The Nature Podcast highlights of 2024
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Get your personalized plan today at Noom.com. Real Noom users compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, the typical Noom user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary. Hi, Benjamin here. We're close to the end of the year. And as is tradition on The Nature Podcast, in this episode, we'll be taking a look back at some of the things we've covered on the show over the past 12 months.

In this Clips podcast, members of the team will be picking out something they made in 2024 and telling us why it stood out to them. Kicking things off is Lizzie Gibney.

If you've paid close attention to the Nature podcast over the years, you'll know that I am a big fan of anything to do with clocks or time. I find it fascinating that although time passing is something natural, the way that we measure it in seconds and hours is totally constructed by humans. This story that you're about to hear involves syncing up the modern methods of timekeeping with the kind of instinctive one based on the Earth day, the length of which is actually ever-changing.

And in this story, there's also a surprise role for the biggest scientific issue of our age, climate change. So I hope you enjoy it. From our 27th of March show, here's Lizzie's pick of 2024. Now, you've no doubt heard about leap years, but we also have leap seconds. Since the early 1970s, these seconds have been occasionally inserted into Earth's official time, which is kept using ultra-accurate atomic clocks.

These leap seconds are needed because the length of an Earth day, from sunset to sunset, changes depending on how fast the planet rotates, and it's rarely exactly 24 hours long. In fact, it's often a fraction longer, and over time these tiny bits of extra time add up, meaning a leap second has to be added to atomic clock time to make sure the two stay in sync. At least, that's what happened in the past few decades.

Now, whether or not a leap second needs to be added, or maybe one even needs to be taken away, comes down to several factors. And this week, geophysicist Duncan Agnew has analysed how the melting of polar ice caps is slowing down how quickly Earth spins on its axis, which could have big implications for timekeeping around the world.

I gave him a call to find out more, and he explained why the rate of Earth's rotation changes. So Earth rotation varies because of a lot of things. One is the effect of the tides interacting with the moon, which of course causes the tides. And over time, that slows the Earth down. That's been slowing the Earth down since a billion years ago and will continue to do so into the future. That is a very steady thing.

Second thing is harder to describe because it's about the Earth's core, which is this giant ball of molten iron inside the Earth. Because it's molten, there are currents in it. It flows around, which changes with time. So we know that if it spins faster, the Earth above it, which is what we're on, slows down. If it starts to slow down, the Earth above it spins faster. The final piece comes about from the melting of ice.

and the poles. And the water from the belt, of course, redistributes itself all over the ocean. So some of it's now near the equator. And that

That changes the shape of the Earth, basically makes it, in some sense, flatter, and that causes it to slow down. So the effect is something like an ice skater. So if they want to go faster, they bring their arms in, and if they're spinning, and if they want to go slower, they put them out. This flatter Earth is like an ice skater with their arms out. Is that right? That's the perfect analogy. Yes, that's exactly right. So we've got three different major forces. We've got this long-term...

slowing down that's thanks to the tidal friction. Then there's the core slowing, which speeds up actually Earth's rotation. And then finally, climate change is kind of counteracting that, is hampering that. Is that right? Yes. Since 1972, the core has been basically steadily slowing down and speeding the rest of the Earth up.

Climate change, starting in about the 1990s, ice started melting at more and more rapid rates. Sea level has gone up more and more rapidly. And that has been slowing the Earth down more and more rapidly. Although the effect of that is significant.

somewhat smaller than how much the core is speeding it up. So on net, the Earth has been speeding up. And now this actually looks like it's going to affect timekeeping. So we now use atomic clocks and we have these things called leap seconds, which we use to reconcile Earth's time from its rotation with this atomic time. It doesn't have any of these fluctuations. Positive leap seconds are the ones that we might be familiar with. They are when we kind of like stop time

And then we wait for Earth to catch up because atomic time has been going effectively faster. But now Earth is not only catching up, but seems like it might be going faster. So we actually have to take a second out of atomic time to catch up. Has that been done before? No, it has not. Every leap second between 1972 when these were instituted and now has been, let's have a minute that's 61 seconds long.

