an archaeologist, you are - but I presume that you date the layers that you find the remains in and that tells you roughly when back in history they were there. But can you get a snapshot of the seasons of when things might have been laid down at the same time?
Emma - The dating methods that we can use to tell us how many tens of thousands of years ago Neanderthals were there are not so precise that we can say, 'It's exactly 452,000 years ago and they were there in February.' We have to use different approaches and one of those can be looking at the animal remains from the animals that they've been hunting. If we were to find that the ibex that they were hunting are in a certain phase of the life cycle, say there are lots of young individuals, well that might tell us that they're at a time when there are young, so it's likely to be Spring. If they're seasonal breeders, we might be able to get some indications as well of perhaps looking at some of the plant remains because there's quite a fluctuation throughout the year and obviously there's certain flowering seasons and seeding seasons for different plants. If we find a consistent pattern where the signals we are getting from the plants and animals are telling us things, that can help us to really pin down how they're using the landscape and particularly at Shanidar Cave where we're working.
Chris - Obviously it's really important if there's anywhere that's a rich supply of archaeology because we can learn from it. But what are the key questions that really matter about this place? There's presumably some things in your mind where you're thinking, this is a linchpin to understanding a lot more about this part of the world as it relates to this group of individuals when they were around?
Emma - We have a huge number of individual questions. Some of the big questions we are really trying to get at is how are Neanderthals using the landscape. From my perspective, I'm a biological anthropologist, I lead the study of the skeletal remains, and I think there are very interesting questions there about how they dealt with their dead and whether that can tell us anything about the way they thought about death, if anything, but also how they conceived the landscape. Sometimes, in more recent populations, we have special places in the landscape. One that we might relate to well is a cemetery. So can we say that about Neandertals? Are they structuring the landscape in a way that has meaning to them, perhaps, 'this is a place for the dead.' 'This is a place where we do a particular activity.' And that in turn then helps us to build up a picture of how they thought that, as I said, comes back to this idea of trying to understand their thinking about the landscape around them and the world around them. I think we've also got big questions about what happens to Neanderthals, and obviously this is a classic question, if you like. Neanderthals, as far as we generally understand it, went extinct about 40,000 years ago - although some have argued that maybe their populations were absorbed into the spreading modern human populations. If we accept that they go extinct around that time, what's their interaction like with modern humans? And this is a question we're hoping to address a bit more in the work that we're planning for 2024. So we're hoping to be back in the field and really focus more on this transition period.
Chris - One of the things I love about archaeology, paleoanthropology is that despite studying some of the oldest stuff on Earth, you get to use some of the newest, most cutting edge scientific techniques, inevitably. Word of the year 2023, artificial intelligence or AI, ss anyone applying that to these sorts of questions; looking for the relationships between time points, movements, geographies and so on, to try to get answers to some of the sorts of questions that you've been putting in front of us?
Emma - Absolutely. People have been using AI to try and answer these kinds of questions for a number of years now, actually. But, over the last year, I think the technology and the computing power has got to the point where this is becoming something that we can use much more. This is something that I think's really fascinating: we can take data that we have, such as 3D data taken using obstructed light, we can use aerial photographs, for example, and so have images of large geographic areas and then actually use AI to predict where sites are likely to be, or also to spot structures that might actually be something archaeological. And this technology's really quite astounding. One of the applications that I think is particularly amazing is that they can use this technology in the Amazon. So even where there's huge tree cover over the land, we can strip that away and actually use the technology to spot where sites are, or equally predict where we think they should be based on availability of water, what the landscape is like, the pattern we know of other sites from that time period, where people are tending to build or to occupy the landscape. Then, use that to help guide our further studies. That's just one example of where AI is making a really big contribution in the field.
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