A mysterious ancient fingerprint and a lemon-shaped planet — the stories you’ve missed

0:07Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Here we are at the start of 2026. We're feeling our way slowly into the light of a new year. and as is traditional around these parts we like to spend the first episode just having a look back at some of the fun stories that you might have missed that were covered in the nature briefing and we've been doing this for a few years now and joining me over those last few years is editor of the nature briefing flora graham flora thank you once again for being here it's my pleasure and making his debut in this start of the year show is nick petrich how nick how you getting on i'm doing well thank you i'm excited to start 2026 with you both well let's talk about a few things that have caught our eye then flora why don't you go first this year what's the story you'll bring into this podcast well i was very excited to read this story in science earlier in december and it's about how researchers have taken advantage of undersea optical cables to detect seismic activity And I saw this one too.

1:09And this is neat because this is reappropriating existing technology. It made me think of, I guess, using the Voyager probes for a different thing they were originally planned for or what turning coal mines into big physics detectors. So getting new use out of existing stuff. Exactly. I mean, you can imagine it'd be very expensive to install hundreds and hundreds of seismic detectors all over the seafloor, but it's information that we would love to have. And this idea has been around for maybe around a decade. The idea that you could shoot a laser down these cables and by detecting what reflects back from the optical fibers, you can detect whether it be earthquakes or other seismic activity.

1:46But the really tough part was doing it, of course, while the cable's in use for something else. And so how did they overcome this challenge? How did they actually manage to get it to work? Well, what they did was they have managed to design a device that when you shoot a laser down the cable, it's actually on a different wavelength from what it's being used for communications. And inside the cable, there's going to be naturally very, very tiny imperfections just as part of the manufacturing process. And when there's seismic waves, as you can imagine, these cables very, very, very slightly move and shift.

2:21And these tiny, tiny imperfections also move and shift. And that actually affects how the laser is reflected back. And so then the researchers can figure out from that backscatter the nature of the seismic activity. And the beauty then is that, of course, these cables are all over the place. And so you could build up a mesh covering a significant part of the Earth? Yeah, exactly. So in this case, this cable is actually 4 ,400 kilometres long. It runs all the way from California to Hawaii. So essentially, it acts like 44 ,000 separate detectors spread 100 metres apart. So immediately you get this incredible coverage.

3:00But just to be clear, this is a prototype. They're showing that it's possible to do this. So it will be some time before it's being used for active observations. Right, because I guess there's a number of things to overcome. maybe governments are doing things that they don't want heard, for example, or companies are using proprietary technology, that sort of stuff. Exactly. So this is not necessarily public infrastructure. The location of these cables is often kept secret for security reasons, as you can imagine. Telecom companies might hesitate to give scientists access to these cables for security reasons, or you might have to sign non-disclosure agreements.

3:32So it's more complex than just firing it all up tomorrow. And is there a lot of seismic activity down there at the ocean bed that scientists are particularly eager to get a look at? So one thing that they could be detecting is the origins of seismic activity that could cause a tsunami. So this could be key to keeping people safe on land. And one of the researchers said what's really great about this is that you don't have to invest in something. You can run it on legacy cables. Martin Kerenbach, who was a co-author, said that it's nice to think that you wouldn't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to have thousands of detectors.

4:05Well, I think it's interesting that, say, this can be reappropriated then for other stuff let's keep going with this roundup nick you've got a story that also has a sea theme i suppose what have you got so yes you are correct i've been reading in live science about an ancient boat and a fingerprint that was found on it which could uncover a little bit about who was on this boat and why they were there right so i'm guessing And this is a pretty old boat then. Yeah, this is a 2 ,400 year old boat. And it was excavated from the Hjortspring Moes Bog in the 19th century. And what's understood about this boat is that it was trying to attack some people on the island of Ilse, which is a small island off the coast of Denmark.

