Geoengineering Arctic Ice and Space Laundry

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For more info, talk to your eye doctor, call one eight four four Myibo Y, or visit myibo dot com Hello, Wlcome to Inside Science from the BBC World Service with me, Tom Whipple You may have thought that dinosaurs were wiped out sixty six million years ago This fossil expert argues they still live among us in a way. Birds are dinosaurs. They're just one group of strange dinosaurs that got small, evolved feathers and wings, started to fly. And so that means part of the dinosaur family tree lives on today. That fascinates me. Also, proposals to change details in an obscure White House document are raising red flags in science circles about their future. Every discretionary grant will now be required to go through approval by a political appointee who will determine whether or not that particular grant demonstrably advances the president's policy priorities. We'll have the best of the week science journals picked over by journalist Caroline Steele Caroline, what have you got? I've got some news about doing laundry in space. Excellent, excellent news. I like my astronauts to be clean. But first before all that, there is a new scientist coming to the lab. It is like a post dooc. Except it's also with the greatest respect to postdocs Post stop the best coworker in the lab because it's across every single database and all the literature. This scientist will never turn up hungover They will never spend the morning browsing the graduate jobs section helping with everything without needing to progress one's career. It will never turn up in tears after having broken up with its girlfriend. It needs no partastal care for me. It is, as you've probably guessed, an AI scientist All the big AI companies are trying to find ways in which AI cannot merely be a tool for science But something else too, a thinking, reading, perhaps even analyysing assistant. Is this the future of research science indefatigable partner that has read all the literature Or is it just another way of introducing hallucinations into that literature We spoke to Professor Claire Bryant from the University of Cambridge. She was one of a handful of researchers around the world given early access to Google's latest AI system onene that it thinks will be part of a new revolution in how science itself is done. She collaborated with Google co scientist to hunt for the molecular switches that cause severe diseases in humans when pathogens leap between species said it would be a really great aid in the lab. and this is what it proved to be because it's only as good as the questions that you ask it. So we were able to go in and ask some very, very specific questions and then it gave us some answers back. We would then quality control the data out and we'd say well, You know, we've got preliminary data which says that that observation is not quite correct. And then we were able to go back, feed that data into coscientist and then get more answers back. And as we refined the output that Coscientist was giving us alongside our preliminary experiments Then we were able to refine more and more of the hypothesis such that we could get down to a specific protein and the amino acids in that protein that differ between humans and birds. and that's what we're testing at the moment. So it was pretty exciting really, because Number one, it was able to identify specifics at that level in a way that we all thought was very logical. And number two, it prioritized the protein that we would have got to eventually in the lab but would not necessarily have been where I started. and that's actually really exciting as well. So it's been been a lot of fun and really, really helpful, I think Can you give a sense of how much time you think it's saved? I am probably two years ahead of the game on my ground If it's right, of course, we won't happen until we experimentally validate it I suspect it is, but if it's writing it'll save me two years at work Thank you, Claire Bryant To find out more about how AI is going to impact science, we're joined by Pushmi Koli. He is head of AI for science at Google Deepmind This is the AI bit of the company that has already changed our lives. Deepmind is where they like to think they create the future and indeed have the Nobel Prize to prove it Pushm me, you're clear that what we're seeing in your company and others, I think, is more than just an incremental advance. If I can just quote you back to you You've written that AI is a new lens on our perception of reality itself and that in a sense we're moving away from science as a strictly human endeavor. Can you explain what that means Thanks, Tom. I mean, we are seeing these systems of intelligence which are allowing us to reason about the data that we have captured at a scale that is just not possible with a single human mind They humanly cannot read are the hundreds of thousands of scientific results that are coming out each year And what these scientific agents like the eoscientist allow us to do is basically explore that vast scientific literature to find the answers to the problems that scientists are interested in solving I used Gemini, your general large language model this morning for a piece of research I was doing, and it gave me an absolutely perfect quote from a historical figure that precisely fitted with my needs. And it took me about five sets of interrogations to discover it had completely made it up. And then when I pointed it out, it sort of shrugged and said, O shhucks, you found me out If you dealt with hallucinations in this and if you have, if that problem solved Why isn't it solve every worldse Hllucinations are a research challenge that all teams are sort of working on resolving. and in