Paris agreement impacts and drought realities

Summary

Science In Action – "Paris Agreement Impacts and Drought Realities"

BBC World Service | October 16, 2025 | Host: Ronan Pease

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Episode Overview

This episode of Science In Action examines the tangible impacts of the 2015 Paris Agreement almost a decade later, focusing particularly on escalating heat and climate change, with a deep dive into research on rising hot days, drought-induced ecosystem changes, and the surprising epidemic controls of ant nests, plus advances in nanotechnology. Experts Freddie Otto, Mindy Smith, and Natalie Strimmet provide insight into how climate pledges are comparing to reality, the vulnerabilities of global grasslands, and how ants naturally manage disease transmission.

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Key Themes & Segments

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1. The Paris Climate Agreement: A Scorecard (01:54–15:32)

Rising Heat & Missed Targets

• Since the Paris Agreement aimed to cap global warming at 2°C (preferably 1.5°C) above pre-industrial, global temperatures have continued to rise.
• According to Freddie Otto of World Weather Attribution, the world has already slipped past the 1.5°C ambition, with temperatures rising by 0.3°C since 2015.

  "3/10 of a degree of warming really makes a huge difference and we notice it."
  — Freddie Otto [05:04]

Hot Days and Mortality

• "Hot days" are counted as those above the 90th percentile for average temperature, linked to increased mortality (03:53).
  • Nighttime heat is especially deadly for those in poorly insulated homes (04:00–04:39).
  • Just a single five-day moderate heatwave in Europe caused 1,500 excess deaths due to the extra 2°C in some cities.

    "That's just in Europe, because that's the only place where we have the numbers... It is quite sobering."
    — Freddie Otto [09:31]

Geographical Inequality & Adaptation

• Small island nations and countries least responsible for emissions are experiencing the most dramatic increases in hot days, highlighting climate injustice (08:28).
• Societies long adapted to stable climates (India, Sub-Saharan Africa) may suffer even more when pushed outside their historical temperature ranges, impacting agriculture and culture (11:01–12:25).

  "If you push them out of this range... the crops don't grow anymore, the houses don't work anymore, the clothing that people wear... it just does not work anymore."
  — Freddie Otto [11:27]

Successes, Failures, and Legal Power

• The Paris Agreement succeeded in creating a legally binding global framework where every country now tracks and debates emissions. The 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice further empowered the agreement legally (12:49–15:32).
• Still, most countries prioritize unproven future tech (e.g., carbon capture) instead of proven, systemic changes (e.g., insulating homes, public transit).

  • "We need to do the easy things... we're not doing it. And I think that's the things where we really need to change step."
    — Freddie Otto [15:10]

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2. Drought Realities: Grasslands in Peril (15:32–25:19)

Experimental Drought Across Continents

• Grasslands (40% of Earth's land) are now subject to controlled drought experiments on six continents to mimic extreme weather and understand ecological impact (16:25–18:29).
  • "Leaky umbrellas" made of plastic strips reduced rainfall by set percentages, mirroring natural droughts without the added heat (17:42–18:29).

Devastating Multi-Year Impact

• Single drought years cause disproportionate ecological damage, but multi-year droughts (like the Dust Bowl) cause ecosystem collapses (19:00–21:00).

  • Roots and soil microbial life are decimated, affecting regrowth and future productivity.

    "This is just not even plant growth that we see, these profound impacts. They occur below ground where we don't see them."
    — Mindy Smith [22:00]

• Post-drought, exotic non-palatable plants (e.g., Russian thistle) overtake former forage grasslands, even if green returns above ground.

  • "While you could say it recovered, it actually didn’t. Because what we saw was the collapse of the main forage grasses that the cattle depend upon and they're still not recovered four years later."
    — Mindy Smith [23:03]

Irreversible Shifts

• Loss of root structures and key species threatens farm livelihoods and biodiversity long-term; parallels drawn directly to Dust Bowl history (21:52–25:19).

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3. Nanotechnology: The Unusual Promise of Ultra-Thin Water (27:33–34:00)

Confined Water’s Surprising Properties

• Water squeezed into nanoscopic spaces between graphene-like materials takes on radically new behavior—conducting electricity much more than expected (28:39–31:46).

