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Science In Action
Researching pain, painlessly
00:43:03
Researchers grow a mini human pain pathway in a flask for testing pain painlessly
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- [00:00]
Roland Pease
This BBC podcast is supported by Ads outside the uk.
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- [01:49]
Roland Pease
Welcome to Science in Action from the BBC World Service with me, Roland Peace. Later in the program, the perilous sea voyage some of our hunter gatherer ancestors made across the Mediterranean to reach Malta, a tiny target island they'd seen from afar.
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Eleanor Sherry
It was thought that, you know, humans couldn't get to these small islands and to be fair, there hadn't ever been any evidence for them that has really stood up to scrutiny. Until now.
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Roland Pease
Also a new look at the evolutionary challenge are large infant brains pose to mothers pelvises. And an update on astronomers plans for an extraordinary encounter in four years time.
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Rick Binzel
Okay, so the reason we have come here is because Apophis is coming to us and this is real.
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Roland Pease
But are we ready to make the most of this rare astronomical opportunity? We're hearing direct from the conference planning an armada of missions to Apophis. We start with the anatomy of pain, the signalling that happens when you burn your finger and recoil. Or more importantly perhaps the incessant chronic Pain some people suffer that can be numbed these days only with highly addictive opioid compounds, for which there's no alternative. This week, we learned scientists can actually watch the neural pathways in action, all laid out on glassware on the lab bench, rather than trying to peer beneath someone's skin. It started when researchers found they could create 3D brain samples grown from stem cells, and then later how to connect those to other nerve cell types. The brain doesn't operate in isolation after all. The pain circuit described in Nature this week is the most complicated of these assembloids yet, says team leader Sergio Paschgu.
- [03:32]
Sergio Pasca
You know, in this case, this is a four part circuit. So it's the first four part assembloid, and it tries to mimic this pathway in our bodies that sends sensory information all the way to the cortex. And it essentially involves these neurons that are sitting close to the spinal cord. They're the ones that have terminals all the way in the skin, and they have specialized receptors that allow them to sense sometimes temperature, sometimes pressure, and sometimes pain. They are then connecting with spinal cord neurons, which are afterwards projecting deep into the brain in the thalamus. And then thalamic neurons relay that information to the cortex. Essentially, it has four neurons.
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Rick Binzel
Right.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
The interesting bit is you say that they know to connect each other to each other so you don't have to sit there with a soldering iron to wire them up.
- [04:25]
Sergio Pasca
Right. I mean, it's quite interesting because, you know, in the beginning, we sort of took an engineer approach where you sort of have to have, you know, a very clear plan in order to write to build any circuit. And it turns out that many of the instructions are already provided with the cells. And at the end of the day, if you think about the human brain, the human brain, like, builds itself, right. Without really a very clear blueprint. It's just kind of every single stage enables another series of instructions, and the cells are, like, connecting meaningful ways. And, of course, there are limitations to this because it's still done outside of the human body. So obviously, not all the cues and all the, you know, all the instructions are really present there. But, you know, there's a fundamental program that seems to be coming with the cells. And so once you just put them in close spatial proximity, because that's all we do, we essentially spend about 100 days making the parts, and then we put them together. And, you know, this is a large structure, by the way. It's almost a centimeter long, and you put them together and you wait for another one. Hundred days. And it turns out that now cells within this large structure start to find each other, connect, make synapses, and then afterwards you have this circuit that you can now start to probe in the context of various sensory stimuli.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
One of the things you've done is to sort of excite them, shall we say, with pepper.
- [05:48]
Sergio Pasca
Yeah, precisely. So at that point, it's sort of like you start asking, well, is this related in any way to what happens in the human body? And it turns out that some of the neurons that we're making in the first organoid, what we call the sensory organoid, has neurons with receptors for noxious stimuli. So red hot chili pepper, I guess, is the classic example, contains capsaicin, this compound that of course gives the effect of the red hot chili pepper, but is also a receptor for pain stimuli. And so if you add this, it binds very specifically to these receptors. We see the neurons lighting up and then essentially the information gets transmitted throughout the circuit. So that gave us a sense that we've at least reconstructed the basic, you know, level of this four part circuit.
