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BBC Sounds Music

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Radio Podcasts Hello lovely

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curious -minded people. We have almost

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made it to the end of

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January and it's the last inside

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science of this dark, cold month.

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So we're scrutinising the global temperature.

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We will be asking what is so

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significant about the figure 1 .5 degrees

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and some brand new clues about how

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life began on Earth from a very

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old piece of space rock. And

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I join you today from a spacious,

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shiny BBC studio in Salford, where, as

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usual, the greater Manchester sunshine is glinting

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through the windows. And I'm joined

0:36

by new scientist writer Graham Lawton, who's going to

0:38

unpick a very busy week in science news. Hello,

0:40

Graham. Welcome to the studio. Thank you for having

0:42

me. And what have you got for us a bit

0:44

later? Give us a teaser. Well, going to talk

0:46

about two stories with really exciting, interesting top lines.

0:48

But when you dig down, it turned out to

0:50

be something really rather different, but no less interesting

0:52

for that. And then we're

0:54

going to talk about a surprising discovery

0:56

about surprising discoveries. Excellent!

0:58

I love it where we will be back with you

1:01

soon. Feel free to get yourself a cup of tea

1:03

and sit back in the meantime. Now

1:05

though, 1 .5 degrees C. It gets

1:07

mentioned again and again at UN Talks

1:09

in the news because this is the

1:12

number we talk about when we talk

1:14

about climate change. Last year

1:16

it was confirmed as the hottest

1:18

year on record, and perhaps most

1:20

alarmingly, the average temperature on the

1:22

planet broke through that symbolic 1

1:24

.5C mark. But to work

1:26

out how significant that is, we want to

1:29

ask, what does 1 .5 degrees actually

1:31

mean? Where did the figure come from?

1:33

And since we already warmed up the

1:35

world by more than 1 .5 degrees,

1:37

does the number even matter anymore? So,

1:40

earlier today I put all these questions

1:42

and more to climate scientist Mark Maslin

1:44

and environmental psychologist Lorraine Whitmarsh. Can I

1:47

start with you Mark? 1 .5 degrees,

1:49

where did that number come from? So

1:52

the importance of 1 .5

1:54

is it is enshrined in

1:56

the Paris Agreement and this

1:58

is where 10 years ago

2:00

the leaders of the world said

2:02

we will keep climate change to

2:04

two degrees and we will have

2:07

an aspirational target of 1 .5.

2:10

And the 1 .5 came from

2:12

some beautiful politics of the EU,

2:14

the UK and the small islands

2:17

nations who were then trying to

2:19

push for greater commitments. What's interesting

2:21

is the science says that between

2:23

1 .5 And two degrees, there's

2:26

a lot of other impacts that

2:28

could happen, which could be catastrophic

2:30

for many areas of the world.

2:33

What does 1 .5 actually mean?

2:35

Just spell that out for us.

2:37

So in many ways, 1 .5

2:39

is symbolic. What it says is

2:42

the huge amount of climate change

2:44

that has happened around the world.

2:47

And people go, oh, 1 .5,

2:49

that's not really going to affect

2:51

me. However, When you do

2:54

it on a planetary scale, it's

2:56

firstly putting huge amount of energy into

2:58

the system, which means the climate system

3:00

is speeding up. But it

3:02

also means that the extreme climate events

3:04

are increasing. Like the

3:07

wildfires in California, you

3:09

have the floods in Spain. But

3:11

also, if you think about it,

3:13

two years ago, we had a

3:15

40 -degree heat wave in the

3:18

southeast of England in July. So

3:20

this was 16 degrees. warmer

3:22

than it should have been with

3:24

a global 1 .5 degrees warming.

3:27

Lorraine, Mark talked there about

3:30

beautiful politics. You are engaged

3:32

in trying to communicate with

3:34

the public about climate

3:37

change. Do you find that 1 .5

3:39

figure helpful or hindering? I think it's

3:41

not really a figure that comes up

3:43

very much. More often we're talking about

3:45

it in terms that relate to people's

3:47

everyday experiences and so changing weather patterns

3:50

and specific risks around kind of floods,

3:52

heat waves and how people can adapt

3:54

to the role that they can play.

