Resurrecting a ‘flipping ship,’ and solving the ‘bone paradox’ in ancient remains
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This podcast is supported by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the academic arm of the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, and one of America's leading research medical schools. What are scientists and clinicians working on to improve medical care and health for women? Find out in a special supplement to Science Magazine prepared by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in partnership with Science.

Visit our website at www.science.org and search for Frontiers of Medical Research-Women's Health, the icon school of medicine at Mount Sinai. We find a way. This is the Science Podcast for November 15th, 2024. I'm Sarah Crespi. First up this week, a ship that flips for science. Sean Cummings, a freelance science writer, joins me to talk about the resurrection of the Floating Instrument Platform, or FLIP.

Flip is famous for turning vertically 90 degrees so that the bulk of the long ship is underwater, stabilizing it for gathering data. Next on the show, researcher Samantha Yausey talks about a bony paradox. Do lesions or scars on buried bones mean the person was frail and ill when alive? Or were they strong and resilient because they survive long enough for disease to damage their bones?

Now we have Sean Cummings. He's a freelance science writer based in Washington, D.C. He wrote about the resurrection of an ocean research platform called FLIP this week in science. Hi, Sean. Welcome back to the podcast. Hi, Sarah. So this is a really unusual ocean-going, shall we call it vessel? Can you describe the FLIP ship for us?

So technically, it's not a vessel. It's a platform because it doesn't have its own propulsion system. It needs to be towed by a tug to wherever it goes. I've heard it described by researchers I spoke with as looking sort of like a giant baseball bat when it's in its horizontal position, floating sort of like a normal ship would on the surface of the water. But once it gets to where it's going, it can fill its ballast tanks with seawater and

and make this sort of flipping motion from horizontal to totally vertical so that only the top 55 feet or so of it, it's 355 feet long in total, only those top 55 feet are sticking out of the water vertically, sort of like a Christmas tree.

Could you give us that in meters? Because not everybody does feet here. Sure. So in meters, that would be a 108 meter long platform in total. And when it flips vertically, all but the top 17 meters are submerged. All the equipment on the inside is designed so that either it can rotate 90 degrees or there's a duplicate of, say, a sink, one on the wall and one on the other wall, so that when you flip 90 degrees, there's another sink that you can use properly. So the researchers have to do this sort of...

slow motion walk from one wall to the other, one wall becomes a floor or vice versa. It sounds like an incredible experience to be on. Absolutely. You know, actually, we have a little clip here from a person who was on the very first flip of the flip ship. So here is Ed Childers talking about this for a Scripps oceanography documentary. And that first flip, what a ride that was.

I mean here's the vents were blowing and one because once you hit the point of no return the flip just like this and then it leaned over and whipped around and I said oh my god what's going on here but I made like I say 57 revolutions but I've never seen one flip the same every time we flipped

It was always different. When we were out there 40 north, 140 west, vertical for 27 days, we went through about five major storms. I'm talking major, 15, 18, 20 foot seas. And flip is going up and down about a half an inch.

He's pointing out kind of the advantage of this design, so it doesn't move around that much? Yeah, so when you have the ship in its vertical position, the bottom 300 feet of it, again, most of its mass is just vertically submerged beneath the surface. FLIP is technically what's called a spar buoy, which is any buoy that floats vertically like that. It's a gigantic spar buoy. And because they have this vertical orientation with most of their mass beneath the surface of the water, they're extremely stable even in inclement weather.

So if you think about a normal ship that's floating on the surface, it has a lot of surface area oriented horoscopes.

horizontally that can be pushed up and down by waves moving under it. Whereas if you have a vertical orientation, you're not as subject to the heaving of the waves that are moving up and down underneath you. So the researchers I spoke to mentioned when they were in horizontal orientation, feeling that kind of heaving of the waves, and then as soon as they turned vertical, it suddenly becomes extremely stable. They can stand on the ship and drink coffee and watch another ship off in the distance getting beat up.

was a memory that one researcher shared with me. What exactly is Flip's story? Why did it come up to be in the first place? You wrote that the Navy built it almost, what is it, like 60 years ago?

