Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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In Wales, the country where this show is recorded, in 2004 only 15 out of 100,000 people made it to their 100th birthday. By 2024 that had almost doubled, 26 centenarians per 100,000 people.
Sääntöjä sanovat, että tämä voidaan kertoa parhailla eläimellisyydellä, parhailla koulutuksella ja yleisellä parhailla ympäristöllisellä terveydellä. Tietysti, jos haluat tuntea hyvältä ajasta, jolla elämme nyt, miksi ei oteta heti ymmärtämään niitä parhailla eläimellisyydellä? Parhailla tavoitteilla tutkia syötä, parhailla tutkimuksia. Meillä on vaksinoita, jotka pysyvät miljoonaan tekemään TB, meesolit, polio, flu ja, kiitos, antibiootit.
We've also learned about the foods that spike your cholesterol and that smoking kills. There are, of course, always outliers. My great aunt, for instance, smoked for most of her first century, and her 100th birthday card was a picture of her holding up a packet of cigarettes with the warning on it that smokers die younger. I'd like to think she would have made it to 200 as a non-smoker.
I'm Marni Chesterton from the BBC World Service. This is Unexpected Elements. And to get this literal party started, more on that later, I have what every party needs, a couple of reliably brilliant science journalists. In Mumbai, India, we have Chavi Sachdev. Hello, Chavi. Hello, Kolata. And in Helsinki, Finland, Tristan Ahton.
Hande ande babon, terve and hello. So this is Unexpected Elements. It's the science program inspired by the news. And for any new listeners out there, what we do is we take a headline. We use that as a springboard to jump off into loads of intriguing science stories. You can expect expert interviews. We've got listeners questions, a bit of archive audio, and hopefully we'll learn something along the way.
Now I've mentioned centenarians and here in the UK there is one birthday celebration you cannot escape this week, especially if you consume any BBC content. But hopefully it should resonate with listeners around the globe. Take a listen to this.
The 8th of May is a significant day. Monumental occasion. TV legend turns 100. Sir David Attenborough. Born in London 1926. He's been doing this since the 50s.
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Chapter 2: What are the secrets behind Sir David Attenborough's longevity?
Yes, wildlife broadcaster Sir David Attenborough is turning 100 years old this week. This is a man who brought us 70 years of groundbreaking television, and I'm not just talking about the stunning natural history programs. Sir David was also in charge of programming at a point where he could put the iconic comedy Monty Pythons Flying Circus on air.
And I think as we talked about before in this show, he's also responsible for giving the UK its first color TV programming. But mainly this is a man who has brought us the secrets and extraordinary lives of the other species that share this planet. So let's use this show to throw him some sort of 100th birthday. Hurray! Does anybody know how David Attenborough has managed to live to be 100 years old?
Minä sanoisin, että hienoja genetikkoja, tai ehkä ei tehdä karttoja kohdalla. Onko se hänen dietansa ja harjoituksensa? Olen melko varma. Näin, että hän syö melko vähän rauhasta. No, kaikki nämä suositukset, genit, dieti, harjoitukset, eikä välttämättä välttämättä. Nämä ovat tärkeitä. Mutta suomalainen tutkimus on löytänyt, että proteiinit voivat myös olla melko tärkeä rooli.
Okay, proteins we might know from our diet as the stuff that we get from fish and meat and eggs and beans. They're also, when they're in the body, the type of molecule that does all sorts of things from building tissues to making hormones and enzymes that regulate our metabolism.
Suomalaiset tutkijat halusivat ymmärtää, kuinka sentenariinit heittävät metaboliikki- ja oxidatiivinen stressiä, joka voidaan liittyä kasvavuuteen. Mikä on oxidatiivinen stressi, kysytte? Voitko minulle kertoa? Yksi metaforia, josta tuntuin, on se, että jos ajattelet säädöstäsi kuten auton moottori, niin voit ajatella säädöstäsi käyttämään oksigenia, jotta saadaan energiaa.
Ja sillä energiaproduktion osalta ne luovat jonkinlaista kemikallista kääntöä, joka on tehty hyvin epätekoisilla molekyyleillä, joita kutsutaan tyhjyysradikoililla. Joten kun sinä olet vanhempi, niiden autot aloittavat pysähtymään, ja niiden kemikallinen kääntö liikkuu liikkuvasti ja huonosti. Mutta eikö teidän terveys luovat antioksidoita, jotka rauhoittavat tyhjyysradikoilta tai kääntöä, ennen kuin se vaikuttaa terveeseen?
Yes, but as you age, you don't produce enough antioxidants to clean up. So oxidative stress is the state your body enters when there are too many of these damaging free radicals, and that stress then becomes involved in a number of age-related conditions.
Now, the usual cliche is my body is a temple, but I'm really drawn to this idea that we need to think of our body as some sort of car. Because I've previously made a doc about obesity, and someone had a really nice car analogy for the stresses it puts on you. And they said it's like you've got a roof rack that's overloaded, and your car's going to be fine at first, but it actually puts a lot of extra stress on the axles and things. No, I could see that. What car are we all being?
I'm definitely some sort of a second-hand car. I need to go to the body shop. I want spares. Are we the car that we want to be or the car that we actually are? I mean, this is radio, so I can be an Aston Martin. No one's going to see that I'm actually a VW camper van, so it's fine. Back to the study, the Swiss 100 study. What did they find and where do the proteins come into this?