- [06:35]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
So it's. So you're seeing, as it were, the signal being passed from the peripheral nerve through the spinal cord into the brain and into the cortex and you're seeing that sort of all lighting up. I mean, if, you know, if I've got something like chili pepper on a cut on my finger, the message sort of pretty quickly flies up my spine and I yell out, ouch.
- [06:56]
Sergio Pasca
Absolutely.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
These organoids, they don't cry ouch. But you see, as it were, the equivalent reaction within the, the brain bit, right?
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Sergio Pasca
They don't, they don't. And that's also because when you do scream ouch, there is an additional pathway that is responsible for you to experience that aversive aspect of the pain stimulus. So, you know, it turns out that they're really, you know, at least two pathways in the brain that are related to pain. One of them senses and allows us to discriminate a pain stimulus. So it allows you to tell, oh, it's in at the tip of the finger, that something is happening. But then those signals also travel to other brain regions where you start getting the emotional aversive component of pain. So our assembly does not contain this secondary pathway of pain. So obviously they're not feeling anything, but they're able to discriminate, at least to sense, let's say, that sensory stimulus and then, you know, send that information across this small circuit that we've built.
- [08:02]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
So, so in this sort of, shall we say, semi animate Sort of system, you're able to see the physiology, the neurophysiology of the pain transmission without actually being pain. Because that's another level of understanding, I guess.
- [08:19]
Sergio Pasca
Absolutely.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
But it does mean that you can start to test out what kinds of treatments can interfere or change that. In other words, to deal with real problems of chronic pain, for example, that people have.
- [08:33]
Sergio Pasca
Yeah, precisely. And I think that at the end of the day, that has been really the motivation for us. Like, what is the minimal circuit of this pathway that we can build outside of the human body so that we can ultimately use it to tackle the biology of complex chronic pain disorders. But even issues of hypersensitivity, I mean, if you think, for instance, in the context of many neurodevelopmental disorders, in particular autism spectrum disorder, patients very often describe have hypersensitivity or hypersensitivity, we still have a very poor understanding of why these patients, who display deficits in social behavior and repetitive movement, also have issues with sensory function. And so I think you can envision using this system to tackle both issues of hypersensitivity in some of these conditions, but also to start thinking, can we actually find better treatments for some of these chronic disorders?
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
And in a way, it's something you can't do either with patients or with animals, is the point.
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Sergio Pasca
Right, Exactly. So, you know, I mean, certainly some of experiments like this have been tried in animal models, but there are still differences between even rodents and humans in terms of pain. And then, of course, they certainly cannot be done in humans. There's no way in a human that you can watch this entire pathway from parts and have the molecular cell resolution that is needed to start testing drugs. Because the advantage of this platform now is that it's scalable. So you can literally make thousands and thousands of this assembloids and start thinking, can we actually find a better drug than an opioid? Because opioids have certainly very effective and. But they've really been discovered thousands of years by chance. Right. And it's still surprising that today it's very hard to say that we have a drug that is better than what we derived from poppy seeds thousands of years ago. So I think leveraging the system to try to now get down to the molecular biology of some of these pathways will hopefully reveal us new therapeutic targets.
- [10:37]
Roland Pease
I certainly hope so. The power of stem cells in disentangling complex biology is for me, a constant wonder. That was Sergi Paschu of Stanford University. All those neurons multiplied sometime in our ancestral deep past to give infants brains that are too large to fit through their mother's pelvis at birth, making human reproduction far more dangerous than birthing offspring in other mammals. This obstetrical dilemma, as it's called, has been well rehearsed in discussions about human evolution, the limits to brain size, the stresses on the mother's skeleton. But it's been revisited this week by a collaboration of physiologists and anthropologist Marion Brazil, using the latest large data techniques of so called biobanks.
