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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof with Jonathan McRae on Newstalk. Proudly supported by Research Ireland. Hello and welcome to Future Proof, the podcast. This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us. I'm Jonathan McRae. If my voice sounds weird, it's because I've been shouting a lot. But also I'm suffering from some sort of... Human flu. I was going to say human flu.
Thank you for subscribing, downloading, rating, and all that. We do appreciate it. If you like something on the program, let people know about it. That would be a kind thing to do. Coming up on this week's program, we're going to be talking about a decade-long chimpanzee war in Uganda. Incredible story, and the details of it are fascinating.
If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us, scienceatnewstalk.com. We get to all of your comments at the end of the podcast. First up, it's time to look back at some of the more interesting stories from the World of Science this week. We're joined by Dr. Ruth Freeman from Research Ireland and Dr. Laura Hayes from the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.
You're both very welcome. Our first story has to do with space travel and an interesting week for it, right?
This is kind of a procurement, head of procurement's nightmare. So you offer someone a massive multi-billion dollar contract, and then the next day, one of their rockets blows up in a massive explosion.
I mean, it was a very impressive explosion.
Big, big explosion. So this is about Blue Origin and it is about NASA who have really committed very strongly over the last couple of months to getting people back to the moon. Obviously, we were all really captivated by the last Artemis mission, which did a fly by the moon. But this is actually sort of about getting... boots on the ground, if that's not an unfortunate phrase.
So what NASA did was they tendered for companies to start bringing payloads and things up to the moon.
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Chapter 2: How did the chimpanzee war in Uganda begin?
So this is things like vehicles, so rovers and things that could transport people around when they got there, scientific equipment. Snacks. Yeah, snacks. But also power, like starting to build solar power stations on the moon. They're interested in going to the south pole of the moon because that's where there seems to be evidence there could be water.
So the idea was this was a tender that was put out. And a lot of people thought that SpaceX would win it, but they didn't. So Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' company, won it.
It's a toss up between two billionaire knobs, in fairness.
I mean, to be fair, yes.
Is that wrong? Am I wrong? No, not at all. Am I wrong?
I mean, there's probably other small companies involved, but it is that whole thing about the privatisation and, you know, getting up there. They're already talking about mining. NASA are talking about trying to do it while Trump is still in office. You know, so it's again all about that ego piece.
And it does make you think because if you think about the last, you know, the 1970s mission to the moon, And the whole story of NASA and of public research and all of the benefits to humanity that came out of a group of focused scientists, well-funded, trying to achieve this impossible goal.
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Chapter 3: What factors contributed to the growth of the chimpanzee group?
There were so many fringe benefits that we all know about for society, and it really felt like a sort of shared endeavour for humanity. And I guess this just feels very different.
Yeah. So what does that mean for Blue Origins, you know, if their rocket blows up the day after they get, I mean, is there a guarantee? Like if I was NASA. Yeah, I would say, yeah, you get 28 days if you buy something online, right?
I mean, look, I guess space travel is still high risk. So, I mean, this has obviously only happened in the last couple of days. So we just need to let the dust settle and find out what's gone on. But, I mean, they're meant to do 25 launches over about the next three years using this Glenn rocket. And so, look, I guess whenever there's an accident, you do have to reassess things.
And that's what delayed the Artemis launch. Obviously, they were having challenges before. So all the best timelines in the world and aspirations, I mean, safety and the fact that this is still pretty high risk stuff is coming back into the equation.
Safety first, unless you're in Burning Man, where the motto is safety third.
Oh, OK.
A second story, Laura, has to do with superconductivity. So not just regular conductivity, but superconductivity.
Superconductivity, right? So this is one of the holy grails in modern physics is trying to get a room temperature superconductor, right? So if you think of a power line or electricity running through a wire with absolutely no resistance, no energy loss, this is amazing. This is what we want, right? Why? Why? I mean, if you think of...
there's no resistance, no heat, we lose maybe five to 10% of our energy going to our power grids to resistance of a wire. So if you think if you're charging something, it starts to get hot, that's resistance happening. So imagine that not happening. You put energy in, it just stays forever. It's kind of some magic, some super type of thing.