That's how it's done. And a negative leap second would be, let's have a minute that's 59 seconds long. So there'd be an actual second that just drops out. And a negative leap second is something we have never had. And it's a,

question is what effect that will have. So we know that a negative leap second is likely coming. What is the impact then of global warming on time and this leap second? So it's being delayed by global warming. I want to emphasize in case anyone thinks this is a positive aspect of global warming, it's completely outweighed by all the negative aspects. But yes, in the absence of this global warming effect,

we would be very close to a negative leap second. As it is, we're not so close. It's being delayed by the effect of global warming. But I think the main takeaway here is the fact that we can actually see the rate of the Earth's rotation has been affected by the amount of melting of polar ice. And leap seconds anyway, as I understand it, are a complete pain for anyone who runs a computing system, anyone who's trying to match time across the world.

But a negative leap second that's never been tried before, would that be even more of a pain? That would be much more of a pain. Leap seconds are a pain because you want to synchronize computers very well. And I would emphasize that while a second doesn't sound like much, just for reference, the official standard for timing financial markets is a thousandth of a second. And so if you had two computers that were a second apart, then that would not be good at all.

The problem is that some human being has to effectively tell the computer, okay, there's going to be a leap second at this time. And most computers have a program in them that allows for this, but usually the program just tells it the time of leap second, doesn't necessarily tell it which way the leap second is going to go, because everyone assumed when leap seconds were instituted that because of tidal friction, which is slowing the earth, that that would be the dominant effect.

And the Earth would just get slower and slower, and we'd always have positive leap seconds. No one really anticipated that there would be a negative leap second. And so we don't really know what will happen to the computer timing infrastructure of the world if there is one. This is a little bit like the year 2K problem. And so will your work help in at least being able to predict that?

when this problem might occur, when we might need to have the first ever negative leap second? I would like to think so, because it breaks down the rotation changes into the different causes. And so if you extrapolate what the core has been doing since 1972 and add global warming and tidal friction, you discover that there should be a negative leap second in 2029. And if global warming hadn't occurred earlier,

and you take that effect out, it would have been about three years earlier in 2026. Now, the problem is the core is fundamentally unpredictable. We don't know much about it. It's changed abruptly in the past. This is rather like trying to predict the stock market.

And so we're not determined that we're going to have a negative leap second. We can only say that this is what the data indicate at the moment. You've worked in geophysics and climate change for years. Did you imagine that you'd see a point where humans were having this scale of an effect that actually our actions are impacting how fast the very planets move?

spins and as a result time itself. I mean I've been around climate change for a long time the place where I work is where the famous carbon dioxide curve comes from I had not thought until recently about the effect on rotation and I was surprised

surprised to see that it's as large as it is. That was Duncan Agnew from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US, talking with Lizzie Gibney. To read Duncan's paper, head over to the show notes for a link, where you'll also find links to all the other stories in this year's clip show.

Up next, Noah Baker's here with his pick. My favourite story that I worked on on The Nature Podcast this year was actually part of a broader special that was convened by my colleague Lucy Odling-Smee, and that was about sex and gender. This is an area which is extremely important to study. It's drastically understudied and misunderstood, but it's also weaponised by political interests. It causes a lot of division, and there's a lot of misinformation out there about what sex and gender mean, what sex and gender are.

And that can lead to an awful lot of suffering, which we're seeing all around the world. And for this podcast piece, we wanted to bring together some of the experts that contributed to this special and get them around the table, try to dispel some of the myths about sex and gender, think about where there needs to be changes, where there needs to be investment, how we should think differently about sex and gender and ways that we can work forward collaboratively to try to be inclusive of all people, specifically

so that healthcare can be built for people that are of any sex, of any gender, people that are trans, people that are non-binary, people that are intersex.

There's an awful lot of complexity here that scientists are aware of, but quite often is overlooked or oversimplified in the broader discourse. And so this piece of content was something which to me was a fascinating way to really dive deep into the complexities here and try to talk about practical ways forward that could be inclusive, helpful and productive. And it was a conversation that I remain very proud of being part of.

So first of all, I wonder if you could all introduce yourself and give us a brief overview of your work and why you got interested in sex and gender. Stacey, let's start with you. Sure. Thanks, Lucy. I'm Stacey Ritz. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at McMaster University. I came to this work on the incorporation of sex and gender considerations into health research on

on a pathway that started as a laboratory scientist myself. I was looking at the molecular and cellular origins of allergic disease in the respiratory tract. And that was occurring at a time when I was developing heightened sensibility about the importance of sex and gender in health research. In fact, it was around the time that the Canadian Institutes of Health Research established their Institute of Gender and Health. And thinking about it in terms of my own work, engaging with a lot of the feminist literature on sex, gender, and science,

And trying to translate some of the insights that I was reading into my work in the lab proved to be really challenging. And I kind of spent more and more time reading and more and more time thinking about it. And it ultimately became more interesting to me than the research that I was doing itself. And over the course of a number of years, I moved away from the immunological research. And my focus now is on how do we incorporate sex and gender considerations when we're doing experimental biomedical research.