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Marianne Brazil
So there's been a lot of work on this question looking at fossils, a lot of work also looking at modern humans, but, but focused primarily just on the anatomy and looking at anatomical variation and what that might tell us about the evolutionary forces at play and how the pelvis has evolved. And so up until this point, the genetic basis of a lot of these features that decades of research has focused on was largely unknown of not just humans, but of the vertebrate pelvic anatomy. And so we wanted to take this approach using these data sets that have become available in the last couple of decades. This one focused on the UK Biobank, from which we have about a little over 31,000 individuals. And we have whole body X ray scans that we were able to then just extract the pelvic anatomy and from those X ray scans identify some traits, some linear and angular measurements that we could look at. And particularly focusing on traits that have been discussed a lot in terms of the evolution of our pelvis and what we've looked at in the fossil record and in modern humans.
- [12:43]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
And what I noticed as I read this is of course, you remind us that the pelvis is not just a place for passing babies out, but a place for walking and all sorts of other things. So it sort of goes to the compromises that evolution's been involved with.
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Marianne Brazil
Yes, absolutely. So, you know, the obstetrical dilemma, that original hypothesis really focused on this mismatch between large brained infants and our bipedal walking. But there's been a growing appreciation that the pelvis is multifunctional. Right, this, this multifactorial pelvis that doesn't just need to be able to pass infants during childbirth, it doesn't just need to be biomechanically efficient, but it's also playing a very important role in keeping all of our abdominal organs secure, in reducing the risk of things like genital prolapse and incontinence and all of these important functions that our pelvic floor is also playing. And for, for a long time those were not really given the consideration that they should have been given and the importance and what kind of selective pressures evolution might have posed because of the impacts that that might have on a given person's health.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
But in a sense, I can see that it's really hard to untangle unless you get big data sets like the ones that you've been looking at.
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Marianne Brazil
Yes, absolutely. And especially when you're trying to use this particular method, the genome wide association studies this rel on really large numbers of individuals where you have really good genetic and also anatomical data. And so for a long time, this type of study just wasn't possible, it wasn't accessible. And so this is, I think, a really cool example of how these growing data sets allow us to ask new questions and allow us to bring new methods to some of these old questions and kind of refine some of those hypotheses a bit.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
But am I right in your paper? One of the things you seem to say is that for some women, the pelvis is actually slightly better adapted for better walking, more efficient walking. But in others, it's actually better adapted for preserving the pelvic floor, as you'll say, so keeping the body sort of stronger internally.
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Marianne Brazil
Yeah. So generally what we're picking up on is we see this kind of compromise that's at play between having a smaller and a larger birth canal. And so if you have a larger birth canal, what we find is that there's a decreased walking speed, which we take to mean that there's slightly decreased efficiency when walking. There's also the increased risk of pelvic floor disease. Right. You have basically a larger birth canal. There's a larger area that the pelvic floor is needing to kind of stretch across to support those internal organs. But you also generally see reduced risk of things like obstructed labor. So there's this trade off, right, where you might have an easier labor, but you may be biomechanically less efficient at walking, and you may have more risk of developing those pelvic floor diseases. So that's if you have a larger birth canal. If you have a smaller birth canal, there's that increased risk of obstructed labor. So you might have a harder time during childbirth passing the infant head through the pelvic canal, but you generally also see an increased walking speed, so higher biomechanical efficiency and a decreased risk of pelvic floor disease. So what we're picking up on here in this study is that there's really kind of a compromise that the modern human pelvis has reached over evolutionary Time trying to kind of balance these different forces against each other.
- [16:24]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
And along with that, you've also been, as you say, looking at the genes. So you get the genes in this biobank as well, and you've identified quite a number of genes that somehow are all playing into this compromise.
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Marianne Brazil
Yeah. So 180 independent positions in our genome that are playing a role in these pelvic measurements that we have looked at. And so this is really novel to have identified these specific positions in the genome that are playing a direct role in the variation that we see in the human pelvis. And so that's really interesting because then it allows us to look at those genes specifically and maybe target them when we're trying to compare across humans or when we have ancient DNA available. It gives us kind of more data to work with and to ask more targeted questions.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
Reading your paper, I sort of wondering, is the current solution, given that evolution is only interested in good enough, not imperfect, is. Is it sort of been arrested at some point of development that there may be better options that are out there, or. I don't know, is this a fundamental design flaw with a big brain?
