Are baby girls more sociable? Super El Niño, meningitis outbreak explained

0:00Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.

0:30You don't have to pick a side. You can have them all. How will AI revolutionize your business? AWSAI is how.

0:41Madeleine Finlay: Hey, it's your ceiling vent, so I'm dripping. Could be the rain, could be the upstairs bathroom. Yikes. You could hire the guy your neighbor recommended, but I'm pretty sure that's just his cousin. Do we know if he's licensed or does he just own a ladder? Listen to your home. Go with Thumbtack. Upload a photo or voice note and we'll diagnose your project and match you with the right pro for the job. Thumbtack. We know homes. Hire the right pro today.

1:18Girls, on average, learn to talk earlier than boys. Some social skills develop quicker too. But why? Is it all down to how we're socialised or is biology playing a role too? Scientists recruited some of the youngest possible study participants to try and find out. Today we're looking at some of the science that's caught our eye this week, including a jaw-dropping El Nino that's set to keep growing and an answer to why the UK's meningitis outbreak earlier this year was so big. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly.

2:08Ian, when it comes to the differences between the sexes, there's always this question and sometimes quite an uncomfortable question about what role our biology is playing and how that compares to our socialisation, other external factors. and this week you reported on a study that was trying to get at this influence of nature and nurture so tell me a bit about this that's right so i think as long as there have been scientists

2:42Madeleine Finlay: or people who would sort of nowadays be classed as scientists they've looked at differences between the sexes okay and these can be like really obvious things like on average men will be taller than women and on average women tend to live longer than men and you know there are also differences that you can see in meeting different sort of developmental milestones in in sort of toddlers and things like that and you know there's some work out there's a lot of bad research out there i've got to say straight away but you know there are studies out there that will say well there are they report small differences in say personality traits and there's always this question of is it all down to the experiences we have or are there differences that come from our biology are there things that are genetic are there things that are to do with our hormone level exposure in the womb and so on so one way you can try and disentangle nature and nurture is to study people who haven't really been shaped by society so newborn babies right problem with newborn babies is well what are you going to get them to do because they're newborn babies you can't really They don't do much.

3:49Madeleine Finlay: They don't do very much. But this study was looking at newborns and these researchers in Cambridge, they recruited 130 newborns to take part in this study. These newborns were aged between eight hours and three days. On average, they were just over one day old. And the babies were seated on their parents' or their carers' lap and had a laptop in front of them. they have the baby watch a video on a laptop and that video is kind of a split screen so on one side you have a young woman making sort of pleasant expressions on the other side of the screen is a video of a Newton's cradle you know that sort of mechanical toys that I think they were probably popular in the 80s just metal balls that clang about right I always think of those on sort of office desks.

4:42Madeleine Finlay: Yeah, exactly. Your sort of 1980s office desk, a lot of black, a lot of chrome, city view through the windows. And yeah, anyway, so the babies were watching these videos as their gaze was being tracked by an eye tracker. And so the point of this experiment was to really look at attention. Where are these babies paying attention? Are they paying more attention to the woman's face are they paying more attention to the to the mechanical toy what a way to start off life straight into a science experiment um so what did these researchers find so first up all of the babies paid more attention to the face than they did to the newton's cradle okay so they're more interested in the person than the mechanical toy but there was a difference that came about in their attention when you look a bit deeper and basically the baby girls were devoting proportionally more of their time looking to the face than the toy relative to what the boys were doing okay so is this small and it's a subtle difference in attention that these researchers found in this particular study but they're saying that they think that might be real that there is a slight skew towards the girls being more interested in the face than they were in the mechanical toy compared to the boys at least.

6:01Madeleine Finlay: These are averages across the group and they're small on that level. So it doesn't tell you anything about individuals. These are group level effects and even at the group level they're small. It's an interesting signal though. So what does it mean? I mean what does it tell us about the differences that we then tend to see at later life stages between girls and boys? Well, I think this is really the beginning of a whole string of other questions that have to come out, right? And, you know, there are studies that show that there are subtle differences in brain structure at birth, on average, again, right?

6:42Madeleine Finlay: And so this work goes that next step in saying, okay, these guys are saying there are subtle differences, again, in this one particular behavioral sort of trait, okay? Could they have anything to do with the reasons why girls on average do start talking earlier than boys, whether they do seem to develop certain social skills earlier than boys? And then the question beyond that is one of sort of more clinical relevance in that, you know, we know that there is more anxiety and depression in females than in males. Could any of these differences at birth, not necessarily the attention one, but other things, could there be other subtle differences at birth which are instrumental or playing some factor in those important conditions later in life?

7:32Madeleine Finlay: And these are all open questions as far as I'm concerned, but interesting stuff nonetheless.

7:50Madeleine Finlay: Maddy, reports out earlier this week were saying that this El Nino we're experiencing has already hit the previous temperature records. What's happening there? We are currently in an El Nino. It's part of a global weather pattern, climate pattern, happens every two to seven years. and what happens in an El Nino is the temperature of the sea surface of the tropical pacific rises and that heat goes eventually from the ocean into the atmosphere and we see more extreme weather events and we see global temperatures rise as well and the strength of an El Nino is measured by how high these sea surface temperatures are in the tropical Pacific.

