Embryos made from skin cells, and remembering Jane Goodall

15:17Jane Goodall:She even gave names to the birds and creatures she encountered, a habit that would follow her throughout her life. As a child, she dreamed of distant lands and exotic animals, sometimes pretending to be Tarzan swinging through the trees. Later on, she would joke that Tarzan had married the wrong Jane. Jane's passion for animals stayed with her throughout adolescence. She famously taught herself to read the naturalist books she borrowed from the library and was determined to one day travel to Africa. Her family encouraged her curiosity, even though such ambitions were unusual for a young woman at that time.

15:50Jane Goodall:She went on to study at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s, earning a PhD in ethology, a rare accomplishment for someone with no formal university science background. Her early work laid the foundation for her fascination with chimpanzees, the creatures that would define her life's work. In chimp society, and this is quite rare in a lot of the animal societies, any male, whether he's high-ranking, middle-ranking or low-ranking, even if he has a disability, he is able to sire an infant. And I think it is because of this ability of all the males with all their varied genes to sire infants that we find so much individuality.

16:32Jane Goodall:I mean, one chimp is as different from another chimp as one person is from another person. In 1960, Jane travelled to Tanzania to begin her landmark study of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park. She was given the unprecedented opportunity to observe the chimps in their natural environment. Over decades, she revealed intelligence, emotion and social complexities such as tool use that were behaviours previously believed to be solely human. Her work challenged the long-held scientific assumptions and inspired millions around the world. Catherine Hobater, a primatologist at the University of St Andrews, recalled how profoundly Jane inspired her own career.

17:11Jane Goodall:What Jane Goodall meant to me was this idea that you could be a scientist and a good scientist at that without necessarily having to become this idea of a sort of cold, objective observer of other individuals. that actually if you cared about the individuals that you were spending time with, if you got to know them, if you got to know them as having personalities, that that actually meant that you as a scientist could ask deeper, richer, more interesting questions about their world. And it was part of the goal of her mentor, Louis Leakey, when he sent her out there, was to send out somebody with a fresh perspective, to send out somebody who didn't have formal academic scientific training, because you would potentially be going in with an open mind.

18:00Jane Goodall:And it's not to say, you know, you have to be an incredibly good observer to see the details of behavior, you have to just have patience by the bucket load. And that doesn't necessarily have to do with thinking about hypotheses and predictions and scientific training. And actually, it, you know, she herself also talked about the fact that that lack of a scientific, a formal scientific background, really paid off in terms of her ability to see with a fresh perspective. And then she had just that incredible ability to share and connect everybody else to what she saw. Beyond her research, Jane founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, dedicated to protecting endangered species and promoting environmental education worldwide.

18:44Jane Goodall:Jane Goodall's life was one of adventure and discovery. Through persistence and curiosity, she became a leading figure in primatology and a powerful voice for conservation. From her childhood in London to her fieldwork in Tanzania, her story shows how determination can help reshape our understanding of the natural world. If she was here and she was around listening to all of this today, she would be the first person to say, don't be sad. What are you all doing talking about me and my legacy? There is a million things out there to do and we just really need to be cracking on with them to make sure that we're protecting chimpanzees.

19:21Jane Goodall:And I think that sense of urgency, that sense of the fact that every single person can do something, even if it's small, everything adds up, that sense of purpose that she was able to share with that positive message, that's the inspirational legacy she leaves behind. And that's what she would want us all to be doing, would be to make sure that we are not the last generation who will be having the privilege as she did to live alongside wild chimpanzees. She was an inspiration to me and played no small part in my decision to pursue a career in zoology and conservation. And one quote of hers that continues to resonate with me is this.

19:56Jane Goodall:When you study animals in the wild, you realise how they live and understand the interconnection of everything and how every little species has a role to play. So you understand that everything is interconnected on this planet. So to save everything else would be to save ourselves too. Thank you, Jane.

20:15Philippa Garrett:will tingle and cat hobata on the life and legacy of jane goodall who has died she was 91 strange flashes of light colloquially called willow the wisp that have been documented over the centuries including even by shakespeare usually over marshy ground and wetlands may finally have a scientific explanation researchers at stanford led by richard zare have found that when tiny methane bubbles burst through the surface of water, they accumulate a charge, because water contains charged particles called ions, and different numbers of positive and negative charges in some of the bubbles can produce a voltage between them, which can sometimes become sufficiently large to produce sparks of micro-lightning.

21:01Philippa Garrett:And this might just be enough to ignite the gas and produce those legendary blue flashes that people have seen.

21:08Jane Goodall:It's something called ignis fatuus, which I guess is Latin for foolish flame. It's a luminous phenomenon witnessed over the centuries by observers around the world. People have attributed all types of things to it, often pretty scary. Lost souls, babies that haven't been baptized who have died, all types of folklore. It was reported in the literature by the Chinese long ago. William Shakespeare refers to it in Henry IV. Even Charlotte Bronte has it in Jane Eyre, this Ignis Fatuis, or Will of the Wisp, as it's often called.