  • "One would expect essentially [pure water] doesn't conduct. And instead we found it conducts really a lot, as high as superionic materials."
    — Laura Fumigale [30:41]

• This insight could lead to next-gen electronics, batteries, or even new types of biological studies, as ultra-thin water layers mimic cell interiors (32:00–32:59).

Potential for Tech & Bio-Mimicry

• The Manchester team is actively investigating devices combining such water layers and 2D materials like graphene for nanochips (33:10–33:51).

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4. Epidemic Controls in Ant Nests: Architectural Immunity (34:00–42:13)

CT Scans for Ant Nests

• Using micro-CT, Bristol researchers visualized the complex inner structure of ant nests, which change in response to disease threats (34:44–36:39).

Behavioral Adaptation

• Exposed ants self-isolate by spending more time outside the nest, voluntarily taking on riskier jobs to protect the colony (37:36–38:28).

  • "The ants that have been exposed to the infectious pathogen exclude themselves voluntarily from the colony, so they spend more time on the outside to reduce the risk of contamination."
    — Natalie Strimmet [38:13]

Modular Nest Design Reduces Disease Spread

• Nests built under disease threat feature more “modularity”—compartmentalized chambers and tunnels—slowing disease transmission (38:51–39:37).

  • "If you have a compartmented group, disease transfers less well than if everyone interacts homogeneously. And here when we look at the ants, we saw the same thing."
    — Natalie Strimmet [40:08]

Instinctive Collective Action

• Unlike humans needing instructions, ants have evolved to instinctively restructure collective behavior and architecture for the colony’s safety—even sacrificing personal interests when required (40:42–42:13).

  • "They've had millions of years of evolution... there's less conflict between individuals... all workers in the colony want the queen to do well."
    — Natalie Strimmet [41:07]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On climate injustice:

  "The strongest increase in these hot days we see... is in countries that have really done the least to cause the problem."
  — Freddie Otto [08:28]

• On climate change legacy:

  "It's those below ground impacts that we think are going to be those legacies that prevent recovery in the future after these kinds of droughts."
  — Mindy Smith [22:00]

• On Paris Agreement’s importance:

  "We should really not underestimate how much of an achievement it is to have a global, legally binding framework..."
  — Freddie Otto [12:49]

• On ant society vs. humanity:

  "We can't request individuals to sacrifice themselves for the group. That would be unethical. But the ants do that."
  — Natalie Strimmet [41:30]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Paris Agreement impacts & climate realities: 01:54–15:32
• Grasslands & drought legacies: 15:32–25:19
• Nanotechnology with atom-thick water: 27:33–34:00
• Ants & architectural immunity: 34:00–42:13

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Summary Conclusion

This episode clearly demonstrates the gulf between climate promises and lived reality—global warming’s pace is accelerating, vulnerable regions suffer the greatest, and adaptation is essential but yet incomplete. Field experiments reveal that repeated drought leaves lasting scars on vital grasslands, while ants show how coevolved behaviors and group architecture can help limit epidemics, offering inspiration for human society. Meanwhile, cutting-edge nanotech may one day mimic or even harness nature’s most fundamental elements. Science In Action deftly weaves these stories, underscoring the urgency, complexity, and wonder at the frontiers of science and adaptation.

Transcript

[Ronan Pease]

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[Ronan Pease]

Welcome to Science in Action from the BBC World Service with me Roland Pease. Later in the program, Social distancing in ant nests is a means of infection.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Control and if you have a compartmented group disease transfer less well than if everyone interacts homogeneously. And here when we look at the ants, we saw the same thing.

[Ronan Pease]

Also prospects of ultra thin water as a tool for nanotechnology and the destructive effects of repeated droughts on grasslands around the world.

[Mindy Smith]

This is just not even plant growth that we see these profound impacts. They occur below ground where we don't see them. And it's those below ground impacts that we think are going to be those legacies that prevent recovery.