3:56

So actually those sorts of global targets

3:58

and sort of some of the more

4:00

technical language around climate change we wouldn't

4:02

tend to be conveying to the public

4:05

generally. and kind of feels a little

4:07

bit out of reach perhaps. So

4:10

Mark, can I just dig into

4:12

2024, hottest year on record? Is

4:14

1 .5 that target officially dead

4:16

now? Where are we? Oh, so

4:19

this is a huge problem because

4:21

the definition is the average midpoint

4:23

of 20 years. So

4:25

even if we passed the

4:27

1 .5 degree limit today,

4:30

We wouldn't officially be able to tell you

4:33

that until 2035. Can I just pick you

4:35

up on that? The average midpoint of 20

4:37

years. So that means we have to get

4:39

an average temperature every year for 20 years

4:41

before we can say that that's the point

4:44

on the graph has actually gone up beyond

4:46

that point. Yes, and that way lies madness.

4:48

So this is just again because it means

4:50

we're 10 years later we go oh no

4:52

we did pass it 10 years ago other

4:55

people have suggested we can use trends and

4:57

the one I most like is use the

4:59

last 10 years of climate records and then

5:01

we can use the next 10 years of

5:03

climate model records and then we put those

5:06

together and we can then see the average

5:08

of the real and theoretical 20 years and

5:10

then have a midpoint. And that makes much

5:12

more sense. Can I ask you to project

5:14

what that will show us in a couple

5:17

of years? Do you think we'll be on

5:19

it? So I think in the next couple

5:21

of years, the temperature

5:23

of the planet will be such that

5:25

we'll look back and go, yeah, we

5:28

have gone through the 1 .5 limit.

5:30

That doesn't mean that we can't go

5:32

backwards. This is not a

5:34

one -way street. It's just we have

5:37

to act. Talking about, you know, we

5:39

could go back seems a good time

5:41

to ask you both about what's been

5:43

happening this week because, you know, this

5:46

week we've seen Heathrow expansion a third

5:48

runway put on the table and my

5:50

inbox has been flooding with environmental groups

5:53

saying that this is a catastrophic decision.

5:55

The LA fires have been officially linked

5:57

to climate change. So does raining things

5:59

back in below 1 .5 again feel

6:02

fanciful now? I think it's deeply unrealistic

6:04

that we're going to change as rapidly

6:06

as we need to. And this is

6:09

why there's a lot of hysteria about

6:11

the 1 .5 limit. Because of course,

6:13

scientists have been using it as a

6:15

way of beating politicians going, you have

6:18

to keep below this. You have to

6:20

keep below this. And of course, we've

6:22

gone through it. And so

6:24

the problem here is, what do we

6:26

say next? Oh, don't go past 1

6:28

.6. Don't go past 1 .7. So

6:30

there's a problem psychologically with these sort

6:32

of limits. But if we

6:35

go back to something like, say Heathrow,

6:37

Heathrow is a really interesting microcosm

6:39

because if we look at the

6:42

aviation industry, it's going to grow

6:44

at 4 % per year. So

6:46

therefore, we need to change the

6:48

whole industry. We need to decarbonise

6:50

flying, not stop an airport

6:52

expansion, because there are something like 500

6:54

new airports being built at this moment

6:56

in time around the world. Mark, you

6:58

touched on it a little bit. Do

7:01

we set a new target? Do we

7:03

need to change our threshold now? I

7:06

don't think we needed a new

7:08

threshold. I think that 1 .5

7:10

is still going to be the

7:12

gold standard. And if we

7:14

go above it, what we're

7:16

going to be saying is we have

7:18

gone beyond where we want to be.