Peg, over to you. Hi, I'm Margaret Goldbein-Peg McCarthy. I'm a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. I'm also the director of the Maryland Institute for Neuroscience Discovery.

And I started my career with a really keen interest in how the brain controls behavior and how evolution sculpts that relationship between brain and behavior. And if you want to look for where you're going to get the strongest impact of evolutionary forces on brain and behavior relationships, it's in the realm of reproduction, reproductive development.

behavior and reproductive physiology. So I started my career looking at these aspects of reproduction and comparing and contrasting males and females using the laboratory rat as my animal model. I've since then expanded, as has the field of neuroscience, far beyond reproduction. When I started, neuroendocrinology was a very niche field that was sort of considered sort of a set-aside to the rest of neuroscience.

But we've since discovered that there are sex differences throughout the brain. And sort of my guiding light, my mantra is to compare and contrast males and females for its heuristic value because it creates a sort of contrast agent in which I can reveal new cellular and molecular mechanisms of just how the brain constructs itself by using this natural tool.

of comparing males and females. And over the years, I found a number of novel ways that synapses are formed, how cell number is controlled, how dendrites are branched, et cetera, just by using this approach of comparing males and females. Florence. So I'm Florence Ashley.

I am an assistant professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law and John Dossiter Health Ethics Center. I'm a transdisciplinary researcher focused on law and bioethics as it relates to trans people. And so my interest in research around gender has really started around addressing misinformation and improving both clinical care and research for trans communities. And that's really where I came into this topic.

So one thing that really struck me in working on this series is the degree to which different people mean different things when they talk about sex and gender. And I know this is a discussion that could last a long time and we've got a lot to talk about.

But I do think it may be worth starting with a brief overview. So for each of you, how do you or your community go about defining these terms? Florence, perhaps we could begin with you on this one. Yeah, so surprisingly, perhaps, and part of this is due to my philosophical background and also legal background, I

I, first of all, use gender and sex largely synonymously and interchangeably. And by and far, when I try to be accurate, I just don't use those terms. I instead focus on what it is exactly that I'm talking about. Am I talking about gender identity? Am I talking about gender assigned at birth? Am I talking about sexual traits or hormonal profile or chromosomes or anything else? Gender modality, gender expression, sexual orientation, and all of these things, which is really a mosaic of concepts.

concepts that have historically oftentimes been kind of reduced down into either gender or sex as categories. And these are just such large terms that I try as much as possible to avoid using them as articulating categories for categorizing individuals or entities. And instead, when I talk about gender and sex, I'm usually talking about

more broadly about the institution or, you know, the regulation of gender, sex or research into gender, sex. But when it comes to applying it to individuals or to entities, I tend to use to try to use more kind of precise and narrow terminology to avoid any potential confusion.

Stacey, what's your take on this? My take has changed over the years. I think if I think back to the ways that biomedical sciences has sort of taken up the terms of sex and gender, there's been a real emphasis in the last 20, 25 years of trying to make a clear distinction between the concept of sex and the concept of gender, because they had been often used synonymously in the literature, still quite often are used synonymously in the biomedical literature. And there was an effort to translate

try and make a conceptual distinction between these terms that would allow for more recognition that the kinds of phenomenon that we see when we're doing scientific research are not all based in biological origins, that they're

There are certainly sex and gender related patterns that we see in human health that have biological contributions, but also have social, political, cultural, economic kinds of contributions. And the effort to distinguish between sex and gender in biomedicine was largely about trying to broaden that recognition beyond a sort of biological essentialist frame that everything is biology.

And so a lot of the ways that scientists are enjoined to think about sex and gender is to try and distinguish them. And the sort of general definitions that are offered tend to emphasize that sex is the biology, gender is the social. And I think that is an important and useful starting point for thinking about sex and gender, especially for people who are sort of new to the field and new to thinking about these things.

At the same time, my thinking around sex and gender has certainly evolved a lot in the last number of years. A short excerpt from our podcast extra, Sex and Gender Discussions Don't Need to be Toxic, which was published back in May. You'll find a link to it in the show notes.