That's right. So the U.S. Navy commissioned FLIP to be built. It was built in 1962, and they originally wanted it for things like understanding how sonar moves through water, through the water column and bounces off of the seafloor, how radar moves through the air over the ocean surface. And that kind of research had applications for naval interests, such as systems for detecting submarines or remotely operated vehicles under the ocean, submarine warfare detection systems, that sort of thing. Making sure that your sonar instruments are as accurate as possible because

The water column is complicated. It moves around. There are currents in the air and in the water, and sometimes sonar and radar are not going to move exactly as they would in perfect conditions. And FLIP was a really, really good platform for studying those things. And is that because it's so stable in the water that you have to do less correction for getting bounced around by waves when you're trying to take these detailed measurements?

That was one reason that the researchers told me about. Another reason is that because it has no onboard propulsion system, no engine, no motor, it's extremely silent.

So if you want to study sonar, for instance, which involves the use of sound waves, there's going to be much less interference from noises on the ship. Another reason is that it's extremely stable, as we mentioned before. So if you were studying how the air and sea interact, for instance, which has to do with gases or aerosols being released into the air from the sea or vice versa, which could change conditions in the air or in the water column that affect how sonar and radar propagate through them.

One thing you might want to know, for instance, is how the motion of waves or wave breaking are a factor in how those interactions between the air and the sea happen. And so it's easier to study wave motion from a stable reference point instead of on a ship that's moving up and down exactly as the waves do. Another part of Flip's design that was really useful for studying these research questions is its shape.

When it's in vertical orientation, it's narrow, it's cylindrical, it interferes a lot less with the wind and the waves and how air and water flow around its body than a much larger ship normally would. It has these long boom arms that hold sensors far away from its body to further reduce interference from the ship's body itself on the measurements. And this was in service for...

decades. This is something that was built in the 60s and used for research all the way up until I think the video that I extracted that clip from was from 2012. But I think it was about 10 years later, so 2023, that the ship was retired. It was sent to be dismantled in Mexico. But now it's heading back out to sea. What happened?

That's right. So FLIP did its final research mission in 2017. It was retired in 2023 and sent to Mexico to be deconstructed. There was this company named Deep based in the UK that had an interest in FLIP for a long time. Deep is a company that's interested in creating sort of semi-permanent or permanent undersea habitats to create a sustained human predatory.

presence beneath the weights for research and exploration, sort of similar to how the ISS creates a sustained human presence in space. And that enables all sorts of research that you couldn't do if you were up there for only shorter periods of time. And one of Deep's early ideas during its conception in 2020 and 2021, the present, as Deep told me, was a vertical spar buoy, sort of like Flip, that would have an airlock at the very bottom of it for divers to enter and exit. And Flip was an inspiration for that design. Wow.

Wow. So you would get flipped to the bottom of the sea? Like you'd start out at the surface and then, or would you travel down through some kind of like elevator? I am not sure. We didn't go into it at that level of detail. I don't know. Well, it didn't get built, right? It did not get built. No, they ended up scrapping that idea. But as they were talking about it, flip was a real source of inspiration for them. And so although they didn't proceed with that idea, they retained an interest in flip and kept an eye on it over the years. And as the president of Deep told me, as soon as they got wind...

that Flip had been retired and was going to be destroyed, essentially. They sent a team down there to check out the damage and see how much they could get it for. And

decided it was well worth the value and brought it back. So they took it through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic. It is now at a shipyard in France scheduled to undergo renovations. They're going to fix it up. And what are they going to use it for? Is this going to be like a research vessel again, or is it going to be part of this

sea tourism, sea living situation? It'll probably be a little bit of both. Deep was very cautious to make sure that we understand they're not totally certain about their final designs for FLIP. But what they did say is that in addition to having their seafloor habitats that will allow study down to 200 meters beneath the surface,

FLIP is a complementary tool for them to study the upper 100 meters of the water. So you can have these undersea habitats studying the lower parts of the water column while FLIP studies the upper parts.

Deep also plans to make FLIP available to researchers for research projects similar to what it did in the past. So how soon might we see FLIP back on the ocean? You know, when might it relaunch? So after its renovations at the shipyard in France, Deep plans to have FLIP back in action as soon as 2026, potentially. Yeah, I would love to ride on it, like as a tourist or because, you know, listening to these past researchers or

crew, it sounds like an amazing experience to be on a ship that flips and then you live or at least exist for however many hours of the research data collection in this very small cramped portion, just kind of sticking out of the sea, but like everything raging around you and you're just calm as can be. It just sounds like it would be a really amazing experience. Yeah, the researcher I spoke with said that the plus side of living on flip is that incredible stability. It's basically like being on a little island.

and the unique research capabilities that it has in comparison to a less stable vessel. The downside is that the living conditions they said are spartan. It's very cramped, not high in terms of comfort. Well, maybe that's something the company will do something about as they refurbish Flip. We'll have to see. One other thing that I just thought of during the flipping process, something they all described is that the whole process takes like 30 minutes.

