The Nature Podcast festive spectacular 2024
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Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week, it's time for our annual festive fun. There'll be games. There'll be songs. And there'll be Nature's Roundup of the people who helped shape science this year. I'm Nick Pettichow. And I'm Benjamin Thompson.

So another year has passed us by. And once again, it's been a fascinating 12 months for science. And to celebrate that later on, we've got a festive quiz looking at some of the stories that made 2024 special. And I must say that quiz went quite off the rails at certain points, but good fun was had there.

all. To celebrate further as well, I'll also be chatting to Features editor Richard Van Norden about Nature's 10. But for now, let's start the show with one of our annual festive songs, where we celebrate some of the science that's been talked about in the past year.

As listeners are probably aware, 2024 has seen a lot of stories about ozempic, or semaglutide, which is used for treating diabetes and as an anti-obesity medication. But it seems it might be able to do quite a bit more than that. So, here to the tune of O Come All Ye Faithful is musician Phil Self with Ozempic You're Able. Ozemore

to treat all kinds of ailments. Oh, GLP-1 agonists, what will you do now? Come and behold it. Diabetes, weight loss, celebrities adore. And those that cannot

While scientists explore your glutamic. To slow down digestion. Reducing your appetite. Eating hard. Smoking hard.

Celebrities adore you And those that can afford you As scientists explore you Semaglutab But there's a shortage For those with diabetes Of late

Prescriptions exceeding supply. Backmarket dealings, constraints at manufacturers. So many folks adore you. But public health implores you to focus on those homes.

So what comes next? Addiction or arthritis? Fivers the list just goes on. There must be trials. Gob and randomized. Analogs the Lord.

Must be tested before you've had a cure. To disease will work. That was A Zempik You're Able, written by Noah Baker and performed by Phil Self. Thanks also to Tracy Watson and George Caputa. Next up, it's time to get competitive as it's the festive quiz. Cue the music.

Hello everyone, the Nature Podcast annual festive shenanigans are here once again and this year instead of our usual host Sharmlee Bundell we have me, Nick Petridge-Howell donning the sparkly host jacket. Because of that, this year we have some changes.

In previous years, I think it's fair to say that the true winners, in fact, have been robbed of their deserved victories by Charmaine Bondel. As the actual winner of a couple of the past years, I would like to formally lodge my objection. Well, I'm just saying there would seem to be a very vibe-based point system. And this year, we're doing it scientifically. There'll be actual points for actual questions. And we'll get to the end and decide who's going to win.

who in fact is the best, the best person who works at Nature, I've arbitrarily decided. Yes, I'm in trouble. I can sense it already. But with that in mind, maybe it's worth introducing the three of us. So I have three of my colleagues here who are probably familiar to listeners. We have Emily Bates. Hello. We have Dan Fox. Hello.

And the master of the nature briefing herself, Flora Graham. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Contestants, as I mentioned, this is a proper quiz this year. So that means we also have to have buzzers. With this being primarily an audio medium, I want you to come up with your own buzzer sound. So I'm going to put you on the spot now. Emily, what's your buzzer sound? Moo. Moo. Perfect. Dan Fox? Moo.

I was going to go quite a deep noise as well. I'm going to go, Dan. Dan, perfect. Dan. Flora, what is your buzzer noise? Oh, it has to be Christmas themed. Oh, go for it. I'm going to go ding dong, ding dong. Christmas bells. Perfect. Make sure you remember them because you'll need to buzz in to answer the questions. And if I don't hear that exact buzzer sound, I won't go to you. Dan. Sorry, just back to it.

Well, contestants, if you've got your buzzers at the ready, we can begin. Cue the music. OK, so as you all know, every year on the quiz, we talk about stories we've had on the Nature podcast and in Nature more broadly. And so this year we had a story about watermarking, a way of marking AI generated text so it can be detected. So I want you to do some detecting.

I've got a set of five nature headlines coming up. One of them was generated by AI and I want you to spot it for me. Oh no. Oh, I'm feeling good about this. Headlines are my bag. I was going to say, this is your thing, Flora. All right, here are the five headlines. Two-faced AI language models learn to hide deception. AI predicts the next global pandemic, but experts question its accuracy.

