This week, we’ve assembled a panel of experts to tackle your science questions, including: Are there plastics in the fish we eat? Can electrical devices affect your fertility? And how does Earth’s tilt give us our seasons? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/donate)
[Music] I have you loud and clear hello hello hello welcome science and that is to say physics medicine nature space time the brain life the universe hello this week if it’s in the sea is there plastic in the fish that we’re eating too also can electrical devices affect your fertility and how does the Earth’s Tilt give us our Seasons this week we’re taking on the science questions that you have been sending in I’m Chris Smith and this is the Naked Scientist The Naked Scientist podcast is powered by UK fast. co.uk now just before we start the program properly I do have a very important announcement to make and that is that we’re launching our Christmas appeal I will give you much more in the way of details at the end of the program but we do need your help and we’ve explained how we need you to help us on our website at naked scientist.com donate right let’s introduce the panel of people who are here to solve your scientific quandre in conundrums this week or should that be conundra Danny Green is from Anglia Ruskin and she’s also an ecologist the oceans have really been in a spotlight this year haven’t they with all the Plastics and things yeah well I mean it’s great because I’ve been working on Plastics the last seven years and thanks to the atenor effect we’ve um we finally got pretty much Global consensus that people are interested in this and they want to solve the problem so it’s great how how much rubbish actually is in the oceans in terms of plastics a lot I think 320 um million tons are produced every year and around 10% of that makes its way into the rivers and waterways as litter goodness and once it’s there it just doesn’t go anywhere it doesn’t or it breaks down into smaller pieces called microplastics which we’re going to find out about so Danny’s here to answer any questions about marine biology and Marine Science and Plastics in the ocean so if you’d like to ask her a question now is your chance sitting next to Danny is Tim Revel is the assistant news editor news scientist so you should be across lots of hot science stories lots of things coming across your desk all the time yeah we have loads of big stories all the time and um you know often talking about artificial intelligence or the latest technology such as 3D printing but one of the big ones we’ve had recently was questioning arguably the biggest Discovery in physics in the last few years and that is gravitational waves whether we actually spotted them or not why are people skeptical it all comes down to the fact that it’s so difficult to spot gravitational way because even though they’re caused by Massive events in Space by the time they get to earth they’re very very tiny ripples we’re talking about measuring something smaller than the size of a proton so actually being able to find them is really really difficult and involves lots of data processing and Analysis and algorithms and all of that means that it’s a bit tricky for someone else to check the work of the people who’ve done it and so when people have come in afterwards and had a look at what they’ve done they’ve sort of said maybe you have made a mistake and that’s where the uh difficult y lies I think Bill Bryson argued that one of the smallest things on in the world is uh some of the components in an air fix kit which he said roughly on the scale of a proton I think I’d be inclined to agree with him anyway Tim’s here to answer your questions about things relevant to technology James Pope is a newcomer to the program welcome James he’s from the British Antarctic Survey and you study climate but why is everyone obsessing about the polls because no one lives at the polls really do they so why is it important to study the polls when the majority of the world population are not there the polar regions are just so important for climate change with you’ve got ice sheets um which can affect sea level rise you’ve got sea ice which can affect the temperature at the high latitudes and maybe accelerate warming in these regions and also very important for uptake of carbon into the oceans heat into the oceans and even the circulation which can affect the nice warm temperatures we have in the UK so in other words it really matters what goes on in the poles because it does have an impact here whether we like it or not and I guess is also a barometer for what’s going to happen everywhere if you look at what’s happening in the polls it’s a reflection on what’s Happening worldwide yes people talk about the polls as being sort of the canary in the coal mine thank you very much James and also with us is Laura Carter Penman who is a fertility nurse at Bourne Hall I guess doesn’t take too much explanation of what fertility is but what does a fertility nurse do we assist people through their fertility Journey we advise them on what is the best course of action what is the best treatment and we also provide quite a strong counseling role cuz as you could imagine for patients it’s a very stressful time and we support them through that Journey if they’ve got a question about their fertility that they’d like to ask I’d be happy to help and there should be no pregnant pauses in the program fingers crossed now before we dive into the questions for those of you at home we’ve got a little Guess Who quiz running through the program we did this last week so our congratulations to Nick d f Briggs Jenny lville and strawman who all got in touch and messaged us with the right answer we’re going to be scattering Clues to the mystery who am I right through the program so listen up for those Clues and see if you can work out who or what makes this [Music] sound what do you think all we be revealed later more clues on the way now we’ve got uh Steve on the line from tford for you Danny hello Steve hi my question is if if microplastics are affecting the fish in the oceans is this m in the food chain that we are consuming thanks for your question Steve um short answer is yes um there’s been quite a lot of evidence finding microplastics in fish that we eat um also in biov valves animals that we eat whole because quite often the microplastics are in the guts of the animals but actually we’ve found microplastics in Honey beer tap water bottle drinking water pop drinks it’s it’s in our food yeah why does it matter though I I guess is that is that what what you’re worried about Steve the fact that if we’re eating it we’re getting a diet of plastic but does that matter to be honest with you I watch the program on BBC about the Plastics in the ocean where they said there was 55 trillion trillion pieces of plastic there so I did a bit of research myself um trying to find out anything about it and within an hour uh what I found was quite horrific with estrogen being one of the main things that was being released into the oceans when that get in the food chain then it’s going to affect the male population as well as the female population if it’s not already been doing it for the last 20 30 years or so Danny so there is um some evidence that microplastics can absorb these other persistent organic pollutants but the evidence is inconclusive actually because some Studies have found that they can absorb these things from the water column and they keep hold of them and then they get pooped out the other end and actually stop