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Chapter 4: What led to the split of the chimpanzee group in 2018?
So a superconductor is kind of a material that at a certain temperature will allow this to happen. But the challenge is that temperature is super cold, right? So we're talking about minus 200 degrees, less than that, even 270 degrees, almost at absolute zero.
We can get this superconductivity and get all this amazing low energy loss, things like this, and kind of crazy stuff with magnets start to happen, such as magnetic levitation. But again, the challenge is how do we have something sustainable at minus 270 degrees, right? That's super hard. MRIs work like that, but again, it's really hard to do that.
So scientists forever have been trying to find a way to get superconductivity at a higher temperature. And this week, researchers at the University of Houston actually broke the superconductivity record that had stood since 1993, which operated superconductivity at minus 140 degrees Celsius.
Which is kind of like 40 foot in January.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, as it feels. But they actually went from this minus 140 down to... up, I guess, to minus 122, right? So this might not seem that much, right? It's still super cold. It's only 18 degrees in difference. But this is huge, right? This is starting to show that we can kind of change the properties of these materials and actually kind of raise them up in temperature.
And they did this with kind of a mad kind of idea of increasing the pressure, so using kind of two diamonds to put the pressure on this material really, really strong, and this means that it can kind of work at kind of a higher temperature, and then they immediately reduced that pressure and showed that they could sustain the superconductivity even at this kind of higher temperature.
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Chapter 5: How do chimpanzees organize themselves socially?
So, Why this is cool is they didn't discover a new material. This isn't things in superconductivity trying to find a new material that can work like this at room temperature. But they use a new material with different types of engineering to kind of show this potential. So this is quite exciting. We're thinking of things like MRIs. We're thinking of levitation devices.
There are trains in Japan now that are trying to use superconductivity to flow If you think of your power grid's data centers, which lose a lot of energy through heat, imagine doing superconductivity like that. And then, of course, quantum computing. So this is a big thing. This is what's driving quantum computing is a big hot topic right now.
So we want to get superconductivity working at kind of higher temperatures that are sustainable.
Super cool. Thank you very much. Our third story, Ruth, has to do with the much lauded on this program, weight loss drugs. And there was bound to be a catch.
Yeah, well, yes, semaglutide, you know, ozempic, regovi, all those drugs that really seem to have amazing benefits for many, many people who are taking them. But this is new research that comes from researchers in Canada that was just published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
And what it shows is an association between some of these weight loss drugs and a condition that is known medically as a non-ophthalmic.
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Chapter 6: What are the dynamics of aggression during chimpanzee conflicts?
Arteritic Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy, or NAON for short, but people also call it an eye stroke. It's not really a stroke as in a blockage, but it's when there isn't enough blood flow to the optic nerve at the back of the eye and those blood vessels are tiny going to the back of your eye and it results in like sudden and I imagine really frightening vision loss.
And it's generally, the vision does not come back after this. So it's a pretty serious condition. And again, just to say the risks are still very small, you know, but what the researchers did was they went and looked at over 30 million adverse events reports that were reported to the US Food and Drug Administration. So obviously every time there is an important side effect, it is logged.
Sorry, 30 million? Yep, 30 million adverse reports. From Wegovy? No, no, no. This is all different adverse effects from all different drugs.
A little bit of a red flag there.
This is a huge analysis of all of the adverse events that were reported to the US Food and Drug Administration. But what they found was there was over 30,000 of those, nearly 32,000 that involved semaglutide-based medicines. And what they found in that 30,000, it was actually Wegovy that showed the most significant association with this eye stroke. Right.
And Wegovy, because it was developed for weight loss, particularly it has more, it's a stronger version of the semaglutide, because obviously the weight loss happens quicker than with Ozempic that was originally for diabetes.
But what was interesting, there is now a tablet form of semaglutide as well, which is called Ribesius, and they found no association with that, or sorry, Ribelus, no association with that. One of the theories here, although it's not clear, is that the mode of injection of the drug, how it's taken up and how quickly it causes weight loss could be a factor.
