The Mariana Trench

27:30So there are things like that where that's kind of almost deliberate. Someone's been doing something there. But one of the weirdest ones, I think, was last year we were down, I think it was 5 ,000 metres somewhere, just on the equator in four days north of Samoa and we were driving along and doing the usual thing. I was telling the pilot, go and have a look at this, go and have a look at that. And we saw this red thing. I thought, that's weird, I wonder what that is. Let's go and have a look and pulled up alongside it. And it was just a packet of Chinese cigarettes just lying there thousands of miles away from anywhere as if someone had just dropped them out of their pocket.

27:59And, you know, it's bizarre. It's really quite bizarre. It can really throw you as well when you're sort of going like, because you're so focused on trying to, you know, record as much scientific data and information and the commentary as you're going along on the seafloor. And then out of the gloom, you sort of see something, you know, and I think, you know, on the Nova Canton trough as well, I had a dive at six and a half thousand metres and I said to the pilot, I was like, oh god there's there's something over there like that's gonna be and it was a cardboard box it's just you know you're like oh oh sugar i've just like deviated from the plan because i thought that was gonna be something you know geologically or ecologically monumental and it's like oh okay yeah the port rico trench was probably bad the port rico had gates and magazines and plates and coke cans and beer bottles and but i mean it's sitting in hurricane alleys i think when these hurricanes, it's not necessarily a story of human folly.

28:51I think when you have tsunamis and hurricanes, a lot of material just goes offshore and if you happen to be next to a trench, it's going to end up there and it's quite depressing to see it. Although the point you make about fibre optic cables on Challenger D seems to me to be quite interesting. The coolest thing about Mariana in terms of man-made naughtiness is there's an SR-71 Blackbird, you know the old aircraft from the 1960s, a big black really cool looking thing? One of them crashed, they didn't want the Chinese to get it, so they took it out of Guam, out to the Mariana, and threw it off the back.

29:23You can see pictures of it online. So somewhere in the Mariana there's a blackbird, which would be the coolest dive ever. I beg to differ, you know. They haven't released the coordinates for exactly where it is. I bet the Chinese have found it by now. Just not telling anyone. John, I want to come back to the animals down there. How do they feed? What are they feeding on, apart from human junk? Most of the time, they're feeding on what rains down into the trench. And trenches are interesting because they act a little bit like a funnel in that there's this stuff that has the poetic name marine snow, but basically it is poo of all the animals that are living in the ocean and it is dead bodies of all things living in the ocean.

30:06And this marine snow sinks down. It does get concentrated in the trenches through this sort of funnel effect. And so the bottom of your trench, I mean, it's a combination of both a toilet and a mortuary but that's what things will make a meal of and they'll make a meal of anything that they can. So oddly enough some of the animals that live at the bottom of the trenches are able to digest things like wood which a lot of animals in the ocean don't bother with. It's quite hard to kind of crack the molecules in wood to make a meal of it but if that sinks and nothing has eaten it on the way down and that's what you get at the bottom of the trench then there's a strong driver for any organism that can make a meal of it.

30:46Now, there are some places in trenches, though, that are really exciting where there are chemical-fuelled islands of life that break all the rules. So, what we call cold seeps there, as Heather mentioned, where you've got these plates subducting, you get the sediment being scraped and squeezed on the subducting plate, and that squeezes whatever's in that sediment out of it. And so, if that's had rotting organic matter in it over you know many many millennia that's broken down into methane methane gets pushed out of the seabed you get these what we call cold seep communities and that's where life is incredibly abundant now they haven't been seen yet in terms of animal colonies in cold seeps in the marianas but they have been seen in the kural kamchatka and the aleutian trenches more than 9 000 meters deep which are the deepest known islands of this chemically powered life which we have on earth which are hugely exciting.

31:39Alan from a scientific perspective the Mariana must be an achievement to go down there but is it the most interesting scientifically or is it just the feather in your cap of having been deeper than anywhere else? It's a bit of both it's not certainly not the most interesting I think it's most prestigious and it's sometimes when you have something with a prestigious name to it it does kind of cloud the reputation it's got and stuff From a purely scientific point, I think we've spent a lot of time going to other trenches. We've done Mariana about six times, but for various different reasons and different boats and different nationalities or whatever.