the animal from absorbing them into their own body and other Studies have found the opposite that they release them and given that we’ve very recently there’s been evidence that microplastics are in human Pooh researchers in Austria um and it’s a preliminary study it’s not a published piece of work yet so take it with a pinch of salt but it’s very likely that we are a pinch yeah take of a pinch of microplastics it’s very likely that we are eating and inhaling microplastics so we definitely need more research to find out about these other effects and Laura what about the point that Steve makes about estrogens and things like that these are female hormones that are in water that might be picked up by these Plastics and then get into our bodies is there evidence for that sort of phenomenon yeah there is evidence out there that that is occurring and that there are higher levels of estrogen um within our Waters does that make a difference it does make a difference because it’s impacting on the male factor and it’s actually then leading on to reductions in sperm because it’s um affecting testosterone production as well so it’s something that we need to be aware of there’s evidence that some animals some aquatic animals are also being impacted isn’t I mean we’ve seen fish changing sex and so on is that is that through this phenomenon yeah so that’s through this phenomenon not linked to microplastics directly but linked to the Eastern in the water nonetheless from the contraceptive pill yep so fish seal so marine mammals as well and other invertebrates too Dan are scientists actively monitoring this and do they have any solutions because I know we we know that there are Plastics in the ocean it’s one thing to say they’re there it’s another to actually do something about it can we can we remedy this I think in terms of trying to remove microplastics I think is going to be very difficult because most of them sink so 98% of them sink to the benthos to the sea floor um and obviously if you’re trying to dredge them out you’re going to cause more damage than good in terms of trying to remedy the situation I think it’s prevention is better than cure in this case we need to stop putting it into the oceans Yeah so basically we’ve done what we have done but now we’ve got toil wor safer Plastics as well so BPA free which a lot of actually a lot of drinks companies have already done well thank you Danny Tim up in the air now for you Robert wants to know how high and how fast could all electric aircraft fly and and how far away are we from actually having an electric airplane as reality I’d say we’re still quite a long way from the reality of flying around rather in sort of jumbo Jets like they are but electric versions that’s not happening anytime soon and the problem is with electric aircraft is it just takes so much energy to fly anything but with an electric aircraft you need a lot of batteries and batteries are really really heavy and the heavier something is the more energy it needs so the more batteries you need and if you’ve ever flown a drone you will have seen this you get these tiny little drones that get into the air really really quickly and a lot of fun to fly around and 8 minutes later your battery is flat you can get some slightly bigger drones but even the big ones they’re much much heavier but even those can only fly for 30 minutes or an hour we’re talking about very short periods of time but that’s not to say we don’t have any electric planes there are some that have been successful and perhaps the most famous one is called solar impulse 2 and this one had solar panels on it and was created by a Swiss team and in 2015 it circumnavigated the globe but the problem was it had to keep stopping and the whole journey took 16 months and it only had room for one person so that’s sort of the the height as it were of um electric planes at the moment and so to answer the original question how high and how fast well solar impulse 2 um traveled at about 70 km an hour which is sort of 43 M hour and was about 12,000 m in the air or about 40, ,000 ft so in terms of height that’s about the same height as a jumbo jet we’re talking similar sort of um distance into the air but in terms of speed a jumbo jet will easily do 500 mph it was doing 43 mph so we’re a long way off of that but people would love to have electric airplanes because Air transport is an absolutely terrible polluter of the air and is also uh adding to our greenhouse gas emissions so is also bad for the environment in many many different ways the problem is we just don’t have good enough technology yet to make flying aircraft that would be sustainable and do the job that aircraft currently do it seems like it all of these issues related to transport come down to batteries and energy Supply don’t they and it’s like we’re we’re sort of the precipice here and we really need to solve this problem and no one’s yet manag to get over this this sort of Chasm of how we get enough energy packed into something that doesn’t weigh more than the AA plane at the moment and all its Fuel and all its passengers cuz that’s the problem isn’t they’re just so heavy as you say and and it’s holding back technology for phones it’s holding back technology and and other Communications devices it’s holding back technology for cars and so on yeah so in terms of things like cars and even trucks and also boats they are perhaps more promising than electric planes because the weight isn’t as much of an issue yes you still have to get going but actually once you get going uh keeping it going is not nearly as hard as it is to keep something in the air or to get it into the air in the first place and so we’re already seeing electric cars sort of making it onto the streets and they there are the first examples of um electric trucks and also electric boats that might be able to um clean up those Industries before we start cleaning up uh planes thank you for that Tim and now moving on James can you help us with this Kate stockings is a geography teacher she’s been in touch how big a problem really is climate change because it’s never out of the headlines these days is the planet in real danger or is this just hot air my wife will identify with this piece of pedantry but I always like to say it’s never the planet we always when we talk about climate change we’re talking about particularly us as human beings but also the other animals alive the planet will carry on regardless but ultimately climate change will be as bad as we choose to make it um the Paris climate agreement coming up on three years old now led to a pretty Landmark statement and agreement from so many governments around the world and that you know the 1.5 degre degre Celsius warming um which of which we’ve already had one degree of to limmit that by the end of the century will be would be really huge and if we can do that probably climate change will not be that bad um pretty very much we could adapt to that um but that will require quite a strong response we’re looking at 50% Cuts in um emissions of carbon dioxide by 2030 and then a complete removal of our or a net removal of all our carbon dioxide emissions so we don’t we we take out everything we put in or we don’t Adit anything at all by 2050 so that’s really really very soon when you start to consider it you know it’s 12 years to 2030 so it’s up to us really thank you James the effects of sibling aggression can be more significant than we once thought 100 electrodes to link my nervous system with a computer and then onto the internet the naked