21:46Philippa Garrett:Folklore aside, the thinkers of the day, what did they speculate might be causing it?

21:52Jane Goodall:Many speculations, great mystery. Pretty clear, though, that it has to be some type of gas that's burning. People think it's related to cemeteries and swamps. and places that have standing water in which there can be organic decay. You get bubbles that are about two-thirds methane, and of course natural gas is methane.

22:18Philippa Garrett:So you're saying that people thought methane could be coming up, something's igniting it, and it's producing a flash of light, and that's what people are seeing.

22:25Jane Goodall:Right. A British chemist by the name of Mills thought, well, maybe it's really phosphine. that's a pH 3 from phosphorus decay that sets it off. And people work to try to make that happen. Indeed, some people have succeeded in getting some mixture of phosphine and methane to combust. But generally, the type of flame that leads to is green, and people really see much more a bluish light. People have also said, well, maybe it's something else. A man by the name of Volta, for which the Volt is named, said he thought it was lightning. I actually think Volta was right, but for reasons he didn't understand.

23:06Jane Goodall:But I'm thinking myself that it is lightning.

23:10Philippa Garrett:So go on then, you reckon you've cracked this or you've got a plausible explanation?

23:14Jane Goodall:I really think I have a very, yes, my group thinks that it has an understanding of how this can happen. We think it's due to something that is a small electrical discharge in the gas surrounding bubbles as they burst when they come out of water. This is because of the charged ions that you find in water, which causes the droplets themselves to become charged. And then when oppositely charged droplets come close together, bang, you have a bolt of micro lightning.

23:46Philippa Garrett:My goodness, so you're arguing that bubbles of gas coming up through a body of water will produce sparks, essentially, microscopic sparks, miniature lightning bolts.

23:57Jane Goodall:That's right. And let me tell you how paradoxical this is. Everybody knows that we use water to put out fire. And now I'm telling you, wait, water droplets or gas bubbles in water can make fire.

24:13Philippa Garrett:Why should the droplets of water or gas be charged in that way though? Just explain that for me.

24:19Jane Goodall:It is because water itself, it's neutral but it's made of ions, negative ions and positive ions. The positive ions are called hydronium ions, H plus surrounded with water. The negative ions are called hydroxide, it's OH minus and the result is when little droplets come off the electrons and the OH - go to the smaller ones much more readily. They're much more mobile. That leads to the droplets themselves being charged.

24:47Philippa Garrett:So you generate some bubbles in water. You're going to have some small ones and some bigger ones. There's going to be a disequilibrium in the charges. So you're going to have a net positive on some and a net negative on others. They're going to issue from the body of the water. And because of that charge difference, you've got an electric field there and electrons are going to jump and give us a spark. so it can effectively water can set fire to itself effectively well set fire to a gas that

25:13Jane Goodall:burns water doesn't burn water's already oxidized hydrogen no i was being facetious but that's

25:18Philippa Garrett:amazing so putting all that together then if we've got bubbles of methane coming up through the water and your theory is right then the bubbles of methane should end up doing the same thing they will produce a spark and they'll auto detonate agreed we've actually seen this by

25:33Jane Goodall:bubbling hydrogen h2 through water and again we see light does it do it at the surface as the bubbles have got to physically escape it's not happening inside the water it's happening it's starting at the surface and then gases above it so it triggers the process can you do it with

25:50Philippa Garrett:methane though so if the if the marsh gas theory is right it should be right now we see light

25:56Jane Goodall:Right.

25:57Philippa Garrett:That nails it then, doesn't it? Is this laid to rest the myth?

26:01Jane Goodall:It is a mechanism for igniting methane. It may not be the only thing that makes methane ever glow, but I mean, I think it's majorly what's happening.

26:10Philippa Garrett:Now, it's wonderful, obviously, to look at a myth that's maybe a thousand years old or so and lay that to rest. But this is amazing chemistry and physics. There must be applications and other things we can explain with this. There are.

26:24Jane Goodall:We think there are. And, you know, this stuff, will-o'-the-wisp, you might say, well, that's not serious. But I'll tell you what's much more serious is I believe it can be used to clean up greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We're actually using this, for example, to remove methane from the air and turn it into methanol. That could be of value because methane is about 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We can also turn carbon dioxide into formic acid and things like this. So there may be a way of actually helping us reverse global warming through this.

27:02Philippa Garrett:Absolutely remarkable and fantastic to hear how pursuit of an ancient legend might lead to a solution to a very modern problem. Richard's there there. He's at Stanford University and that work was just published in PNAS. Well now it's time for question of the week and James Titco has been homing in on the answer to this one from Bavesh, voiced by a member of our team.