And the thinking is, if you lose weight very, very quickly, one, we don't fully understand the overall impact on your full body and the hormone balance, but also your blood pressure may drop. And actually, low blood pressure is a risk to getting blood into those really, really tiny blood vessels at the back of the eye. Right. So that's not definitive.
And again, look, with all these things, the researchers would say this is not causation established. This is a correlation. But it is interesting because it was a correlation with one particular form of semaglutide drug as opposed to the whole family.
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Chapter 7: How many deaths have occurred due to the chimpanzee war?
Yeah, okay. I suppose, you know, it is something to keep an eye on. And remember that we are very much in the early years of this. So number one, these drugs will get better. But the flip side is we don't really have long term data on how these drugs will affect people. So it's interesting. But it's not something to worry too much about.
No, I mean, one of the interesting things was men appeared to face roughly three times the risk compared to women for this particular side effect. So that's also interesting. Like we may actually end up seeing, you know, sex-based differences in some of these side effects because guess what? Men and women's bodies aren't, you know, identical when it comes to biochemistry.
Yeah, for sure. Our final story, Laura, has to do with vision correction. So when I was younger, I had these Buddy Holly glasses and I got teased for them and I went and got LASIK when I was about 19 years old. And when I, like the next day after I sort of, you know, I took whatever the bandages off or whatever, I could not believe the change.
It was a complete transformation from can't see a single thing, like can't find my glasses on the table to absolute crystal clarity. It was a crazy thing to happen to somebody. This is to do with LASIK, but a better way of doing it, a really interesting approach to improving short-sightedness.
Yeah, absolutely. And this is also close to my heart. I wear lenses every day, maybe for an irrational fear of lasers going into my eyes. Someday I've heard of stories like you and someday we'll get the confidence, I guess, to go and get it done. But yeah, so LASIK has been extremely successful. Millions of people around the world have got it for corrective surgery and it works extremely well.
And there are some side effects. I don't know if you've had this with dry eyes and maybe halos at night and things like this. It's gotten better over the years. But these researchers at the University of California in Irvine have developed this new experimental technique where they correct vision using tiny electrical currents they put in a lens in your eye without the use of lasers.
So LASIK, you know, as I say, it's the most common used way to correct vision at the moment.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from the chimpanzee war about human behavior?
It uses a laser to permanently reshape your cornea and kind of cut some things. So it is like a surgery, an invasive surgery in some sense. It only takes a minute and it's very successful. But, you know, how can we think of other ways to do this?
So like, have you ever seen LASIK surgery?
Yes, yes. It's crazy.
So they get a laser. I mean, the one I got, they get a laser and they just cut the top off your eye and leave it like a sort of a the top of a lid, like a dustbin lid. And it just flaps open. Yeah. And they just they create some bubbles or whatever. And then they and then the flap just goes back on. They say, don't. just don't get anything in your eye now for the next few weeks.
And I'm like, that's a terrible thing to tell somebody. And actually, the day after I got my LASIK, we went to a festival. I didn't tell my doctor. We went to a festival and I slept in a tent for seven days with all the dust and it was really dry.
But the day before we left, there was this, you know, those big flags that they have at, you know, sometimes if you're at a festival to try and find your friends, someone whipped one of those and it literally created a mark just on the top of my cheek. And I was like that close to, I'm sure, going completely blind. So yeah, it is scary.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. That kind of gives me a bit of a... Yeah, anyway, glad that your eyes are okay. But this idea is slightly different, right? So the idea is that you put a lens in your eye and you induce current in it. So your eye has, in your cornea, it's made of collagen, right?
So they've found that if you put kind of this lens in, induce current, it actually changes the acidity of your eye, changes the pH. And what they can do is they can actually mold it into a different shape. So they put this lens in, put a current in, and then mold it to a new shape. And this is if you think about your eye like a camera, your lens and your cornea focus light on your retina.
So when you do laser surgery, it takes away a bit of that cornea to kind of make the lens a bit better. But here it actually reshapes it to the mold that you want. So kind of like braces for your eye, if you like, where you're not actually changing anything, you're just moving things around. And they found this is actually quite successful. Now, they've tested it in rabbit eyes.
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