Ancient Antarctic ice cores & is a sense of humour genetic?

0:01Cha-ching! That's the sound of Lowe's Labor Day Savings. Get up to 45 % off select major appliances and save up to an additional$100 on select laundry pairs. Plus, get three bags of Miracle-Gro.75 cubic foot garden soil for just$10. Labor Day deals are on now at Lowe's. In-store and online. Valid through 9-9, while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowe's.com for more details. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

0:33all engine running absolute genius get this welcome welcome this is the show where we bring you science what that essentially means is discovery advances research technology unbelievable without further ado this is the naked scientists hello welcome to the naked scientists podcast the show that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine. I'm Chris Smith. Coming up, scientists get their hands on the oldest ice on Earth, and we've been to see it, but what's it going to reveal? Also, measles is on the up, again, and we find out why, and is humour genetic?

1:14We talk to the scientist who studied hundreds of pairs of twins to find out. From Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education, this is The Naked Scientists.

1:34Up first this week, a shipment of ancient ice has arrived at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge following its extraction from deep underneath East Antarctica. These ice cores are a bit like tree rings. They contain a snapshot of Earth's climatic past, documenting the temperatures and amounts of precipitation. It's hoped that the cause will provide a detailed picture of the last one and a half million years of climate and atmospheric history, including helping us to understand why the climate goes through warm and cold phases, and why the rate at which this has been happening appears to have changed abruptly in the last million years.

2:12I went to meet Liz Thomas and the ice at the British Antarctic Survey's Cambridge base.

2:31we are now standing in our cold laboratory in the british antarctic survey it is cold it is very cold yes so we keep this laboratory at about minus 23 to minus 25 degrees what's in front of us liz so what we've got in front of us is a plain looking white box but actually it's what's inside that's really important so what we have here is potentially or we think the oldest ever Antarctic ice core and you've got some in there can we have a look yeah I will show you so let me just get this lid off here ah it's it's like mini drain pipes it looks like sort of drain pipe sections in plastic bags it does so we have a section of the core that is three and a half centimeters by three and a half centimeters these longitudinal sticks that you can see and the reason they're in the plastic bag is because we obviously want to avoid any contamination, anything from the atmosphere, from the air, getting onto this ice because it's incredibly precious.

3:28How did that come out of the ground? So this is part of a big drilling effort. So in Antarctica, there's been teams of people over a number of different seasons drilling the ice core. Where in Antarctica is it from? So this is from East Antarctica. So it's a place called Little Dome Sea. and the ice I'm looking at how old is that then where's it come from in terms of underground so actually these numbers on the bags correspond pretty much to the depth within the ice sheet so the core that they drilled and they reached the bedrock in January just this year they got down to 2.8 kilometers which I think is quite staggering but the piece of ice that you've just got in front of you so this is bag 2589 so that's roughly what it corresponds to so 2 ,589 meters in the ice sheet.

4:15We know roughly how fast ice builds up so therefore how old is that that I'm looking at then? Yes so we know from how much snowfall we get and East Antarctica doesn't get very much snowfall. This has actually been built up over a very long time period and we think this particular piece of ice in front of us could be as old as 1.5 million years. My goodness I'm pretty cold in here you've got a very thick coat and I haven't can we get out of here and go to your office and then you can tell me a bit more about it absolutely let me put the lid on

4:52it's a bit warmer in here it is a bit warmer yes what will you do with those cores now then so the method that we use is something called continuous flow analysis and we'll take those sticks that you saw those 3.5 centimeters by 3.5 and we hold them over a hot plate it's not very hot, about 10 degrees. And that slowly melts it millimetre by millimetre and allows the liquid to then flow into a number of different analytical instruments that look at the different chemistry, the different particulate material. We can look at the composition of the water and that provides a whole array of information about the climate system and environmental change.