7:20

And therefore, this is really bad. What

7:23

we cannot do, and we cannot allow

7:25

the politicians to do, is to switch

7:27

to, oh, but in the Paris Agreement,

7:29

we mentioned two degrees. So why don't

7:31

we just kick back and don't wander

7:33

until we get to two degrees? No.

7:35

So I suppose it's worth saying that

7:38

the 1 .5 degree target is one

7:40

policy target that we have, but there

7:42

are also other ones. within the UK

7:44

for example we have carbon budgets that

7:46

we're trying to keep within and these

7:48

are amounts of emission reductions that we're

7:51

trying to make over a period of

7:53

years and so those are really critical

7:55

markers of our progress in decarbonising society

7:57

so I don't think we need to

7:59

be sort of overly focused on the

8:01

1 .5 target that is important but

8:03

also thinking about these these different targets

8:06

and these different measures of progress is

8:08

also important. Well, it's a bit more

8:10

immediate, isn't it, to measure emissions as

8:12

well. So do you think that's more

8:14

useful? Yes, I do, actually.

8:16

And I think as well, having

8:19

those kind of windows of a

8:21

period of years in which you're

8:23

trying to bring down emissions is

8:25

helpful. It provides the flexibility that

8:27

policymakers need, actually, because there's so

8:29

much uncertainty in how to decarbonise.

8:31

We're still learning as we go.

8:33

And I think providing those windows

8:35

actually is quite useful. And

8:37

Lorraine, how does all of that

8:39

kind of difficult news when it comes

8:42

to, you know, news that doesn't seem

8:44

to stack up with our targets to

8:46

reach net zero and to rein in

8:49

emissions? How does that affect people's

8:51

mindset, the ability to engage people with

8:53

climate change? It fundamentally undermines their confidence

8:55

that the government is doing anything on

8:58

climate change. It disempowers them because they

9:00

don't feel that they have any agency

9:02

to be part of tackling climate

9:04

change. We did some interesting research a

9:07

couple of years ago actually where we

9:09

kind of compared people's response to COVID

9:11

with people's response to climate change and

9:14

what we found was that people

9:16

inferred the severity of COVID. from

9:18

the government's response to it and they

9:20

said we've never had lockdowns before this

9:22

must be a really bad risk. With

9:24

climate change then we hear people going

9:26

but it can't really be that bad

9:29

is it because otherwise the government would

9:31

be doing more they would be taking

9:33

it seriously as if it was an

9:35

emergency. That sounds like two almost diametrically

9:37

opposed really difficult attitudes to sort of

9:39

engage people with feeling completely hopeless and

9:41

also feeling oh well it clearly isn't

9:43

that important because otherwise there'd be urgent

9:45

action. How do you tackle that as

9:47

a psychologist? Yes, we have been calling

9:49

for the government to develop a public

9:51

participation strategy on climate change, which thankfully

9:53

they are going to be doing this

9:55

year. And as part of that strategy,

9:57

they need to demonstrate their leadership and

9:59

the action that they're taking on climate

10:01

change and join the dots for people

10:04

to show, yes, we are

10:06

reducing emissions across all these different sectors

10:08

and in these different ways, but crucially

10:10

also show that the role that people

10:12

can play in tackling climate change, because

10:14

where we're going to have have to

10:16

increasingly make emission reductions is on the

10:18

demand side. In other words, how we

10:20

use energy, how we travel, how we

10:22

eat. So we really need to show

10:25

how people can be actively involved and

10:27

make it easier for people. Thank you,

10:29

Mark Maslin, Professor of Climate Science at

10:31

University College London and Lorraine Whitmarsh, Environmental

10:33

Psychologist at the University of Bath. Now

10:36

Graham, you are a science storyteller, a seasoned

10:38

science storyteller, so listening to that, would you

10:40

say the famous, perhaps infamous 1 .5C, that

10:43

figure, has it helped or hindered your storytelling?