27:23Jane Goodall:How do guided missiles reach their targets? Thanks, Bavesh. There are many different types of guided weapon geared towards hitting different kinds of targets. We'll look at a couple of them today. Two of the big considerations for the missile of choice is the range that you need to fly to hit a target and whether it's moving. Let's start with a large stationary target, a military base, say. Because it's not moving, you generally don't worry about having sensors to track the target embedded in the missile. Instead, the missile might use an inertial navigation system. Here to explain is Dr David Galvao-Wall, head of the Air Platforms and Weapons Group at Cranfield University.

28:09Jane Goodall:So you provide the missile with a coordinate in space where it needs to fly prior to the launch of the system, and it will navigate itself in that direction. You might program the missile with GPS coordinates and use a GPS chip to provide positional information, or you might use accelerometers and gyroscopes, which are sensors on board the missile, to determine where in the flight it is. So there are lots of classes of both accelerometers and gyroscopes. The simplest forms are mechanical systems that are operated using some kind of mass inside them that moves on the basis of the motion of the vehicle.

28:43Jane Goodall:And we can use various instrumentation around those masses to detect what the relative motion between the mass and the overall system is. And this allows us to determine how it's rotating or how it's moving in a linear fashion. Inertial navigation systems therefore work on the same principle as the human vestibular system. This is the anatomy located in our inner ear that's responsible for our balance and spatial orientation. If you were sitting blindfolded in a car, it's what allows you to feel which way the vehicle is turning, or whether you're speeding up or slowing down. Modern inertial navigation systems allow some missiles to travel hundreds of kilometres to reach targets just a few metres across.

29:26Jane Goodall:This is all with pre-programmed instructions, making it harder for the target to know what's coming. As mentioned though, this works best for a target that isn't moving. If we're looking at attacking a moving target, we have to track the motion of that target relative to the missile as it's travelling. There's a couple of ways you might do that. You can either use something called remote guidance, where you have an off-missile sensor, which detects the direction to the target and the direction to the missile simultaneously, and then calculates steering instructions, so left, right, up and down, to try and align those two bearings.

30:02Jane Goodall:If you can align those two bearings and the missile is flying towards the target, it'll be on an intercept trajectory. So that's one way you can do it. The other is something called homing guidance, where you embed target tracking sensors in the nose of the missile and they look for the target themselves. Generally this is achieved with infrared or radar sensors and you're looking for radiation that's transmitted to the target and then reflected back, or radiation that's emitted directly from the target to determine where it is. The catch is, unlike with navigational guidance, our target might now be able to detect the light waves shown in its direction by the sensors.

30:43Jane Goodall:So lots of targets have various electronic and physical countermeasures. We also have things like stealth aircraft that are designed to either absorb radiation or to deflect it off in various random directions. Target systems that have countermeasures also often have sensors that will allow them to detect whether they're being targeted by various systems. So, for example, you may have a laser warning receiver or a radar warning receiver that detects those emissions. If it's an aircraft, for example, you'll be using radar anyway. You're likely to be able to detect radio waves that are incoming, as well as the ones that you're transmitting to look out for reflections.

31:20Jane Goodall:So, Bavesh, guided missiles find their targets using different methods. Some are pre-programmed to hit a certain spot and, using modern navigational guidance systems, require no further instructions to travel hundreds of miles. Or a range of sensors embedded within the missile or outside it could be deployed to guide a missile towards a moving target, but this gives the target the potential opportunity to detect the light waves shone in its direction. There are, of course, other ways modern missiles reach a target, and they often use complementary systems to mitigate the weaknesses of certain methods.

31:57Jane Goodall:But many thanks to Dr David Galvao-Wall, head of the Air Platforms and Weapons Group at Cranfield University, for helping walk us through some of the basics. Next time on Question of the Week.

32:10Chris Smith:Ian Madley from Stockport here.

32:13Jane Goodall:Urban heat dumps caused by density of heat sources are well known. Almost all of this heat is generated from fossil fuels. as we move to heat pumps particularly air source units which draw heat from the ambient air my question is will this impact the heat dome effect look forward to hearing about it and we very much look forward to getting back to you ian but if you have any thoughts on the potential

32:41Philippa Garrett:answer or a question of your own for us to put under our microscope in the meantime why not send it in to chris at thenakedscientist.com we also discuss all of these and the past questions over on our website at nakedscientist.com forward slash forum always worth a look that's all we have time for today but do tune in on tuesday when we're going to be looking at covid and immunity now anecdotally some are saying they are constantly ill with something these days and they point to covid suppression measures like lockdowns as having led to an immunity debt that is now leaving us all open to infection again.

33:17Philippa Garrett:Others argue the virus has done something much more maligned to our immune systems and left us vulnerable. But which is it? Well, next time we'll take a look and review where we are with long COVID as well. The Naked Scientist is supported by Rolls-Royce. Thanks to all of you who continue to help us with our production costs. And if you'd like to make a donation to support the programme, we really appreciate that. And you can do it safely and securely at nakedscientist.com forward slash donate. In the meantime, from me, Chris Smith, and from all of us here at the Naked Scientist team, thanks for listening, and until Tuesday, goodbye.