Most of it, most of the process of going vertical happens in like the final minute to 90 seconds. So it's slow, it's slow, it's slow for like 20, 25, 26, 29 minutes. And then suddenly you do that last, you know, 45, 50, 60 degrees in like 90 seconds. That sounds terrifying. Also maybe like a amusement park ride. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So in those, in that last 90 seconds, you kind of just have to trust that it's going to work and everything's going to go correctly because there is no going back, but flip never had a bad flip. It always flipped correctly. All right. Thank you so much, Sean. This has been a great conversation. Thank you, Sarah. Sean Cummings is a freelance science writer based in Washington, DC. You can find a link to the story and some flip videos at science.org slash podcast.

Don't go anywhere. We're talking about judging frailty from old bones with researcher Samantha Yausey up next. Japan's Noster specializes in postbiotic gut microbiota metabolite-based pharmaceuticals research to treat metabolic and immune-related diseases. Noster's products include biosynthesized GMP bacterial preparations and QMEC, the world's first HYA-50 metabolite postbiotics healthcare supplement.

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This week in Science Advances, Samantha Yowsey and colleagues wrote about evaluating resilience and fragility in bones from medieval London cemeteries. Hi, Samantha. Welcome to the Science Podcast. Hi. Thank you for having me. Sure. You know,

There's a lot going on here. I didn't actually summarize your paper in my intro. I was a little intimidated. But I think we should start with one of the two paradoxes that come up in this work. We'll start with the osteological paradox, the idea that if you're looking at bones and you're trying to tell something about the health or the life of this person that died and there's lesions or there's signs of disease on the bones, they could mean the person was sick or could also show

should show that they survive and that they live long enough with a disease to get scarred and maybe even start to heal from it. So, you know, how does this paradox, this osteological paradox, complicate your life as an anthropologist? The osteological paradox is this idea coming out of a paper from more than 30 years ago at this point. And the idea is that

We are limited in the lesions we can look at on the skeleton and things that leave marks on the skeleton. And one of the fundamental things we know about how those skeletal lesions form is they take time. You know, you have to survive long enough to be able to form those lesions.

And if we look at a person who has no lesions, the first thought in your mind would be, oh, that person is incredibly healthy, right? They have no marks. They are dead. They are dead, but they were incredibly healthy while they were alive because they have no marks on their skeleton that suggest poor health. But...

The kind of paradoxical idea is that that person who has lesions had to live long enough for those lesions to form. So if we look at somebody who has no lesions, it's possible that they just died so quickly that they have no lesions whatsoever. And so they were actually the frailest of them all. They were in the poorest health because they died so quickly. Yeah, they had the plague for one minute and then they were done.

Exactly. And then they were gone. Okay, so that must make it difficult to judge the quality of life of a person that died just from their bones. And this is something that probably has

made a big problem for people in your profession, right? Absolutely. We get into huge debates at this point about, okay, if we see a lot of lesions, does that mean that health is declining? People are not doing as well as they were before because more lesions are appearing? Or does it mean the exact opposite, right? That people are actually doing better because they're surviving long enough to have these lesions. So every time we look at a skeletal sample, we now have to reconsider, okay, is it

what we're initially thinking or is it the exact opposite? Could be one or the other. It's a very binary decision. Exactly. So one of the things it seems like this paper is trying to do is create kind of a more powerful and robust index to say this person was fragile, this person was resilient and using marks on bones as part of that instead of kind of the end all be all. Right. Yeah. So we've actually had...

skeletal frailty indices for a few years. And that's coming from modern health contexts where healthcare professionals are scoring people, particularly as they get older, on this scale of how frail are you? How poor has your health gotten at this point? So we've borrowed this idea and we're trying to create similar indices for bioarchaeology. But we have to be cognizant of some of these paradoxes and some of the limitations

of our work with skeletal samples. The other paradox we need to incorporate here is this male-female mortality-morbidity paradox. And mortality is basically lifespan or life expectancy. Morbidity in this context means how sickly or how often you are hit with disease or illness during your lifetime. Bring it all together, male-female mortality-morbidity paradox.