In the middle of each week's Nature podcast, we have a couple of short, sharp science stories known as the Research Highlights. More often than not, they're read by Dan Fox, and here he is with a couple of his standouts. This year, I thought I would pick two research highlights that are both interesting pieces of science, but that also encapsulate a key holiday experience – overindulgence.

So, if you feel like you've bitten off more than you can chew this year, know that prehistoric fish and freshwater crocs would no doubt sympathise. Freshwater crocodiles in Australia have developed a bad eating habit: consuming poisonous toads. Now, researchers think taste aversion training could help to save the reptiles' lives.

In the Australian tropics, many populations of freshwater crocodile have declined by 70% thanks to the predators' ingestion of poisonous cane toads. To tackle this, researchers created bait toads by removing the amphibians' poison glands before injecting them full of nausea-inducing chemicals. They then distributed the now harmless bait in crocodile hotspots along with pieces of chicken used as controls.

Over a five-day period, the team saw that the number of toad baits eaten by crocodiles declined and found that this new aversion was generalized to live cane toads, with crocodile mortality at one test site reduced by 95% after baiting. The authors hope that they can ensure the crocodiles remember their aversion for years to come. Snap up that research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Around 48 million years ago in a lake in what is now Germany, a few bat-eating fish bit off more than they could chew. Fossilized remains of two species of extinct lake fish, gar and bowfins, were discovered with the remains of a small extinct bat in their jaws.

The bat's wings probably got stuck in the jaws of the fish and the researchers behind this paper conclude that these mammoth morsels might have impeded the movement of the predators, leading them to die of starvation and exhaustion.

The large number of other bat fossils found in the area suggests that gar and bowfins had lots of opportunities to scavenge on or attack drowning bats, and these tiny mammals may have represented a substantial food source for the fish. If you want to chew over that research a little more, you can find the paper in Biology Letters.

Dan Fox there. Up next, it's Nick Petrich-Howe. So this year I've picked a piece I did. It was actually a special episode on AI and language. And so the reason I picked this one was because it actually came about through me just playing around with some of these large language models, these AIs like ChatGPT.

And I've been learning Serbian for quite a while, and I wanted basically a non-judgmental conversational partner. And so I was playing around with ChatGPT, but I quickly realized it actually made quite a lot of mistakes. And so I then investigated this, and it turned out there was a lot of literature on the topic, and it's quite a big topic.

topic in this area of computer science. And so I looked further into that and talked to some people and that's how the podcast came about. Now I will say it was a 45 minute podcast and I don't want to take up the entire of this best of episode so I think this is just a small excerpt.

But I will say it was a very interesting one. So if you do get the time, it's well worth a listen because it turns out it's a lot more complicated than just getting the code and everything under the hood right. There's a lot of interesting aspects of how culture shapes language and the ethics and everything involved too. So there's a lot to unpack with this one. First published in August, here's Nick's pick of 2024.

ChatGPT has a language problem. So my native language is called Tigringa. It's spoken in Tigray, in Ethiopia, and also in Eritrea. This is Asmal Ashteka Hagdu, an AI researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute and founder of a language technology startup focused on African languages.

In the past, he and his colleagues have looked at how ChatGPT performs for certain African languages, like Tigrinya. And we ran a series of very small experiments, and what we discovered is basically, at least for these languages, the result is total gibberish. To probe deeper, I asked Asmalash to try out some prompts for me. I should mention that he was using the more advanced paid-for GPT-4 powered version of ChatGPT as well.

Here's how ChatGPT responded when asked to list sports in Tigrinya. If you are a speaker of Tigrinya, and if you look at these things, there are some Tigrinya things. If you're asking me what this sentence means, I would have a hard time telling you anything. And in particular here, for example, football, soccer. Here it says, literally it says, mind.

That's not soccer. Soccer is a group or a show. Now, I've heard of keeping your head in the game in football, but leg mind? That's probably a bit of a stretch. In the end, Asmash tried out around 30 different prompts for me in Tigrinya, and he found similar oddities throughout. Here, the prompt was like, list examples of European countries.

So it has the pattern of just repeating anything you give it here. So for example, it was in the thing. So whatever was on the prompt, it kind of repeats these words. So we have a mention of sport here, even though we're not talking about sport. Remember I said before, like leg, mind?