- [17:45]
Marianne Brazil
Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, evolution can only act. Natural selection can only act on the variation that exists in a population. Right. So it's kind of limited in what it can do and how it can solve problems that organisms are facing. And so it's working with the existing variation that we have in previous human populations. And it's trying to do that in a way that maximizes survival, maximizes reproduction. But like you said, it's not a perfect solution. Right. It's just, it's good enough. It's whatever is the best available option in a population that allows those individuals to survive and reproduce. And so in this sense, it's interesting that these two things we're talking about infant brain size being large and a pelvic canal that's relatively narrow. These changes happened at different points in our evolutionary history. Those pelvic changes where we really see a reconfiguration into something that looks more like a modern human pelvis that's really well adapted for upright bipedal walking. We see that change happen again from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees up through Australopithecus. That's happening in the first half of our lineage. Since our split with chimpanzees, these really large heads that we have evolved to have that our infants also have. Those increases in brain size didn't really happen substantially until Our genus until genus homo in the 3 to 2 million year interval is when we're starting to see, see a brain size increase kind of take off. And so you have this situation where early in our evolutionary history our pelvis has become well adapted for bipedalism, but then we have at some point selection for larger brained infants. Lots of reasons why that might be right, having to do with social learning and social complexity and advantages around survival. And then that kind of puts us in this area of conflict where you have these large brained infants, but you are committed to this bipedal way of walking and having to walk efficiently and also to be able to support all of those internal organs in this upright position. And so you have this kind of conflict that emerges more recently in our evolutionary history as selection for larger brains really picks up.
- [20:23]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
You know, it seems to me really unfair for evolution to have left it to the mothers to sort this out.
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Roland Pease
When, well, you know, why not just have babies with pointier heads?
- [20:33]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
If we'd all gone around with pointier heads, you could still fit the brain in, but not be such a pain in the pelvis.
- [20:39]
Marianne Brazil
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. And you know, why don't we have pointy heads? You know, it might be because that that variation has just never been produced, or it might be because there would be disadvantages to having pointy heads. And so that hasn't been a viable evolutionary strategy as a way to get around this. Right. Again, evolution can only work with the variation that it has available to it at any given point in time.
- [21:04]
Roland Pease
Marianne Brazil of West Washington University whose observations were just published in Science. A reminder. This is Science in Action from the BBC World Service.
- [21:16]
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Rick Binzel
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Roland Pease
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Roland Pease
It feels like we're on some kind of a wayward journey through human neuroscience. So let's travel on a little more to one of its destinations. An irrepressible spirit for venture. Spreading overland from Africa to the whole globe is one thing. Each step taking our ancestors to new territories. But archaeologists have just described evidence that hunter gatherer forebears thousands of years ago probably routinely made the perilous overseas journey to Malta a mere.in the middle of the Mediterranean, at least 80 kilometres from the nearest mainland. Today, we'd think nothing of such a journey. But before the rise of civilizations, Eleanor Sherry led the dig that found the unexpected evidence.
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Eleanor Sherry
When we started digging, we went through the usual sequence. On top, we found early modern material, going into things like Romans and then moving down into the Bronze Age and the Neolithic, where you find lots of pottery and domesticated species like cattle, sheep, pigs, etc. And that's where we thought the story would more or less end, because that's where it always had. But buried underneath this, under a sort of a rockfall layer, we found more evidence of humans in the form of stone tools and burnt animal bones, but without the pottery. And the animals were no longer domesticated species, they were wild species. And so when that started to come out of the ground, and because it was deeper, then we knew that we were probably looking at something far older.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
So, and far older being it's at.
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Eleanor Sherry
Least a thousand years older than the first farmers who arrived in Malta. And the arrival of these hunter gatherers was about 8,500 years ago, which is far too early for them. To have been farmers in this region because farming hadn't yet arrived.
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Roland Pease
Right.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
So you got sort of evidence of stone tools, you say.
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Eleanor Sherry
Yes.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
And the animals had been. It sounds like these would be animal remains that had been butchered in some way. You can tell that?
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Eleanor Sherry
Yes. Butchered and cooked. Yes. So things like red deer.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
So they had fires and stuff?