8:40And they look actually at just a patch of the tropical Pacific that they call the Nino 3.4. And they measure how much above this temperature is from a 30-year average. And the reason that they use the sort of most recent 30-year average is it takes into account a little bit of the human-caused rising ocean temperatures. And for an El Nino that's classed as moderate, you're looking at a one degree Celsius rise above that average. For an El Nino that's very strong, that's two degrees Celsius. Right now, currently, the sea surface temperatures in this Nino 3.4 patch are just a fraction above three degrees above average so this is this is big it's very big it's already in line with previous records and the reason that this is so shocking is because we're actually quite early on so you would expect an El Nino to peak in November so these temperatures are going to keep rising and what's even more shocking is the deep subsurface temperatures in in the tropical Pacific in certain places are nine degrees above average.

9:57So actually there's this kind of core, this hot core that's going to keep fueling this. And so it looks like we might even get to sea surface temperatures that are four degrees above the average.

10:12Madeleine Finlay: So, I mean, this sounds really worrying. What do scientists think the consequences will be? Yeah, I mean, there's a reason that this has been called a Godzilla event, unprecedented, jaw-dropping. It looks like it's going to be bigger than anything we've seen in the past 1 ,000 years, anything we've ever directly observed. It looks like 2027 is going to be the hottest year ever on record. and how bad it's going to be, how really bad it's going to be, depends on where you are. So at the moment, say in India, their monsoon rains are already massively reduced. In Sri Lanka, they're experiencing a drought.

10:56Across Central and South America, they've seen their hottest temperature records broken in between June and August. I mean, the Panama Canal is already cutting traffic because the water levels in the lakes that feed it are so low. And in places like Central and Southeast Africa, you're going to see heat and drought. You'll probably see something similar in Australia. So around the world, there will be this massive increase in temperatures, threats of droughts. But there are also places where you're going to see more rainfall. So North America, you're likely to see more rainfall. And actually, already, the governor of California has declared a state of emergency because they're expecting that there's going to be big storms, floods.

11:47And here in the UK, and really in the northwest of Europe, we're looking at a rainy, wet, stormy autumn and winter.

11:57Madeleine Finlay: So there's going to be huge disruption to weather patterns, to rainfall, to floods and droughts around different parts of the world. Do we know what the knock-on effects of all that is going to be? Well, we saw a report this week from climate scientists that have predicted that the additional heat that we will get from this El Nino could cause 450 ,000 deaths in the next six months. And it looks as if this is going to hit the tropical nations the hardest. So that's countries like Nigeria, Indonesia, India, Brazil. Alongside that, obviously, when you have this extreme heat, you're also likely to see droughts, and as well as really impacting wildlife, that will impact crops and floods as well, that will have a massive impact on crops.

12:51And so this brings alongside it food insecurity. And a previous report found that 50 million people around the world could be pushed into acute hunger by this El Nino. Looking at the kind of wider impacts, a previous El Nino, the biggest on record, I believe, or one of the biggest on record, 1997, 1998, that knocked off five trillion dollars from the world economy what's interesting i think is that the scientists who who did that first report that i was talking about they called it a postcard from our future because we're going to see temperatures in the next six months that will become normal really in the next 10 to 20 years and one of the questions i do think is really interesting about all of this is there has been this question of does climate change cause El Ninos to either be more powerful or more frequent?

13:54This is a massive area of scientific debate. It's not an answered question, but there are pieces of evidence that are making it look like, well, yes, actually, we are heating up the ocean. That may cause El Ninos that are stronger to happen more frequently. So this is also something that we may see more of, these kind of extreme peaks alongside that postcard from our future. So, Ian, it is going to be a difficult six months ahead for the world. So strap in.

14:30Coming up, an answer to what caused the UK's unprecedented meningitis outbreak earlier this year.

14:41Madeleine Finlay: Our chief technology officer is an AI, and our human team reports to that AI. Meet your new manager. They're an AI chatbot. He's fired people. The AI boss has fired human employees? Yes, for lack of performance. Black Box, The Chatbots, a new series from The Guardian investigates about the strange things happening between AI and us. The whole series is out right now. Search for Black Box wherever you get your podcasts.

15:14Finally, Ian, in March this year, the UK had a meningitis outbreak, which at the time was described as unusually large. 21 young people, mostly students, needed hospital treatment. Nine ended up in intensive care and two sadly died. This was traced back to a nightclub in Canterbury, in Kent. But there were questions around why the outbreak was so severe. And scientists from the UK Health Security Agency and the University of Oxford have been looking into this. Before we get to what they found, give me a bit more background.

15:57Madeleine Finlay: That's right. So this was a major outbreak of meningitis and it was rapid. now the illness was caused by meningitis b bacteria and these bugs can live quite harmlessly in your nose at the back of your throat and you know people carry them around with no problems okay but occasionally these bugs can break through into your bloodstream and when they break through into bloodstream they can cause you know a blood infection septicemia which is very dangerous and they can also cause inflammation of the meninges now the meninges are these protective membranes around your brain and your spinal cord and this is a really serious disease okay the fatality rate for meningitis is 10 to 15 percent and if it's not treated it's a lot higher and so it's it's incredibly serious and and when you see a big outbreak like this happening very rapidly it's terrifying um how does it spread well these bacteria are in saliva so they spread through coughs and sneezes, but they also spread through kissing, through sharing drinks, through sharing vapes.