Neuroscience podcast explores the workings of the brain and the nervous system in our bodies and beyond that sticks and Stone may break your bones with words and neglect my HT your brain so you’ve got the little brain slice in the recording chamber and from unraveling outs disease to digging into dreams join me Katy Haler each month as we make connections with Scientists around the world and spark up conversations on the latest Neuroscience news you can listen and download for free at naked scientist.com SL Neuroscience or subscribe to naked Neuroscience wherever you get your PO CS this week on The Naked scientists we have a panel of experts who are taking on your science questions on the way does the Earth’s Tilt affect our climate and are rising sea levels really a problem before that though here’s the next part of our Guess Who game for you at home we played you a strange noise that this animal makes to start with here’s our clue too its eyeball is bigger than its brain what do you think it is now Laura what about this one um there’s been a bit of discussion on the for I wonder if you can help um with this question from Paul Harrington who asks this can electrical devices reduce fertility and is it true that tight boxes are bad for sperm so what do you think well the plain answer is yes they they can affect um there’s minimal research about sort of mobile phones and things like that clearly we don’t want to be putting a mobile phone on somebody’s testicles for a month to see the effect of the sperm on it but aren’t we effectively doing that Laura if you ask most men where do you keep your mobile it’s in their pocket and where’s their pocket right next to their nether regions exactly so we would be recommending that you put it in your top shirt pocket if you have one or your back pocket or you know you see these people you know you got your Runners out there where they have strapped onto their arm the other thing that we obviously like to do we’re of a generation of Netflix Watchers and what have you you know laying bed with your laptop where do you put it slap bang on your groin you know that’s about the worst place that you can have it it’s to do with heat and actually the reason the testicles hang outside the body is cuz sperm likes to sit at about 35° where your body is about 37 degrees so the increase in heat has a real impact on sperm production so we want to keep the testicles cool so has anyone actually done the study on the laptop effect or the the warm testes effect there’s the warm testes effect there has been a lot of research done on that risk cyclists particularly with their nice tight Lyra it’s not looking it’s not looking good for you Tim not only do I have my phone in my pocket I cycled to the studio yeah Danny can I just a little bit embarrassing my husband’s Dutch and um we’ve been together for 10 years and when my dad first met him one of the first things that he said to him was you know what’s your bicycle seat like is it soft enough it’s okay and well they’ve said that it’s not so much about the damage it’s all to do with the wearing of the Lyra and the heat that’s generated much more so than the actual damage of the cycling there’s some evidence to that but most of it is about the fact that you wear nice C oh he do he doesn’t wear like it’s all right then you need to be letting it all hang free anatomically there are nerves that run along the bit of your body that then sits down hard on the bicycle seat aren’t there and there was a suggestion that that by sitting down hard on the bicycle seat yeah you you can damage those nerves and this may affect your function is is that not such a consideration then not so much of a consideration as the heat but it is still a consideration as is when P patients have to have surgery that involves that kind of area then obviously what we would usually recommend is some kind of semen preservation sperm preservation because obviously it can lead to erectile dysfunction which is more the issue than about some hot baths and things like that because you know people love a good soak in the tub don’t they does that have a consequence as long as you’re probably not soaking for hours on end you know a hot bath now and again is not going to do you too much damage but obviously if you are actively trying for a family we would be recommending showers cold showers cold shower could have the opposite effect couldn’t it that’s that’s supposed to cool your order no no definitely not get getting there together you heard it here first on the Naked Scientist so Tim is it hot baths for you Tim then is it or I’ll be taking a cold shower as soon as I get home so basically the bottom line is laptop not on your lap then yeah laptop not on your lap on a desk or mobile phone not your pocket mobile phone not in your pocket nice cool cotton box of shorts and cooler showers and not warm Barts thank you Laura here’s another question hello Chris it’s soat here from Nepal I have a question about dandr why do these dandr keep coming back for some person and is it the skin cell that is shedding and why does it vary from person to person and what can be the solution about it well first of all what actually is Dand draff well it’s very common it’s more common in men than women it’s more common under the age of 50 and it tends to have its peak onset after puberty kicks in and that probably happens because once you go through puberty your hormone profile changes and your hormone profile including testosterone and estrogen levels affect the composition of the secretions that the glands in your skin and scalp put onto the skin surface and those secretions include oils and other things and that in turn affects the composition of the microbes the so-called microbiome that lives on the skin and that’s probably the key to this because dandr is is flaky skin it’s dead bits of skin which is shed all the time but when you get dandruff what’s happened is that the process by which the skin renews itself has for some reason speeded up so you’re growing more skin and losing more skin and because you’re losing more skin you’re more likely to see yourself losing more skin which is why you get these little flakes of skin it’s nothing to do with hygiene it does appear to be due due to microbes because there are various conditions which are associated with it including an overgrow of fungus so certain fungi growing on the scalp perfectly naturally and you often see this in young babies actually they get something called cradle cap when a young baby’s first born you end up with a flaky skin on the top of the head and it’s probably as their own microbiome is first establishing itself you can also get dandruff if you’re prone to eczema which is another inflammatory skin condition or sometimes just a certain change in products like shampoos and things which can irritate the skin can cause this to happen and then some people have’ got psoriasis as well and psoriasis can sometimes also cause a dandruff like like phenomenon what can you do about it well you you can treat it with very shampoos and they often have things like zinc in them they might have selenium in them these are things to look for in the ingredients things with zinc and selenium are very good because they actually affect the microbes that cause the dandruff um also salicylic acid the chemical relative of aspirin can sometimes also be in um these remedies and that’s very good as well and sometimes col tar in the old days people used to use colar it smells terrible but it uh it it works a treat and then there’s an