5:33I thought that Ice scientists are also interested in trapped bubbles of gas. How would you see those if you just melt them? So that's absolutely true. So one of the really critical things that we're going to as a community look at in this ice core is a new record of carbon dioxide greenhouse gases. We are not going to be measuring that in this laboratory because in order to do that, they have to use a very different method. They have to crush the ice to extract that. But you can see the bubbles. So actually, those pieces of ice you saw, because they've been so compressed, It was very tricky to see the bubbles.

6:04It looks very glassy. But under much less compressed ice, you can visibly see bubbles within the ice. What will you then do with that data? What's this going to unlock that we haven't got access to already? So currently, our longest ice core record goes back 800 ,000 years, which still is pretty staggering when you consider that humans, Homo sapiens, have only been on this planet for about the last 200 ,000 to 300 ,000 years. But beyond that, we don't have an ice core. And so this is really entering that unknown period of what was the climate doing prior to that. We do have other measures of the climate though, don't we?

6:38The coral, for instance, captures a cross-section of what the sea chemistry was and that kind of thing. So what can you get from the ice that these other methods that we do have can't tell us? So there's a number of different archives and mainly for the southern hemisphere, it's the marine sediment cores. And they're a fantastic record that actually can go back nearly 5 million years. but they do have a few limitations and that's actually what we refer to as their resolution there's only a few data points per hundreds of thousands of years so understanding the different processes that were occurring can be quite a challenge and the one thing that is unique to an ice core is its ability to capture that record of greenhouse gases no other paleo climate archive can achieve that and what's the big question that you want to get underneath when you've got this working and with this amazing sort of sample that you've now got what will you be able to address?

7:32So what we're hoping to address is actually understanding how the climate naturally progresses from cold periods to warm periods so hopefully people are fairly familiar that we have in the past had what we've referred to maybe as an ice age these extreme cold conditions and then today we're in a warm period now these cycles are purely natural so they happen over over quite long time periods. And what's interesting is that currently these cycles, or at least for the last 800 ,000 years, happen on scales of around 100 ,000 years. So they're fairly frequent, fairly regular, and we think fairly well understood.

8:08But prior to this, from the other archives, these marine cores, it suggests that actually these transitions were much quicker. So it only was 40 ,000 years. And so the warm periods weren't quite as warm, and the cold periods weren't quite as cold. So it's a really big fundamental question in the scientific community is how and why did that change? Any theories? There's a lot of theories. And one of the things that we're hoping to address is around the role that the Southern Ocean plays in the carbon cycle. So we know our understanding of these glacial and natural variability is that carbon has a very important role in our climate system.

8:46and so what we're hoping to achieve is to look at how potentially the southern ocean's role in the carbon cycle may have changed over time so currently it acts as a sink it draws down co2 from the atmosphere but potentially some processes relating to maybe difference in wind strength or the amount of sea ice across the southern ocean may have meant that those processes were different in the past and that's actually a very important question because we think that those processes are actually changing right now and will potentially change more into the future. It may therefore give us insights into what awaits us as we force the climate more then with man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

9:27Exactly. So one of the key processes is that the climate system is really complex and we need to understand all of these different potential processes and tipping points in the past to help us better predict how it might change in the future. so understanding how the southern ocean has acted as a source or a sink for carbon dioxide over long time scales is really essential for the climate models that are tasked with predicting how it may change in the future if we continue to depend on fossil fuels and it was pretty awe-inspiring to be looking at that ice that effectively fell as snow one and a half million years ago that was liz thomas she's at the british antarctic survey and she's got hold of the world's oldest, currently, ice cores that she has just shipped back from Antarctica.

10:14UK health officials are urging people to make sure that they're vaccinated against measles following the death of a child from the disease in Liverpool. There's been a huge surge in cases in parts of the UK over the last couple of years, as well as across Europe, and the United States is also experiencing its worst measles outbreak in decades. The cause is almost solely down to under-vaccination. Migration from parts of the world with weaker public health and vaccine programmes, as well as poor uptake in countries, mean that we've fallen below the protective herd immunity threshold that's needed to keep everyone safe.