17:01Madeleine Finlay: Now, back in March, we spoke to Dr. Eliza Gill at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine about this outbreak as it was basically still underway. And she was speculating that, you know, maybe these bugs had switched on particular virulence genes, which these bugs can do, which had made them more invasive. And what this latest study has done is really go into the genetics of this particular outbreak strain. And the bug is called Neisseria meningitidis. And so they wanted to look at what does the genetics tell you about what's happened here? So what did they find? Well, the way you do these studies is you get bacteria from the patients and you sequence the genomes and then you compare those genomes to the genomes of other bacteria of the same species and you look for differences in the genomes, okay?

17:53Madeleine Finlay: and what's quite striking from this paper that the Oxford team and UK HSA have come out with is that it shows that there are 92 differences, genetic differences, between the outbreak strain and the near relatives. What's really interesting about bacteria is they can pick up DNA from other bacteria. What seems to have happened here is that these outbreak bugs have stolen genetic traits from other bugs around them that are less harmful themselves, but they've stolen the traits And that has made these bugs really dangerous. And you can look at actually what the genetic changes are. Now, it doesn't explain all of the 92 changes, but it explains some of them that were important.

18:34Madeleine Finlay: One of the things that's really interesting is that for these bugs to grow in your bloodstream and therefore cause a lot of disease, they need to be able to scavenge iron from you. And these bugs had acquired genetic traits that made them really good at this. It's called iron piracy. So they take up a lot of iron. they're really good at that okay that made them dangerous another thing that these genetic traits that they took in from other bacteria altered was on the surface of the bacteria you have these sort of hair-like protein structures and the gene variants that they picked up altered these hair-like structures they're called pili and those allowed the bacteria to attach to other cells more effectively so that means they can bind to your airway cells more effectively and importantly they also found they could bind to the cells that line your blood vessels more effectively.

19:25Madeleine Finlay: Okay, so these things, again, make this bug more dangerous. They're already pretty good at evading the immune system, okay? They have a kind of a cloak around them that makes them hard to see if you're the immune system. And they've also lost sort of certain molecules on their surface that the immune system uses to identify them. So they're quite half the immune system to spot. But then And they've ramped up their ability to cause disease by these other genetic changes that they pulled in from the environment and from other bacteria around them. Ian, this is fascinating, but it also sounds slightly terrifying.

19:59I mean, as you say, this is a really dangerous bacterium already. So what can we take from this? What can we learn from this?

20:09Madeleine Finlay: key is the importance of doing continuous surveillance of these bacteria so you know what is out there and you know what genetic changes are happening and you know when you're going to have one of these flare-ups of of rapidly invasive highly invasive bacteria okay and also obviously flags up the importance of the vaccine you know in the uk at the moment we have a particular program designed that people do at the highest risk usually those going to university this that sort of age to give them a shot to protect them against men b bacteria that is really important i think the other thing to note is that these flare-ups these these events where you a bacteria suddenly acquires a lot of genetic changes that make it suddenly go bang they're lethal but on the plus side they also burn out very quickly i mean this variant of of neisseria meningitis that caused this problem in Kent burnt out within about a month.

21:12Madeleine Finlay: You trade this super high invasive sort of ability where you can get into people and cause disease. You kind of trade that for how that bug can persist in people. So when they happen, they happen and they're scary, but they tend to be short-lived. They burn out fast. And we're talking at a time when students are going back to university, young people are going back to sixth form to school. So if you haven't had the MenB vaccine yet, now's the time to book in that appointment. I should probably say one more thing actually about it before we wrap that up is that, you know, it's really important to know the symptoms for meningitis because this is an illness that you have to move fast on.

21:53Madeleine Finlay: OK, it's not the sort of thing that you can suspect in the evening and think, I'll see how I am in the morning. You go to A &E and there are checks you can do. Now, unhelpfully, a lot of the symptoms are similar to flu. But, you know, the sorts of symptoms you want to look out for are things like, you know, a stiff neck, sensitivity to light. And, you know, the classic one being a rash that doesn't disappear when you apply pressure. And this is, you know, you can get a pint glass and you can roll it over the rash. And if it doesn't disappear, that's, you know, a sign. And so knowing the symptoms and acting on them fast is super important as well.

22:30make sure you don't just think oh this is a bad hangover well this is a problem because there's

22:36Madeleine Finlay: so much overlap when people go to university a lot of bugs going around people come from different parts of the country mixing a lot of bugs and a lot of alcohol and that gives you a lot of reasons to not suspect meningitis when you might have it well ian all very good advice so thank you so much Thanks again to Ian. You can find all his reporting at theguardian.com

23:04And that's all from us. This episode was produced by Ellie Sands, the sound design was by Joel Cox, and the executive producer was Ellie Bury. We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then.

23:23Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.

23:30Behö話