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Eleanor Sherry
Yeah, they had hearths, plentiful hearths. And we could see where the hearths were and where they were sort of dumping the ash after they were cleaning out their hearths. And both contained abundant animal remains and they sort of discarded refuse of their meals.
- [25:41]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
And the way you describe it, if this was occupied even later as well, this is a very protected, sheltered part of the island or something.
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Eleanor Sherry
Yes. So the site is a doline, which is a collapsed cave. It's a large collapsed cave that's about 50 by 70 meters. It's basically a big hole in the ground which has an overhang on one part and it's sort of more cave like on the other part that sort of goes much further under the overhang. But in the northwestern edge of the cave where you get the prevailing winds, you've got this nice rock shelter. It's in the lee of those prevailing winds and it's dry. There are springs in and around the cave, raw materials available. And if you stick your head out of the cave, you've got this beautiful coastal plain in the distance between teaming with animals you can hunt as, as well as the sea and the beaches. So it's sort of like prime real estate for hunter gatherers.
- [26:37]
Roland Pease
And the point is that this.
- [26:39]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
So Malta and Gozo and there's one other tiny island. This, this is sort of, well, not halfway between Sicily and Africa, but it's, it's, it's between the two. And your point is that it hadn't been thought it would at that time it would be possible to make that sea journey.
- [26:58]
Eleanor Sherry
Yeah, that's right. The dominant model has been that hunter gatherers either couldn't or didn't want to get to these remote islands. And the reason for that is there was sort of some sort of vague view that they didn't have the maritime technology. And that maritime technology somehow came into existence with the transition to agriculture and all the profound changes that involved. But the sort of more compelling reason is that hunter gatherers do need to exploit a much larger land area than farmers. They don't have the ability to grow high yield domesticated crops in intensively small spaces. You know, they have to hunt for their food and they have to gather, they have to be careful about not overexploiting their resources. And for an island the size of Malta wouldn't have been much larger then than it is today. It just seemed extremely unlikely. How are these people going to live on such a small island? And if things go wrong, then they're sort of stuck miles away from any mainland. And for this reason it was thought that, you know, humans couldn't get to these small islands. And, and to be fair, there hadn't ever been any evidence for them that has really stood up to scrutiny until now.
- [28:04]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
I mean, you mentioned fish. So if they came from Sicily, do you find similar fish remains in Sicily? And would they have been involved getting into some kind of a canoe or something to catch them, or would they just be standing on the, the shoreline and letting them wash up or something?
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Eleanor Sherry
Well, Sicilian hunter gatherers at more or less the same time also had a quite a rich marine diet, which already told us that these people were, you know, very good at exploiting marine resources. But there's a difference between sort of fishing on the shore, looking at what's get washed up, or maybe going out on a paddle boat not very far from the shore and making a 100 kilometer open water sea journey. And you know, that's the difference here, is that they would have had to have made that incredible journey to be able to get to Malta. There's just no other way here. And they would have had to have done it in something we think is like a dugout canoe.
- [28:59]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
I mean, the amount of material you're finding sounds like it wasn't that they just got washed off course or anything like this. This is pretty deliberate as far as you can tell.
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Eleanor Sherry
Yeah, that's right. And they were here for centuries. It wasn't sort of, you know, they were here 8,500 years ago and that's it. You know, they sort of, the intervening years, that was just their sort of earliest arrival. They were there for centuries after that.
- [29:20]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
I mean, short of getting a time machine and going and asking them, there must be so many questions that you, well, could you expect to be able to answer some of them?
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Eleanor Sherry
We hope to be able to answer some of them. So some of the questions we're pursuing is, for example, you know, what's the ancestry of these people? So trying to get some DNA. We also hope if we can recover any human teeth at any point, we could also do some chemistry on them to see not just the ancestry, but where did they grow up. Are there any signatures of these people coming over from Sicily, because the water, from the isotopic signatures of the water from the place you grow up in leaves a signal in the growth of your teeth. So you can tell the difference between your ancestry, but also where you grew up.
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Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
So you've got a whole island to dig around then. And.