[Ronan Pease]

It was not quite 10 years ago that negotiators from around the world gathered in Paris to hammer out what has been the most meaningful agreement on climate change to date. After two decades of failed attempts, the headline target was to stop global temperatures rising more than 2 degrees above pre industrial levels or more ambitiously, no more than 1.5. It's perhaps a damning indictment of how little we've achieved, that that more ambitious target has already slipped from our grasp. Temperatures have kept rising. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 keep rising. Even the amount of new CO2 we pump out each year has not yet peaked. And year by year, the weather impacts associated with the warming floods, droughts, heat waves, they also keep mounting. The World Weather Attribution Collaboration, which analyzes such trends, has just released an assessment of the way hot weather has changed since the Paris Agreement and how much more it will change if we remain on our current path. Hot weather as measured by the number of hot days is each year, as WWA leader Freddie Otto explains.

[Freddie Otto]

So hot days is days that are above the 90th percentile of the average temperatures that people experience. And we've chosen that because that is very strongly linked in those countries where we have the data with an increase in mortality. It doesn't mean necessarily that it feels very hot for everyone because we look at average temperatures. So it can be that the daytime temperatures are quite high, but the nighttime temperature is not so high, or you have high nighttime temperatures and not so high daytime temperatures. And that's often quite dangerous, especially for people living in poorly insulated homes. I mean, we had to make a decision on what to choose. We chose that.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

You say that in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was signed, global temperatures are about a degree above the pre, pre industrial temperatures, that it's going by 0.3 degrees since then, which sort of suddenly makes me think, you know, a third of a degree in just the past decade. And from what you're saying, you can actually see the fingerprint of that in the number of hot days around the world.

[Freddie Otto]

We can see the fingerprint of that in the number of hot days. We also looked at some case studies of some of the really severe heat waves that have happened in the last. And we also see that there's a strong increase in heat waves and particularly in heat waves that are so hot that they would have been impossible without global warming. So really, this part of our report, comparing the temperatures at the time of the signing of the agreement and now is to show that, yeah, 3/10 of a degree of warming really makes a huge difference and we notice it.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean, 20 years ago I was worried about global warming, but it seemed off in the distance. But, you know, in a sense you're saying that year by year that crank is actually affecting the kinds of weather we experience.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes.

[Freddie Otto]

So it's absolutely Here and we are experiencing already extreme weather events. And in this report we highlight heat events that would not have happened without climate change and that are already really going towards the limits of what we are able to deal with right now. That doesn't mean we couldn't adapt to them, but we haven't so far. So that also shows that there is just. Even if the world would wake up tomorrow and everyone does their highest possible ambition with respect to mitigation and we would limit temperatures to 1.5, even then, we still need to adapt. So that is also a really important point, that climate change is really not an issue for the future, it's an issue for the present.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

But your report is, I mean, the 1.5 degree target is already effectively bust. I don't see any chance of us getting to that. The 2 degree limit also seems to be not on the table according to your report, that the expectation is we're going to reach at least two and a half degrees of warming. And the numbers you present in this report for that are terrifying. But I guess given what we've seen with just 0.3 degrees in the past decade, I'm not surprised.

[Freddie Otto]

And I think that's the numbers for 2.6, which is in an optimistic interpretation of the current pledges and policies that countries have implemented or have said they will implement. We will get to 2.6 degrees by the end of the century. And the numbers that the heat day or hot day numbers that we look at and the heatwave case studies just show that is not a world we want to live in. So the hope is that we will not get to 2.6, but that actually better policies and stronger, properly high ambition in mitigation will be implemented in the next decades. I know in this current rather cloudy geopolitical world, that doesn't look very likely. But I think just the impacts that we are already seeing and that we will continue to see in the next decades will just force us to do more.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean, which, which of the areas sort of alarm you in terms of the hot days or the heat waves?

[Freddie Otto]

I think what we see with this hot day analysis, again is that the strongest increase in these hot days we see in small island state countries and it's in countries that have really done the least to cause the problem and that they are the ones who really have not profited at all from the fossil fuel burning over the last two centuries. And so I think that this massive injustice in who is paying the price is for me, I think the most striking that this report Underlines again.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean, it's for us, I can see in, for example, in Europe, I think you're talking about an extra month of extremely hot days, which presumably would be in a lot of summers every year, that the kinds of weather, I don't know that we've seen in the past year or two, 20, 23, for example, where we've been, people have been saying, gosh, this is intolerable. We'll just have to get used to.

