Four types of thinker, the cyclosporiasis outbreak, and the UK’s biggest telescope threatened

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1:21What do you spend your day thinking about? Work, world events, health woes, when you're going to get that next cup of coffee. According to a new study, we can all be loosely grouped into four types of thinkers. But which one are you? Whatever one you fall into, our thoughts are often occupied by food. And if you're in the US right now, you might be wondering to yourself, dare I eat that lettuce? When is it going to be safe to eat lettuce again? I don't know, I haven't thought about it, especially when I've been asked that question. The largest ever cyclospora outbreak continues in the country, and it's now been linked to two fatalities.

2:06So when will infections get under control? And here in the UK, funding has been slashed for a telescope said to be the world's clearest eyes on the sky. Artists, musicians and scientists are speaking out. Today we're bringing you three stories you need to know about this week. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly.

2:39Ian, you recently wrote about a pre-print study from Claremont Graduate University in California that was all about trying to figure out what we think about in our daily lives. Why were they curious about our day-to-day ponderings?

2:56Madeleine Finlay: So this work was led by an associate professor of economic sciences called Joshua Tassoff. He was just really interested in this idea of what is it people are thinking about from moment to moment, from day to day? Why are we thinking about those things? And do any kind of patterns emerge over time or across different people? And I spoke to him about this and here's what he had to say about why he got interested in this. In economics, sort of in the standard approach, we only look at what people directly consume, sort of the observable things that people consume and the observable things that people produce.

3:36But it seems like much of what we actually consume and much of what we actually produce are our own thoughts. Thoughts make the plans that make, you know, productive economic behavior possible. Thoughts are notoriously difficult to capture, right? If you ask me, what are you thinking? I'm suddenly thinking about what I'm thinking about. So how did the researchers go about trying to find out what people are thinking?

4:07Madeleine Finlay: A really good point, first of all, just about how hard it is to analyse our own thoughts. But what these researchers did was they recruited a bunch of people. It was 258 Americans. And they got them to download an app. and once you had this app it would beep randomly at eight times throughout the day for a couple of weeks and when it beeped you had to write down what were you thinking you also had to say what you were doing and then also how happy you felt and in all they got more than 23 000 real-time responses on which to kind of take this first dive into seeing what people are thinking throughout the the course of a day.

4:47So what did the participants report?

4:49Madeleine Finlay: About a fifth of our thoughts or about a fifth of the thoughts in this cohort at least were around our sensation so sensory information how am I feeling work was about 17 % of the thoughts in this group and then I think about 14 % was food and drink. Well I was going to say surely yeah thinking about food. And then you know when you get to sort of 10 % you're looking say 10 % of thoughts are around sort of hobbies pastimes things we like doing in leisure time. But then you can sort of start delving in a little bit deeper. And I thought there was some really fun stuff here. I mean, if you look at sort of loves and hates, obviously a lot of love for boyfriends, girlfriends, family, pets, a lot of hate for work, sometimes co-workers.

5:34Madeleine Finlay: And then if you look at what people said they were thinking about when that thought was about something that they felt they needed. And I love this one. It was sleep and coffee, which I think a lot of us can connect with. And another thing I thought was interesting was if you look at the thoughts people had that they associated with things they were worried about. People worried about mothers and daughters way more than they did about fathers and sons. But one thing Josh pulled out of this that he thought was really interesting was that what people were thinking about was really quite sort of closely linked to their levels of happiness.

6:15What people are thinking about is a strong predictor of their current happiness. And that's controlling for what they're doing or who they are. And in fact, what we find is that what people are thinking about explains more of their happiness than what they're doing or who they are.

6:35Madeleine Finlay: But one of the other things that Josh picked out of this was really interesting was that they think that, you know, just as we have this trade-off where we have to work to make money, to have the life we want to have and so on, that we're also doing a similar kind of trade-off with our thinking, that we can't constantly be thinking happy thoughts all the time or sort of, you know, just having all these really joyful things. We also have to be thinking about thoughts which are going to perhaps be more productive in the long term. The standard model in economics is that you're trading off labour with leisure.