antifungal you can rub in something called keto cornol which also can be used and if you do this it’s suppresses the fungus that causes the dandruff the problem is though that if you are prone to that particular overgrowth of those yeasts and fungi that cause it as soon as you stop the treatment then you might get it back again and this is exactly what is being referred to in the question that it does relapse if you take the the pressure caused by the shampoo of so the best thing is if you do get this it’s nothing to do with hygiene people perfectly clean hair get it equivalently with people who who have dirty your hair it’s all to do with the the microbes that inhabit you and therefore the best thing to do is to find a shampoo that’s working for you and keep using it as long as it makes the problem go away but um you know it it is a pretty much a Moder thing because we’ve all become so obsessed about hygiene these days we tend to notice it and I think the association with it being under 50 the cynic he says probably because by the time you’re 50 odd you probably lost well you lost you partly because don’t care but you lost all your hair the naked scientists podcast is produced in association with Spitfire costeffective voice internet and IP Engineering Services for UK businesses find out how Spitfire can Empower your company at Spitfire [Music] do.uk you’re listening to the naked scientists with me Chris Smith and with me a panel of experts taking on your science questions Tim Revel is a new scientist journalist Danny Green is a marine ecologist from Anglia Ruskin University Laura Carter Penman is from bour Hall she’s a fertility nurse and we have James Pope who’s from the British Antarctic Survey and he models climate change now we’ve got a quick quiz on the way for them but before that don’t forget the quiz we have for you at home we’ve got a game of Guess Who Running through the program we’ve told you so far it makes a strange sound which we play to you we also learned this animal’s eyeball is bigger than its brain and your third clue is it can Sprint at up to 70 km per hour final Clues are on their way but what do you think it is now I promised the panel of people earlier that we were going to have a little quiz to keep them on their toes so this is the naked scientists quest for biggest brain of the week award okay two teams Tim and Dany versus Laura and James so Tim and Danny you’re going to go first and uh basically I ask the question you get it right or wrong you get a Bing or a bong okay you’re first question what color not a bong like that Tim where are you coming from this is a family show it’s family show um Tim and Danny what color died you get if you boil the sea snail which is called murex uh blue defer to Danny oh it’s really embarrassing if I got it wrong I’m going to say blue well I’ll give you three choices how about that you can have red or yellow or purple which do you think it is you’re going to go for you’re going to go for purple very good that a bing yes it was a bing that’s close to Blue it Tyrion purple it’s made by boiling sea snails the snails normally use the secretion in question to sedate their prey it turns purple when it gets exposed to the air it takes tens of thousands of these snails to yield just gram quantities of the die and that’s why the purple was traditionally a color that denoted High status because exactly because it was so rare okay plus one for Tim and Danny very good you’re in the lead so far good given you only have one question no no competition yet James and Laura a giant squid is the same length as a a London Underground Carriage B A minib buus or c a double decker bus my guts it’s got to be the the longer one I’m trying to think what’s longer carriage or going to kill me that I’ve got this wrong cuz he tells me these sort of facts on a regular basis um can we find a friend so we’re going to go with the underground one do you think that’s going to be the longest yeah go underground underground no unfortunately actually these squid Danny you must know the answer to this do you was it the double it is the double decker answer they they get 12 to 13 m in length the the giant squid double deck of bus is about 12 M so a colossal squid actually can be even bigger 15 M so Tim and Danny in the lead so far round two round two is a matter of time Tim and Danny there are trees alive older than the Egyptian pyramids is that true or is that false true because the the methus OFA tree wasn’t that 5,000 years how old are the pyramids actually before we start a few thousand so the fire yeah the the ausa tree is 5,000 years old I think that’s older than the pyramids yeah to go yes so you’re going for you’re going that this is true oh yes another high there are specimens of bristle cone Pine in California and Nevada and they are at roughly 5,000 years old capable of predating the pyramids the oldest of which were erected 4,600 years ago they’re not the oldest living thing though um there are patches of do you know what Danny another Marine thing to put you on the spot which are 200 thousand years old seaes seagrasses yeah um they’ve been documented as 200,000 years old and they live in the Mediterranean Sea it’s a clonal organism has been growing there in these patches for for 200,000 years amazing James and Laura um can you redeem yourself so these guys are on two so far you’ve got zero so you’re doing well let’s see if you can improve on zero time passes faster for your face than it does for your feet is this true or false czy um time time time it’s all to do with gravity isn’t it I guess and the gravity of your head is different to the gravity of your feet cuz you’re further away from the we assume you’re standing up yeah so I don’t know it’s still I’m still guessing either way I’m not a physicist um I don’t know what’s your thought I don’t know your age shows more on your face doesn’t it I mean that’s a basic one to go for we’ll go with that yeah yeah we’re going to go with face time passes faster for your face than your feet true or false you have to give me true or false answer faster for the face face is older true yay the logic was dubious but the answer was was correct um assuming you are standing up Einstein’s theory of general relativity which of course you’ll be very familiar with as as a fertility nurse there Laura um it states that the closer you are to the Center of the Earth the slower time passes at the top of Mount Everest for example a year is 15 micros seconds shorter than at sea level so time does actually pass a bit faster for your face then it does for your feet you’re off the bottom okay if they get this wrong it goes to tiebreaker if they get this right then you really are not the biggest brains of the week okay here we go this round is all about technology and we want to know does this technology exist in other words is IT Tech yes versus Tech no did you see what we did there that was cool wasn’t it okay Tim and Danny radiation blocking boxer shorts Tech yes techno maybe in Japan because they have a lot of issues with radiation don’t they yeah with like nuclear power plants and things box of shorts is a is a weird phrase here cuz don’t they sometimes put sort of things in front of you if you’re having various scans to protect vital bodily organs so they might not be boxer shorts they’re always inventing things I think it might be I think it might be Tech true they might not work are you going Tech yes or Tech no Tech yes going Tech yes yep it’s unveiled at the consumer electronic show this year Spartan’s radiation blocking