[Freddie Otto]

I mean, we have to get used to, because we have seen, I mean, we have done. Earlier this year, we have done a study or two studies together with epidemiologists from the Institute of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene to see what the changes we already see because of climate change actually mean in terms of mortality. And for just one heat wave that lasted for about five days and that was not super hot, we found, been looking at 10 cities that 1,500 people extra died, that would not have died if it wasn't for these extra 2 degrees of warming that on average we saw in these cities. And I think that really brings home that the numbers might not seem a lot on their own, but in terms of what they mean for how many people we have already lost due to climate change. And that's just in Europe, because that's the only place where we have the numbers. It is quite sobering.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And again, I just want to come back to the point that it's the speed, you know, people will say that the lifestyle in India is better adapted to the heat than, let's say, the lifestyle in Europe. But the point is that that's been a lifestyle that's been developed over centuries. And in a sense, if we're to confront these changes, the adaptation is extremely expensive and disruptive in terms of the way we live our daily lives.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes.

[Freddie Otto]

I mean, it's, of course, people in India and people in sub Saharan Africa are adapted to very different temperatures than we are in Europe. But especially in the more tropical countries, you have had for centuries very little variability in temperatures. So year in, year out, and also throughout the year, the temperatures were extremely stable. And so the societies have really developed around this very narrow range of very stable temperatures. And that means that if you push them out of this range, which we already have done, and that's why you also see so many more hot days in those countries. It means that the crops don't grow anymore, that the houses don't work anymore, that the clothing that people wear and the behavior they have adopted just does not work anymore. And that's true, yeah. For Europe as well, it was different behavior and different types of clothes, but everywhere we see it just doesn't work what we used to do. So we have to really change how we do things, what we grow, when we grow it, how we. How we water it, when we do our work, when we do our breaks. Everything needs to change in order to be adapted to a warmer world.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

Treating your report as a sort of scorecard for what we've achieved since those pledges were made in 2015. Have we done well, that the most extreme scenarios are now off the board, or have we failed because we aren't getting close to the targets, and even if we did, they would still be quite harmful?

[Freddie Otto]

I would say both, because I think we should really not underestimate how much of an achievement it is to have a global, legally binding framework that has meant that over the last 10 years, every country in the world has looked at what are our emissions, what are our policies, what policies can we implement or could we implement to reduce emissions? That is a major achievement. And I think also especially this year where we had the advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice that has also clarified that the Paris Agreement is not sort of living in isolation as a document, but is really an integral part of. Of the global legal framework that is based on very basic principles like do no harm and that these interact with the Paris Agreement and therefore really provide a very strong legal framework for every country to act. That's powerful and important and gives reason also for hope for countries, especially the more vulnerable countries, to maybe use the Paris Agreement and this legal architecture to get further towards the goal that is part of the Paris Agreement to limit warming to well below 2 degrees. But of course, the pledges at the moment are not there yet. And in that way we have failed to not just see how fast we need to act, and especially that we need to do the easy things, because a lot of countries invest in technologies that don't exist and that we know will never be able to actually reduce emissions on a scale like carbon capture and storage, but they don't invest in insulating homes, in getting people to use public transport instead of private cars, and the things where we know how to defossilize sort of local and regional transport, but we're not doing it. And I think that's the things where we really need to change step. But the Paris Agreement provides a really good framework to do that.

[Ronan Pease]

Freddie Otto of World Weather Attribution and of Imperial College. Let's talk about crop impacts leads rather naturally to the next item on the vulnerability of grasslands to repeated drought. Less sexy than rainforest, perhaps, grasslands nevertheless cover 40% of our planet's land area and are incredibly important to us and to nature. As rainfall patterns change and droughts become more common and more intense, the question has been whether these rich ecosystems can adapt and survive. The answer, alas, appears to be no. According to a set of nature based experiments coordinated over six continents. Mindy Smith of the Colorado Arm explained the simple way they manipulate the rain that their grass plots receive.