7:07And what we find is that there's a very similar trade-off that's happening in your head, that there's happy thoughts that you could be thinking about on your own. But if you're thinking about productive things, you're doing work in your head that's cutting into your happy thoughts. And what about larger patterns in the data? Do we think in similar ways to each other?

7:28Madeleine Finlay: Well, there was a really interesting part in the study where they They looked at kind of how people clustered in the way they were thinking. And, you know, this is a small study, but they found that you can sort of group people by almost like vibes. And you can separate out sort of four groups. Now, you know, there's no suggestion that these four groups are set in stone. But the four that they picked out were, you know, one group being the sort of the warriors, they called them. And these were people who were more concerned with world events, about things that were impacting on sort of public safety, public health.

8:03Madeleine Finlay: And so, you know, this would obviously be things like wars, thinking about the pandemic or post-pandemic. Those people, interestingly, also listened to more music than average. And it may be that that was a kind of a self-medication to sort of balance out the emotional stress. Another group that they identified, they called sort of domestic thinkers. And their thoughts were more dominated than others by chores around the house. things they had to do at home home finances and another group they had they called the bodily thinkers and these ones they were very attuned to how they were were feeling and these people had more intrusive thoughts and one thing i think this is quite a good example of how we might move around different groups is that may have just been a group of people and you would find them in any study who were just a bit under the weather and clearly they're going to be focused on symptoms and then the final group they called them the work hard play hearts and these are people who they did think about work more than most people they also thought about their sort of leisure time activities more than most people these people were actually the happiest of all the four groups so i think there may be something in that that if you're sort of engaged in your work in a positive way but you're also thinking about what is going on in your outside life it's probably not a bad uh bad recipe for happiness yeah one of the things that i really liked about that group was the words associated with it.

9:20There was presentation, but there was also nail. So it was like, these people are like, I'm going to nail that presentation.

9:27Madeleine Finlay: Well, I love that because I was talking to Josh about that and we were saying nail. So is that sort of, you know, a verb or a noun? Anything, you know, I presume it's a verb, but maybe they just think about nails. I've got to admit, Ian, hearing those groups, I feel partly attacked, partly seen by the Warriors group. I think that's where I fit in. If I was going to put you in a group, I would put you in the work hard, play hard. Okay. But look, I have a few questions about this study because first off, what I'm thinking about is not only dependent on my personal context, but also the kind of wider context around me.

10:07Like you said, if there's a pandemic going on, if there's issues going on in my house, you know, the plumbing's gone, the electric's gone. Plus, I think if there was a buzzer going off, there would be times where I wouldn't necessarily want to admit what I was thinking about. You know, it's like sharing your Google searches. There's something very intimate about sharing your thoughts at any one time. So what can we really take from this study?

10:33Madeleine Finlay: I fully agree, right? There are a lot of limitations from this. And this is kind of an exploratory study to see if this kind of methodology could be useful. As you say, if a buzzer goes off and you have to write down your thoughts, an awful lot of my thoughts are partial thoughts that I can't even, they're not even crystallized into thoughts that I can articulate. And obviously there's also things which people don't want to share that they're thinking about. And it's interesting that they got very few responses where people were thinking about sex. and like maybe people don't think about sex as much as we suspect they do but it really was very low and possibly linked to that about a quarter of the beeps were not responded to so yeah i think there are plenty of limitations on that front i think what i just really like to see is to see this done kind of bigger and for longer and to really dig into it and and have more confidence in those numbers

11:36Madeleine Finlay: maddie this summer we know there's been this unprecedented public health event in the u.s the country's experiencing its largest ever outbreak of cyclospora what's been going on with that so in early july the centers for disease control and prevention the cdc in the u.s started investigating hundreds of cases across the country of cyclosporiasis. Now, cyclosporiasis is a gastrointestinal illness caused by a microscopic parasite, cyclospora, and it's not something that's spread really from person to person. It's a foodborne illness typically. So the cyclospora hide out on fresh produce, things like lettuce, herbs, fruits, and also in water contaminated by human feces.