the context of c scientists There are tens of thousands of Gemini submodels that are working to figure out the evidence for every claim or every assertion that has been made in a particular hypothesis. Let's move on to this might mean, if what you think is going to come to pass comes to pass and if this is as useful as certainly Professor Bryant seems to think it is, what does it mean for humans? One of the things you've also said is that we're moving from being solvers of puzzles to architects of questions. Is this a fundamental shift Yes, I think so. I think that thinking about what are the scientific problems that are going to change the world in a better way, that will be the role of the human scientist. The manual process of going through hundreds of thousands of papers and actually bringing insights and piecing them together to find the solution, that process is where these AI agents will be able to help us in accelerating science What would you say to scientists who are worried about what this means for working as a scientist? I think the important thing to mention here is that this technology is going to lead to an acceleration and an expansion of science. It will not mean that less science happen. In fact, it means that science will become much faster, much more efficient, and we can do more of it S, Thankk you so so much for chatting to us. That's utterly fascinating. Thank you Let's hope that the fast march of AI doesn't lead to the catechism that some doomsters foretell It was a cataclysm sixty six million years ago that led in a way So this What's that we heard. It is of course the sound of ferocious dinosaurs We mean that literally, well, perhaps not the ferocious bit. Steve Brusarte is professor of paleontology at the University of Edinburgh. He's a long time friend of the program and one of the world's great dinosaur experts. When he talks to us, he talks to us about dinosaurs But he's written a book called The Story of Birds. And he's done so, he told us, because well what you hear is a pleasant twitter What hears is the echoes of long dead Noble beasts. Who in a real sense live with us still? Today's birds, when we see a sparrow at our bird feeder, when we see a robin on our fence post, they are actual dinosaurs. And I know that's a weird thing to think about, but it's actually an idea that goes back to the time of Darwin. Because as you say, this isn't a new idea. It takeakes us back to I think the first protagonist in this sort of argument. Huxley, the guy known as Darwin's bulldog and he's standing in front of an audience and he's making this astonishing argument. How did this begin This was back in the eighteen sixties. This was just a few years after Darwin published the Origin of species and laid out his bombastic new theory of evolution by natural selection. And of course, this was being heavily debated across Britain, across the world and many scientists were looking for evidence that would further prove or maybe disprove Darwin's Theory and Thomas Henry Huxley was really foremost. And so what he did was he did lecture tours and he gave this really famous lecture in the eighteen sixties and he laid out evidence that modern birds share features with reptiles. For instance, the feet, you look at the foot of a chicken It's covered in scales, it has claws, It kind of looks like a reptile foot. So he talked about those things, but he also discussed some remarkable new fossils that had just emerged from Germany fossils of archaeopyics, this animal that looked like it was half bird, half reptile. It was definitely a bird. It had feathers, it had wings, it had big wings Clearly it could fly, but it had teeth instead of a beak. It had big sharp claws on its hands. It had a long bony tail. So it really did look like a half bird, half reptile, and Huxley used this as evidence to connect birds and dinosaurs. And by the end of the eighteen sixties, this was a pretty well known idea, and even Darwin himself was writing about it in later editions of the origin of species. But then it fell out of favour and you write in your book that in the sort middle of the twentieth century, there were lots of people pushing back on this until in nineteen seventy three A guy called Ostrom wrote a one page essay in nature, which you say is the single most important page ever written about dinosaurs. Tell us what that is. Yeah, so the theory went out of favor. Until Ostrom, in the nineteen sixties, a four hundred years after Huxley and Darwin, Ostrom discovered this remarkable skeleton of a very bird like raptor dinosaur called Dinonicas a small sleet footed long armed predator in the American West. And he used this to resurrect the idea, yeah, wait a minute, some of these small dinosaurs really do look like birds. And so in the sixties and the seventies, he presented these ideas to the scientific community, they started to gain traction again. But a lot of ornithologists held out and ornithologists, many of them said, okay, if you think these Velociraptor type dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds, prove it, once and for all, find a dinosaur fossil with feathers on That was the challenge. And in the nineteen nineties, finally that challenge was met with the discovery of these feathered covered dinosaurs by farmers in China outworking their land. It was one of these discoveries that was really unexpected. when it comes down to it, iss very hard to preserve soft bits like feathers or hair or skin as fossils. So that's why it took a long time to find these, theseese were buried by volcanoes, kind of like Pompeii when the city was buried. So the feathers were locked into stone really quickly. And so by the end of the nineties, there was the Trump card, the final piece of evidence to conclude, you