10:45

I'm not sure yet. I mean, it's actually

10:47

climate stuff is really hard to do. Well,

10:49

not because there isn't stuff to report because

10:52

there's always new things, but essentially the story

10:54

hasn't changed for 20, 30 years. So it's

10:56

really hard to engage people because you see

10:58

a climate story and you think, well, I

11:01

know that that's going to be kind of

11:03

bad news. It's going to be hard to

11:05

swallow. And I kind of already know what

11:07

the story is. I think 1 .5 in

11:10

some ways is it was a symbolic target.

11:13

Getting there, I think might well, I'm kind of

11:15

hoping it'll be a wake up. call, but I

11:17

dread that it might just inspire hopelessness and nihilism.

11:19

But in terms of storytelling, at least it gives

11:22

us an excuse to go back and say, like

11:24

you've done today, what does 1 .5 mean? What

11:26

do we do now that we've gone past it?

11:28

And is there any hope of bringing ourselves back

11:30

to it? Yeah, quite. Well, thank you very much,

11:33

Graeme. We'll be back with you shortly. And

11:36

as we're dicing with the livability of

11:38

this planet, this week we're a step

11:40

closer to understanding the origins of life

11:42

on Earth, thanks to some specks of

11:44

dust scooped from the surface of an

11:47

asteroid called Bennu. Back in

11:49

2020, NASA's audacious Osiris -REx mission

11:51

successfully grabbed a sample of rock

11:53

and dust from the asteroid's surface

11:55

with a robotic arm. The precious

11:57

cargo was then dropped off in

11:59

the Nevada desert in September 2023.

12:02

and a select group of scientists from around

12:04

the world were given tiny pieces of the

12:06

sample to analyse. Two of those scientists joined

12:09

me now. Sarah Crowder from the University of

12:11

Manchester, who is in the Salford studio with

12:13

me. Hi, Sarah. Hello. And

12:15

Sarah Russell from the Natural History Museum,

12:17

who is on the line from Washington

12:20

DC because she is on a Bennu

12:22

press tour. Hello, Sarah. Hi, Vic. Hello.

12:24

Two Sarahs, one asteroid. I'm

12:26

going to start with the studio, Sarah. Sarah

12:28

Crowder. How much of Bennu actually came back

12:31

to Earth and where did it go? So

12:33

the total mass that was collected from the

12:35

asteroid was a little bit over 120 grams.