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Eleanor Sherry
The problem, it's a very overdeveloped island and there's not many places left that have the sediments to look. So this is, you know, an incredibly important site to us and you know, the depth of the sediments and the amount of remains. And it also permits us to be able to do some other chemistry work where we can look at, for example, the seasonality of collection of edible marine castropods and what time of year they hunted the deer. So is this pointing to a seasonal exploitation of the island or does it point to exploitation all year round? If it points to exploitation all year round, then they have to be spending a long time here because you can't go on the Mediterranean of winter in a dugout canoe, even with sails. It is a difficult task. And we hear about tragedies every year on boats coming over from North Africa. It's very, very treacherous in the winter. And so if hunter gatherers are living here all year round on a tiny island, what does it say about hunter gatherers having highly mobile lifestyles? I mean, almost looking at semi sedentism at this point. So it's further stuff breaking down these long held dichotomies, I guess, between hunter gatherers and farmers.
- [31:23]
Roland Pease
I mean, when you say that, just.
- [31:25]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
Go back to the moment when you were digging down to these layers because presumably you were expecting just to find random animals or something, but. And you first saw things that looked out of place.
- [31:36]
Roland Pease
You know, we all sort of gather him around.
- [31:39]
Eleanor Sherry
Yes. So yes, it was, it was, it was an experience. You know, I remember very clearly being in the trench and going, you know, this isn't right, this is not what's supposed to happen. And where's all the pottery gone? And why do these bones look so strange? They don't look like the domesticated species I'm used to. At the time I didn't know it was deer because I'm not deer, a bone expert. We had to bring in specialists. But, you know, I knew, I knew what it wasn't. And the depth of it immediately suggested age. So when we got our first suite of radiocarbon ages back, I sort of had to sit down for a minute and I phoned up my collaborators and I said to them, you know, guys, I think you ought to sit down for this one because you're not going to believe it, and I'm not sure I do. And really, when you've been told something for so long that something is not possible, then you struggle to believe it yourself, even when you know it's in front of you. So we thought, okay, well, how can we see if this is really true? Have we made a mistake somewhere? Have we dated the wrong thing? Have we, you know, is there some sort of movement in the sediments that's mixing the sediments up? You know, some sort of error that would lead us to believe something that wasn't? Which is why we decided to be so meticulous and take so long and use so many different methods of analysis to gradually pull a very coherent and very robust picture together, that we definitely have Mesolithic hunter gatherers on Malta. And they had to have me making these incredibly long sea journeys to get here. And then the paper reports all our activities from 2021 onwards, where we dug a 5 by 5 meter trench in meticulous detail. I mean, and I have to say, without, you know, wanting to blow trumpet, I think this is one of the best excavated sites in the world at this point.
- [33:32]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
Yeah, because you've been so meticulous.
- [33:36]
Eleanor Sherry
Yeah, the documentation is phenomenal and we could reconstruct the whole thing in 3D for you. We have thousands of points in three dimensions. Photogrammetry, digital models. You know, it's incredible.
- [33:51]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
And the way you described it, can you now moved another 5 meters or 10 meters or something? Is, is there sufficient material left for you to hope for some of the other things you were talking about? The other, you know, like finding it would be, you know, it's. The actual humans are still missing from this.
- [34:10]
Eleanor Sherry
Well, we, we're still going through the Mesolithic deposits. As you know, we haven't gone through all of them. There's still a lot left to dig. And last season, which was last August, September. So sort of post this paper, really, we found human remains and we found other animals that we didn't find the first time around, like whales. So it's sort of adding to the picture and we are going to be able to add to this picture in the future. So, you know, at the moment we're announcing that this extraordinary discovery exists. And it's important that we do so because it's helping to raise new questions across the whole Mediterranean region.
- [34:48]
Roland Pease
Eleanor Sherry of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. Go nature.com to read more. Let's venture a little more to outer space. But outer space no further than some geostationary satellites where astronomers are expecting in April 2029 a close encounter of a very thrilling kind.