paradox. There's some kind of correlation or not correlation here? Right, right. So in modern populations, living populations, we have a fair amount of evidence for this morbidity-mortality paradox whereby females live longer than males, but those females exhibit higher morbidity throughout their life compared to their male counterparts. And so part of what we wanted to ask of this paper was,

did that same morbidity mortality paradox exist in medieval London? You know, how far back into antiquity does that paradox go? Yeah, because it happens in animals, but humans, you see differences kind of depending a little bit on gendered relationships within the culture. Right. So there are all sorts of things that could be affecting morbidity and mortality patterns. It could be something intrinsic to the person, like their genetics. It could be something

extrinsic to the person. So something like socioeconomic status or a person's gender and all of these things kind of build up and accumulate and impact someone's morbidity and the mortality patterns we see on a population level. Okay, so let's get into the bones here. The bones that you studied are from Medieval London Cemetery. So can you give us when these people died and how come we have access to bones that were in

in cemeteries? We, for this paper, used information from four different cemeteries that have been excavated in London and are dated to the medieval period. So generally all of these skeletal samples kind of are constrained within the time range of the 11th century to the kind of early or mid-16th century. And the way we get access to these samples is actually usually through contract or salvage-based

archaeological projects. So somebody is doing some sort of building in London, as they always are, and they stumble upon a cemetery. And that cemetery is excavated by professional archaeologists and then retained somewhere. And all of these particular skeletal samples are curated by the Museum of London's Centre for Bioarchaeology. And they are wonderful in the sense that they provide...

researchers like us with some of the data about pathological conditions that we see in these skull remains. It's so amazing to think about how old the city is that it has to have bioarchaeological databases. It's insane, especially for those of us in the U.S. We think of old as 200 years, not 800. So what features were you able to catalog from these bones and how are they important when we think about frailty or resilience?

We are actually able to see a lot of different things. Some of the most important, at least for this particular study, were age at death, so the age at which someone died,

their estimated biological sex. So were they more consistent with a female individual? Were they more consistent with a male individual? And then any sorts of lesions that might tell us about frailty or resilience. So for example, we looked at enamel hypoplasia. These are grooves on the teeth that form when you are a child, usually before the age of six. And it tells us about your

growth and development period being disrupted, maybe by disease or malnutrition. We also looked at a few other indicators. So things like osteoarthritis. Today, osteoarthritis is the most common degenerative joint disease. It's when the cartilage in your joints starts breaking down. And so this is typically associated with somebody just making it to older age. And so one of the things we were interested in is, okay,

Is finding osteoarthritis potentially a sign of a person's resilience, that ability to survive to later life? Right. Now, there weren't any kids in your sample. We can exclude them because you can say, okay, these bones are done growing or not done growing. But you did look at stature or their height, the height of their bones. That can also give you clues about what their life was like. Stature is another one we looked at specifically in

Instead of trying to use some equations or formulae to estimate someone's stature, we looked at the length of their long bones. So this is going to be a major component of your stature. So we looked at things like how short is your femur? And one of the things we know from previous work is that if someone has, again, disruptions during that growth and development period, they tend to have shorter femora.

And we can try and connect those shorter ephemera with how long someone lives once they reach adulthood. So some of this is giving you insight into early life and how exposed to stress or trauma these people might have been. And then you also have kind of like, how did they put up with the trials and tribulations of aging and how long did they survive that? Do we know how these people died?

Do you know any information about cause of death before you started doing this work? So in some samples, yes. In other samples, no. It usually depends on how much historical and archaeological context we can get either from the cemetery itself during excavation or from

documents associated with that cemetery. Some of these collections were just cemeteries that the average population was feeding into, and that's where the average Joe was getting buried.

Other samples, for example, the East Smithfield Cemetery, this was a cemetery sample that we know from historical evidence was specifically formed to accommodate victims of the Black Death in the 14th century. So in that case, we know how all of those individuals died, they got played. What did you see, you know, in terms of these different markers on the bones from all those different groups?