12:39

Now a small fraction of that will

12:41

be distributed to, as you said a

12:43

moment ago, scientists worldwide. But a large

12:45

fraction of it will actually be retained

12:47

for future generations to study, you know,

12:49

maybe in 50 years or more. So

12:52

can I ask each of you, not

12:54

to pit planetary scientist Sarah against planetary

12:56

scientist Sarah, but how much of Bennu

12:58

did you each get? We've probably got

13:00

a few milligrams total. So we've got

13:02

about a teaspoon fall, which was about

13:05

100 milligrams, but this was

13:07

actually to share out amongst several

13:09

different groups. So you weren't hogging

13:11

more of the asteroid? We weren't

13:13

hogging it all, no. Sarah

13:16

Russell, I'm going to call you DC

13:18

Sarah. The first analysis of this incredibly

13:20

precious piece of rock that you were

13:22

involved in has just been published. Before

13:25

I get to the results, can I ask you

13:27

what you were doing to this sample, what you

13:29

were analysing, what you were looking for? So we

13:31

wanted to find out what the rock was made

13:33

of. and from that try

13:36

to reconstruct the history of asteroid

13:38

Bennu from its formation right at

13:40

the very beginning of the solar

13:43

system and what's happened to it

13:45

since. We looked at

13:47

it in enormous detail so we

13:49

did a whole series of measurements

13:51

we did some CT scanning to

13:53

enable us to look on the

13:55

inside of each of the grains

13:57

brought back from Bennu and then

13:59

we did some electron microscopy to

14:01

look at the grains really close

14:03

up which is we really kind

14:06

of needed to push our equipment

14:08

because the grains were so so

14:10

tiny they were typically a micron

14:12

which is a millions per meter

14:14

or or less So what were

14:16

you looking for and what did

14:18

you find? Firstly we wanted to

14:20

know what Bennu was originally made

14:22

of and what we found was

14:24

it's actually really hard to find

14:26

these primordial grains that it was

14:28

made of because it's experienced so

14:30

many changes since it formed and

14:32

in particular we found it had

14:34

been completely altered by water. So

14:37

we think that when it first

14:39

formed it formed from a mixture

14:41

of rock and ice and then

14:43

it gently heated because it was

14:45

slightly radio active and the ice

14:47

melted. And that completely

14:49

transformed the minerals that was originally

14:52

made off. And what we found

14:54

was that it formed mostly clay

14:56

minerals. But the thing that

14:59

we were reporting today was that

15:01

we found this whole sequence of

15:03

salt minerals. And we

15:05

think that they formed from

15:07

hods of salty room temperature

15:09

water. So that tells us

15:12

there was actually, you know, these little bits

15:14

of liquid water briny water

15:16

inside the asteroid. And

15:18

these would have been great places to

15:20

form new organic molecules. So it might

15:23

have something to do with how organic

15:25

molecules can start to form. Right, so

15:27

there's some teasing words in there, isn't

15:30

it? Organic water. These sound like some

15:32

of the ingredients for life. Does that

15:34

mean that the ingredients for life were

15:36

in Bennu? Yes, that is exactly what

15:39

we're saying. So we don't find any

15:41

evidence for life itself in Bennu. We

15:43

have to make that really very clear,

15:46

but exactly all of the ingredients needed

15:48

to cook up life were on Bennu.

15:51

water was there which is obviously essential

15:53

to life as we know it. The

15:55

salts themselves also contribute other bioessential elements

15:58

so we find a lot of phosphates

16:00

for example which make up the backbone

16:02

of DNA so we've got all these

16:04

sort of Lego bricks that make up

16:07

life and we think that asteroids like

16:09

Bennu may have impacted the earth in

16:11

its earliest history and brought these ingredients

16:14

to our planet. Wow, so the Lego

16:16

bricks of life. Studio Sarah, there's another

16:18

paper published this week. I know you

16:20

weren't involved in that specific study and

16:23

your analysis is yet to be published.

16:25

But how does that add to all

16:27

of this evidence about the significance of

16:29

Bennu and these ingredients for life? So

16:32

Sarah just touched on the other paper

16:34

was looking at the organic compounds. So

16:36

these are compounds that are built around

16:38

chains or rings of carbon atoms. And

16:41

they found amino acids, which are

16:44

essential for making proteins, all living

16:46

things use amino acids to make

16:48

proteins. And they also found

16:50

the building blocks to make DNA. And

16:53

what I think was really interesting

16:55

is the amino acid. So amino

16:57

acids form two types of molecules.

17:00

If you look at your hands for a

17:02

moment, we have a left hand and a

17:04

right hand that are mirror images of each

17:06

other. And you can't superimpose one hand on

17:08

top of the other. So the

17:10

amino acids form molecules that have

17:12

the same chemical formula, but

17:15

they're mirror images of each other. And

17:17

all biology on earth uses what we call

17:19

the left -handed type of the molecules. And

17:22

we don't really know why this

17:24

was. In some meteorites, we found

17:26

an excess of the left -handed

17:28

molecules. So this might

17:30

have suggested that maybe in the early

17:33

solar system, for some reason, there was

17:35

a preference for the left -handed type.

17:37

But in the Bennu samples, they found

17:40

a 50 -50 mix of the left

17:42

-handed and the right -handed type. Wow.

17:44

So that kind of questions that theory.