Only one prompt he tried returned a useful answer to Asmolash. When presented with Tigrinian text, ChatGBT correctly identified it as Tigrinian. But for all the other prompts when it was trying to respond in Tigrinia, it generated completely nonsensical answers.

Unsurprisingly, Asmash didn't think it would be useful for speakers of Tigrinya. It would be a waste of your time. I mean, it's just generating nonsense. So I wouldn't recommend anyone using ChatGPT to do anything useful because it doesn't at this moment for these languages. ChatGPT and chatbots like it are taking the world by storm.

but if you're not using English, chances are you are having a worse experience. And that's a problem. You might think of these technologies as just tools unaffected by our unobjective humanness, but in reality they are anything but.

The language part of the large language model fundamentally impacts how they can function, because language is intrinsically linked with culture, history, belief, identity, wellbeing, inequity and progress. And as these chatbots become more and more integrated in our lives, we need to confront some uncomfortable truths about how we design this technology, how it could be used and the impacts it could have.

In this podcast, we are going to explore the relationship between LLMs and languages and ask what must be done to ensure that AIs work for everyone. I think everybody in the community agrees that we need to democratize AI. There should not be disproportionate benefit in one language versus the other, right? So we want fair access, you know, and we want to empower communities in different languages.

A short section there of Nick's podcast extra, chat GPT has a language problem, but science can fix it. My turn next. Now, I've been privileged this year to speak to researchers working on a hugely diverse range of subjects. But when it came to choosing a story for this year's clip show, I really didn't need to think twice about it. It had to be the frogs.

This is a story I covered back in June, and it's a fun one that was an absolute joy to tell. But underneath, it details what could be a really simple, cheap and practical way to tackle a serious problem and potentially help a group of animals that are under severe threat from an often deadly infection. Here's my pick of 2024. Back in the 80s, researchers studying frogs noticed something mysterious.

The animals were disappearing. A lot of people were doing repeat field studies every year going back to the same populations and then suddenly one by one they were meeting at the conferences and saying my study species is vanished, I don't know where it is anymore. And it wasn't abundantly clear what was happening but it was happening really fast. Around the world, formerly vibrant populations of these amphibians were suddenly going silent and no one knew what was going on.

It wasn't until the late 90s that a culprit was identified. A fungus. No one was really thinking like a fungus. And it was a fungus in this group of fungi that are not typically pathogens. They typically just eat dead stuff like most fungi do. But this was the pathogenic chytrid. This is Anthony Waddle from Macquarie University in Australia who studies this fungus called Botrychokytrium dendropotitis, often known simply as BD or chytrid.

It's thought to have originated somewhere in Asia before it spread around the world through animals being traded as pets. And while it doesn't affect all frogs equally, as a pathogen, the fungus is often brutally effective. Our conservative estimate is 90 species extinctions.

and hundreds of other species have declined. And really, this is an ongoing problem. There are still populations blinking out. There are still species going extinct. No other infectious disease has ever caused this much devastation to biodiversity. It's the worst infectious disease ever recorded. So when you look at the challenge ahead of you, it's kind of immense. One of the reasons the challenge of tackling this fungus is so immense is that once it's in an environment, it's virtually impossible to get rid of.

So far, the most effective way to protect severely affected frogs has been to keep and breed them in captivity, treating any that get infected with antifungals. But Anthony and his colleagues have come up with an, on the face of it, simple and inexpensive way that could help some frogs clear an infection, which they describe in a recent Nature paper.

Their method relies on BD's Achilles heel. The fungus really struggles in high temperatures. In frogs, it really struggles at even moderately warm temperatures. So if you make a frog 26 degrees, the fungus is not going to kill them. It's going to struggle. It's long been known that keeping a frog hot keeps the fungus at bay. And this helps explain the seasonal waves of infection seen in some locations.

In the summer heat, the fungus practically disappears, only to rebound and tear through populations with a vengeance in cooler months. And this got Anthony and his colleagues thinking. Could they use this knowledge about the fungus's weak point to come up with something to give frogs an edge? Evidence suggested that frog populations who had access to areas that are warmer, to hotspots in the wild, can persist in the face of BD. But these hotspots can be few and far between in winter.

To overcome this, the team decided to build their own. And like the old saying, if you build it, it'll come. And we were hoping that was true. We just built different types of prototypes and came up with one we thought would be really good. And then we went with that for the study. And their final design, well, it might not win any architectural awards. Let's put it like that.