[Mindy Smith]

You put a shelter up, but you cover it with strips of plastic to whatever percentage amount that is the target that we want to meet. So for example, my site, to get a one in a 100 year magnitude drought, we reduced each rainfall event by 66%. Right. And so that meant the shelter was covered with 66% of it was covered with strips of plastic. So each rainfall event excludes 66% of that particular event. And the rust goes into the plot through the slabs. Right.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And so how big is this area that you cover?

[Mindy Smith]

Some of them, it varied from site. We had flexibility in the design. We said, hey, what works for your site? Do it. Some shelters were like 2 meters by 2 meters. The shelters at my site were actually 6 by 26 meters. So they varied in size depending on the resources that were available and what people were able to manage. Because we did not have funding to actually do the experiments, we relied on our collaborators to say, hey, yeah, this sounds like a great idea, I want to participate. But by doing it in as cost effective a manner as we could, that allowed for a lower entry into that kind of study. Right.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

So without, I don't want to sound rude, but in a sense you're deliberately putting up leaky umbrellas, as it were, over patches of grassland. And the leakier it is or the less leaky that it controls the drought.

[Ronan Pease]

But then you're using the natural rainfall in every other way.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

It's sort of connected to the weather and.

[Mindy Smith]

Exactly. The thing about doing drought that way is we're imposing drought from a meteorological perspective, meaning that it's a deficit in rainfall. It doesn't include that element of heat that often accompanies natural droughts. That said, because of that, the impacts that we saw are likely underestimating what actually would happen if these kinds of droughts occurred naturally across the globe in the regions that we studied.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And I presume the plants you find in each of these areas are slightly different. So in a sense they are representative of what kinds of grasslands you get in each of Those areas definitely, and.

[Mindy Smith]

That'S what we ask people to focus in on, were natural systems or, or representative systems. So some, you know, in Europe there's many kind of managed grasslands and so that was not excluded from our study. But many of the sites, I would say a majority of the sites are natural native grassland or shrubland systems.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

In this particular paper, you're concerned with the idea that it's not just a period of drought in one summer or something like that, but you're looking across the cumulative impact over several years, because.

[Mindy Smith]

That'S something that we hadn't up until this study hadn't been able to do systematically. And there's a number of hypotheses that are out there about what role duration plays in influencing the impact of drought. So we know magnitude can be really important. Right. And so we impose these extreme droughts. And we actually published a study just focused on the single year drought and we showed that when extreme.

[Freddie Otto]

Yeah.

[Mindy Smith]

The impacts are much greater and much greater than you would predict based on what we knew before. Now when we add that element of duration, that's where all bets are off. We start to get, sometimes systems are quite resistant to it, but overall when we have extreme drought occurring over multiple consecutive years, that's where we see profound losses occur. And to just put that in a historical context, that's exactly what happened during the Dust bowl in the US is that we had multiple extreme years in a row. And it wasn't for the whole duration of the decade that the Dust bowl covered, but there was a four year period during the Dust bowl where that was where the most profound impacts occurred. And we essentially just replicated the Dust bowl across a large range of grassland and shrubland sites.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

That's very interesting to put anecdote rather than data into the conversation. We had a long hot summer here in the uk. All of my grass sort of died off, but when it started raining, it's all turned green again. So grasslands are incredibly resilient. The roots survive and. But you're saying that if you just keep on hitting the grasslands, it sort of breaks down. You better sort of put some technique, technology on there, some science on that.

[Mindy Smith]

Yeah. So I'll just again use my, the site that I, I work in, which was part of this, this larger study. By that fourth year of the drought, that's when we actually observed mortality. And that's, that's what happened anecdotally during the Dust bowl too. The first couple years actually, people felt like everything's okay, but it's once you get into those multi, you know, three, four years, that's where we start to see mortality occur. And that's when really all bets are off because then if we get rain again, we're actually not going to get the growth we would expect. Right.

[Ronan Pease]

And do you know what it is that, is it just that the grass.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

Is dying or is it because actually in the soil there's a lot more than just roots. There is. Have you able, have you sort of dug in?

[Mindy Smith]

We have.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

Into those roots and yeah, so just.

