Energy drinks curb, and biting back against beetles

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1:07Welcome. Welcome. This is the show where we bring you science. What that essentially means is... Discovery is... Advances. Questions. Research. Technology. Unbelievable. Without further ado, this is The Naked Scientist. Hello, welcome to The Naked Scientist podcast, the programme that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers from the worlds of science, technology and medicine. I'm Chris Smith. Coming up this week, a new test to detect Alzheimer's disease long before symptoms first appear. The study showing Earth can sequester only a tenth of the carbon that we thought it could and how drones, traps and sniffer dogs are protecting the UK's timber industry from beetle attack.

1:57We begin this week with plans to ban under-16s in England from buying high-caffeine energy drinks. Health ministers say products like Red Bull and Monster fuel obesity, disrupt sleep and make it harder for children to concentrate in school. Some countries have already gone down this path, while others, like Australia, are watching closely and will probably follow. If a new law is passed, shops, cafes and even online retailers will no longer be permitted to sell these drinks to younger teenagers. It's a move that could affect thousands of young people and the aim is to tackle obesity head on. Amidia Lake is a professor of public health nutrition at Teesside University.

2:38She's also part of a research centre called FUSE, a group of universities that examines issues around public health. An energy drink is different to a regular soft drink because it contains caffeine and the threshold is more than 150 milligrams of caffeine per litre. What does that mean though? Because Coca-Cola, Pepsi, they've got caffeine in them, haven't they? A cup of coffee might contain 80 milligrams of caffeine in a cup of coffee. A cup of tea, about 50 milligrams of caffeine. A cup of cola, 30 to 40 milligrams of caffeine. And then energy drinks, we are looking at those bigger cans, we're looking at 160 to 200 and sometimes even higher milligrams within that one can.

3:27So those larger cans, that is about two espressos worth of coffee in a can. And the calories, how many calories are in a can of these energy drinks? Okay, so if we think about one of the larger cans, like Rockstar Monster, they have around 230, 240 calories. So similar to cans of pop because they've got sugar in them. Who is drinking them? These drinks have been one of the fastest growing sectors of the soft drink market, and that is globally. So this is a global issue and it's a global story. These are global companies and this is a big proportion of their global sales. About one third of 13 to 16 year olds are having them once or more a week.

4:18Also 11 and 12 year olds. So we know it's happening in younger children as well. But occasionally during the week is arguably much less bad than if someone's got a regular habit. So is there evidence that there is extreme intake or that there's a rising trend towards more consumption? There is evidence globally around rising trends. There's evidence internationally. For example, I've just looked at data from Finland where it has been increasing year on year and also the gender gap that there once was between boys and girls has completely narrowed, which is really interesting and is down to the marketing and advertising of these drinks.

5:01Given the fact that it is the fastest growing sector, the concern globally is that this is particularly in younger age groups and in under 12s, so looking at 10, 11 year olds. And what sorts of health harms might be arising from this rising trend of use? We have reviewed the international evidence and we have found that there has been physical health outcomes associated with them. And that is what you might expect, stomachache, headaches, dental health impacts, cardiac issues, obesity in relation to increased calorie intake. and then in terms of the mental health factors associated with the intake of them it is a whole range of issues through anxiety, increased stress, increase in depressive symptoms and also the caffeine in these drinks impacts sleep which is hugely important when it comes to well every age group but particularly adolescents and that growing brain and that growing body.

6:12Do you think it's a symptom of lifestyle in general and other pressures on young people rather than just the prima facie cause here? Because a colleague of mine in Australia said that what she's seeing there is increasing numbers of young people who are staying up half the night playing computer games, socialising online, playing with smartphones so they don't rest properly, they feel sleepy the next day don't have time for breakfast so on their way to school they snag down a couple of tins of this stuff it a wakes them up gives them a bit of energy because it's got calories in it then they crash at school later having been up half the night can't concentrate but then come the evening having slept it off they feel perkier again so they rinse and repeat and it's a vicious cycle it is absolutely and our qualitative evidence actually supports that.

7:02So we know that that is what is happening, whether or not, you know, the energy drinks are at the crux of this and putting a sales restriction in place isn't going to magic wand that away. But there is a lot to be discussed around, for example, devices in bedrooms and just the importance of sleep. But using caffeine as a means of combating that sleep deprivation, Adults do it, but now we're seeing younger and younger children do it. And there is a strong link between these drinks and computer gaming culture. How practical is it to intervene in the way that the government are proposing to, though?

7:43Because we've seen a number of things like sugar taxes and junk food interventions and healthy eating legislation's got more bits of policy around it than almost any other sector of science or health science. and it clearly doesn't work very well because of rising trends in terms of obesity, for example. So do you think that regulating these drinks in this way is A, practical and B, going to translate into any particular benefit? So if we go back to your question about policy, my colleague Dolly Van Toliken and her PhD explored how many pieces of obesity legislation we'd had in the last 30 years.