Oh, it's horrendous looking. No, it's all right. What I like about it is it's something that you might find in your backyard. So all it is is a pile of common masonry bricks that we painted black. They're arranged in kind of like a high rise apartment structure.

And we put a greenhouse that we bought from Aldi over the top. That holds in humidity, which is important for frogs. Obviously, their skin can dry out. And while the bricks are absorbing heat from the sun, the greenhouse kind of holds it all in. The bricks in the frog sauna have holes where the animals can chill. Or perhaps more accurately, warm. Even on a relatively cool Sydney winter's day. Even on a day that's, you know, 15 degrees outside and sunny, it could be well over 28 degrees, 30 degrees in the greenhouse.

We're lucky in Sydney we have lots of sun and winter is no exception so they perform quite well in providing these high temperatures. And these saunas were pretty affordable. It turns out the first batch of greenhouses the team bought from the budget supermarket chain were on sale and Anthony reckons the cost to build one comes to around 70 Australian dollars. But how effective was this setup at helping frogs clear the chytrid fungus?

To find out, they tested it using an Australian frog that was once a common sight in people's gardens on the east coast of the country, the green and golden bellfrog. The male of the species has a call that sounds a bit like a moped changing gear. They're a fat frog, cute. They are big for a frog. They probably fit in the palm of your hand. They are amazing colours and they're a very expensive

Explosive breeding frog. They can have like 10,000 offspring at once. It's amazing they haven't evolved resistance or just like bred their way out of being in trouble. But here we are. Like so many frogs, these bell frogs are susceptible to BD. And it seems to have played a significant role in their decline. Since the arrival of BD, 90% of its populations have vanished. Before they hit the sauna, frogs were tested in the lab. Evidence suggested that these frogs like it hot, but the team hasn't.

had to test it. When the animals were given the choice of what temperature they could hang out at, they would move to an area where it was on average about 29 degrees Celsius. To see what effect this had on their ability to shake the fungus, the team infected frogs and either artificially kept them at this high temperature or allowed them to choose their temperature once again.

The approaches had differing results on infection severity. The frogs that could move around and change their body temperature however they want rapidly lost infections, which was surprising because we thought, oh, if you put the frogs really at high temperatures, it should just kill the kitchen right away. But it was the frogs that could move around, even if they were on average colder than the ones at the high temperatures, they lost it much faster.

having the ability to change their body temperature at will was the best thing for them. This was in marked contrast to frogs kept at lower temperatures, who all experienced much more severe infections. What's more, other experiments showed that infected bellfrogs who'd been heat-treated were more resistant to a future infection. In a sense, they'd been inoculated.

But would lab effects be seen when the frogs had access to the saunas outside? Despite their rustic appearance, the frogs loved sitting in them. And when the team compared how infected frogs that sat in uncovered and hot saunas fared compared to those who had access to shaded saunas that were cooler, the results were stark in terms of infection levels. In terms of percentages, maybe at any given time, 10 to 100 times lower infection rates.

in the frogs that had access to the hot shelters. And we'd expect this to translate to real differences in survivorship. And we have the evidence from the lab that it's like 22 times greater chance if you've survived an infection to survive a subsequent one. So I think the real benefit of these is not just that initial time they survive, it's that even if this frog is cold the next winter,

It could have that resistance. And they enable frogs to do that themselves. We don't have to intervene. Taken together, this vaccination-like effect, alongside providing the frogs with a place to clear an infection, could be a powerful tool in the fight against the chytrid fungus, says Anne Savage from the University of Central Florida in the US, who's written a News & Views article.

about the research. So when I saw this study, I thought this is one of those examples of a very elegant piece of scientific research that is so obvious and intuitive when you read it and you think, why didn't I do that? And I actually do know of some herpetologists that have

in casual ways, done these sorts of things as a practical solution. But no one has published it as scientific research and done it in such a rigorous way that clearly demonstrates the benefit of providing warm refugia for frogs. So I was really jazzed to see it because it's probably the least expensive and most beneficial practical management tool that we could start using.

And while this research shows the benefits of this approach, Anna wants to know how many frog species it could benefit and exactly how it works. At the minute, it's one species, and one that's quite happy at warm temperatures.

So we would want to repeat this study across different types of frogs in terms of their genetics and evolution, and then also in terms of their ecology. So the paper does a really good job of stating directly that if it's a frog that prefers cooler temperatures, this whole project of the refugia and the immunization, like we don't know if it would work under that scenario.