10:48Michael Marks is Professor of Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Measles is a viral infection and historically it was a very common infection of children and most people who get measles will have an illness where they may have fever, sore eyes and characteristically a rash over their whole body. And proportion of people that get measles will become more unwell with that. They may get a pneumonia, a chest infection, and some people will have an infection of the brain, but some people can get much more seriously unwell. We've luckily got a vaccine these days, haven't we?

11:26Is that particularly effective or ineffective? So it's a very good vaccine, probably one of the best vaccines that we have. If you've had all of your doses of measles vaccine, it's probably more than 95 % effective at stopping you getting measles. What we know is that measles is very, very infectious. So I'll try and give a comparison to help people understand. If you think about probably the biggest virus we've all talked about in the last five or six years, which is COVID. On average, one person with COVID will transmit that virus to two or three other people. Measles, if you had a room full of people, all of whom had not been vaccinated, and there was one case of measles, that person might spread the measles virus to 16 to 20 people.

12:17So it is much, much more infectious than all other viruses. And that's why the vaccine is such a critical part. So if we've got amazing vaccines that are effective in the way you say at combating one of the world's most infectious viruses, why have we got outbreaks? The first is that because this is probably the most infectious virus we know of, in order to stop spread between people, you need to have a really, really high rate of vaccination in the population in or around 95 % of people. So that's the first thing. You need a really high level of vaccine in the community. and unfortunately for a number of reasons rates of vaccination in many parts of the community are much lower than that they might be 75 or 80 percent and although that still sounds very high because measles is so infectious you need to get this really really high level of vaccination to stop transmission many of the victims are really little kids as in they're under one year old when we get really bad cases and in some cases unfortunately deaths but we don't give the vaccine until more than one year of age so that seems a bit illogical why would we wait when the vulnerable period is younger than the age we're vaccinating if the vaccine is so effective if we can vaccinate enough of the population then we can stop the virus spreading and that protects those individuals in this case young children who haven't yet had a chance to be vaccinated and And that is a concept that has been called herd immunity.

13:56So this is the idea that if enough of the population are immune, they cannot catch the virus. They therefore cannot spread the virus to other people. That protects those individuals who, because of their age or because of other medical reasons, can't receive the vaccine. So that's the strategy that we rely on. but it does, as I've said, mean we need to get really, really high vaccination rates in order to protect those individuals who haven't yet had a chance to be vaccinated. So why don't we just vaccinate them younger? The baby's immune system is still maturing. You need the right cells to make a good response to that vaccine because what you don't want to do is give the vaccine and it only protects you for six months and you have to vaccinate again and again and again.

14:46And what we've been able to establish through studies, if we vaccinate young children a year and then they receive several other doses in their young childhood, they develop immunity protection from measles that lasts for life. So we've got a schedule of giving the vaccines to the children when we know that they will respond well and that they will develop protection for themselves for life. What's the reason then for the under-vaccination that's going on? It's not just the UK. we've had big outbreaks in the US, in Texas, they've had enormous numbers of cases there, in Europe, many, many countries in Europe that previously had very low levels of measles activity have seen in recent years a big spike again, all attributable to low levels of vaccine uptake.

15:30What's behind this? We have grown up over the last 20 or 30 years when we have had this vaccine. And so most people don't have the experience of seeing this disease and understanding how devastating it can be. So that I think is one part. And then the other part are that people have very incorrectly raised a number of concerns over the safety of the vaccine. They have said that the vaccine might cause serious side effects. But really, there is comprehensive data from many, many countries and millions and millions of children who have been vaccinated that show that this is a very, very safe vaccine.

16:09So unfortunately, we have this perfect storm, disinformation, incorrect information being shared, telling people that the vaccine is not safe when the vaccine is perfectly safe. And at the same time, people feeling like maybe measles isn't such a big problem. And so we're seeing those two things come together now. And that is meaning that we only have 70 or 80 % of the population being vaccinated and many, many children acquiring measles, some becoming sick and unfortunately some dying. Do you think the problem will just take care of itself then? Because so many people will catch it that one of those reasons you've highlighted, which is that people haven't seen cases, therefore they don't know how dreadful this is, it will educate people and perhaps it will flip the pendulum back the other way.