32:14There's been reasons for doing it, but no one trench represents all other trenches. And so it's the deepest one, therefore it's an outlier. It's not the same as the rest of them because it's deeper than them. The biggest problem in Mariana we've got is that one of the only big trenches in the world that does not lie along a coastline. So all that organic matter that comes into the surface that rains down its food, it's the only one that doesn't have it. the rest of them are somehow attached to or associated with a continental landmass it's also quite low to the equate which near the equator and so there's not a lot of food on the surface there anyway so it is what we call oligotrophic which means it's in an area of the ocean that doesn't have a lot of energy and it doesn't have any seasonality and so there's lots of reasons why mariana doesn't represent anything other than the fact it's super deep so if the question you're trying to ask is what happens at mega deep depth i guess it's your one but if it's the question is what happens in trenches or what happens across a massive depth range.

33:06There are many other places you need to go to as well. The analogy I always use is, like, if you're trying to understand high-altitude biology or high-altitude flora and fauna, how much would Mount Everest tell you about every other mountain in the world? Not very much. It would tell you a little bit about altitude, but it wouldn't tell you anything about a mountain goat in Kilimanjaro, right? So do I get, John, in that case, is the implication of what Alan's saying, that the environment in Mariana is actually very static and constant compared to others? It depends on what timescale we're talking here.

33:41Now, everywhere in the deep ocean is changing as a result of impacts of human activity. So climate change affects all of the ocean, including the deepest depths in the ocean, and it affects it in several different ways. I mean, we are getting warming of waters, and that is getting deeper and so on, But fundamentally for deep ocean, what's changing is the flow of oxygen that reaches the deepest parts of the ocean. So all the animals that we've been talking about, they're animals. They need oxygen. The oxygen is dissolved in seawater. Where does that oxygen come from? Well, it dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean in the polar regions, the surface, where dense, deep currents form and sink.

34:22And then they spill out across the ocean basins. So life at somewhere like the bottom of the Mariamma Trench, the oxygen that those animals are consuming began its journey into the deep actually in the Antarctic, and it takes several hundred years for it to kind of flow and get there. And that flow is getting weaker as a result of climate change. Yes, well, does that mean that climate change is going to affect them in 300 years' time? It does, yes, indeed. And that change is already on its way from changes that we've made in the atmosphere. So we already know that overall, globally, the deep ocean will end up with about 10 % less oxygen than it had in pre-industrial times.

35:00Now, it's very patchy and different bits will be affected more than some others. But overall, globally, it's on track for 10 % less than it had already. It's going to change the distributions of species around the world. Some can tolerate that. Some can't. Their distributions are going to shift. And that's a change that's already baked in. That's already happened. It's on its way to the deep ocean. It just hasn't reached the deepest places yet. Heather, it strikes me that when you're looking at something like the trenches, it involves a lot of different skills. It involves geologists, it involves engineers, it involves biologists, all sorts of people.

35:38How do they work together? Do they understand what the other is doing? Very much so. I think I can speak on all of us. I think the most rewarding expeditions have been the cross, multidisciplinary ones. and each discipline, you know, thinks a little bit differently, you know, the engineers to the geologists, to the physical oceanographers, to the biogeochemists. And I think that fusion and that sort of spark between the different disciplines and making, you know, hearing about their research questions and their concerns or their technological challenges or what aspects they're trying to overcome.

36:15And then you can sort of, oh, well, actually, you know, we do it this way. or you can take and learn from each other. But I mean, I've worked over 20 years now with all these different disciplines and learned so much. And I think in order to undertake successful research, you need to be able to work together with everyone in these environments. And it's certainly, I've learned a lot in terms of, I'm a geologist, not an engineer, in terms of the challenges, in terms of how you build vehicles to put down to these sort of depths and things, you know, working with Alan, for example, as an engineer.

36:51You know, it's fascinating and it's allowed me to think better and more strategically and more creatively about how to sort of address geological questions, you know, like how can we get physical samples and cores from these deep areas without using a big drill ship like the Japanese vehicle Chikyu, you know, trying to think a little bit more out of the box. but I think also in terms of the big discoveries I think if you look back at how those expeditions and how the people on board have worked together that's helped contribute to some of these big discoveries that we're making in the deep sea now as well It's struck me in this discussion how remarkable the research into biology has been John, I've got a question for you how do you study these animals when presumably if you bring them up to the surface they're not going to survive are they they they don't survive no they don't explode okay because of the pressure thing that we talked about in in reverse okay they're not there's nothing in them to expand as they come up if it's solid tissue and liquid body fluids um but we can learn a lot from the specimens that we do get of course um we can look at the adaptations they've got we can we can look at what molecules are in their cells and and so on these days though we're also able to preserve animals actually at the seafloor, which is really useful.