know decisively that today's birds really did come from the dinosaurs. Okay, and so now taking us up to the present day, which your book does, it looks at what happens to birds next. There's one place where birds slash dinosaurs lived on where we actually had the lost worldld, the Jurassic park of Dinosaurs take us to that place and tell us what these bird slash dinosaurs have been doing. What did they become sixty six million years ago, that enormous six mile wide rock, the asteroid falls out of the sky, triggers a mass extinction. seventy five percent of species die, including every single type of dinosaur except. for some small fast flying beaked birds Then those birds had a new world to make And so did some other survivors, some little furry ones, our ancestors, the tiny little mammals that survived And in many ways, mammals usurped a lot of those niches in the food chain that the big dinosaurs once held. And so after the asteroid, we see mammals become really big and that's where we get elephs and hippos and whales and rhinos and so on and us There was one place in the world where the mammals never really got to, where it was dinosaurs in the guise of birds that held on that controlled the big niches in the ecosystem, notot just for a little bit but until just about seven hundred years ago. place this lost world of dinosaurs is a place that we call New Zealand, the edge of the world, really, in many ways. It's so geographically isolated, it was a place where Mammals never really got to. Dinosaurs could hold on. There were moa birds that were ten feet tall, The top plant eaters, there were these Hasts eagles. They were twice the size of the biggest modern eagles. They were the top meat eaters, basically filling the T Rex role. And that persisted until the first humans got to New Zealand and started to change the environment sadly, and many of those birds went extinct. But there's still the kiwi and there's still a few other sublime birds that only live in New Zealand that are remnants of that last outpost of the age of dinosaurs. Thank you, Steve Brusat. rememinder, you're listening to Inside Science from the BBC World Service Tell us what science you think we should be investigating our email addresses inside science at bbc. coot uk What if a marginal gain unlocked greater performance. What if an insight in data change everything At ArAMco, our focus on detail helps us deliver reliable energy to millions across the world Because margins aren't marginal They' where we can truly push the limits of what's possible. A RAMco an integrated energy and chemicals company Learn more at arramco. com Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. 'was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight We feast An offer you can feast on. seell your car today on Carvana Pick up these mailly. And now I'm joined by Roland Pes. You've been hearing about more concerns in the US with growing political involvement in how science there is going to be run. Indeed Tom, proposed changes to the way science funding is allocated in the states, which an editorial in science is headlining another red alert, arguing they will damage US leadership in global research Proposed changes were posted last week to what's called the Federal Reister in effect, a technical document few people, even scientists are aware of, titled The Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget, led by President Trump's close advisor Russell Vote and wouldn't normally attract much attention. But as a former staffer at the National Institutes of Health or NIH One of the many U. S. science funding agencies Liz Jenxi is one of the few familiar with the original guidance, the role of the office, and is alarmed by the proposed changes Just to tell the story, I was at a science conference last week when this dropped downloaded this four hundred page PDF document to my laptop and while I was In the science sessions, I was scanning through it quickly and highlighting key sections that I thought were highly objectionable and kept highlighting And after a while of doing this, I thought my head was going to explode so I tried to talk about it with some of my scientific colleagues and They said, what's OM B Who's Russell vote Oh, you're being alarmed. Everything will be fine. and I just thought it was incredible. So my task when I went home was if I could just come up with the top ten reasons why This rule should have everyone's hair on fire and they read it I'll be happy. But she wasn't really, and nor were the scientists who read her post detailing the changes to the guidance which in effect she warns, and others agree transfer decisions about what science the US government supports away from independent experts and into the hands of the White House's political apparatus They're proposing to revise the guidance that it shall no longer be a series of guidance statements where the agencies would then have their autonomy to go about their business and make their grant awards as they typically do based on independent scientific peer review. And this document is alarming because it takes all that decision making about the science and all the decision making that's done by civil servants at other agencies. away from those agencies. Just talk me through this a bit. So what you're saying is The practice has been the Congress's head here X billion dollars Go and spend it on making advances in health They would give people like you the means to do that and you would take advice from other scientists about which projects you would support. and it was sort of independent Guided. Absolutely, R And by law We were required to have these study sections, we called them, which were scientists who would review the applications, rank the applications, score the