Could AI-designed proteins be weaponised? Scientists lay out safety guidelines. AI's now beat humans at basic tasks. New benchmarks are needed, says major reports. AI made of jelly learns to play Pong and improves with practice.

Buzzers at the ready, what do you think? Damn. Go for it. It was the second one, which I've forgotten what the words were, but they were the wrong words. I think they were AI words. Yeah, I agree. They were boring. That was on my list, yeah. So sorry to whoever wrote that if it was not an AI. It was indeed AI. You are correct. I'm giving the points to Dan because he buzzed in. So...

Yes, AI predicts next global pandemic, but experts question its accuracy. I thought it sounded plausible when I was getting ChatGPT to generate these, but yes, you were correctly identified. It wasn't as bad as most AI headlines. That would have been workshopped more, though, if it was one of ours. It would have had something a bit more to it to grab you. There's just that secret sparkle. It took you millions of years of evolution to see. Millions of years of evolution for a nature headline. Yeah.

All right, I have a bonus for you as well. Just true or false, is this next one AI-generated? Buzzers at the ready. Could AI predict financial crises? Wall Street is betting on it. No. I think that was Flora. It is AI-generated. It is AI-generated. Well done. But I thought I would read that story. That sounds interesting. I mean, it doesn't sound like an interesting story, but would nature put Wall Street in a headline? I don't think so. Fair enough, fair enough. Using the insider nature knowledge there.

All right, I've got an archaeology round coming up, so get your fingers on the buzzer for this next one. This year, we also had a story about two cities in Uzbekistan that were revealed by LIDAR.

one of those cities was named tash black what was the name of the other dan go for it uh two gun black two gun black is correct well done points for a long time on that one a lot of re-recording that voiceover to make sure i got those names wow i have more of a general knowledge you need to watch the nature youtube channel i mean i do watch it but i don't memorize every single noun and

number. Remember the name of every ancient Uzbek city recovered by Lida. I mean, if there's anyone who can honestly say she has watched every single nature video you guys have published this year, it's me. So I might have to see, as you can see, I'm already trying to butter you guys up. We appreciate it.

I'm filled with fear at this stage. It is all to play for at this point still. So, next question. In August, we published a story about the origin of the altar stone of Stonehenge, the large central stone.

What basin did their analysis suggest it came from? Emily Bates. The Orkney Basin. I have the Orcadian, but I'll accept the Orkney. Orkney is technically wrong. Orcadian is correct. Orkney is the island that is part of the Orcadian Basin, but the basin actually stretches into the northern part of Scotland.

as well. Yes, it's sort of the Northern tip and the Orkney Islands, as you said. I got too excited. You did get too excited, but I gave you the point anyway. I think subsequent work said it's definitely not Orkney now. They have absolutely said that. No, Dan, stop. They have said that, but it's still the Orcadian Basin, but most likely not from the Isle of Orkney.

All right, moving on. The microbiome was another topic we covered this year. And I was wondering if anybody knows what did perturbing a mouse dad's microbiome do?

Perturbing. Perturbing. There was some perturbation going on in the mouse microbiome of the dad. Go for it. I believe it affected the health of his offspring. That is indeed correct. So the offspring was smaller and didn't survive as well after the microbiome was perturbed, suggesting that even the father's microbiome has an effect on their offspring. Okay, next question. This is a physics-based question.

Why might we have to add a negative leap second to Earth's time in several years? Ding dong. Go for it. Because the moon is getting... No. Moon. The Earth slowed down slightly.

The rotation has slightly changed. Yes, I'll give it to you. So the speed of the Earth's rotation relative to the core is increasing. So the core is slowing down, the outside is going faster, but that process has actually been delayed because of climate change and that's caused a redistribution of mass of

from the poles to the rest of the Earth, sort of slowing that process down. So we may not have to add that negative leap second for a few years. Also, adding a negative leap second is quite a strange concept. But yes, at some point in the future, we'll have one less second. There'll be a second that goes missing at some point. Exciting. Wow, that's a real silver lining of climate change, isn't it? Yeah, I know, right? That inconvenience.