4:52And these raiders, they lost that particular battle. They were defeated. And then the defenders sank the boat and that allowed it to be preserved. because it sank in water that was a low oxygen environment. So this boat has been knocking about for a while. It's been the source of many mysteries, and one of the mysteries is where exactly it came from. Excellent, we've got a 2 ,400-year-old detective story. Keep going, Nick. So yeah, what's happened with this now is researchers have been looking at the various components of the boat. So when it was excavated in the 19th century, it was chemically preserved, which may have changed some things so what they did is they searched through the museum collections to look for parts of the boat that hadn't gone through this chemical preservation process and what they found when they did that was some colking tar which is a material that's used to basically hold the boat together and seal it against water and in that tar they found a fingerprint which is presumably from one of the people who you know built the boat or maybe repaired it i mean what does a fingerprint tell researchers about the history of this boat almost nothing in actuality they were very excited to have found a fingerprint but they were not able to determine the identity of the person it came from or their sex or anything like that they did make a 3d model of the fingerprint which is pretty nifty in of itself but they weren't able to tell a deal from that but the coking tar itself held a few more clues and it may paint a different picture from what has come before about where exactly this boat has come from and where did this boat come from well according to the researchers who did this particular study that was published in plus one they believe that it's come from somewhere east from germany so somewhere in the baltic sea they reckon and the reason that they believe that is the colking tar seems to have pine resin in it so presumably it's come from somewhere with a lot of pine forests and at that particular time the only places with a lot of pine forests were further north and around that baltic region so previously it had been thought that this boat had come from somewhere near what is now hamburg in and the reason for that is there were some ceramics on board that seemed to be from that region so this paints a very different picture because hamburg and denmark are quite close whereas this seems to have come from much further away so it could suggest that someone's come a long way to do this raid the question is still why they would have done that and that's what they hope to uncover in the future because they're aiming to extract dna from the tar and learn more about the people who built the boat.

7:40Right. So it kind of exposes this network between different parts of Northern Europe. It may well do. It could expose trade routes and things like that as well. Because obviously one of the questions is, why is there Hamburg region ceramics, but also tar from somewhere else entirely? So there's a lot more mysteries I think this boat holds still. I think what I loved about this story, even though it's quite interesting in and of itself is just to see a human fingerprint I think is always really evocative and these little traces that connect us back to previous people on this earth I always find that compelling.

8:17I agree I think it's very magical and that's what attracted me to this story and that's why I wanted to tell everyone about it but I think that's all for this one. Ben I'm assuming you have a story for us as well that you're excited to tell us about. I am excited to tell you actually Nick And this is a story about attracting things. In this case, it's a story that I read about in Science, based on a paper in Science, and it's about pollination. And plants have lots of tricks to attract pollinators. Sweet scents, rewards, giant arrows that humans can't see, but that insects can, that literally point to, go here, please.

8:51But there's another pollination signal, and it's heat. And that's what's been uncovered in this research. And this appears to be an ancient way that plants attracted pollinators, long before flowers, as we know them, arose. And this research focuses on a group of plants called cycads. Now, these are very strange things. They are prehistoric plants, several hundred million years old. And they kind of look the same now as they did back when the dinosaurs were alive. There's like 300 species of them, and some of them are quite endangered. but they do something kind of unusual. And what do they do, these strange flowerless prehistoric plants?

9:34Well, they get hot is what happens. Now, some plants are capable of generating significant levels of heat using energy from metabolic processes, that sort of thing, right? And sometimes this can be absolutely extraordinary. I learned that sometimes plants can increase temperatures like 30 degrees Celsius above ambient, so like hot at this point. And this was thought to play a role in pollinating in some instances some plants do this maybe to make the scents move through the air you know if you heat the air up the smells go further this sort of thing kind of unclear and it turns out cycads can get hot as well so the bit of these plants that's used for reproduction looks i suppose a bit like a pine cone on top these cone shaped things and one of the authors for the study said they were looking at these plants at night using infrared and these cones glow like beacons.

10:28And it turns out that this ability is crucial for attracting a pollinator. Now, maybe not the ones that you think of, maybe not a bee or a butterfly, but in this case, a tiny beetle. And how did they know that the heat was what was attracting these beetles? Through some really interesting experiments done in a botanical garden in Florida. And what they did was, in some experiments, they labeled these little beetles and could see that they were attracted to these hot cones. But was that because they could smell something? And what the researchers did was they made fake 3D printed cones and heated those up.