And then it is wonderful that we have this practical knowledge of some kind of functional vaccination. But I do think it's still very important to understand the mechanism. We already have a number of studies that show there's all different types of immune responses being stimulated or not being stimulated associated with different types of disease outcomes. I think it's really important that we do start

Honing in on mechanistically, how do frog immune systems work and how much of that variation is because of different environments, genetic variation present in the frogs, and maybe even unique modes of immune function in frogs that we don't know anything about.

Anna hopes that understanding how some frogs defend themselves against BD infection and whether the saunas help boost immune activity in others could ultimately lead to genetic engineering strategies to introduce resistance into imperiled frog populations. But immune systems are complicated, and that's a long way down the track.

Anthony is cognizant of the limitations of his work, but knows that right now options for frogs are limited. We have so few positive stories in chytrid and conservation that this to me is like so exciting because we can help one endangered species. And Anthony is using the saunas to help the green and golden bell frogs, both in captive and in wild populations.

For example, setting up saunas in Sydney Olympic Park, home to one of the last large Belfrog populations in Australia. He's also hoping that people make their own to put in their gardens and is putting the build instructions out for others to follow.

But while this method is unlikely on its own to reverse the decline in a group of animals facing a devastating disease, he's hopeful it could make a difference, even if it is a somewhat unorthodox approach, the success of which was somewhat unorthodox.

Anthony Waddle there. You also heard from Anna Savage.

You can find a link to Anthony's research paper and a news and views article written by Anna over in the show notes. We round out each edition of the show with the briefing chat, where we discuss a couple of stories covered in the nature briefing.

Rounding out this clip show is Emily Bates, who has chosen a briefing chat she had back in July with Nick as one of her favourites from 2024. Here she is. I've been lucky enough to talk about a whole host of topics in the briefing chat this year. It's been great chatting to the team about everything from tardigrades to maths problems.

But the one I've chosen to share is all about a study looking at how psychedelics affect your brain and NASA's cancellation of a mission to look for ice on the moon. Enjoy. Finally on the show, it's time for the briefing chat. Emily, what have you been reading this week? So I found an article on nature.com that caught my attention that was looking at how the psychedelic drug psilocybin causes lasting changes to pathways in the brain.

So psilocybin is the active compound in magic mushrooms. And it's one of lots of psychedelic drugs that are being investigated as therapies for conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

And there's quite a lot of data that these compounds have a positive effect, sometimes lasting years after the treatment has ended. But researchers still don't fully understand the mechanism that underlies this. So we've covered various psychedelics a few times on the podcast as well. And yeah,

Yeah, it's really hard to work out how exactly they're having their effects on the brain. So what was the approach they used in this study? So a lot of previous studies have looked at the effects on individual cell types or very specific areas of the brain. This took a much more holistic view of the brain. So they put seven participants in groups.

an fMRI while they took psilocybin and they imaged them before, during and after they took this high dose. And they were able to get images of the flow of blood throughout the brain. And this is sort of a proxy to measure which groups of neurons are active and communicating with one another.

And what they found was that psilocybin caused groups of neurons that normally fire at the same time to become desynchronized, so disrupting the usual pattern of neural communication. And the greatest effect was in the default mode network, which is thought to generate...

a person's sense of self, space and time. So it's the part of your brain that is normally active when you're daydreaming. Right. And when you say desynchronise, what does this exactly mean? Because it sounds like quite a dramatic change. Yes. Desynchronisation is stopping two areas of the brain communicating as much. And it does sound like a bad thing. It's disrupting the usual patterns of neural communication. But what this actually leads to is the brain becoming more malleable, more plastic and

So it's been found in people with depression and other mental health disorders that they have these very...

rigid processes going on in their brain that are tricky to break. So being able to disrupt these pathways, it allows them the opportunity to rebuild them in a more healthy way. I mean, this sounds like it could be very promising, but when we've covered psychedelics research on the podcast before, it's always been used in very sort of specific settings, right? Yes, absolutely. So this was all done in a very strict environment. They had doctors on hand in case someone experienced a

bad trip. There's actually something quite interesting around that. They found less neural desynchronization when participants were engaged in an active task of audio and visual matching. So they were making their brain think about something else. And when they weren't involved in that task, they found far more neural desynchronization, which suggests during a psychedelic experience that

grounding so bringing yourself back into yourself could be a way to get over a bad trip to stop trying to look at external things and to come back into your brain it's also worth noting one of the participants of this study was actually one of the researchers they decided to take psilocybin scan their own brain and get the data from themselves and reported on his experience he said i was inside the brain and i was riding brain waves so his trip involved a brain itself which i