[Mindy Smith]

Use our study site as an example of it where we saw a 98% reduction below ground. The root production was also drastically reduced. And what we then found is that when you look at soil structure and like the pore spaces in soil which are so important for microbial function, those were eliminated and we saw a huge decline in microbial activity. So this is just not even plant growth that we see. These profound impacts, they, they occur below ground where we don't see them. And it's those below ground impacts that we think are, are going to be those legacies that prevent recovery in the future after these kinds of droughts. And that's again what happened in the Dust Bowl.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

Just one thing, I'm presuming that when you do these measurements, you know, this was after, immediately after these years of droughts, what would really interest me is what happens three or four or five years afterwards. And you know, whether the seeds which are there and the spores, whether it.

[Ronan Pease]

Can regenerate with time. You've not done that yet.

[Mindy Smith]

I presume some sites have and I'll speak to the site I work at just as an example where we had that huge loss in plant growth. Right. And afterwards we, we did a, a manipulation where we added different amounts of rainfall to see how post drought rainfall amount would influence recovery. And what we found is really interesting plant growth. If you measured it as above ground biomass, it actually well exceeded what above ground biomass was prior to the drought. But the problem with that is it was all exotic forb or flowering plants that are not palatable, that if you were to put livestock on the land, they would not want to eat it. And so while you could say it recovered, it actually didn't. Because what we saw was the collapse of the main forage grasses that the cattle depend upon and they're still not recovered four years later. And so that does not bode well for the health and sustainability of these grasslands because we've lost the key player which are these forage grasses from the system. And we've essentially turned it into a Russian thistle dominated grassland. So it's quite profound, the impacts. And again, when you look at the Dust bowl, same thing happened. So we show experimentally exactly what happened and the mechanisms that led to the collapse of some of the grasslands during the Dust bowl with our experiment, I.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

Have to say I'm quite shocked by that.

[Mindy Smith]

Yeah, we were too. I was expecting that. The grasses, you can presume they're senesced, but we actually killed them. And that's a huge change to a system like that, which 80% of the biomass is below ground and it's produced by these forage grasses. You remove that, you remove all the below ground root structure, change soil structure and you get a system that's just essentially a weed patch.

[Ronan Pease]

Ecologist Mandy Smith of Colorado State University and the International Drought Experiment detail Science magazine, which you can reach via the Science in action [e-mail].

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[Ronan Pease]

Let's stick with water, but not As a life sustainer, but as a potential nanotechnology material. Graphene is the poster child for nanotechnology. Atom thick sheets of carbon that behave quite differently from their multi LED bulk form graphite. Super strong, phenomenally conductive, amazingly transparent. But at the risk of offending graphene fans, carbon atoms are really quite dull when compared to water molecules, H2O, whose molecular details is odd, ungainly bent shape. Its ability to dissolve salts and to repel oils underlie the liquid's unique life giving properties. Laura Fumigale was convinced that water's behavior would change as dramatically as carbon's if you could squeeze it to a layer or two. And she went to Manchester University, the home of graphene, to test her ideas. First, how to isolate a monolayer or two of water in tiny nano canals.

[Laura Fumigale]

It's very much based on graphene technology that has been developed here in Manchester and very much by Andre Game. And through that technology we are now able to have these nanochannels, nano capillaries in which we have these few water molecules trapped inside. And this allows us to isolate few molecules and measure their properties.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean these channels must be a thousand times finer than a human hair or more than that even. I mean there are pictures in your paper which show them, but I think it's really hard for us to imagine what just a few atoms or a few molecules looks like.

[Laura Fumigale]

Yeah, I mean we have many techniques that can help us to study them, but exactly seeing water is very complicated at the moment. In our case, for example, in the paper we are able to probe these electrical properties is still a great question how they arrange inside the canal, the channel. But we know they are there and we know we can prove this signature of their presence that are these high electrical properties, incredibly high properties that we.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

Measure and the electrical properties. So I think we all know not to put electric devices into water because it can short out everything and so on. Presumably this is part of what. This is why water can be electrically conducting, even if only poorly. But also it's why water can dissolve salts and things like that.

[Laura Fumigale]

Yeah, I think this point is a bit unclear, probably. So water conducts, we know it, but that's natural water with a lot of ions that move through water. So of course that at macro scale is clear more or less how it works. But another thing is understanding the behavior of the molecule of water itself. And we are talking about pure water without ions in these channels at the.