boxer shorts are made from a fabric which incorporates silver fibers woven into the cotton so they block radio frequency signals from smartphones and then they can’t IR radiate your private so this Laura be very interested in this you can you refer all your Tim Needs these clearly so he can you know saw question I saw him and thought of this yeah um but I think of your patience you could say look you could get a set of these um the other bonus is that the silver means that the underwear is also antibacterial so that will keep Chi fors at Bay in your nether regions um well look you have lost but do you want to have a go at the do you want to see if you can sort of get two points anyway you have go why not okay your your Tech yes or Tech no is um trip sensitive shoes that can summon help if you should fall over is that a tech yes or a tech no tricky cuz there’s lots of Technology out trippy trippy definitely trippy along with the Techno theme my grand um had one of those sort of panic buttons when she fell yeah there’s not you can get things that tell you not to leave the house now for dementia patients and stuff like that so you going to take yes or take no yeah I think we got to go yes you’re going take yes oh I’m getting before you could snatch defeat from the I was getting some evil looks I was like oh no really um yeah evone have made some smart shoes they’ve got accelerometers gyroscopes and pressure sensors in them so they can detect if you should take a tumble so they’re potentially very helpful as you say for elderly people but also they have their eye on hikers and climers his adventures might lead them into remote locals where they could take a tumble and apparently these shoes come with their own own sort of network subscription so they can send data and and that kind of thing um so I guess you could say they come with a running cost do they use them outside weather Spoons on a Friday night I don’t know that could come in handy couldn’t it okay thank you very much anyway our big brains this week give yourselves a big round of applause and you can please please salute how big Dan Danny and Tim very well done the prize is you go home with your reputation in tag okay okay back to the questions Danny can you have a think about or Ponder on this one for Sam some people say we know more about space than we do our own oceans is this true what do you think in short I’d say yes it is and particularly if you’re talking about understanding the topography and the shape of the oceans um so for example we technically we we have got 100% of the oceans mapped but the resolution is to 5,000 m whereas we’ve mapped 98% of Venus to 100 m resolution so we do know quite a bit about quite a few places but not necessarily the bottom sea no but there is actually a big movement in 2017 there’s a group called The General bimetric chart of the oceans or gbco for short and they’re launching this huge effort to map everything in more detail by 2030 and this is a big collaborative thing which would mean that um you know ships that are out doing things for Fisheries or for recreation would also be mapping the oceans using multi-beam Sona which is obviously a lot quicker than just a single Beam at one at a time there’s this huge collaborative effort to map the oceans in more detail however some ecologists are concerned that this also may lead to a huge race to try to mine the oceans more there’s lots of Precious Minerals down there there’s diamonds gold obviously Oil we’re already on the oil wagon so there’s an issue that is this going to lead to conservation or to exploitation I wondered if you were going to say something else when you mentioned the sonar and conservation issues because there is a question as well that one of the reasons we see things like giant mammal big mammal beachings whales driving onto beaches is because of distress caused by Marine noise and underwater sound pollution yes exactly so this is another big issue it’s also associated with um oil rigs and the whole the whole process of exploration of the sea as well as exploitation but is sonar of the kind used by shipping is that destructive and disturbing to the envir behavior of these animals yeah so there’s a lot of evidence that this is interfering with their navigation systems and causing them to beach so it’s a bit of a worry that in order to understand the ocean we could she be doing damage it could be disrupting it even more Yeah Tim why is the ocean not mapped much better you’d imagine it’s much much harder to map the surface of Venus you know millions of miles away than it is to map the ocean floor but there’s a lot of water in the way just in short it makes it quite difficult and obviously there’s some areas that are mapped a lot in a lot more detail so we’ve we’ve mapped about 10 to 15% to 100 m because those are the shipping routes and the places we go to but the areas that we rarely go to with really turbulent seas are going to be less less well understood at this stage I spoke to a group of marine scientists at the University of abedine a few years ago and one of them passed on the sobering fact that he ventured not personally but with a probe ventured to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean it’s about 7 miles you know 12 km down very long way down and the first thing he saw when he reached the seabed was a plastic raincoat plastic raincoat yeah yeah he said it’s just staggering you know there’s nowhere you can go almost where you don’t see the destructive influence of people that that stuck in my mind for you know good reason now sticking with the water though James one for you Chris has has highlighted a question for us on Twitter and Chris says why are rising sea levels and melting ice caps a problem apart from the obvious people think about the obvious about the inundation of of coastal towns and cities but some of the more probably less welld discussed issues are sort of around freshwater sources so the three types of ways we get fresh water um if you live somewhere like the Himalayas you get it from Monsoon rains and Glaciers if you live somewhere like the UK you get it from reservoirs or Aquas so aquifers are um water storage underground in permeable rocks what’s possible is that near coastal regions if the sea level rises high enough it can actually flow and spill over from the sea into the aquifer and essentially poison the aqua by introducing a saline component and making it no longer suitable for fresh water other issues my mom lives up in Southport and they have a lot of salt marshes up there so that’s land that is at or just below sea level they get it’s inundated by the brackish water so slay line freshwater mix so you get an entirely different type of ecost structure there but obviously if that inundated rice Patties or standard arable land here in the UK you just lose the ability to grow crops in the area but it’s always worth saying that sea level rise is probably the least of our issues in terms of climate change under its most extreme scenario we’re looking at only a maximum of 1 M by 2100 sea Lev ice because the ice sheet so that’s the bit of ice on actually on ground um currently it just takes a long time to melt I mean if you put some ice cubes on the desk right now they take it a long time to melt and ice sheets take even longer you’re talking several thousands of years even to get some of the more vulnerable ice sheets to completely collapse so it’s probably not a huge issue immediately so it’s not so much the the actual water movement that is the issue it’s what goes