I think it's quite nice. Insight there into a neuroscientist's state of mind, I think. Absolutely. And so I wonder, what is the sort of next steps for this research? We've discussed like how it could potentially be useful for certain conditions. So what is next to sort of, I guess, bring something like this to the clinic? Well, this data can't show precisely what is causing the potential therapeutic benefit, but it does sort of offer clues. So it's possible that psilocybin is causing

causing the brain network changes or perhaps it's creating the psychedelic experience that causes parts of the brain to sort of behave differently it will be good to untangle whether the blood flow directly correlates to the neural communication as obviously with fmris you're not measuring the actual electrical signals of the brain but the blood flow to different areas

The researchers hope to conduct further experiments to investigate the effects of psilocybin on the brains of people with conditions such as depression. Well, it certainly sounds like some fascinating research. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall during some of those experiments, I think. But for my story this week, if you'll ride on my brainwaves, I'm taking us up to the moon. Or at least, actually, I'm not taking us up to the moon because this is a story about a moon mission being cancelled.

Oh, what was this moon mission? So this was an article I was reading about in Nature about NASA's mission to go to the moon and go to the moon's south pole and map the ice and drill it there. And as we've talked about a lot of times on the podcast, a lot of countries, a lot of agencies are interested in the ice on the moon because it could be potentially used for fuel in the future or it could be used for oxygen. And also missions like this can just help us understand the moon better and the solar system more generally.

And so the reason that this was cancelled was due to rising costs. And a big part of that was the Voltaire's investigating polar exploration rover. And this is a rover that's been assembled, but it seems that it'll never touch down on the moon. So what are the reasons for this cancellation?

So it's mostly just delays. So there have been delays in building the rover and also in building the commercial lander. And that's pushed the launch date back all the way to 2025. And that's caused an estimated rise in costs of another $176 million. So NASA had an internal review after that, and they decided to discontinue this mission because they want to make sure they have enough budget for other missions that they're planning as well. And also NASA said that it's a

bit of an uncertain budget environment for them at the moment and the reason for that is in 2024 they had a smaller budget than they did in 2023 and the budget proposed for 2025 is only a one percent increase which is actually lower than the rate of inflation so that means it's a real terms cut

So this is not delayed, it's done, it's not going to the moon at all? No, it doesn't seem so. Well, maybe the rover will go, but we'll come to that. There's just been sort of spiralling costs and that's been associated with delays in building the rover and also the commercial lander that would actually put it on the moon. So one thing to note here is the rover has been built by NASA,

But the lander that would actually put it on the moon has been built by a separate company, this Astrobotic Technology. So is this rover doomed for the scrap heap? No, there is a potential that if you want to, you could use it. So NASA is actually looking for partners to take over the rover because basically it's fast.

complete so so another agency could perhaps take over this mission if you've got i don't know i guess a few hundred million dollars spare not one for the pocket change yeah maybe it's outside of our budget but you know if there's any uh space agencies listening that are interested then perhaps they can take it over if no one does though they'll probably use the components of it for future lunar missions but this has also been a bit of a surprise for researchers because

you know, it seems strange at this point when the rover is complete to, you know, basically scrap the mission altogether because some researchers have asked like, why don't they just put it in storage and wait for a better moment to do it? But that's the decision NASA has made for now. So are there other projects looking at going to ice on the moon or is that it for ice? No, no, there are more missions. So we talked about on the podcast before, there are other nations that are interested in going to this part of the moon and looking for

ice there and NASA itself are not giving up on it. So despite what has happened to this mission, there's another mission scheduled for later this year, the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 or Prime 1. And that's going up on a lander built by a different company, Intuitive Machines. And they've successfully landed the spacecraft on the South Pole already. So, you know, they have a bit of a track record here.

Well, I'm sure we'll have more on moon missions in the future. It's a staple over here. Emily chatting with Nick there. You can find a link to those stories and all the others in the show notes. And that's it for this year's Clip Show. Loads of good stuff in there. And that's pretty much it for this year. Thanks as always for being with us. If you've enjoyed what you've heard, it'd be great if you could leave us some stars or a nice review. I'll be back later this week with a long read. Look out for that. Otherwise, we'll see you in 2025.

I've been Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.

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