8:21And there was nearly 700. And had it curbed obesity? No. So that's an interesting point around, you know, using things like the sugar drinks levy that has been vastly successful. And we do have some excellent evaluation of that. I think in this case, a sales restriction on energy drinks. First of all, you know, we are not we are not with the sugar tax. The UK was was a pioneer with this. we're not a pioneer. Latvia, Lithuania, Poland already have restrictions in place, and those are for under 18s. Norway, it comes into place in January, that's for under 16s. So we're seeing a trend, there's a global trend in terms of restricting by age.

9:12We already restrict by age for many other things. So, you know, cigarettes, alcohol. In fact, we restrict by age for lots of things to do with children that don't actually have a scientific evidence base. They can't go in and buy aerosols or knives or crossbows or, you know, fairly sensible things, but yet they can walk in and buy a can that contains the equivalent of two shots of espresso. So worrying, isn't it? Amelia Lake there at Teesside University. Alzheimer's disease is a progressive brain condition that slowly erodes memory and thinking. It often creeps up on people unnoticed for up to 20 years.

9:54But by the time symptoms do appear, treatments can usually do little other than slow the decline and by a modest amount of that. But researchers in Bath and Bristol believe they might have found a way to detect Alzheimer's disease much earlier, which means we could commence treatments much earlier, which might boost their impact. Their three-minute brainwave test can spot memory problems in people with mild cognitive impairment, a condition that often precedes Alzheimer's. The study's been led by cognitive neuroscientist George Stottart from the University of Bath. Currently, we have to wait for people to turn up at their doctors and say to the doctor that they think something's up.

10:33Now, unfortunately, that can take a very long time to reach that tipping point for people. So often it's taken a crisis to occur in that person's life that perhaps they found that they can't do their job anymore or they have got lost when they've left the house. The problem with that, from a medical point of view, is by the time that's happening, the disease has already done an awful lot of damage to that person's brain. And it's really too late to start doing anything about that disease. And so we want to be able to pick up that disease much, much earlier. So we've developed a new test, which is called Fastball.

11:14And it's a very quick three minute test that's entirely passive. So what that means is the participant doesn't have to do anything. All we ask them to do is watch a screen. And on that screen, we play some images very rapidly, three images per second. So it's quite quick. And what we do is we repeat some of those images from time to time. Now, whilst they're watching these images, they wear a special cap which measures their brain activity. It's called an EEG cap. And we can measure their brainwaves with that cap. Now, what happens when one of those images repeats is the brain has a little recognition signal that it elicits.

11:58And we can detect that with the EEG cap. So we use the EEG cap to measure people's recognition memory. And by doing that, what we've been able to show in our experiments is that people with Alzheimer's disease show really reduced recognition memory and in our paper that's just come out recently we've shown that this memory is also reduced in people at very high risk of Alzheimer's disease so people who don't yet have a diagnosis but are quite likely to get one in the next few years. How specific is it for Alzheimer's disease? So if I for instance had some other reason why I had a memory deficit or some other chronic condition that was eroding memory how specific is your test to say yes chris has got alzheimer's versus chris has some other memory deficit that's a really good question and it's one we're in the middle of answering now we don't have the answer to it yet but we are in the middle of two very large scale studies we're recruiting patients from neurology clinics with all sorts of different neurological problems and that will give us exactly those accuracy numbers so that we can tell whether it's sensitive and specific to Alzheimer's disease or whether it's just a general marker of memory impairment.

13:17Now my prediction, my hope, is that it is specific to Alzheimer's disease and the reason I think it will be is because we built this test from the bottom up. The starting point was to identify which area of the brain is impacted very early on in Alzheimer's disease. And it's a little part of the brain buried deep in the middle of the brain called the perirhinal cortex. And so we built the task to rely very heavily on that brain area. And how sensitive is it? So in other words, if I came to you with some undetectable clinical features to me, I don't think there's anything wrong with me. How good are you with this test at telling me I'm going to get Alzheimer's disease?

14:01and how much lead time can you bring with this? We don't know how accurate it would be in the scenario you've described because what you're describing there is a screening tool, picking up impairment in people without any symptoms at all. It takes a long time to run studies like that because you have to test people and then you have to wait 10 or 20 years for them to develop the disease. And you have to test enough people in the first place that enough people go on to develop that disease. so we don't have the answer for that yet but our two large studies will tell us how accurate and sensitive we are at detecting established Alzheimer's disease but also in detecting Alzheimer's disease in those at risk so those with what we call mild cognitive impairment or and there's another group called subjective cognitive impairment and these are people who tell say to their doctor they're having problems with their memory but when they come and do the traditional pen and paper tests they score fine so they're an important group to look at as well.