with it it’s the mechanism that’s driving the ice to melt that’s causing a rise in global temperatures going to have other knock-on consequences directly for the inhabited land area rather than just a direct impact of sea level rise yeah I I would suspect that most coastal regions would see impacts from um things like extreme weather phenomenon You could argue that even half a meter rise makes a coastal area more susceptible to the storm surges from hurricanes or even just bad weather like we see here in the UK so it’s not completely right off B but certainly it’s not sort of some sort of dystopian flooded future and how how much sea level rise are we looking at probably you said the worst case scenario might be a meter or so but how much are we looking at probably if we go following the trajectory we appear to be on and let’s assume you know we end up with about a 1 and a half degree rise across this Century what sort of sea level rise is that going to translate into so the one the 1.5 um degree rise so the recent report that the intergovernmental panel on climate change produced on this they estimated it would be somewhere in the of about 6 I think with an uncertainty range of about. 3 to7 of a meter so there’s an element that we’re sort of committed to a certain extent but I think from memory a lot of that is mainly due to just the warmer Planet means that actually the ocean the the size of the ocean just expands the water expands in size so it’s thermal expansion less than actually the Melt of ice sheets and Glaciers cuz the poles have melted in the past haven’t they in Earth’s history we have had a planet in the past where there was no at either pole yes and conversely when we had the last glacial maximum so about 20,000 years ago sea level was as much as 120 M lower so in some respects we’ve had 120 M of sea level rise we could if we melted everything that was left get another 70 but it would take an awful long time to melt everything that was left so that’s sort of reassuring and not reassuring all at the same time but I guess it depends where you live you live in Cambridge could be Cambridge on SE before too long thank you very much James I’m glad I invested in that property I’m going to have a beach front property if I’m going to keep driving my car as much as possible now to drive up sea level rail of course I’m not I’m taking it all very seriously James thanks very much Laura can you help us with this David on our Forum has said what do we actually mean by the word infertile infertile is actually quite an old term that was used really um we say that couples are infertile if they’ve been trying for a year and haven’t conceived naturally but we would actually consider most of our patients to be something more subfertile really that they have issues with their fertility but that can be assisted or mainly there’s a lot that can be done with just Lifestyle Changes weight has a huge impact smoking alcohol heat we talked about stress factors environmental factors so really I think infertile is quite an old-fashioned term and we should be moving to more the term of subfertile to what extent do you think that the rising Trend in infertility is because of our mod Lifestyles we’re we’re living life where we’re burning the candle at both ends aren’t we I think it has a a huge impact we like to have it all and do it all as females you know we all want to have these amazing careers and unfortunately our bodies don’t match with that our bodies still want us to be having children in their in our 20s and early 30s our bodies aren’t designed to be having babies in their late you know in our late 30s and early 40s we spend a lot of time talking about um reproduction in schools and how not to have children but we don’t tell people when to start having children so what should we be saying then I think we should be explaining how you get pregnant we need to go back to basics but we need to be explaining to people that you know when fertility is going to have an impact and for women you know it’s 32 33 35 is a real start of the cliff and it does have an impact on men as well you see lots of you know older you know MC Jagger with his hundreds of children that he seems to be having um but allegedly yeah and that what gives people the impression that oh I can put it off till tomorrow yeah and I think you know lots of older pop stars you know funny enough they all seem to have twins in their 40s really easily you know makes you think you know are they actually having reproductive therapy and not talking about it so I think we should be being more honest with ourselves and more honest with the younger generation and making it easier to be back to work all the things that go with that the social factors that go with that that you can be at work and be a mom and it’s not a bad thing thanks for that Laura okay D how about this one for you this is from tams in do immortal jellyfish really exist perish the thought immortal jellyfish is there such a thing could there be such a thing yes so I mean it’s not Immortal in the way that in the old movie The Highlander is Immortal um so not chopping off heads and absorbing their powers unfortunately but yeah there is a jellyfish called um terat Toops as dorai and it was actually discovered by accident by a um a lazy grad student who was doing some experiments on them over the summer and his name was Christian summer and he um he had the Medusa in the tank which is the um jellyfish form that we know and love the adult form with the Bell and the tentacles and he sort of left them over the summer and he he went off and had went on holiday when he came back he expected to find some dead Medusa maybe some pops all he found was PPS which is the juvenile form that’s the form that sits on the bottom and then that eventually grows into smaller muus and then they are sexually reproductive and then they produce planul larae they come back down into um pups again and all we found was pups we thought that’s strange what’s happened where are all the dead ones where are all the different stages so then they did some experiments and they discovered that what was happening was that when these animals get stressed they revert to a juvenile state so it’s a little bit like the Benjamin Button of um of um Nigeria I guess so they get stressed um and then they can go back into being a pup and they can go again and they can do it again they can do it for forever as far as we know in a laboratory system at least so they transform the body of the big one the parent for one of a better phrase into lots of little Bevy off bits which are the polyps back into one and it’s it’s a little bit like um like a butterfly going back to a caterpillar it’s a bit like that but it’s also it’s it’s reabsorbing and and re sort of deploying all its body parts to make it a totally new form of the organism not just one but but many yeah so it’s a process called um trans differentiation and apparently there’s there’s Talk Amongst um medical scientists like yourself to use this in a way for for human health and to reduce the aging process but what if what you’re saying is true that these animals can just basically turn themselves back into a more primitive form of themselves there there will be some some jellyfish cells in the adult that turn into juvenile jellyfish cells but then when those little ones grow up to make big ones they’re going to make new cells aren’t they so that the cells that are in there are not that there might be the odd cell that’s from the original Parent but they’ll have grown to