17:46

This was one of the most exciting

17:49

and puzzling findings because it's not what

17:51

we see in meteorites. So we have

17:53

this whole collection of asteroids already on

17:56

Earth in the form of our meteorite

17:58

collection. A meteorite is any

18:00

natural extraterrestrial object that's fallen to

18:02

Earth and the fact that they

18:04

don't have this racemic mixture of

18:06

equal amounts of left -handed and

18:09

right -handers makes us think that

18:11

maybe they tend to become contaminated

18:13

with terrestrial life. What

18:15

that tells us is we really needed

18:17

to have this space mission to go

18:20

to an asteroid and bring back this

18:22

very pristine sample to enable us to

18:24

be able to look at What an

18:27

uncontaminated asteroid looks like. It's fascinating. Thank

18:30

you. Sarah, can I just say

18:32

it's studio, Sarah? Benu's

18:34

journey in terms of scientific analysis is

18:37

nowhere near over, as you were alluding

18:39

to earlier, but you're doing your analysis.

18:42

Right now, I know that you can't talk

18:44

about it yet, but can you give us

18:46

some hints as to what you're looking at?

18:48

So I often like to say that I

18:50

zap space rocks with lasers. But

18:52

then people think I'm zapping my laser

18:54

up into the sky. I'm

18:56

not. We're doing this all in the lab. And

18:59

we're studying the gases that are trapped

19:01

inside. the pieces of the asteroid. And

19:04

one of the things we will try to

19:06

do is determine an age for the asteroid.

19:08

So that will then help us understand more

19:10

about the physical process is happening in the

19:12

history of the asteroid. So how old do

19:14

we think then it is? We talk about

19:16

billions of years. Yeah, it'll be about 4

19:19

.5 billion years. But, you know, we can

19:21

probably tie it down a bit more than

19:23

that with the analyses. Right. Sarah,

19:25

you touched on the fact that a lot of

19:27

this will be a lot of this sample, this

19:29

tiny sample is going to be saved for future.

19:31

your analysis, what else do we have

19:33

to discover? Because I know that hundreds of scientists

19:35

are already looking at this material. We

19:38

don't know, and that's the beauty of having it on

19:40

Earth. As we've got the samples

19:42

on Earth, we can save some of

19:44

them for future generations who might use

19:46

them to answer questions we've not thought

19:48

about yet, using techniques that we've not

19:50

even developed yet. And this is exactly

19:52

the kind of thing that happened with

19:55

the Apollo samples. When they came back

19:57

from the moon in the 1960s and

19:59

70s, some of the samples were put

20:01

into long -term storage and have only

20:03

been opened, and people have only started

20:05

analyzing them. in the last four or

20:07

five years. Analytical techniques

20:09

we have now are hugely

20:12

developed from the techniques that

20:14

were available 50 years ago.

20:16

Asking questions and having the techniques that

20:18

we haven't even thought of yet or

20:20

even invented. Exactly. Well, thank you to

20:22

both of our planetary saras. And we

20:25

still have Graham Lawton here in the

20:27

Salford studio, a writer at New

20:29

Scientist. Hello again, Graham. Hi. Now,

20:31

we asked you to troll through some of

20:33

the science of the week. It's been a

20:35

busy week and you've handpicked a few highlights

20:37

for us, haven't you? I have. And we

20:40

have to talk about artificial intelligence, don't we?

20:42

Well, I think we probably do this week.

20:44

I mean, specifically DeepSeek, this new AI from

20:46

China that's really put the cat amongst the

20:48

pigeons. There's been so much talk about this.

20:50

Give us a kind of brief lowdown. It's

20:52

a large language model, very much like the...

20:54

that we're familiar with, but the thing that's

20:57

different about it is that it performs at

20:59

a level of those more familiar things, but

21:01

on an absolute shoestring. And it's been called

21:03

AI's Sputnik moment. I think

21:05

that's appropriate in some ways because what's happened

21:07

is it's got to come out the blue

21:09

and it's really burst the bubble of people

21:11

who thought they were leading a technological race,

21:13

but turned out that they were blowing their

21:15

own trumpets a bit too hard. It's

21:18

not technologically very different from what we

21:20

already have. So there's large language models.

21:22

How do they work? They're essentially like

21:24

scouring all of this information for patterns

21:27

and then they use that to... predict

21:29

when you can ask them questions to

21:31

predict the next thing that they'll say.