- [35:10]
Rick Binzel
Okay, so the reason we have come here is because Apophis is coming to us. And this is real. As you know, apophis is about 340 meters in size. It's going to come within 5.8 earth radii. And we think an object this large comes this close about once per thousand years. It's a very spectacular event. And I always think it's very important to say three times. The three most important things are that Apophis will miss the Earth. Apophis will miss the Earth. Apophis will miss the Earth.
- [35:51]
Roland Pease
April last year, science in action came from a conference planning for this exceptional opportunity. A very near asteroid that had once been seen as a threat to Earth, but was now a once in a lifetime chance to learn about the nature of any future too close encounter. The time to mobilise missions was very short then and it's still shorter now. NASA said last year they'd redirected an existing mission, Osiris Apex to catch up with Apophis days after its Earth flyby and ESA shared outlined plans for a mission Ramses to track the asteroid from just months before. The rest though was mere aspiration. Rick Bindersel, who you heard there, has organized a follow up meeting running in Tokyo right now. Rick, what's new?
- [36:41]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
What's going on?
- [36:43]
Roland Pease
Is there better news?
- [36:45]
Rick Binzel
There is better news, Roland. We have our Osiris Apex spacecraft, which is a NASA spacecraft formerly known as Osiris Rex, which delivered a sample of an asteroid to Earth. Osiris Apex is indeed on its way to on a trajectory that will let it meet up with the asteroid Apophis in 2029. It turns out the amount of fuel in the spacecraft and the laws of orbital physics don't quite let us get to Apophis before Apophis comes whizzing past us. But the Europeans are going to collaborate and bookend this mission by doing a re fly of a spacecraft called hera, renamed as Ramses, which is a rendezvous with Apophis acronym. And Europeans have stepped in and showed us that international collaboration is the key to planetary defense and Earth safety. And their Ramses spacecraft will get to Apophis before it comes by the Earth. And we'll get a full before and after look to see how the Earth's tidal forces stretch and pull on this asteroid as it goes by.
- [38:06]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
Last year the mission still wasn't fully funded by esa. Do we know any more about whether the governments, the European governments will say, yeah, this is worth doing?
- [38:16]
Rick Binzel
Well, you're quite right, we're not quite there yet. But ESA has funded Ramses to go forward in the sense that, you know, you have to start finalizing the designs and getting some parts together because time is of the essence when they're trying to launch in about three years from now. And the formal decision, and the final decision will come from a ministerial council later this year.
- [38:46]
Roland Pease
Did they give you any hints?
- [38:48]
Rick Binzel
Well, it's good news in the sense that the mission wouldn't have been encouraged forward if it was doubtful, you know, so we, we don't want to count our chickens before they're hatched. But, you know, the, the Ramses team is going full speed ahead. The international space science community is absolutely thrilled to see collaboration towards understanding asteroids and asteroids that might pose any hazard to the Earth because asteroid impacts know no borders. And it's going to have to be international collaboration for any threat that may ever come along from an asteroid. And this is the way to practice it. This is the way to show the world that, you know, space agencies really do want to work together and we really do care about planet Earth.
- [39:44]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
You're in Tokyo. So jaxa, the Japanese space agency, have.
- [39:50]
Roland Pease
They revealed any plans or are they going to take part in any of these other missions?
- [39:55]
Rick Binzel
So JAXA is in negotiations now to see if they can provide some instruments aboard the Ramses spacecraft and maybe even provide the rocket launch to send the Ramses spacecraft on its way. So there's a lot of things on the table, a lot of things being discussed. And again, involving the Japanese, the Europeans and NASA, this is a worldwide demonstration that, like I said, space agencies really do care about Earth and the scientists and the agencies all want to work together, you know, for missions that really matter to daily life on Earth.
- [40:34]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
I mean, launch vehicles. I got the impression last year was a really critical thing. It's one thing to build a space probe, but if you can't find a rocket to put it on, and they're all booked up, as it were, already, so, you know, that's. That was another side I thought maybe you had some more news on.