make lots of newer cells weren’t yeah exactly so is it is it strictly Immortal then well it’s Immortal in the sense that it can just keep going sort of again and again ultimately I’m not sure that in the sense you know like a human being can reproduce Laurel know and you take an egg cell that an adult has made but actually made when her mother was pregnant with her and that egg is then fertilized by a sperm and from that one cell you then make a whole new organism but at the same time you’ve still made all new cells so the you you could call a human Immortal then in the sense that it’s sort of similar to what the jellyfish is doing isn’t it it’s not yeah Ian I suppose technically it’s not Immortal but it’s probably the closest thing that we have on Earth that we know of to Immortal perhaps why do you think the jellyfish do this is it is it some kind of defense mechanism I think it’s defense mechanism preservation now it’s not been observed in the wild keep in mind because obviously this is difficult animal to study it’s only been seen in the laboratory and as far as we know it can just keep doing this over and over and even if you pinch them with a pair of forceps they can do this within 3 hours they can revert back from the Medusa stage back to the pup stage so it happens very quickly as well yeah well that could be useful in medicine couldn’t it if you needed to sort of repair a bit of yourself and you could just grow another one well there you go tamson that you can have a sort of near immortal jellyfish I didn’t know that thank you very much Danny and moving on Tim Frankie has a question for you she’s from Cambridge my question is how much will technology feature in our future will it take our jobs so is Frankie out of a job owing to technology and Ai and all that kind of thing you were discussing earlier uh I guess it depends what Frankie does um and it also depends who you ask so one very famous study that looked into what jobs will be automated in the future came from the University of Oxford and they reckoned that about half of all jobs in the US and a third in the UK were at high risk of automation basically the job would be given to a robot um at some point in the following 20 years but since then that study has been questioned a lot and a lot of people say it’s actually a lot lower and so it’s really really hard to know what’s actually going to happen in the future but I think there are some examples from history to look at and one of the things people talk about is will robots actually create more jobs than they take and so the famous example of this is the job of a bank teller someone who you talk to at a bank to help you with your banking many years ago the ATM was invented and people said well that we have no need for bank tellers anymore because you go to a machine and it gives you your money and tells you your balance why would you need a person anymore but what happened in the next 20 years was actually it became so much cheaper to open a bank because most of the work happened at the bank at the ATM machine that more Banks were opened and after 20 years there were more bank tellers after the invention of the ATM than there were before so some people are suggesting that Automation in its current wave will have the same effect lots of jobs will become automated but people will then get extra jobs on the back of that and the sort of more manual or less interesting parts of the job will be automated away but the short answer is we just don’t know yet it’s a worrying time really isn’t it do you think scientists will always have a job though because um someone’s got a dream up asking for a friend Chris or I guess so I would think also maybe journalists as well because uh asking the sort of hard questions and conveying it in a way that you think people are going to be interested in it I think that’s going to be quite a tough act to to match isn’t it definitely but there are aspects of this that are already being automated in terms of journalism there are AIS that will look at academic papers and write them in short summaries that’s almost my job currently so there are loads and loads of aspects of this there are also AIS that will look at for example social media and make a story out of that which many journalists also make a living so I think no one is completely safe but there will be new things for us to do and perhaps the mundane aspects will be automated away hopefully let’s keep our fingers cross thank you Tim now James um got a question here from Donald on the Naked Scientist Forum that’s naked scientist.com Forum he says if the Earth wasn’t tilted what would be the impact on our climate it’s a brilliant question the short answer is that um basically every single day would be 12 hours long everywhere but your latitude would affect how high the sun was in the sky so if you the equator you’d always have sort of 12 hours with a very high midday directly in the middle of the sky Sun if you’re at the poles you would have a very low right on the Rison Sun for 12 hours a day so the energy we get from the Sun comes in you can sort of imagine if you uh if you took a took a football or something and just put straight lines towards your towards this football that’s s the energy from the Sun without that tilt all of that energy would go into the equator there’ be less energy going into the polar regions so you’d have more energy transfer from the the equator and the low latitudes up to the higher latitudes so in the mid latitudes where we are we’d probably get stormier um because there just be more movement of air um and overall the UK it be like it probably be much like sort of the week before Easter permanently what with the traffic you mean or but but being more serious for a minute so basically the temperature we experienc is because it’s the amount of solar input the amount of energy falling on the land for that length of time and so we have summer because the Earth is tilted and we see more Sun during the summer period and we have winter because we see a bit less because that part of the Earth surface is tilted away so the sun’s not as high in the sky so so basically it’s thanks to the fact that the Earth is tilted that we have seasons and therefore we have a seasonal climate yes exactly yeah cuz someone said to me the other day that Mars is also tilted about cuz the Earth is tilted 23 and 1 half degrees Mars is tilted about the same so therefore Mars sort of has Seasons as well but it’s a a great deal colder than it is here on Earth Earth has got very lucky it’s in that we’re in this really nice little slot in the solar system where if we were a few 100,000 km nearer or a few hundred th000 km further away from the it may be almost uninhabitable and it’s that sort of that variation we’re just in a real sweet spot and again our tilt AIDs that but also that tilt is what um added to things like the ice ages so the the glacial interglacial Cycles where huge ice sheets waxed and waned over especially Northern Europe that is part of that was due to the changes in the Tilt and also the change in the shape of our orbit around the Sun so why should the Tilt change I don’t actually know I think the Tilt was sort of very early on in the earth’s formation the Earth was slightly knocked off its spinning axis so put it onto that slight tilt and it’s just got a natural wobble like like a s spinning top essentially and so owing to the fact that it it is just gently changing that degree of inclination over very long time scales is that why we go through phases of the Earth’s a bit