I am expecting you to get this one, Flora. Absolutely no pressure. But on the briefing chat this year, the famous part of the show where we talk about stories in the nature briefing, we talked about synthetic meat. Now, one of the things that's been hard to replicate is a process by which amino acids and sugars react with each other to give meat that recognisable aroma and taste.

Does anybody know what the name of that reaction is? Emily Bates? The Maillard reaction? Maillard reaction is correct. All right, we also had a story about frog saunas on the podcast. The idea of these saunas is that they could help frogs fight off a deadly fungus as it couldn't survive the higher temperatures inside. Now, these saunas were constructed from breeze blocks and greenhouses.

Does anybody know where the researchers who did this work bought those greenhouses? Damn. Is it Aldi? It is, in fact, Aldi. That's amazing. Thank you. And Aldi, send the cheque directly to Dan Fox Care of Nature Towers. Hashtag not sponsored.

Matt and I was like, I've got this. I know everything about this story. They were in Australia. The frogs actually loved the saunas. Like they would seek them out. And then the question was, where did they buy the greenhouses? Aldi, of course, being the discount supermarket famous in Europe and now the rest of the world as well, I think. And yeah, the researchers believe that it cost around 70 Australian dollars, all told.

Another thing we talked about a lot at Nature this year was about self-experimentation. And there was a story about a woman who took an MRI scan of herself 75 times in a year. Does anybody know what she was looking to find out? Ding dong. The effect of pregnancy and childbirth on the brain.

No, but similar topic. It's the menstrual cycle. No, no, no, contraceptive pill. Yes, it was the contraceptive pill. I will give it to you just. Panicking. So she measured her brain when she was on and off the pill and found a rhythmic pattern of change in brain volume and connectivity between brain regions.

And she also found that the brain was very adaptable because when she went off the pill, those changes went back to the way they were. Next question. Two dummies were launched into space in 2022 to better understand the effects of space radiation on female bodies. Does anybody know what those two dummies were called? No. Emily Bates? Helga and Zohar. Helga and Zohar is correct.

All right, that is the end of the main round. We also have a lightning round. These are all based on research highlights that have been published in Nature this year. It's a good thing I forget these the second they leave my mouth. Damn research highlights fox here. All right, but it's everything to play for here because the points are relatively close, so this could be the difference. First question. Which direction do baby turtles swim when hatching?

Dern is upwards through the sand to the sky. Upwards is correct. Objection. Baby turtles do not swim when hutching. They climb. Because they're in sand. They're not in the water. The sand axes are fluid in this situation, in this model.

That's a valid point, Flora. I thought that was like a cunning trick question, you know. No, but it's a valid point, so I'll give you a random bonus point for that. Oh. Pedantry points. Pedantry points. I thought it was one of those, like, how much weighs more? A pound of feathers or a pound of... This is why Flora wins every year, because she gets little pedant points. How dare you? I'm having to desperately cling to the pedant points only this year.

Next question is about the Dwarf Planet series. What does its ocean become as you go deeper? Ding dong. Floor. Liquid methane? No. Moo? Methane. Solid methane. No. Just like dirtier. Dirtier. Dirtier.

So yeah, Sirius's ocean gets dirtier as you go down. So it is almost pure water and is ice at the surface. And then as you go down, it becomes progressively richer in impurities like salt and mud. And this will help researchers resolve discrepancies about how they've been modelling Sirius's ocean.

This question is relevant to this time of year in the UK, I think. What did researchers find would reduce beer consumption in England? Ding dong.

The total obliteration of the human race. That probably would do it, but not correct. Dan? It's smaller glasses, little smaller measures. Smaller measures is correct. They talked about taking pints or, you know, 568 millilitres for those out there that want that specificity. They talked about taking them off the menu instead using two thirds. Devastating. Very devastating. How would you go for a pint if there is no pint?

Two fossilised fish were discovered this year with what in their jaws? Vapes. Vapes. Surprisingly incorrect. I actually picked this as one of my highlight of the year highlights. Oh, did you? Do you know what the answer is? Oh, wait, say Dan first, otherwise... Dan? It's fossilised bats. It is fossilised bats, correct. Dan Fox is storming this round. Choked on a fossilised bat.