38:17So for example, you can collect a specimen and you can process it in a way that its tissues are preserved in something that allows you to see what genes are actually switched on at the moment that you encountered it. So that, you know, otherwise we can do that with specimens we bring up, but of course they'll have gone through a lot of changes on the way up. But actually being able to preserve things in situ is giving us really big insights in what we call genomics and transcriptomics, seeing what genes are actually being switched on in that organism, in its environment, to understand how it's adapted to the conditions down there.

38:48Historically, Alan, people have believed that this is an area of giant monsters and all sorts of mysterious creatures. Do you encounter that sort of attitude today, despite the fact that we now have a much better idea of what's down there and they're not giant monsters. Yeah, it's all the time. It's one of the most common questions you get is about questions about megalodon and stuff like that. And, you know, I think when you start looking into the energy in these systems, it could never, ever support a large animal, especially not of that kind of size. But even bigger than a shoe is quite difficult to maintain at those kind of depth.

39:27So it's just all to do with education, I think, and the way in which deep sea is portrayed in the media and things like that, I think we can probably do it a bit more responsibly and stop referring to monsters and creatures and stop making movies about it. But then, you know, little snailfish aren't going to make a Hollywood movie, right? So, you know, they don't even have any teeth. Well, they did make a Disney movie about a clownfish, so maybe the snailfish could come next. Yeah, different types. Who knows? I'm very interested in deep sea vents and deep sea mining. Is that something that you have to engage with, that debate about whether the minerals should be exploited in this way?

40:10I mean, I work primarily on deep sea vents, which we don't get in subduction trenches in the same way, these black smoker systems and so on. Yes, deep sea, that is one of the environments that's being targeted for a form of deep sea mining. There are others as well. People get very excited these days about the manganese nodules. That's a totally different environment, totally different set of ecological kind of challenges involved there. For deep sea vents, the active ones, which have these incredible colonies of species living around them, we don't actually need to do any more research to say that mining active deep sea vents would risk extinction of species.

40:45And we've been very clear to that to the international regulators. And I hope when they do draw up some kind of code for this activity in the future, that'll be the top line for this environment is that active deep sea vents must be protected. And one final question. Is the Mariana Trench less interesting now because it's pretty well known what's down there and it's not as active as the other trenches? Or will people still want to go down? Heather? I think as Alan hinted at, you know, just because it is the deepest, of course, you know, there's still going to be a lot of interest and activity down there.

41:25But, I mean, for me, you know, the South Sandwich Trench, the Tonga Trench, the Kermadec Trench are much more interesting from a geological perspective in terms of the activity going on there. We're managing to document sort of volcanic pyroclastic density currents and the rocks that have been deposited by those features at 8 ,000 metres wash depth, which has never been done before. So we're starting to look at new processes. We're getting little glimpses as to volcanic processes at depth in these environments now that hadn't been noticed before. So there's still a lot to be learned from these environments.

42:01But I think certainly widening and working elsewhere and engaging with other researchers as well. There's also another way to look at it, because the Mariana's massive, right? If the volume in the Mariana is about the same as the volume of the Himalaya, and the size of a submersible might, let's say, is the size of a Land Rover. So if you put a Land Rover on the Himalaya and said, look, how long is it going to take for you to document everything on this thing? It's going to take you a while, right? So you could theoretically spend your entire life just working on that thing. But again, within the bookends of it being this is what happens in the Mariana Trench, you can't necessarily make bigger statements about this is what happens in every trench.

42:37But it's still valid. And the Mariana Trench, weirdly, is actually five different areas. There are subducting semen which partition it. So from an animal at Challenger Deep, for example, could not get to the top of Mariana Trench without having to decompress by thousands and thousands of metres. So technically it's five bins of really deep ones. So, yes, there's all sorts of interesting things to do. My thanks to John Copley, Heather Stewart and Alan Jameson. And next week, it's the Roman arena and the role of gladiator fights in imperial politics. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

43:16So, tell me, what did we miss out? John? I personally am really fascinated in kind of like the inner space race that took people to the bottom Mariana Trench for the first time and the context for that. There were various private individuals who were designing these vehicles and engaged in this work and innovating and so on. And then the French Navy wanted to get involved and then they had a bit of a bust up. and eventually the US Navy got involved and bought up the technology at a time when they were, during the Cold War, this is around about 1960, when they were really flexing their muscles publicly in terms of capability in the ocean.