12:26Now, if you consume cyclospora, typically about a week later, you're going to start experiencing symptoms like watery, often explosive diarrhoea, gas, bloating, nausea, loss of appetite, you might get a mild fever as well. And late spring, early summer is cyclospora season. It's when you see these sorts of outbreaks. But the one this year has just been absolutely ginormous. The numbers have been extraordinary. So there have been thousands of lab confirmed cases, but actually it looks like there are more than 11 ,500 cases across the US. It's not currently clear why that is. The FDA are investigating at least six outbreaks.

13:15One has been traced back to shredded iceberg lettuce sold at Taco Bell. And that has been again traced back. The evidence points to Taylor Farms in Mexico. And this is kind of a mega producer of fresh produce that supplies places like Taco Bell, Walmart, Costco, McDonald's. But where the source of the other outbreaks are remains a mystery.

13:42Madeleine Finlay: So this is a huge thing to have to go and investigate and Maddy sadly we know there have been two deaths linked to cyclospora in Michigan and the report suggests that those people had underlying health problems but even so does that really tell us anything about how this outbreak is being managed? These sorts of outbreaks are really difficult to get a handle on and there's a few different reasons for it. First off there's a really long incubation period so that week between consuming cyclospora and then getting sick that's quite a long time and then it depends on lots of different factors so the first is that if you get sick then you go to your doctor then the next thing is if you go to your doctor do they request the specific test that looks for cyclospora then is that result then reported to state authorities and the state authorities then have to share that with the CDC who then work with investigating authorities and then the investigating authorities have to get in touch with those people and find out what those people were eating maybe weeks ago so you can see why it's so hard to figure out what's going on and why there's a massive lag in data and also why most of the cases go unreported why the numbers, the official numbers are so much lower than probably the real numbers.

15:06But at the same time, the Trump administration last year did push through a lot of cuts to state and local health authorities in the billions. And the CDC saw a cut in their workforce of about 25%. And there is a specialised parasitic team at the CDC, and their numbers went from 11 to 3. So there's probably a good reason why people are saying the response has been slow and the communication to the public hasn't been very clear.

15:37Madeleine Finlay: Finally on this one Maddy I've got to ask why is it always lettuce? Why is lettuce always the culprit in cyclospora? Yeah people aren't imagining this it is often lettuce and there are a few different reasons why. So the first is how lettuce is grown so often it's irrigated and washed and the way that that's done means that it can come in contact with untreated water. Then you look at the lettuce itself, you know, it has a lot of nooks and crannies and folds where the cyclospora can harbour. But with lettuce, unlike a lot of other fruits and vegetables, you can't cook it. And we consume a lot of lettuce, salads, sandwiches, baguettes, tacos.

16:19It's in so much of our food. So at the moment, if you're in the US or Mexico, I would avoid personally eating lettuce. When it comes to other fruits and vegetables, peel them, cook them. Fresh produce is something to be very careful around. Thankfully, we don't have it here in the UK. But if you're travelling in those places, is beware the lettuce.

16:48Coming up, why the UK's most iconic telescope is under threat.

17:13just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of 10, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. No more, wait, who talked to this customer last? And if you're worried about after-hours leads slipping through, Quo's optional built-in AI agent can answer questions and even book appointments while your team's offline.

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18:05Madeleine Finlay: That's Q-U-O dot com slash tech.

18:14Now, Ian, last week the news broke that the iconic Jodrol Bank Observatory might be closing in 2028. And this week, a huge range of celebrities and scientists, people like Tim Peake, Professor Brian Cox, Brian May, Jarvis Cocker, all signed a letter to try and save Jodrell Bank. So what is this all about? Why is it under threat?