Wow. It's pretty good, isn't it? All right. Next question. Where did bacteria found on an asteroid actually turn out to be from? Moo. And the baits? The Earth. Yes, that is correct. And solid guess if anyone got that at home. Yeah, it turns out that it was probably a contamination showing that we should be really careful when we go out there because we'll probably take something with us.

To be fair, the alternative is we just go at alien life, which I think would have made the news. We should say, though, this was an asteroid sample that had been returned to Earth. So it's not like a spacecraft went out to the asteroid, found a sample, analysed it and found bacteria. I mean, that really would have been a bit of a turn of events. So, yeah, I mean...

The fact that it was dropped onto the earth in a sample container, then they had kind of struggled to open it for quite a while. Lots of stuff happened. I mean, they did go absolutely incredibly above and beyond to try to keep it clean. So yeah, it is still a very interesting discovery. But to be fair, it was surrounded by earthiness at the time. Earthy bacteria, yep. And their final question, so fingers on buzzers, or mouths, I guess, on buzzers in this case. The final question is...

Why do adult chimps play? No. Emily Bates. Because it's fun. Probably true, but not in this case.

What might you learn if you're doing... Learn bonding and teamwork. Teamwork is the answer. Adult chimps play in addition to young chimps to learn teamwork and to learn how to cooperate. Maybe why humans play as well. Like a quiz. Like a quiz. It could be. It all comes round. We've learnt so much teamwork through doing this quiz together. And so I think that brings us to the end. So the winner...

and conclusive best person at nature is Dan Fox. Dan research highlights Fox. I will say as well, before the lightning round, Emily Bates was in the lead and Dan brought it in the lightning round. So well done, Dan Fox. You were the best person at nature. How does it feel? Fantastic. I'd like to announce the renaming of the nature podcast, the Dan Fox podcast and party hour. And, you know, I'll also be ending the podcast. Yeah.

Thanks for listening, everyone. Speaking of, thank you, everyone, for listening. And we'll be back again with the quiz next year. Cue the music.

Well, I hope you all enjoyed listening to that as much as we enjoyed playing the quiz. And I'm a little bit sad, I must say, that I'm again not the winner, but I guess because I was hosting this year, I'm happy to let Dan have the victory. I mean, there was one competitor who didn't take part this year. So you were getting 12 months. Anyway, I think it's time for another of our festive songs. This year also saw a lot of research into CAR T-cells, which are immune cells that have been engineered to fight cancer.

But it's not quite so straightforward. Although these treatments have shown a lot of promise, some caution is needed. So, to the tune of Silver Bells, it's Phil Self once again with CAR-T Cells. CAR-T Cells, CAR-T Cells, giving the when you therapy, modify lymphocytes.

by the FDA Cancer fighting Tumor fight Sure they've been right In the trials there's a feeling of promise With genetic engineering You can personalize Treatments to give patients the all clear CAR T-cells

Cartycell, or new thing, modified lymphocyte, passed by the F. It's not all bright, there are stoplights, side effects in high, secondary lymphoma. With new questions on how best to revolutionize.

Treating cancer so one day we'll hear CAR T-cell, CAR T-cell, A4 new therapy Modified lymphocyte if passed by the egg Always there are new approaches that keep grabbing

Autoimmunity in remission. Using CRISPR and a donor. Trials have been high-filed. With success and excitement. All you party cells. Donor cells. In the warn you therapy. Modified lymphocytes.

When passed by the F, when passed by the G, A,

That was Car T Cells, written by Noah Baker and performed by Phil Self. Thanks also to Victoria Aranda and Heidi Ledford. Last up on the show, it's the time where we do some reflection on the last year. And the way we like to do that is with Nature's 10, which is Nature's list of the 10 people who helped to shape science in the past year. Join us next time for a more interesting episode of Nature's 10.