21:33

Explain that. It

21:35

can construct things that appear

21:38

to be intelligent, knowledgeable answers,

21:40

you know, whether they are or not is up for debate. So

21:43

in technological terms, deep seek isn't

21:45

anything particularly new, but from another

21:47

perspective, it's hugely disruptive. And that's

21:49

from the fact that it costs

21:51

almost nothing to put together. I

21:53

mean, according to these unverified claims,

21:55

it was 20 to 50 times

21:57

cheaper than the AI. AI is

21:59

developed by open AI, Google, Meta,

22:02

the big names in that industry. So

22:04

DeepSeat claims to have spent just over

22:06

five million. dollars on training

22:08

this AI and that's like an

22:10

absolute fraction of the hundreds of

22:13

millions that the competitors have spent.

22:15

It uses significantly less computing power

22:17

and the training data was much

22:19

smaller. And what that kind

22:21

of suggests is that those big companies have

22:23

done too much. They've put too much into

22:25

their systems. They didn't need to do that

22:27

to get the same kind of results. Now,

22:29

I know there's a bit of a dispute

22:32

over whether Deepseek actually did what it said

22:34

it did and maybe it used somebody else's

22:36

training. data. But I think that it is

22:38

a moment for AI to sit back and

22:40

think, okay, what are we doing wrong? What

22:42

have we done right? I mean, there are

22:44

things about this that are also really exciting

22:46

from a science perspective. For

22:48

one thing is open source, which means

22:50

that other people who are not involved

22:52

in the project go in and look

22:54

at the code and rummage around and

22:56

change things and add things. And that

22:58

will probably stimulate some more research in

23:01

this area. And also because it's so

23:03

cheap, it opens AI up to researchers

23:05

and students who'd love to be able

23:07

to use these things but just can't

23:09

afford the very top -end products that

23:11

are coming out of the United States.

23:14

There's been some caution urged about deep

23:16

-sea caution over downloading it about what'll

23:18

happen to your data and also about

23:20

misinformation. I know some of our

23:22

BBC colleagues Asked Deepseek is made

23:24

by a Chinese company. They asked Deepseek what

23:27

happened in Tiananmen Square and it didn't answer.

23:29

And it was just an example of how

23:31

censorship is perhaps kind of casting a shadow

23:33

over how helpful and truthful that information that

23:35

Deepseek has given you is. Yeah, I mean,

23:37

I think there is mistrust around it and

23:39

it sort of kind of plays into the

23:42

story going on about TikTok and the United

23:44

States and so on. But I think that

23:46

using any of these things, you need to

23:48

be cautious because as soon as, even with

23:50

like with social media, as soon you spill

23:52

some of your data out into the world

23:54

of technology, you've spilled it out there, and

23:56

that's where it's going to stay. And you're

23:59

kind of opening yourself up to all sorts

24:01

of, well, God knows what, we'll find

24:03

out, won't we? Now, we've been

24:05

talking a lot about life on Earth this

24:07

week, haven't we? And you have a fascinating,

24:09

rather strange story about mice. Yeah. So this

24:11

is reports coming out of China that researchers

24:14

there have created mice that have two dads.

24:16

Oh. So rather than a mother and a

24:18

father, they've got two fathers. Now,

24:21

This is quite a breakthrough in terms of

24:23

stem cell biology, in terms of reproductive biology,

24:25

and it obviously raises the question of, well,

24:28

if we can do it in mice, can we do

24:30

it in humans? Is it possible that two

24:32

men could have a child who is biologically

24:34

both of theirs rather than using, they'd have

24:36

to use a surrogate mother? The

24:39

answer to that is no. Right. Well,

24:42

not yet. Not yet, anyway.

24:45

In theory, yes. In practice, it's quite

24:47

difficult. So mice with

24:49

two mothers are a well -known phenomenon.

24:51

They were created maybe 20 years ago.