warmer for a while it’s a bit colder for a while and that’s what people call the natural cycles or sort of milanovich cycle yeah so when people say the Earth has always throughout its 4 and a half billion year history gone through Cycles when the climate has changed ched how do we know that the warming that we’re seeing today is owing to our influence and not just the Earth entering another of these natural variations because the Earth has completely Frozen up in the past it’s completely melted its poles and been really really hot in the past hasn’t it it’s probably the the toughest parts of of climate science in many respects so we have different ranges of data some of that is the modern-day uh satellite observations weather stations that’s all very new recent last 50 years we have um proxy data which comes from things like tree rings um the ice core or even sediment cause from the deep ocean like we can go back about 65 million years for some of these sediment cause and we can looking at the fossilized Plankton and the chemistry of the shells we can approximate what the temperatur would have been but ultimately what we can see is that nothing has happened as fast nothing that we’ve really seen happens as fast as what we are currently observing and that’s that rate of change that makes the anthropogenic effect the man-made effect of climate change different to Natural climate change which has always happened and will continue to always happen with our signal on top of it thank you for that James Laura let’s move over to you Sophie has been in touch on Facebook and wonders if you can help her out with this when during their monthly cycle are women most fertile well most women average a 28 day cycle some ladies have slightly shorter cycles and some have slightly longer cycles and most ladies ovulate about halfway through that cycle so around about day 14 so from a fertility perspective we would usually recommend regular sexual intercourse from around about day 10 because sperm lasts of five to seven days an egg will only last sort of one to two days maximum so ladies are mainly fertile from probably about day 14 of their cycle round to about day 21 of their cycle so it’s all to do with ovulation occurring on day 14 but what about if a person doesn’t have a regular cycle because that what the data you’ve given us assumes that a person knows where they are in that cycle so what happens then so for us we might recommend that you have some scans so you can see what’s happening to see whether what the follicle production is um going on within your cycle patients can try using lutenizing hormone sticks so sort of surge kits as they’re called you can buy them over the counter pee on a stick and it tells you whether you’re ovulating or not okay obviously for ladies then that aren’t detecting that they may need some help with something like chopine a reproduction of a follicle stimulating hormone that usually occurs naturally but isn’t in those encourages the the chemical process of of ovulation yeah and then obviously would link that again with scanning so that we can see that there is a follicle production as well so what roughly what fraction of people do have a regular cycle and what fraction have irregular Cycles so probably one in six ladies have an irregular cycle so it’s quite a high high proportion really I mean we keep focusing again here on sort of female Factor but actually 40% of problems are male Factor problems 40% are female 20% sometimes sit between the unknown and also um is a mixture of two quite often it appears that patients are drawn together if they both have an infer have an infertility issue well they say opposites the track but not in this case um James you going to say yeah I was going to wonder um you’re talking about sort of kits you can buy buy over the counter would you put any stock in smartphone apps that sort of suggest your fertility in the cycle yeah there’s lots out there now which help you track your cycle they would recommend that you track your temperature because there’s supposed to be a slight temperature rise when you OB your there’s now um bit like fitbits and things like that they’re now out there for fertility as well it’s it’s a big sort of upand cominging Burge in Market within that side of things as well and it can help do people say they they find they’re useful or do you think it just helps people to focus their mind they get a plan in place and so they tend to stick to it which means they’re more likely to be successful um for some patients it’s really helpful it gives them for a focus for others it just absolutely adds to the stress of the situation and we would recommend that they go and seek help from a specialist going see their GP speak to a fertility nurse you know there’s there’s lots of things out there to help and actually the apps are useful but I think sometimes for patients who are really struggling it’s not the best thing it really adds to their stress and some people use these apps because they don’t want to get pregnant is that a risky strategy then I would say that’s a very risky strategy Laura thank you very much and it is no laughing matter obviously if if it does go wrong cuz you spells disaster for some people doesn’t it right time for the final clue for our guess who I am my scientific name is struthio camelus struthio camelus and I have three stomachs does that give it away team what does everyone think do you know what our thing is that makes that funny grunting noise it can run at 70 mph and has an eye bigger than its head what do you reckon panel James go I’m going to go on Lim hereit I’m going to go for a camel he’s going camel camel any advance on Camel a hint when you said that the eyes were were massive I thought it was some sort of monkey thing but I’m not so sure now with the 70 miles per hour in the three stomachs thr me I thought it could be like an ostrich or something like that they can run quite fast and they have big big eyes they do have big eyes yeah it it is an ostrich well done it is an ostrich yes they struth is an Australian um kind of exclamation must the size of that ostrich well there we must leave it this week because the arrow of time has defeated us but just before we go we would like to ask you please to help us we give you our programs every week for free and we hope you enjoy them but we do of course have to meet our running costs and also to pay our very hardworking staff and that means we need to raise funds to do this and to safeguard next year’s programming we need to raise £50,000 by the end of this year now the good news is that if everyone listening to just this one single program were to contribute the cost of a single cup of coffee then we would have sufficient funds for the next few years not just this one so look please if you appreciate what we do for you consider buying us a virtual cup of coffee for Christmas we’ve explained how you can do that at naked scientist.com donate thank you very much for listening and thank you for sending in your questions so that our panel Tim Revel Danny Green Laura Carter Penman and James Pope could answer them for you Izzy Clark put the program together do join us at the same time next week when we’re going to be discovering the marvels of manufacturing how do things get from the brains of Engineers and turn into the stuff we need tune in to find out the Naked Scientist comes to you from Cambridge University and is supported by the epsrc and Rolls-Royce I’m Chris Smith and until next time thanks for listening and goodbye [Applause] [Music]