applications, give us written comments about the strengths and weaknesses of particular lic And then we would use that information and basically go down the list and fund as many of the top scored grants until we would run out of money for that year. And that's pretty much how our decisions were made. So how is this being changed then by these proposals? Supposedly they'll continue the charade of doing the peer review But at the end of the road, they'll have to funnel those grants that they want to fund up for a political pre issuance review is what they're calling it every discretionary grant before it may be awarded will now be required to go through approval by a political appointee who will determine whether or not they believe that particular grant demonstrably advances the president's policy priorities. y sense of what criteria they're actually using? If you read the document, they do say that all the grants must include benchmarks for what they're calling quote unquote gold standard science. Which sounds good. It's a phrase I've heard before. Right, Right. Doesn't it sound good? However, it's not really defined in this document And since there's not a standard here it's the political people who will be doing that decision making It's really quite unclear to me How would the political people be applying this term gold standard science in their review? I mean, in the preamble to the document that I've read, I mean, it talks about the need for greater transparency, but it talks about wasteful spending on far, which I think is an aid ground that was run across the world. or they talk about Dangerous gain of function research, which was supposedly funded by NIH and things like this. Those are their criteria, are they It's unclear, but what what you have here is a rule making document that's masquerading as having some scientific justification. And in reality, the examples that you gave are basically Cpiracy theories or crank science. they're not real So they believe that the COVID nineteen pandemic was caused by a lab leak. All the evidence really suggests that it was caused by the virus jumping from animals into humans, not from a lab. So we're talking about people who are not grounded in science, but they are throwing around scientific sounding terms like gold standard science too make it seem like it's science related I have to say, what I think we have to remember is that President Trump was elected in twenty twenty four in a sense on a program to take control of these things These are the kinds of decisions which a democracy makes. ultimately, you know the White House is responsible for this money Do you do you have grounds? to argue back against this? Well, it is true that he was elected, but it is not true that our president has complete control over how the money is allocated in our form of cononstitution. The Congress has what we call the power of the purse, meaning They decide how the money gets allocated and what programs and they are representing the voters as well. and if they decide that the NIH should be allocated forty eight billion dollars for a given year and they specify how much should go to each of the disease areas as they very well did The president does not have the authority to ignore that and stop funding for example, pandemic preparedness research. And I think this proposed rule will basically make that kind of grant termination a permanent odified power of the president, that's what they are trying to do. Liz Jenxi, formerly a staff at the National Institutes of Health until last year when she resigned because the direction she saw the administration was heading Thanks for Roland, and now to Caroline Steeel How much have you got for us? Well, I want to be greedy and start with two papers. So one that's been published recently, the other was published at the start of April, and they're both about geoengineering Arctic sea ice So as we all know, Arctic sea ice is melting at an alarming rate. It's expected to be completely gone in summertime by the twenty thirties. which is bad news for polar bears, but also bad news for the whole planet because SaI does this amazing thing where it basically reflects sunlight back into space and keeps the surface of the Eth cooler So this geoengineering idea is basically to cover the surface of this ice in sea water, which would then hopefully freeze and then thicken the ice and slow down its melting. That's the idea This is completely bonkers, isn't it Well It's definitely an out there idea, but it has now been for the first time tested, actually by two different field trials. So one in Canada and one in Svalbard in Norway. So scientists basically pumped seawater from underneath the sea ice onto the surface and both trials did successfully thicken the sea ice by quite a substantial amount But this is the interesting or maybe slightly disappointing part. So the scientists in Canada found that thickening the sea ice did slow the ice's melt. So it lasted for an extra seven to ten days in summer the scientists in Norway basically didn't find that the ice lasted any longer. It still melted by the same date. So really mixed results But also we're talking about, I mean, I don't know the precise comparator, although it's normally safe to say the area of Western Europe because you can change the size according to your needs. But this is a very, very big area of ice. Yeah. You'd have to do something too Yeah, it's a huge area of ice. And I mean, so the Canadian scientists flooded two hundred fifty thousand meters squared, but that's still a tiny, tiny fraction And also you've got to consider the fact that In sort of pumping the water onto the surface, you are warming the area a bit and all the vehicles involved in the process will also have local warming effects