[Ronan Pease]

Moment, like dissolved salt.

[Laura Fumigale]

Yeah, it is really the simplest medium. We can talk about it inside and Then in that case, water is expected to be an insulator. And that's why it's an incredible large value we measure because one would expect essentially doesn't conduct. And instead we found it conducts really a lot as high as superionic materials. And so it opens a lot of applications if we manage to control it and do devices that behave similarly, for example.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

So you're saying that there's something about having this very thin layer of water that makes it more conducting than even.

[Laura Fumigale]

Yes, that's what it's about. If you confine few layers of water down to 1nm scale, then in that case water itself, without any other ions added to the water to the medium, conduct extremely well. And so it's really about squeezing down to few layers water to obtain new properties.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

So you said that this might actually be technologically useful in a way you could actually devise a system where you turn want this water on and off or something.

[Laura Fumigale]

Yeah, fundamentally we are trying, the community in general is trying to develop atomic scale technologies in which we can mimic how nature behaves. And of course, the more we learn from an electrical point of view, we can try to build better electronic systems, better batteries or better transistors that, that use these properties and we can construct new technologies about it. I mean, there is these two side of this research, a very fundamental one to understand the property of water. And the interest is to really understand how nature is built. It goes down to biology. It's very important, for example, for biology. I think this type of information we can get from our synthetic nano channels because it mimics really the size of water, where water is confined between biological molecules. It's really molecules interact through very thin water layers in the end.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean, if you look inside the human cell or something like that.

[Laura Fumigale]

Exactly.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

There's water inside and then all these proteins. So these kinds of very thin layers are coating all our proteins and so on. Exactly. It's really hard to understand actually how they're doing it.

[Laura Fumigale]

Exactly. So we have a great motivation just for that. But also the other one in which, even more if you want, with the technology we have Here in Manchester 2D materials technology, one can relatively easily try to translate this type of information into new type of devices that mimic the same behavior.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean, you talked about Andre Gaiman and graphene and so on. You know, that's famously a one molecule thick layer of carbon. I'm sort of wondering when we'll see maybe a device which has both the water channels and the graphene because they do things in different ways. And that's how you make the next generation of nano microchips or something.

[Ronan Pease]

Thing.

[Laura Fumigale]

Yeah, no, it's. The community is very active on this and we certainly see new devices coming out from this type of research.

[Ronan Pease]

Laura Fumigali of Manchester University, her experiments are laid out in Nature this week. I've been thinking Waterene doesn't really flow off the tongue as a label. There must be some word they can come up with. Anyway, finally, ants. It seems they've acquired natural strategies, a bit like social distancing, to avoid passing around infections inside one of their colonies. Epidemic controls in a densely packed ant's nest. The idea seems simple, but testing it means, first of all building an ant's nest in a lab and then seeing inside it. That's what Bristol University's Natalie Strohmet engineered.

[Natalie Strimmet]

So we're using a variant of the CT machines that's in use in most hospitals in the world to see inside human bodies. And what we use is a variance of that, which is a micro ct, which looks at much smaller volumes than a human body, but at much higher spatial resolution. So we can see tunnels that are less than 1 millimeter in diameter.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

It does sound extraordinary. You have an ant's nest, as it were, in a box or something.

[Freddie Otto]

Exactly.

[Natalie Strimmet]

In a jar, if you wish.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

A big jar, yeah. And then you put it inside the X ray machine.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And that allows you to see the. How complex can an ant's nest be on the inside?

[Natalie Strimmet]

Well, it can be actually quite complex because they build a series of chambers and large cavities where they hold the brood and the queen and the nurse workers. And then those cavities are connected by a network of tunnels, which is basically the roads to move between different parts of the nest and to bring food from the outside. So it can become quite intricate very quickly, especially as colonies grow.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And I guess the point of your paper is that these are very densely packed nests.