15:03And when you test these people how good is your test at hitting the nail on the head so in other words your test agrees with a neurologist or an elderly care expert how often? We had a paper in 2021 which had our Alzheimer's classification accuracy and that showed that we could get up to about 90-92 % accuracy in telling whether someone had Alzheimer's disease versus a healthy older adult. So that's good accuracy and sensitivity, but clinically that's not much use because those patients had already been diagnosed. So we want to be more accurate than that earlier on. To do that, we need to test, as I mentioned before, large numbers of people, a proportion of whom then go on to develop Alzheimer's disease.

15:51So we will learn that accuracy number from our current study in a few years time as we follow them up. Is the longer term ambition here that if you can get this giving you a really long lead time with the drugs that we foresee coming we've only really tested those on people with already manifest Alzheimer's problems and got limited benefits from them slowing down the condition a bit haven't we people are saying well if we could intervene earlier maybe the gains would be bigger absolutely earlier diagnosis brings so many benefits i mean it brings benefits potential benefits for the patient given greater certainty given them the opportunity to make lifestyle interventions modifications which has been shown to slow disease progress but also as you say the drug development and the ability to use disease modifying therapies earlier and also who knows how that might improve and help the actual drug development itself so not only will the drugs that we have work better but could it be that we actually improve the development of those drugs in the first place by doing better stratification of patients into clinical trials and better characterization of patients in these clinical trials.

17:07George Stottart he's at the University of Bath and that study has just come out in brain communications.

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18:38Sponsored by Epidemic Sound. Perfect music for audio and video productions. This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me, Chris Smith. Still to come, why the UK is using drones, traps and sniffer dogs to target a beetle. Before that though, climate scientists say that Earth may be able to sequester far less carbon than current climate models assume. The findings which have been published in Nature suggest our planet's long-term carbon storage capacity is realistically maybe only a tenth of what we thought we might be able to lay our hands on. Now this matters because if part of our strategy to combat climate change ends up relying on sequestering at least a proportion of the carbon dioxide we emit, that rescue package just shrank by 90%.

19:22Yuri Rogel authored the study. He's at Imperial College London. So we know that climate change is happening and we know very well what we need to do to stop that from becoming worse. And that is we need to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Now, there is a variety of ways in which we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that we emit. The most important way is, of course, to stop producing carbon dioxide by stop burning fossil fuels. But another additional way of doing this is to capture CO2, carbon dioxide, and to pump it underground. And the estimates of how much of that carbon dioxide we could be pumping underground until recently were really enormous.

20:12Tens of thousands of billion tons of carbon dioxide. and what we are trying to do with this study is to see whether all of this technical potential is actually practically available if we take into account some aspects like where it could be risky or where it would be undesirable to actually be pumping co2 underground so you're saying ignoring the practicalities for a minute assuming we could do this and we could capture carbon dioxide and we wanted to and we were going to put it underground how much could we really put underground compared to what people think we could is sort of where you were coming from exactly so we very much rely on what people have done before so what we do is not starting from a fundamentally different point we start from this technical potential of how much space there is underground in our Earth's crust to store carbon dioxide.

21:09But then we start removing those areas where we think the risk is too high. For example, we start removing those areas that are too close to where people live. Because pumping things on the ground means that there is a risk that this carbon dioxide starts to seep into the groundwater and so on. We also exclude areas that are currently protected. We exclude areas that are too deep or areas that are too deep in the ocean Or equally, we look at areas that maybe might be managed by indigenous groups and where we therefore do not want to disturb the nature or the environment. And if we start doing that, we start to see that lots of the technical, physical potential that is available starts to be excluded.

21:54And we ended up with an estimate that is significantly smaller than the hypothetical global estimate for storage that would be available. What does your number look like then? And how does it compare with what we thought we had at our disposal? The number is still big, 1 ,460 billion tonnes of CO2. So just to put this in context, right now, on an annual basis, our entire global economy is emitting 40 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. It would take more than 30 years of current global emissions to reach this entire 1 ,400 billion tonnes. The important thing, however, is that this is almost a factor 10 smaller than the estimates, than our starting estimate.

22:41That does not take into account these different risk factors or areas where we would not necessarily want to be pumping CO2 in the ground. Another way of looking at it is to say, well, how much climate change in terms of temperature escalation does that offset and for how long? Yeah, that's right. So every ton that we emit in the atmosphere adds to global warming. We also understand that if we remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then permanently store it somewhere so that it doesn't enter the air anymore, then global warming will be reversing. There are some uncertainties around this, but to first order, we understand that this will happen.