43:55They sent a submarine underneath the North Pole for the first time, they surfaced one at the North Pole, they had the first circumnavigation submerged by a nuclear submarine and they wanted to be the people to get to the deepest point for the first time. So that whole story I think is a very interesting one. Mirroring the space story. To some extent. The Russia, the Soviet Union really weren't involved in sending people. I mean, they were sampling deep trenches in the late 1950s and looking at life down there, but they weren't looking at these kinds of demonstrations of capability in the same way.

44:28Heather, what did we miss out? I think the evolution of the Pacific Ocean as a whole is really interesting. So if we go back 200, 300 million years, we had a supercontinent called Pangaea and it was surrounded by a super ocean called Pantalassa. And basically Pacific is the last remnant of that ancient ocean. And that's why it's so much older than the Indian and Atlantic. So they opened at 200 million years ago as the supercontinent Pangaea started to break apart. That's when the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean started to open. But what's really cool is that in the northwest Pacific, actually just near the Mariana, is where they sampled the oldest oceanic crust in 1989.

45:16And it was drilled by a big international collaboration called the Ocean Drilling Programme. And that was a hundred... It proved rocks that are Jurassic in age, 170 million years old. And that is just fantastic. And I love the fact that the Pacific Ocean is this old ocean made of old geological rocks, the oldest oceanic rocks that we have on our planet. And that's why the Pacific Ocean technically is contracting as it's getting consumed, rather than the Atlantic and Indian that are still opening and widening at this time. So that's still the breakup of Pangaea? Yes, yeah. And I love that. I love that the geological timescale is still sort of trundling on and it's just this conveyor belt of sort of motion.

46:03So if we think about plate tectonics and the Earth being made up but these jigsaw pieces all sort of moving relative to each other and some are sliding past one another. That's a strike slip sort of margin or one's being consumed by another. That's your convergent, that's your subduction areas and other ones are sort of where we get new crust being formed. And I just love that conveyor belt of evolution. John? The thing that surprises me as a biologist though when I hear about this geological history is that nevertheless, even though the Pacific is the oldest bit of ocean crust we've got, it's still really, to me, very young, compared to 3.5 billion rocks on land in some places.

46:40Yeah, well, 4.6 billion years. Central Canada and even the northwest of Scotland, that's some of the oldest rocks on our planet, is 4.3 billion years. But I think it shows how dynamic the ocean is. Yes. That's the thing. It's much more dynamic than the land. Yeah. But, Alan, anything you feel we've missed out? I've got a funny story about a party. Go on, then. So, yeah, so Challenger Deep was not discovered in 1875. It was discovered in 1952, right? But Challenger 2, right? So I read this book once. It was called The Hydrographers Tale, and it's by a guy called Steve Ritchie, who ended up Rear Admiral Steve Ritchie.

47:17He was the highest-ranking hydrographer in the Royal Navy. And he had done the soundings for the D-Day landings. He ended up on Challenger 2, and he sounded what is now Challenger Deep, the 10 ,000. And I remember talking to my boss. I used to work in Aberdeen for many years. I said to my boss, like, this guy's just the guy who discovered Challenger Deep. my boss said yeah he lives just up the road I was like you're kidding me so I ended up at his 93rd birthday party and he lived in a town called Colliston and his family had been there for 200 years and we turned up thinking there's going to be this frail old man in this cottage.

47:45I really hope there's rum at that party. Oh there was lots of rum He was wearing some like African poncho and his house is all like oil on canvas drawings of some harbour in Borneo somewhere it was brilliant. Unfortunately he died a couple years later but it was great to just you know it's like I've actually met and went to the birthday party of the guy he discovered Hold on, let me get this straight. The Challenger Deep was only really identified by him. It's murky because someone gets a deep sounding which says there's something big there, but then refining just exactly where the deepest point is takes a little time.

48:15So Challenger Deep as a feature on a map turns up in 1877, but it's not, you know, that's before there was a Mariana Trench or whatever, and that's one measurement. And they've just drawn a kind of a circle around it. By the way, did the Challenger, the original Challenger, did they have to have rope going down five kilometres or something? They did. I wrote it down, actually. Hang on, let me... The piano wire. Yeah, it was phenomenal. They covered 70 ,000 nautical miles, but they had 144 miles of Italian hemp for the soundings that they were doing. And quite often they had a bucket on the end of that rope so they could take a little sample of the sediment that was down there.