24:54

But mice with two fathers is technically much

24:56

more difficult. And there have been reports that

24:58

it's been done in the past. past

25:01

few years but this is the first time

25:03

we've got confirmation. Why was this such a

25:05

challenge to have two male parents, to have

25:08

two sperm and their biological information in

25:10

one embryo? Sperm and egg, what's called imprinted,

25:12

they carry certain patterns of gene expression and

25:14

to make an embryo from two male cells

25:17

you have to replicate an egg cells

25:19

imprinting and the egg cell imprinting is much

25:21

more complicated than a sperm cell. imprint. You

25:23

have to sort of switch the sperm into

25:26

taking on the role of an egg and

25:28

that's genetically very tricky. Yeah, so it's

25:30

a huge technical challenge which has finally been

25:32

achieved. Whole new ethical minefields there I can

25:34

see. It is a huge ethical minefield and

25:37

that's one reason why this is not

25:39

really applicable to humans because we'd have to

25:41

bypass some ethics that we consider at the

25:43

moment to be kind of red lines that

25:46

we that we wouldn't cross. People who are

25:48

either excited about this because they think

25:50

oh I could have a child with my

25:52

male partner or people who are kind of

25:54

opposed to it, both of them are going

25:57

to be disappointed. That

25:59

solves that ethical quandary for now. What else

26:01

have you brought for us in your bag

26:03

of stories this week, Graeme? Well, this is

26:05

a kind of unfinally moment, really. It's a

26:07

nice story. It's good timing. It's a nice

26:10

story. So how often do you think unexpected

26:12

scientific discoveries occur? as in unplanned, not looked

26:14

for or hypothesised. Exactly. The kind of things

26:16

that, well, Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin because he

26:18

left his petri dish by a window, those

26:20

kinds of discoveries. Maybe not quite so consequential

26:23

as that, but... I don't know, maybe a

26:25

third of the time, a quarter of the

26:27

time? You'd think that, wouldn't you? It's more

26:29

like 70 % of the time. Wow. So

26:31

a study which came out at the University

26:33

of Sussex in a journal called Research Policy,

26:35

which is not a journal I would normally

26:38

read. Sorry, Research Policy. Avid,

26:40

a major of Research Policy. But the

26:42

journal Nature picked this up and did

26:44

a really nice story about it. So

26:46

they looked at 1 .2 million biomedical

26:48

publications and measured what they call the

26:50

unexpectedness of the findings. But

26:52

they looked at these 1 .2 million papers

26:54

and found that almost three -quarters of them

26:56

contained unexpected results. And how they worked that

26:58

out was they looked at what the original

27:00

grant proposal had said, which is where the

27:02

scientists lay out what they're going to do,

27:05

and then they looked at the research papers

27:07

that came out of there. And they compared

27:09

the two, using AI actually as another application

27:12

of AI in science. And what they found

27:14

was surprising to them and probably to everybody

27:16

is that, as I said, 70 % of

27:18

those papers that came out of those research

27:21

proposals found something that the scientists had not

27:23

said they expected. to find.

27:25

So you've squared the circle all the

27:27

way back to AI, AI and surprises.

27:30

That's fascinating. Thank you very much, Graeme. It's

27:32

been lovely to chat to you about a

27:34

busy week in science. My pleasure. Well, surprisingly

27:36

or unsurprisingly, because we do know how long

27:38

we have for this program, that is all

27:41

we have time for this week. So thank

27:43

you so much to both of our planetary

27:45

serers, to Graeme Lawton from New Scientist and

27:47

to all of our listeners. Until next time,

27:49

thanks for listening. You've been listening to BBC

27:51

Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill, the producer

27:53

with Sophie Ormiston. Huber and Jerry Holt. Technical

27:55

production was by Kath McGee and Natalie Ladley.

27:57

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC

27:59

Wales and West. To

28:01

discover more fascinating science content, head to

28:03

bbc .co .uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and

28:05

follow the links to the Open University. Until

28:08

next week, thanks for listening and -bye.