Briefing Chat: Evidence mounts for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb

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1:06Hi, listeners. Benjamin here. Welcome to the Friday show, where we talk about some of the stories we've read about in the Nature Briefing, which is, of course, Nature's daily email roundup of the latest science news. Joining me this week is Lizzie Gibney. Lizzie, how are you doing today? Hello. I'm very well, thank you, Ben. How are you? I'm doing okay. You've got an exciting story today. Tell me all about it. I do. This feels like what would be to Egyptologists, like for me, discovering dark matter. But for Egyptologists, this is something absolutely huge, if true. This is an exclusive in Nature by Jo Marchand, a group of Egyptian researchers think there is evidence that there may be another tomb beyond Tutankhamun's.

1:43And there is a chance that it belongs to the famous Queen Nefertiti. Now, Nefertiti, if you remember, was this very, very powerful ancient Egyptian queen from the 14th century BC. She was Tutankhamun's predecessor and possibly mother's stepmother. That's not exactly clear. But her tomb has never been found. There have been some good theories about where she might be buried. And one of them has been that perhaps she has this burial chamber which is attached to Tutankhamun's. And Tutankhamun's tomb then is in the Valley of the Kings. And you're right, there has been this debate about what is behind the wall in his tomb, right?

2:23Right. So he had a weirdly small tomb, given that he was such a, you know, a big name, and when you look at it you can see that there are like cracks in the walls and they've done some scans and realized that like the paintings on the walls don't seem to be as you'd expect and so some suggestion that maybe there's a false wall and so what the theory was was that maybe Nefertiti was buried there and then when Tutankhamen died later he would die young so he was only 19 so maybe they weren't expecting him to die at that point they hadn't built him a snazzy tomb yet so maybe they converted one of the outer chambers of her tombs, maybe they kind of boarded hers up and made one of the outer chambers bigger and turned that into his tomb.

3:03And this has been the working hypothesis for a few people, but then other people saying, nah, so what's happened here then? So, you know, some people study the geophysics with a number of tools and didn't seem to find anything. Bring us up to today and some studies that are being published in the occasional papers of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, have found evidence that actually perhaps there is a network of corridors, perhaps some chambers behind Tomb Karmann's tomb. So there are two different techniques that it is. One is ground penetrating radar. So that's literally using like radar, you can go to some extent through the materials there.

3:39And where you have a change in material, it will bounce back and you'll get something of a picture. Now, in the past, they looked for a chamber and found nothing using that. This time, and this is done from within the tomb, they found what may look like a corridor about two meters wide, but perhaps have been filled in with rubble. Previously, they've been looking for a big chamber. And actually, they're now saying maybe there is a corridor. The second technique that they did that they haven't done before is called a microgravity survey. So you're literally looking at the gravitational field strength in that area.

4:08So as you'll remember, matter has a gravitational pull. And if there's less matter, if there's a lower density area, the gravitational field strength will be lower. So if you do a survey of this area, you might find patches that are lower density. Literally, the field strength is lower. And that will tell you potentially if you have a chamber or area that is of lower density than its surroundings. So both of these techniques put together, they built up a picture which is suggestive of some kind of complex because, for example, they can see right angles. They can see a wall that is parallel with another known, they can see what look like potentially open spaces.

4:53The reason this is so tentative is we're not just able to look in, peer in as if we put on x-ray glasses, you know. There's so much that can conflict with these microgravity surveys. So if you have any vibrations, that acceleration mimics gravitational pull. You have to factor in all the terrain around it. The resolution drops off severely with distance. So there's a lot that goes into these calculations. And that is why geophysicists looking at these results have said it certainly is plausible, but they wouldn't yet say, oh my God, we found these chambers. But that hasn't stopped people getting excited, of course.

5:28Well, I must confess that I am tentatively excited as well. But that obviously begs the question, like, maybe there's something there. How are we going to find now. Exactly. So, of course, you would never just... Take a lump hammer to it. Yeah. The way that these researchers are proposing to do it, and it's very, very delicate in all senses, like there is a lot of effort that goes into preserving these tombs, and rightly so. What this group would like to do is to drill a hole, which is literally a few centimetres wide, and they would drill from above down into one of the chambers that they think would be empty.

6:00So, not the one that they believe is the tomb itself, but one of the kind of offshoot areas that's far from the tomb. And they would literally drill through down into it, and then they would send down a little camera so they could have a look. And the idea is this will tell them if their theory is right about what they're seeing on these geophysical maps, if those low density areas actually do correspond to corridors and open spaces or not. And as you say, of course, these are absolute treasures, these places. And And so this has to be done very carefully. Is there a potential timeline for this?

6:35There's a group called Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, and they're going to meet later this month. And it's hoped that they will make a decision on whether this kind of very careful camera work can happen. And if it is approved, then we might even have that work start to take place before the end of the year. Well, I am very excited to hear that. And listeners, lock into the Nature podcast, because I guarantee we're going to cover that if they find something exciting. But let's move on for the time being to my story. And it's one that I read in Nature, based on a paper in Nature Neuroscience.