48:55But I mean, imagine keeping track of all of that wire. And it wasn't actually the absolute cutting edge technology at the time. So Lord Kelvin, the absolute polymath genius, 1872, he'd invented a wire sounding machine using piano wire to measure the depth. So what they do is they lower a weighted line and they kind of look at the rate at which the line is paying out. And when it slows down, they assume the bottom of it is now touching the seabed. And it's, you know... In really deep water. In really deep water, yeah. The ocean currents can take it. And so anyway, that's why a lot of the early measurements are way off for things.

49:35Lord Kelvin's piano wire machine is much more reliable. Now, he sent one to the HMS Challenger, but they couldn't get it to work properly. It was still a prototype. And so they just shelved it and they went with tried and tested hemp. But they still had, was it, 12 and a half miles of piano wire with them as well? It's just... And actually, that's something that, Because of the popularity of upright pianos amongst the middle classes of the 19th century led to mass production of piano wire, which meant it was available in these huge lengths for ocean sounding. What do we use for ocean sounding today?

50:08Acoustics. Sound, yeah. But very, very accurate, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, we know that, you know, Challenger Deep, for example, is 10 ,925 metres. Plus or minus six. Yeah, plus or minus six. error margin you know and it's you know that's that's using sort of a sound to sort of it goes from the ship down to the seafloor bounces off the seafloor and comes back up what's interesting it was um the meteor in 1926 used sound to measure water depth for for scientific purposes it had been used by the military pre-1926 but the first use for scientific purposes was actually in the South Atlantic in the South Sandwich Trench and it was an expedition and we went back and surveyed it in 2019 and we were within one metre of what they recorded in 1926 it was the Germans that had been out on RV Meteor and it was, you know that way that it's just it was almost 100 years later so it's meteor deep in between the ropes and the acoustics there was a thing called bomb sounding which was brilliant so you'd stand on the back of the boat, you'd light a stick of dynamite you throw it off so it blows up on the surface and there's a kid in the hull who pushes a stopwatch when the bang goes off and then pushes the stopwatch when he hears the echo They're also trimming the length of the stock on the dynamite You mean the echo coming back You basically listen to the bang you know the speed goes around 1500 metres per second so you divide the time it takes between the bang and the echo by 1500 metres per second that gives you the depth and so there's a guy called Bob Fisher in Kulenberg and these guys they would sort of draw it based on these things and there's a hand-drawn one in the Philippine trench I think we went there and tell you what, it's not bad it's not bad given they're just lobbing dynamite off the back of the boat there's a scientific paper where Bob Fisher stood on the back deck with basically a case of TNT just like lighting it off a cigar and just lobbing it into the ocean I'd hate to be writing the risk assessment for that trip and then eventually when we get echo sounding after bomb sounding that was in part because of the Titanic.

52:17So there was a German inventor who, after the Titanic, came up with a way, well, can we detect, you know, potential collision obstacles using sound, looking ahead? And then people said, well, if we turn that vertically, we can use that to measure ocean depth. Got it. That's safer. Yeah. I bet it is. Well, just a little bit, yeah. Yeah. I was also very interested, by the way, in the fact that the fibre optic cables are only at Challenger Deep. And I can just imagine the type of the endless covert activity that is going on in places like this. And it's not a little bit, it's everywhere. Yeah. It really is.

52:51And you don't want to get tangled up in it because we have no idea if it's 1 ,000 metres long or 10 ,000 metres, but it's everywhere. We don't know if there's something on the end of it. So whenever you're going along there, you've got to keep your eye out. And as soon as it's seen, it's cut the dive, just move. We published it all. We actually drew a map of it and tried to recommend an area to not take an untethered vehicle because it's pretty bad. Why do you want to get rid of the fibre optic cable? Because presumably you can reuse it if it's... Oh, there's lots of different reasons. Some of it's obviously...

53:21I'm not sure I want to talk into who we think is doing it. Some of it's underwater cable, which is... Yeah, it's about getting live communication back to the surface. So there's ways in which you can do that by having a surface buoy that gets winched below the surface so no one can see it. So you can, if you imagine you had a flotation device with a beacon on it 100 metres under the surface and it's connected all the way to the bottom, Now, you can listen to submarines coming out of Guam, which is, let's be honest, this has got something to do with that. But you don't want someone to be able to steal your listening device.

53:48So you have a little winch that then comes up for an hour, beams all your information back up and then pulls yourself back down again. And so there are those in the area, I would think. But to get that technology right and to get stuff down there, fibre optic is the way to go. And the vehicle John talked about, the fibre optic ROV, we had that out and it was terrible. We happened to be there when it imploded. The whole thing imploded. It was just very experimental, but it was just a complete disaster. But all that fibre optic is gone now. It's all lying in the bottom of the sea again. So it's messy.