18:43Madeleine Finlay: Let me give you a bit of a picture of Jotteral Bank itself, first of all. So Jotteral Bank is like a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And the thing people will recognise if they've ever driven past it is this 76 metre wide radio telescope dish, which is the Lovell Telescope. Now, that is a grade one listed structure. It's part of our national heritage, but it's also a very active telescope. It was actually built in 1957 and they finished it just before Sputnik launched. It was at the time the only telescope that could then track Sputnik. And so that Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank, the site where it is, this is in Cheshire, is a really big part of what's called radio astronomy, which is astronomy in the sort of radio wave range of the spectrum in this country and also globally.

19:35Madeleine Finlay: Why it's been hit, though, is that the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the STFC, which is funded by UKRI, they have essentially overspent in the past and they've been hit by electricity costs rising. They run a lot of the UK facilities. And when electricity prices go up, their bills really are horrendous. Staff costs have gone up. So basically science, in the UK at least, is having its own cost of living crisis. and so SGFC now has to find a lot of money before 2030 just to balance the books and we're talking hundreds of millions of pounds and loads of other telescopes and other areas of physics have been hit as well but Drodrill Bank is probably the most iconic one the one that a lot of people will know about and it's been hit because the funding is being pulled for what's called eMerlin.

20:26Madeleine Finlay: eMerlin is this network of seven radio telescopes in the UK of which the Lovell telescope is one and I spoke to the associate director at Jodrell Bank and he said basically if you pull the money for e-merlin you pull the rug out from underneath Jodrell Bank and so it is existential for them now you know there are hopes to find other ways to fund it which they're being required to do but we don't know how well that'll go yet. Ian the fact that this could have such a major impact on UK astronomy and£2.8 million, you know, it's not change that you find down the back of the sofa, but at the same time, the UK Research and Innovation Agency, you would think for something this iconic and important that they would be able to find that money.

21:13So what does this say about our research priorities right now and where that's headed?

21:20Madeleine Finlay: you're right i mean the uk ri budget is about 10 billion but they don't have the money they need to run the facilities and to fund the commitments that they've already made now there's also some reprioritization so the government is looking at trying to move government funding to areas like like quantum computing and ai and things like that and sensibly trying to find big growth areas are going to you know feed into our economy in the sort of medium term but you have to think about this fundamental science that is done. Jodrell Bank at the moment is involved with work on dark energy, dark matter, the sort of invisible substance that you see clumping around galaxies.

22:08Madeleine Finlay: It's also looking at how planets evolve, how galaxies evolve. It is often the fundamental science that leads to the big step changes that drive what we can call progress. I mean some people might say well look where where is progress in technology but the shift in emphasis there and the loss of some of this more fundamental research is something that we may you know you may end up paying for in the longer term or at least not having the expertise in the UK and not having the sovereign facilities in in the UK anymore. Critical science depends on this money people's jobs depend on this money do you think they're going to find it?

22:44Madeleine Finlay: Well I think for Jodrell Bank there are certainly some possibilities. They are very connected to the University of Manchester. The University of Manchester is very keen to keep the Lovell telescope going. But, you know, show me a university in the UK that has any money. But one option, you know, one idea may be to go to the users of Drodrell Bank and say, we don't have any money. Can you contribute? And this means going globally, essentially cap in hand. Now, at the moment, telescopes are shared essentially for free. and so that would kind of break a precedent it's an option though another thing is that jodrell bank has really recently shown that they can track space debris and space objects by basically bouncing radar off these objects and jodrell bank can detect that and so that that could actually be a really useful facilities for um for space agencies so maybe that they could get some funding from space agencies you want to be able to track space debris and so there are some options that are being explored but none of those are you know are in the bag yet time to start taxing people for making mess in space and using that money to fund these sorts of trackers it's a really fair point ian thank you so much thank you

24:03a big thanks again to ian 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.

24:21Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.