- [40:52]
Rick Binzel
Yeah, well, nothing to announce today. We'll leave that to the agencies and the agreements that we hope they'll get to. But I think everyone wants to do their part. I think that's really the great news out of this, that the space agencies and scientific colleagues around the world are talking to each other. We all want to do our part. We want to take, you know, planetary defense and just making sure we understand about asteroids and what impact hazard they may be. It's a very small probability, but one that we now have the technology to know what's out there and protect ourselves if it ever happened. And it's simply what we do. I think as a mature space faring species, you know, I like to say the dinosaurs who were wiped out by an asteroid impact didn't have a space program. We do, so we don't have an excuse.
- [41:54]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
One other thing, I did notice on your schedule that you had a kind of one hour zoom call from the conference into the Chinese Space Agency who are just doing phenomenal stuff at the moment. And I believe they have got another asteroid mission of their own planned. You know, was that constructive?
- [42:13]
Rick Binzel
Yes, we had a very good exchange. It turns out there was a simultaneous space conference in China the same time we were having our space conference in Tokyo. Just by happenstance, it was the same date and it was actually the Chinese who proposed that we connect the two conferences. We did so for an hour today. It was very useful exchange of information. We explained what, what we are doing, what NASA is doing, what JAXA proposes, what ESA is doing, is all very public. On the Japanese side, the plans are still aspirational in terms of wanting to do something about Apophis. Not a lot of details, but just the fact that we could have a conversation I thought was very productive. And as I said to our colleagues in China, I said this may have been a very small step, but any long journey begins with a small step. And so we, I think we've accomplished something today.
- [43:14]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
And I also saw some tech bros, shall we say Blue Origin was back at the conference this year. They, they first revealed their aspirations last year. Is that any more concrete? You know, would private finance be the way forward?
- [43:33]
Rick Binzel
Well, there certainly are a number of concepts. There's still more concepts out there, particularly involving cubesats and small sats that might be privately funded. You know, something within the realm of a university. Those are some concepts that we're discussed today. Blue Origin has a launch vehicle called the New Glenn Rocket. They would love us to love to sell you a launch or a supporting ring, basically a platform on which to put your satellites and operate at Apophis. So they were really here offering services, not offering anything for free. But they're a new player in the space capability, more power to them. You know, competition is great. So it's an ongoing discussion. We should, we should say it feels Terribly.
- [44:27]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
You know, the flight paths that's in 2029 missions have to be probably launched the year before to take advantage of it. They have to be ready before then. You don't feel the time is running out. You'll feel confident, are you, that this will be, you know, maximized.
- [44:44]
Rick Binzel
Well, time is of the essence, that's for sure. And I also like to say that Apophis is coming whether we're ready or not to take advantage of the science opportunity that it's going to present when it safely passes the Earth. So, no, you just have to go full speed ahead. You have to go forward with optimism and make the case that this is a science opportunity. It's an opportunity to see how that asteroid shakes, rattles and rolls as the Earth tugs on it. So it's sort of the Earth strikes back as it tugs on it as it goes by. And how the asteroid responds tells us how it's put together. And knowing how these hazardous asteroids are put together is one of the key things that we would need to know if we ever really had to seriously push one out of the way. So nature is giving us this, this natural experiment for revealing some of its secrets. We just have to figure out how to watch and, and it's such a great opportunity. We're so excited about it that we just go forward with confidence that we can make the case and we can make this happen.
- [45:54]
Interviewer (possibly Roland Pease or a co-host)
Well, Rick, I'm sure you're actually going around there twisting arms and making all kinds of deals which will come to fruition. I do hope so. Rick Binzel is Emeritus professor of Astronomy at mit.
- [46:07]
Roland Pease
It's nail biting stuff, especially with all the financial turmoil right now. Whether astronomers will persuade their government backers or friendly billionaires to invest in this extraordinary natural experiment. I'm certainly going to watch every move from now till April 2029. And after science in Action next week though, we'll be taking a deep dive into the 60 year history of Moore's Law, of exponentially improving electronics and of its future. Join me, Roman Peace and producer Alex Mansfield for that and head to bbcworldservice.com for our archive of editions, which in principle goes back as long as Moore's Law. 60 years, though we're missing the first three decades, I'm afraid.
- [46:54]
Marianne Brazil
This is the.
- [46:55]
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