11:02And you could see that the beetles were attracted to them when they heated up and they went when the cones cooled down. So it seemed like this was a way of attracting these pollinators. But then I guess the question is, how were the beetles picking up on this heat and what exactly was going on to attract them? Yeah, these are great questions. And in this research, they've attempted to answer that too. And it turns out that at the very tip of the antennae of these beetles are some neurons that respond to heat. And we move away from botany into molecular biology here. And the team showed that the activity of a gene called TRPA1 was really important to be able to detect the heat in these beetles.

11:44Now, this gene is known to be involved in infrared detection in mosquitoes and snakes as well. And by blocking the activity of this gene, the beetle's attraction to these cycad cones was diminished. Sounds like they covered all the bases. Well, there's even more to it. So it turns out that different species of beetles can tell the difference between different cycad species based on the heat being given off. Different plants give off different temperature ranges. and some cycad plants the males get hotter a few hours before the female plants which may help the beetles go to the male plants collect some pollen then head off to the next warm place which is the female plant deposit that pollen and pollinate the plant it's this incredible dance that is ancient between these two sets of organisms i mean this sounds like a very intricate dance as you put it But I do wonder, is it a delicate dance?

12:38Could this be disrupted by things like climate change, for instance? Right. Well, as I say, some of these plants are endangered. And it's one of those things where when one part of the puzzle gets taken away, you miss the whole picture. Right. So it's existed for hundreds of millions of years. And let's hope it exists for hundreds of millions more. But that's kind of it for that story. Before we go today, Flora, obviously you're overseeing the outputs of the nature briefings. Anything else that caught your eye over the holiday season? So I cannot let you go without telling you about this one last story.

13:13This is something that I read about in New Scientist, the papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. And this is about a planet that I'm calling Lemon World, but is technically called PSRJ2-322-2650B. Catchy. You can see why I've given a little name and I'm really hoping this will catch on. Now, you know, we've almost become used to hearing incredible, amazing exoplanets that have extreme situations. But this one is really one of the most bizarre that I think has ever been discovered. I mean, its discoverer, Michael Zhang, calls it an evil lemon. The reason is because it orbits a pulsar. So this is a rapidly spinning neutron star, incredibly dense, you know, one teaspoon is as heavy as the island of Manhattan and all that kind of stuff.

14:08And it orbits so fast that one of its days is only 7.8 hours. So it is whipping around this incredible pulsing, radiating, incredibly dense star, incredibly fast. The star itself spins 300 times a second. Yeah. So as you can imagine, this is not, you know, an easy life for this planet. And the intense gravitational relationship with its star means it's actually pulled into a lemon shape. So that's why we're calling it Lemon World. It's being totally stretched and strained. And not only that, its atmosphere contains molecules of carbon, which scientists were very surprised to find, because there's this idea that it just couldn't have these complex carbon molecules in this situation.

14:59So not only is it lemon-shaped, it's deep red, probably has clouds of graphite in the atmosphere. So this is really like Eye of Sauron kind of stuff. it's probably at its coldest point maybe 650 degrees celsius so very hot warmer than a psyched yeah i mean this is not a place to go skiing and unlike most other planets the wind blows in the opposite direction of the planet's rotation so this is just completely bizarre and seems to kind of defy the established models of planet formation so what could be more fun than discovering a planet that not only looks weird and acts weird and is spinning at all these crazy speeds but also makes us think while we don't know everything about how these kinds of planets are formed i do recommend people check out the nature briefing to see a picture of this planet i mean artist's impression artist's impression let's be clear artist's impression but like when i first saw it it was like what on earth is this because it didn't look like a planet at all to me So, yeah, it is a very weird, interesting planet for sure.

16:03Well, when neutron stars give you lemons, it's time to make lemonade. I think we should probably leave it there for this first podcast of the year. Flora, while you're here, why don't you tell folk listening where they can sign up for the Nature Briefing to get more stories like this delivered directly to their inbox? Oh, well, please do pop on over to nature.com slash briefing to sign up for free. And we will put links to all of today's stories up as well. but for the time being Flora and Nick thank you both so much for being with me today thank you thank you very much Ben