7:05And it's a continuation of some work from a team who I've spoken to before. And it's about brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. I've heard a lot about them recently. I feel like that's really taking off. Yeah. And these brain-computer interfaces, as their name suggests, they interface between a brain and a computer. And they can read electrical signals in the brain and translate those into signals via like an algorithm, that sort of thing, into an action. And they've been used by people with neurological disorders, perhaps using the system to move a cursor on a screen. But most of these BCIs focus on one function, whether that's moving a robotic arm or talking via a computer, like thoughts to speech, which is something that we've covered on the podcast before, using an avatar on a screen.

7:51But only one thing at a time. Now a team of researchers behind this work have described a single implant that can do more than one thing. They've actually got an implant, have they, that's literally reading out the electrical signals from their neurons. Yeah, these things are quite small, very thin, and they have these really, really thin protrusions like micro needles, which will go into a part of the cortex. And they have like a little box on top with a wire that goes into the computer. And this is what can pick up on somebody's brain signals. So naively, you might think then that there is only one certain kind of function that they would read out.

8:25But I guess a single error of the brain can do more than one thing. This is where this comes in, right? Because they've designed one, the first one, in fact, that can translate verbal and non-verbal modes of communication simultaneously within seconds of the user thinking it, right? Because a lot of communication, as you and I know, relies on more than just talking, right? We nod, we shrug, whatever it is. But the difficulty in decoding these kinds of things is that some of the neural areas interact and the patterns of neural activity can be slightly different between different tasks if you're simultaneously speaking and gesturing that signal might be different if you're just speaking or just gesturing right so there's a lot to unpack here seems like a massive data problem like if you've got one pattern that's like speech and then you can imagine one pattern overlay that's gestures like untangling those two things at once is going to be so hard.

9:17Exactly right. And so there is a lot of training that goes into this. And in this work in particular, the team works with two participants and the device that was implanted, it has this array, as I say, of electrodes, 253 that are placed on the surface of the cortex. Now, this implant covers quite a large surface area of what's known as the sociomotor cortex. Now, the first person involved in this research had impaired speech and movement following a brainstem stroke. And the researchers asked this person to silently speak five phrases and attempt to wave, nod, shake their hands or clap, right?

9:52And the second participant had a type of motor neurone disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which caused progressive speech paralysis and motor impairments. Now, at the time of this study, this person was able to type messages on a computer or a phone, but was asked to vocalise 10 phrases and imagine making gestures like a shrug or a thumbs up without moving their body except for the facial muscles you see and this is this training data which helps the computer and the researchers unpack what signal might be related to which movement so they know what the patient's trying to do they can compare that readout with what they're trying to do and then in the future use that data to figure out what someone's saying perhaps when you don't know what they're trying to say pretty much bang on so the bci's in this instance recorded the participants neural activity when they attempted to, as I say, speak or gesture, as well as they were trying to do both.

10:41And I think that's what's key here, such as pairing the word hello with a wave or pairing yes with a head nod. And then this training data was used to decode these neural signals into text or gestures or both at the same time. And what was interesting is they found that training these BCIs on data collected during all three tasks produced higher accuracy in decoding speech and gestures together than just training it on speech or gestures. So there's some crossover. There's this kind of X factor that helps it know what's going on. And what are they going to do with it now that they've created this?

11:17Well, actually, they've shown that it does work, right? So they linked these BCIs to personalised full-body avatars. Now, the previous story I covered was an avatar of someone's face and would speak. This is essentially a full-body representation. And in conversation tests, the researchers asked the participants to respond to questions or comments in real time, essentially using a phrase, a gesture, or a combination of these, but crucially from the training data set. And it was quite accurate. The median accuracy for the first person's BCI was 100 % for both gesture and speech decoders in three or five conversation tests.

11:52Now, the second person's was slightly less an average decoding accuracy of 75 % for speech and 85 % for gestures. So the idea is at some point in the future, people with these neurodegenerative diseases might be able to literally just from their brain imagine how they would like to convey themselves and their avatar would both say what they're trying to say and have the mannerisms and the gestures and act it out as well. I think that's what this group have been working towards helping people who are experiencing conditions like this who are unable to communicate verbally or gesturally to do that and as we say there the way that we communicate is such a multimodal thing.

12:29Now there are some caveats here it has to be said someone quoted says that the levels of speech decoding is maybe a bit lower than has been seen previously and that these are isolated gestures rather than continuously reconstructing where someone's hand may be it was a point in time or a gesture and these were isolated sentences too now the team have said that they really want to take this forward and i think they've clearly come a long way since the speech paper i covered back in 2023 so ultimately in their paper they say that the findings demonstrate that one cortical implant could support multi-effector control, essentially do more than one thing, and hopefully will be a step towards brain-computer interfaces that allow more natural communication for people with paralysis.

13:12I mean, that would be such a difference to people's lives if we manage to get to that point. That's incredible. Okay, I think that's all we've got time for on the briefing chat today. Yeah, absolutely right. I think we'll leave it there. And listeners, if you'd like to know more about these stories, we'll put links to both of them in the show notes, as well as links where you can sign up for the Nature Briefing to get even more stories like this delivered directly to your inbox. But for the time being, all that's left to be said is I've been Benjamin Thompson, Lizzie Gibney. Thank you as always for being here.

13:36Thanks so much, Ben.

13:57That's just chicken. And their lightly breaded chicken nuggets are free from gluten, dairy, and soy. Look for nature-raised farms on your next grocery trip and feel more confident about your choices. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments. QVC has what you need for the season ahead with brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at qvc.com.