54:19I think that's what I was hinting at. It's really messy. It's just like today, you know, we don't have anything apart from submersibles that go that depth. Technology is moving forward, and I think we need to move away from those sort of... Yeah, there was two solutions to it. One was super fine fibre optic. Another one was super heavy. Japanese went real big heavy stuff, and then the Americans went super thin, and both turned out to be the wrong. and then someone's recently did a completely untethered one and that got lost as well. So it's not easy. So we're going somewhere in between. It feels like the right thing to do.

54:46If it was easy, other people would. We wouldn't be doing it as a group. Yeah. I've come across quite a lot of fibre stuff in terms of drones as well now. Yes. That's the same stuff that was in the American... It was torpedo wire. That's what I assume. So it just falls out. So the faster you go, the better it works. If you stop and try to do anything, it breaks. Yeah. Which, of course, from a research perspective, were wanting to stop to pick up the samples of the communities and the rocks and things that are down there. Was it something that occurred to me when you were talking about the life down there?

55:17And I think it's one of the sort of funnier things. It's the snailfish eating the amphipods, but of course amphipods eat soft things that have fallen down and are decaying. So what do the snailfish do to stop the amphipods eating them from the inside out? They have an internal jaw. So they have two mouths. They have the big mouth at the front that suck an animal in. But if they just swallow it, that the animal then just bore itself out of its stomach. So it has our second jaw inside its head that when it swallows, it just grinds the animal to make sure it's dead. Oh my God. But what is really, from a non-biologist, and that's what I was talking about, when you pick up things from lots of different disciplines so that if you come across something unusual or noteworthy that isn't from your own discipline, you know that it's important.

56:01But when I'm looking back at some of the video and watching the snailfish, So you see them sort of suck up the amphipod. But then as it's the second internal jaw is working, they sort of collapse and they have a little food coma on the seafloor as this is working, don't they? And you just see them. Yeah, they're just sort of sat, sort of, you know, doing a beach, well, what my family call a beached whale impression after you've had too big a meal. They're just all sort of sat on the seafloor going, oh, crikey. But really, at least it means I'm not going to get consumed by my dinner from the inside out.

56:31You know, it's just sort of funny things like that that keep you going. but I mean I think as we're sort of exploring more and more of these environments and stuff you know that the discoveries that we're making is is makes it all worthwhile it makes the sort of trips away away from family and friends but also the other thing that I failed to ask you about which I should have done was about what the implications of the research are for human health because that was a fascinating aspect of it in terms of I think it's to do with the enzymes and the protein folding. Is that right, John? Well, there are a lot of insights we can get from deep-sea animals.

57:07I mean, I'm not so familiar with actual trench organisms, but it's something I keep an eye on. And, you know, deep-sea life can inspire us in two different ways, actually for material science. So I was co-authoring a description of a species called the scaly-foot snail, and it's teaching us how to make better solar panels because it can create tiny crystals of a metal mineral at room temperature, and this is what people want to be able to do for solar panels. And now people have been able to recreate this process in the lab with kind of off-the-shelf ingredients. I also was involved in describing a species of deep-sea shrimp, which has got tiny little bristles on it, which have inspired a new nanomaterial that's fantastic for heat and sound insulation.

57:49So there's those sorts of things. And then there's a lot on the biomedical side. One of the chaperone molecules that you get in a lot of deep-sea life in laboratory studies, you know, can help to rescue human proteins that get bent out of shape, which is involved in quite a few human diseases. Well, look, thank you all very much. This has been absolutely fascinating. Really appreciate it. Ah, Simon. Does anyone want tea or coffee or rum or something? No, I'm all right. Thank you. The chances of finding a glass of rum in the BBC are actually less than zero. Thank you very much. Thank you, yeah.

58:24Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. I'm Paul Kenyon and for Radio 4 and the History Podcast, this is Two Nottingham Lads. When the invasion happened, it was completely hell on earth with the sounds. The sad thing about war is people lose their empathy and their humanity. I want to know how two men from Nottingham ended up on opposite sides in the war in Ukraine. and what became of them after a chilling encounter in a prison in Donetsk. Out of all the places in the world where I meet someone from Nottingham, it's in captivity on two sides of the conflict.

59:07It's a story about how and why you pick a side in a war that's not your own. You can listen to Two Nottingham Lads first on BBC Sounds.

59:23If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.