16:53Or do you think we're actually going to have to do something about this? We will have to do something about it. This sort of disinformation, this misinformation, it's so pervasive now and we're seeing it spread almost like a virus freely. It's not just measles vaccine. You know, we're seeing declines in the rates of many, many childhood vaccines uptake, as you say, not just in the UK, but across Europe, across North America. And I think we will need public health efforts, both to reassure the population about the safety of the vaccines. And we'll need to think about, you know, campaigns, for example, catch up campaigns for children that have missed these vaccines.

17:34Now you're three or your four or your five we need a program in place to let you catch up and be vaccinated michael marks at the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine and we recently actually made a detailed program all about measles and its biology with more information on the virus its origins and how it causes disease and if you'd like to give that a listen we've made it very easy to find you go to nakedscientist.com forward slash measles and you'll find it there

18:05Cha-ching! That's the sound of Lowe's Labor Day Savings. Get up to 45 % off select major appliances and save up to an additional$100 on select laundry pairs. Plus, get three bags of Miracle-Gro.75 cubic foot garden soil for just$10. Labor Day deals are on now at Lowe's. In-store and online. Valid through 9-9, while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowe's.com for more details. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

18:36The Naked Scientist podcast is produced in association with Spitfire, cost-effective voice, internet and IP engineering services for UK businesses. Find out how Spitfire can empower your company at spitfire.co.uk. Music in the programme is sponsored by Epidemic Sound, perfect music for audio and video productions. This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me, Chris Smith. still to come, it's no laughing matter. We want to know, is a sense of humour genetic? Stay tuned to find out. Before that though, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Switzerland, have been grappling with arguably one of the biggest questions in particle physics, which is when the universe formed and produced both matter and its mirror image antimatter counterpart, But where since has all that antimatter gone?

19:30If there's only matter left over making up us, then there must have been less antimatter than matter made in the first place. Otherwise, it would have all cancelled itself out. So how could this happen? Well, there must have been more matter to start with, of course. And scientists have been searching for ways that this could have come about. And this week, they have found one more mechanism, which accounts for a few percent of the effect. but that does still mean there is a big exciting gap in our knowledge. And to take a look at the new paper for us, out this week in Nature, here is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, Ben Alenak.

20:05We're made of matter and not anything else and in the theories of particle physics that's weird. We'd think that the matter and the antimatter, they get produced in equal quantities in the early universe and they should just annihilate and produce radiation. So really we should be made out of radiation. But how do we know that they were made in equal amounts in the early universe? That's an assumption, isn't it? There's a lot of theory and observation that goes into it. So we know from measuring the afterglobe, the Big Bang, what was going on. We know there was a hot gaseous plasma and we know how they behave.

20:40So if it's very hot, it's going to be producing matter and antimatter like they do in collisions at CERN, like cosmic rays do. So you can measure these collisions and see how often matter is produced and antimatter and so on. And you see that it would be with equal rates. You constrain it. The question then is, well, where has it all gone? Why are we made of matter? Where has that antimatter vanished to? We know the answer to that. Nearly all of it has turned into photons, actually, particles of light. But the weird thing is, all of the antimatter and the matter almost has cancelled itself out and turned into the afterglow of the Big Bang.

21:17All but one in 10 billion particles has annihilated into photons. but the one that's left was matter as opposed to antimatter out of that 10 billion on average. So there's some slight mismatch in the way these interactions work between matter and antimatter and that's what's not fully understood in the theory at the moment. There isn't enough of this mismatch predicted by the standard model of particle physics. Why should there be a mismatch at all though Ben? Why shouldn't we make equal amounts of matter and antimatter? and as you say then all just turn into radiation why is there a disparity in the first place?