[Ronan Pease]

So they're like, I don't know, a.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

High rise building with lots of people going around here, lots of little ants. And that's a perfect conditions for an infection to spread.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes, absolutely. Infectious pathogens, they love it when they're in a crowd of individuals which interact very closely. And also in an ant colony, all workers are sisters, full sisters. So they're very genetically similar, which means that they will be susceptible to the same disease. So this is a dream for a disease to spread.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And so the surprising title of your paper is this is architectural immunity, that they alter the structure of their nests. If Some of them are infected.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes. So what we looked at was the very first stages of nest building, when they start from scratch. And then we compare the structure produced by ants in healthy condition with the structures produced by ants which were challenged by this pathogen, so that were aware there was a threat outside. And that's where we found differences in the structure of these nests. The nest is not already built, it's in the process of being built at very early stage. So we introduce the disease about 24 hours after they started building their nest. So when they're still enlarging, you were.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

Looking at this both with the CT scan that you're talking about, but also you're videoing the behaviour. I mean, give us a sense of what sorts of. Of things he saw.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yeah. So we were able to video the behavior only at the surface, and we were just looking at the number of exits of the ants. So they're going in and out a lot during nest building because they're removing the soil that they've excavated. And so we were able to distinguish the ants that had been infected from the ants that had not. So we can compare their behavior and what happened. So the first response we noticed was one that was already known, that the ants that have been exposed to the infectious pathogen exclude themselves voluntarily from the colony, so they spend more time on the outside to reduce the risk of contamination of other ants. So we saw them exit a lot more frequently than the healthy ants.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

So they were still working, though?

[Natalie Strimmet]

They were still working, yes. Yes. So this is a fungus that they can manage pretty well. So it's not a death sentence to the colony, which is probably why they're still working, but they're taking on a sort of a job which is less risky in terms of contamination to others.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And so what about the architecture that your title says?

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes, so we can sort of represent the nest as a network where the chambers and the junctions are connected by tunnels. And once we've got this nest represented as a network, we can apply all the network analysis tools that are available, which apply to any network, social networks, Internet networks, and we can draw on those methods to make predictions on how the structure of that nest might influence transmission. And so we found quite a few differences in the topology of the networks produced in the healthy or in the exposed condition.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

The topology, you mean, as it were, the way that things are interconnected?

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes, the wiring of the chambers. So how chambers are connected to tunnels and via tunnels to other chambers, and how that is then connected to the outside, that is what the ends change and they adopt a network that shows higher modularity, for example. So modularity is a way to measure compartmentation. And if you have a compartmented group, disease transfer less well than if everyone interacts homogeneously. And here when we look at the ends, we saw the same thing when looking at the modularity of the chamber and tunnel wiring, and we saw it was more compartmented.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean, it's sort of so interesting.

[Ronan Pease]

They do this without an instruction network.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

I mean, I can't help thinking of the pandemic and lockdowns and social distancing and in the supermarkets, we all had to go one way around the supermarket.

[Ronan Pease]

But we had to be told to do that.

[Natalie Strimmet]

Yes.

[Interviewer (BBC Host)]

And these ants just get on with the job.

[Natalie Strimmet]

They do, they do well. They've had millions of years of evolution in which to sort of fine tune these rules and these strategies. And in the answers, less conflict between individuals because only the queen reproduces, which means all workers in the colony want the queen to do well. So their interests are aligned, so they don't need to be told to do something that sort of harm them in order to make it better for the whole of the colony, because that's what they've been selected to do, if you wish. And that's where we differ because of course, in human societies we can't request individuals to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group. That would be unethical. But the ants do that. And so they're ready to adopt any behavior that helps decrease disease transmission. And in particular for these architecture, that's where the mystery still lies. And that I would very much like to discover is how they do it. We can't look at building because it's underground, so we don't know how they achieve these differences. Especially the infected individuals are on the outside, so we don't know yet how they communicate that threat and hence modify their building to produce different structures without an architect telling them this is what you need to achieve. It all emerges. So this is indeed fascinating, and I don't know yet how it's done.

[Ronan Pease]

Natalie Strimet with Nature's lessons on avoiding pandemics, published this week in Science. After the past few years of reporting on the COVID pandemic, I'm wondering why it's so hard for us smart humans to take such simple precautions. Anyway, that's it for Science in Action. From the BBC World Service this week, I'm Ronan Peace. The producer is Alex Mansfield. Join us next week for the penultimate edition of Science in Action.

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