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Chapter 3: How can a jellyfish help us understand immortality?
One of the processes that we're really interested in is the way in which zooplankton are able to take carbon down to depth. So we have some really nice data from the Arctic that there are a particular species, a group of animals called copepods, which in the polar regions have a really nifty way of dealing with that wintertime dilemma of carbon.
no food in the water column and predators around. So they feed really happily on phytoplankton, those marine microscopic plants, in the summertime. And then they take all of the carbon that's bound up within the phytoplankton from their photosynthesis and turn that into a carbon-rich fat sack in their body. And if we imagine that the biomass of these copepods
Ympäri maailmaa se on noin 10 kaksi ihmisen biomassia. Ja sitten kun keskustelu edistyy, ne mennävät läpi 1500 metriä ja pysyvät veden kolmessa lähellä heidän hengityksensä, jossa he pysyvät ja levitävät tuon karbonin, jonka he sijaitsevat sivustolle.
into the ocean. So what we're trying to understand is how many of these copepods are there, where are they distributed, and how much carbon are they capable of taking to depth. We have data for the Arctic on these species, but we have absolutely nothing
No information on them in the Antarctic. And already we think that for the Arctic alone, that this process of taking carbon down to depth or sequestration as it's called, could be in the order of two to three times that of the Amazon.
Those are stonking numbers, given that the Amazons, you know, known as the lungs of the world and, you know, there's all of the stuff about them breathing in the carbon dioxide. So actually more is going on at the Antarctic, you think?
Kyllä. Joten sinulla on kuvia, ympäristöä ympäristöä, jota useimmat ihmiset eivät koskaan näe. Mietin, mitä näet ympäristössä. Oletko nähnyt mitään niitä isoja jäätöjä, jotka ovat ruokaneet?
Wow, yeah, we have been incredibly lucky. We've seen not one, not two, but three icebergs. And they are vast. I think the first one that we saw was about 76 kilometers long and about 45 kilometers wide.
Ja sitten seuraavassa kurssissa me tuli A23a. Kun sinä olet laittamassa, niin sieltä ja oikeastaan näkyy vain irti. Se kuulostaa ihanaa. Ja myös hieman hauskaa, koska se on kilometrejä irti, jotka tulevat sinuun, eikö? Kyllä, se on hauskaa. Ja sinun täytyy pysähtyä vähemmän irti, koska jos jotain jää pois...
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Chapter 4: What unique research is conducted on the Sir David Attenborough research vessel?
That totally clocks. Yeah, spreading joy. If that appeal to the written words has moved you to write to us, our address is Unexpected Elements, BBC World Service, Cardiff, CF104GA in the UK.
Of course, we love reading all of your emails and messages on this program. And last week we asked if you had any stories or anecdotes about Sir David. And we also reached out to some people in the extensive BBC network for their stories. To start things off, we have a voice note from Helen Scales, a marine biologist, broadcaster and author.
A few years ago I wrote a book about the Royal Institution Christmas lectures. In particular the ones about the natural world. So of course I had to include the 1973 lectures by David Attenborough. And his series was about the language of animals. So I watched back his lectures, the film, I wrote the book, and I got in touch with David to see if he might be so kind as to write an introduction. And I was so thrilled when he said he would. In fact the note that he wrote for me is something of a confession.
Hän sanoi, että hän yritti poistaa tutkimuksen. Hän kirjoitti BBCin, että hän halusi poistaa kontraktaansa. BBC perusti hänet tämän tutkimuksen. Jos katsoisit niitä, näet, että ne ovat todella hauskoja. Koneet eivät aina tehdä sitä, mitä hän toivoo. Koneet eivät vastaa äidin ääniin. Pukupiini ei tullut poistumaan, eikä hänellä tullut vananeita. Minun suositukseni on, kun David saapuu rintalaisella limalla.
The lemur called Tammy and feeds him some grapes while he discusses how lemurs use stinky smells to communicate with each other. Luckily they don't do that actually in the room, but it's just this really lovely interaction between David and Tammy there in front of the cameras. Yeah, it's really gorgeous.
So the reason that Helen told us that he was unsure about doing these lectures is because they're televised live and he was worried about all the animals misbehaving. So, you know, they say never work with children or animals. And the absolute irony of this is that who was the person who made the decision that the annual lectures ought to be broadcast live? Yes, it was Sir David Attenborough back when he was controller of BBC Two.
Real editor vibes there. Now we've got another correspondence from Andrew Wilson, who's worked on the sound for wildlife documentaries for 40 years, including the iconic David Attenborough series, Blue Planet and Planet Earth.
I think we were recording narrations for the original Blue Planet series. And he was coming down from London, where he lives. But he was running a little bit late, and I was just waiting in reception with a cup of tea in my hand. And I saw him coming down the road, so I opened the door to let him in. And just as he came through the door, there were a couple of students the other side of the road, a couple of young girls walking up towards the university.
He spotted him and went, oh look, it's David Attenborough, and sort of waved. He turned and gave them a smile and a little wave back. He came through the door and I said, why doesn't that ever happen to me? He looked at me like I was mad and he said, well, you've either got it or you haven't. I thought, yeah, you have got it and I really haven't. Awww.
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