Joining me to do so is Features Editor Richard Van Norden. Hi Richard, how's it going? Hello Nick, doing well thanks. Well it's good to have you here once again to chat through this and we've got some exciting picks to look at. We can't talk about all 10 of them but we've picked a couple to focus on and I

The first person I wanted to talk to you about is someone who I thought was a bit of an unusual pick, because often we focus on people who have had scientific accomplishments in the past year. But this person was picked for a slightly different reason. Can you tell me a little bit about them? Yes, here we've got someone who is quite famous and well-known for what they've done in their scientific and economic career.

But now found themselves thrust into politics at the very late age of 84. This is Muhammad Yunus, a very well-known economist and I suppose civil activist who's famous for pioneering and expanding the idea of microcredit.

offering very small loans to people to help them get started in business, which has helped transform lives for the poorest people in society. And he won the Nobel Peace Prize later on for establishing Grameen Bank, which provides microloans to millions of people across Bangladesh. And this idea has lit the spark on what's now become a worldwide movement, a criticised movement, but a movement of lending small amounts to the very poorest of people. Well,

Come 2024, and as listeners may know, there were demonstrations and essentially a revolution that toppled Bangladesh's autocratic government this year. And students led this revolution, and they had one demand. They wanted Muhammad Yunus to lead the nation. So Yunus found himself leading Bangladesh's interim government, because it's still expected that there will be elections later on.

And thrust into that position, he now needs to lead the reform of this country of 170 million people. So he's got huge expectations on his shoulders. Rather unusual position for all the natures tend to be in. And I understand that this isn't without some controversy as well. Well, it's very unclear whether he can bring in the kind of institutional reform that students want to.

Before the revolution, much of Bangladesh's police and civil service and judicial system and even banks had become extensions essentially of the ruling party. And now Yunus and some of the students who led the revolution who've been given posts in this interim cabinet, they set up various working groups and committees to try and make sure that public institutions are protected from political interference. Whoever gets into power eventually wins.

But, you know, can Yunus end corruption? Can he protect civil rights? Of course, Yunus is not elected. He's doing this, what is effectively a caretaker role. Now, for the moment, he has backing from the military. And so it's not quite like in other countries where you see a revolution and then another party just comes in and you see a wave of instability and nothing good comes of the change.

So a lot of people are hopeful that in Bangladesh it will be different. And I guess this will be something we'll be keeping an eye on to see how this economist ends up running a country. But speaking of things like corruption in institutions, the next person I want to talk about is someone who's been investigating fraud in scientific publications.

And now we've talked about science sleuths even on Nature's 10 before and on the podcast more generally. But what's so unique about this person? We've picked Anna Abalkina this year. She's a Russian science sleuth. Like other sleuths, she spots fake papers. She spots plagiarism,

She also spots hijacked journals. And I think she's sort of specialist in this. These are journals that are scam websites and they clone authentic journals, effectively just to con authors out of publication fees. And I think what's unusual about her is, first of all, she studies activity in Russia. And actually this year, she found that her name was on a watch list for a Russian agency that tracks online activity online.

So she, again, actually was an economist. And back in the 2010s, she found that her papers had been plagiarized, which is pretty shocking for a start. And she then got involved in Dissonette, a Russian grassroots network of academics and journalists that looked at Russian PhDs for plagiarism, which then caused quite a few high profile Russian politicians to resign.

She thinks it was this that ultimately led her to be on this social media watch list. But after that, she left Russia to do a PhD in Italy. And she thought, well, this problem is a Russian problem. But she ran into a barrage of international fraud that I think our listeners will be well acquainted with. Fake studies, bribes, editors, paper mills and all that.

And this year, she's really focused on the hijacked journals, these scam websites. And what she's shown is that these fake websites even get indexed in reputable indexes of scholarship, like Scopus, Elsevier's index. And it seemed that they sort of sorted this out. They actually sort of deleted all the homepage links of all the websites in their system. So you wouldn't accidentally think, you know, this website looks genuine. Elsevier says it's genuine. Yeah.

But this year, Abelkina showed that there's still other scam journals that are indexed there. And just in November, she showed that even the highest profile publishers have some of their journals cloned by scammers. The publishers, of course, say they're looking into it. So Abelkina is sort of leading all of this. Very interesting. And...