One of the things we noticed is that not all of our lesions were telling us the same thing and not all of our lesions are giving us good usable information, right? So we studied this list of 10 different markers on the skeleton and it turns out that only a handful of those are actually giving us useful information about frailty. So for example, enamel hypoplasia and short femur length, they were consistently associated with

higher risk of death and individuals who died sooner. Other skeletal indicators like osteoarthritis is associated with individuals who lived longer and consistently showed these lower hazard of death. This helps you build up kind of an index of what you should pay attention to when trying to figure out what conditions were like for people who've died in the past.

The other part we wanted to talk about was the sex, mortality, morbidity paradox. So how did your data shake out for that question? We have all this evidence from other studies that have previously been conducted that females typically exhibit longer survivorship compared to their male counterparts. And so we asked that question of medieval England, and what we found was that there wasn't

a difference between the index scores that we produced for females and for males. This suggests that there is something that is mitigating or overriding that physiological advantage that females have in living populations. And instead, it's kind of giving a bit of an advantage to males.

what we started to consider was maybe it's a cultural benefit that males are primarily receiving. We know from written records that medieval England and medieval London specifically is a patriarchal society. It's favoring males over females. So perhaps they were given some sort of cultural benefit or maybe females were exposed to some hazards that males were not.

What about the idea that the males are more fragile in youth than they all die off, like the ones that weren't going to make it die off early? This is interesting. When we were looking at how much femoral length contributed to our indices, what we found is that

males, the impact of femoral length was not as pronounced as it was in females. And females were significantly more variable in their femoral lengths than males. And so what we suggested is maybe there was some impact of selective mortality in that a lot of these males with short femora are dying at young ages. And we only studied adults in our study. So all we're seeing is that adult cohort

So if all of the really frail males with short femora die at young ages, then the surviving adult cohort of males looks very robust, has very long femora. And so femurs aren't going to contribute to our index very much for them, but it will for women. What about the classism, like the fact that there is like a giant underclass in London and an upper class? Are we able to see that in the state or the cemetery is kind of also the

divided along class lines. Unfortunately, the symmetry samples that we examined didn't have solid class delineations.

So we couldn't really examine whether or not socioeconomic status or class was a major impact on somebody's mortality. What did I miss from the findings? Do you feel like we kind of hit the main points? The other main thing I would hit on would be the kind of novelty of combining these two different approaches to studying frailty. So this is the first time that we're seeing

measures of hazards analysis or survival analysis being used to inform these population-specific frailty indices. Previously, we thought that skeletal frailty indices were just kind of a one-size-fits-all approach, and you can take the same index and apply it to different contexts, different time periods, different samples. And what we're finding here is that it might be best to

create an index that is specifically attuned to the population you're working with, in this case, medieval London, rather than just applying these frailty indices willy-nilly. How is it different than maybe what you would do at a cemetery where you are in Virginia?

So we would actually still use the same approach. Part of what we're looking at is first evaluating which biomarkers are informative about frailty and which biomarkers are informative about resilience and which biomarkers aren't telling us anything. And then narrowing down that list and only using those particular biomarkers that might be relevant in this setting. So for us, it was things like enamel hypoplasia and osteoarthritis and femoral length and

For other people, maybe it's things like trauma or periodontal disease or something like that. And so they would be choosing different indicators to include in their index. As someone who studies, are you exclusively a medieval London person or are there other places that you would love to do this kind of analysis on?

I am not exclusively a medieval London person. That's what's kind of interesting. All four of us who worked on this paper have worked in medieval and post-medieval London, but we also have interests in other places.

And so one of our next steps after this paper is performing the same analyses with another sample. We're actually currently working with a sample in Milan, Italy, to ask some of the same questions. You know, do we get the same index when we perform these analyses in a totally different location? I will spoil that a little bit for you. The answer is no. All right, Samantha, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me.

Samantha Yowsey is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at James Madison University. You can find a link to the Science Advances paper we discussed at science.org slash podcast.

And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us at [email protected]. To find us on podcasting apps like Spotify, Outcast, Pocket Cast, Apple Podcast, search for Science Magazine, or you can listen on our website, science.org/podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, and Kevin MacLean. We had production help from Megan Tuck at Podigy.

Our music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wenkui Wen. On behalf of Science and its publisher, AAAS, thanks for joining us.