21:55We don't know the answer to that really I mean that the theory can describe it if you have three families of matter particles which we do and they have complex masses so you know they involve these imaginary numbers the square root of minus one so you describe it in this way then you can get a little mismatch in some of the interactions it's actually weak nuclear interactions that have this mismatch. In these interactions you can favour one over the other a bit but actually with the measurements that we've done with these weak interactions there's not enough and in fact we should have nearly still nearly cancelled it all out so this is pointing to new physics you know there must be something new something wrong with the theory something missing that provides this mismatch.

22:41And how are the scientists at CERN trying to probe that? They produce particles which then decay in two different ways into matter the matter particles and some anti-matter particles and the exact opposite so actually this recent measurement is lambda b baryons they're called decay into a proton a certain k on a couple of pions all right but you compare that with the rate that they decay into an anti-proton the anti-k on and the couple of pions and see if there's any difference and so if you see a difference you're measuring this mismatch in the actual interactions of the particles themselves and so you can try and help to constrain what's going on.

23:23Do they see an asymmetry then when they do this? Do they see an asymmetry and do they see an asymmetry which is a closer fit with what we observe when we look at the universe and relate that to the theories that account for why we're here? With the recent measurement they see a few percent asymmetry and that isn't enough information to to tell actually whether there's enough difference between matter and antimatter they've also measured it previously in other types of particle and yeah with the current theory it's nowhere near enough it doesn't give you enough difference between matter and antimatter to explain why we're made of matter and not photons.

24:03Is it fair to say then that they can add a few percent on to getting us closer to explaining the asymmetry that we observe but there's still a gap then there's still something that we can't explain? So the few percent is the experimental measurement in the in the decay but actually it's orders of magnitude with the amount of matter that's around in the universe so really there's got to be some new physics there's got to be some new forces and other particles which explain why there's such a big disparity because it's just not described mathematically within the theory that we currently have. What do people think might be going on?

24:43I mean there must be some ideas that we can then test. There are many ideas. There are proposals for heavier particles which decay and which differ a lot. So new heavier particles which are not in the standard model. I was sort of surprised when you just said that because I thought the whole point of the standard model was it's now complete we understand it all we have things like the Higgs boson in there we have the picture so you're saying the standard model isn't complete it's potentially wrong. Absolutely in fact it looks for example because of this problem that it's wrong and so that's why physicists like me are still very interested in looking for new particles and forces.

25:25So the classic way that you would explain this is with something called leptogenesis, where you invoke some heavy right-handed neutrinos, and they might decay in very asymmetric ways to matter and antimatter. And in fact, there are other reasons to suppose that they exist. The strict standard model says the neutrinos shouldn't have mass, therefore they shouldn't be able to oscillate into each other. So there are other measurements which indicate you know that the standard model is incomplete is it within scope of what we've got at the lhc and so on to try and probe this or we do we need a bigger boat as they say in jaws if you're lucky the lhc can probe it and discover whatever it is but there are many proposals which you wouldn't be able to do with the lhc because it's not powerful enough and in particular this leptogenesis idea that's unlikely to be able to be probed by the lhc because the particles involved would be predicted to be just too heavy.

26:21There are proposals to build yet more energetic colliders. That's one way. Cosmic rays actually are an interesting source because they come in with very high energies. I mean, you get collisions at energies of like, you know, a million times higher than the Large Hadron Collider. But that might be one way, for example. So nature may have provided us with the space equivalent of the LHC to see sufficiently powerful particle collisions that can answer those sorts of questions. How intriguing is that? Cambridge University's Ben Alenak there. The comedian Tommy Cooper's legendary catchphrase, just like that, encapsulates his effortless comic timing.

26:59But was this comedian's sense of humour written into his DNA? A study conducted in Cooper's native Wales involving over a thousand twins has cast doubt on any strong genetic link to comic talent though. Instead, the evidence suggests that whether someone is funny or not is probably shaped more by their environment and life experiences. Here is Gil Greengross at Aberystwyth University to tell us more about it. There's a lot of research about the genetic basis of many cognitive abilities, such as creativity and intelligence. And basically, most psychological traits has at least a partial genetic basis.