She's very unusual in her focus on the kind of Russian and ex-Soviet countries, although she's also looked at Iran and India. And for our next person, I wanted to talk a little bit about MPOCs. Now, people may remember various outbreaks in the past, but this is still very much a thing that is of big concern to a lot of researchers. This year, the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern over rising cases of MPOC,

especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And the person we featured, Placide Mbala, is an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC. And he led a team who sounded the alarm about this latest MPOCs outbreak.

He actually analysed the genome of the virus that they saw in Kinshasa and they showed that it was a new strain that could pass from person to person. And it was distinct from the strain that caused the 2022 outbreak and other previous outbreaks. And this particular strain of the virus has been brought to some countries that have never seen it before. And by travel, it's been brought to places like Sweden and the US and the UK and India and so on. Ambala has been persistently raising the alarm that

And what he said to us is it feels like scientific amnesia that this global outbreak happened in 2022 and

And even at the time, Africa never got the therapeutics and the vaccines that, for example, the United States employed in 2022 and 2023. And then we see it coming out again in the DRC. In the DRC alone this year, this particular strain has caused an estimated 36,000 cases and 1,000 deaths. So quite a high fatality rate there, you know. And

And belatedly now, people are talking about getting vaccines out to the DRC and other places in Central Africa, although not on the scale required. I mean, it sounds like it would be a frustrating position for Placidae to be in. Absolutely. And he's known as a very sort of diplomatic and democratic person who's been coordinating...

response and community engagement activities across the DRC, as well as doing all this sequencing. He basically wants to better understand how the virus spreads and to stamp it out. And he's testing ways for health officials to work alongside local communities, in particular with stigmatized populations who are at high risk of contracting MPOCs.

So he's been crucial in the DRC's response to MPOCs, but also to Ebola. And I think he'll be a central figure fighting these fires.

Well, let's hope that his work is shining a light on this issue and there will be better solutions for MPOCs going forward. And speaking of hope, the last person I want to talk about is someone who's had kind of a success. This is someone who was campaigning for better pay for PhDs and postdocs, which we know is a concern, especially with rising inflation around the world. This is Caitlin Carras, who, yes, had a success. Hooray, something's gone right.

In April, she got to look at the Canadian budget. And the good news was that in the budget was the biggest pay rise in 20 years for graduate students and postdoc researchers across Canada. Lots of boosts to the numbers of government scholarships and the value and the pay.

And she said there was absolute excitement and giddiness when I saw those numbers. So Caras had been leading a project called the Support Our Science campaign in Canada. She wasn't the first executive director, but when that person, Sarah LaFond, was stepped down in November 2023, a board of scientists chose Caras to be her replacement director.

And essentially what it was, was a lot of rallies, a lot of meetings, a lot of email campaigns and a nationwide walkout in May last year, which Karas says was the most effective thing. I mean, I guess if science stops, then the politicians have to listen. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. She says it was her favourite moment. Some 10,000 researchers stopped working in protest when the government in its last budget didn't increase scholarship amounts.

So it's quite rare to get a nationwide salary boost, but some other researchers have been successful in the US. They're getting pay rises. And, you know, why did this campaign succeed? Karas thinks it's because they highlighted the economic contributions of research and the diversity of the graduate student community.

Now, Caras herself is not going to benefit from this. Oh, no. Because, you know, she's finished her PhD. And I believe the campaign is now finished. But she's proud to have left Canadian research in a better place. You know, the ecosystem of science research in Canada, more money.

more inclusive for people following after her. No, I'm sure she'll be happy with her legacy there. And I think that's all we've got time for this year. But listeners, if you want to read more about the people we've talked about or about the rest of Nature's 10, then you can find a link to the full feature in the show notes. But for now, Richard, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks.

Well, that brings us to the end of the show. But fear not, listeners, there'll be plenty more content from us to keep you entertained over the festive period. Coming up, we'll have the News and Views team picking some standout stories from 2024. And we'll also have some of the podcast team's favourite stories from the past year. I've just finished putting that one together. There's some really good stuff in there. There'll also be a long read. And at the start of the year, we'll take a look forward to what science can expect in 2025.

I've been Benjamin Thompson. And I've been Nick Pertrucciol. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys.

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