23:24And so we can estimate what removing 1 ,460 billion tons of carbon dioxide means in terms of reversing global warming. Now, if we would use that space that we have calculated exclusively to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, this would add up as a central estimate to roughly 0.7 degrees of warming that can be reversed. This estimate is an absolute ceiling for what this storage space can deliver, because it assumes that every ton stored is indeed removed from the atmosphere and is not used to, for example, capture carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that are still being burned, but instead of being released into the atmosphere, are then stored again underground.

24:08And it also assumes that while we are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, there are no other activities ongoing that still continue to emit carbon dioxide in atmosphere so the 0.7 degrees the central estimate is an absolute ceiling and it's not very much is it it's quite a low ceiling when you think that we think with what we've already done we've well and truly breached that so we couldn't even reverse what we've already done if we use all of what you think is there at our fingertips and sequester that carbon back into the ground? Currently we are roughly at 1.4 degrees of global warming.

24:48We would currently not have kind of the safe storage space to fully reverse this. We would have roughly the space to maximum reverse half of this. I do want to highlight here that our estimate really provides today's estimate and I would believe that if we really start trying, we will find ways to improve this. But that doesn't mean that today we need to kind of trust that we will be able to remove more. So that's why we call this a prudent limit. We say this is the amount that you should count with today until proven otherwise. Yuri Rogel, that study just came out in Nature. Across Europe, bark beetles have left a trail of destruction.

25:32They attack and compromise spruce trees, which they've killed by the million. Now these tiny creatures are increasingly invading the UK too, arriving, as it turns out, across the channel by air under their own steam. But scientists are racing to try and stop them, and armed with drones, traps and now even sniffer dogs, they're taking the fight directly to the beetles. Here's Max Blake, who's head of tree health at Forest Research. Spruce really underpins our forest industry. Conifers and spruce in particular grow far better in our conditions to produce more valuable wood than any other trees. They are largely free from significant pests and diseases.

26:12But the risk that we're looking at here, Ipsotipographus, is the most significant pest in Eurasia of spruce species. So it feeds on a few different species like Siberian spruce, a bunch of different species in Japan and China. Yeah. And when you say it feeds on them? So a male will begin to bore into the bark, and it'll make a little nuptial chamber, attract a female. The female will come in and then begin to make what we call a maternal gallery, which will go vertically up the tree. And then usually if the male's lucky, he'll attract a second female, and she'll go down the tree. And what you end up with is two very straight tunnels going up the tree, and the female will lay eggs in either side of this tunnel.

26:56And that's where the larvae come from. And the larvae will begin to eat, radiating out from that. So you get this remarkable pattern coming out from these galleries. And what they're feeding on is tissues in the tree which transport nutrients up and down from the roots to the leaves and vice versa. Do they compromise the tree then? So once they start doing this, does this kill the tree, just stunt the tree? What's the impact? They will eventually kill the tree. So when there's enough of these galleries produced by enough beetles, they'll girdle all of these tissues. And it's kind of like having all of your blood vessels suddenly blocked up.

27:33Now, typically, Ips doesn't really do that. So what it normally does is it feeds on storm-damaged trees, trees that have been particularly drought-stressed, things like that. So trees that can't really defend themselves. Normally, that phloem network is very well defended because, of course, it has to be. This is the main thing that's keeping that tree alive. So they're able to flush those galleries with resins, which kill the beetles if they're healthy. But if they are weakened, then that's sort of when it can come in. So it was unprecedented for us when we found Ipsotopographus actually breeding here in the UK back at the end of 2018.

28:13We didn't know why it was there. We eventually realised, and this was one of those realisations where your gut almost gets ahead of the direct evidence, and we were certain that they were able to fly over the channel from outbreak populations in Belgium, France, and probably northern Germany. Does this mean all your fears are being realised and what can we do? Now you've identified that these guys can come by air, what will you be doing about it? The fact that they can go on these air channels and fly far further than we ever thought possible looks on the one hand to be very scary. We also know that we need to jump in and catch populations when they're very small to have a better chance of eradicating them.

28:57But that's difficult, isn't it? Because if they're small, they're hard to spot. so how can you find them how do you know where to center your attention they are remarkably hard to find so the exit holes and the entrance holes they produce on the trees are about three millimeters wide we've managed to find just single galleries by eye in entire woodlands just just made up of pure spruce which might be 10 or 20 hectares it takes an awful lot of very painstaking work on the ground to go and find these. But the fact of the matter is, is that as our surveillance has increased, we're also looking at trying to be as efficient and as quick as possible.

29:36And that's where adopting some new techniques takes place. So what do they look like, these new approaches? So we've been looking at the use of drones. That's quite obvious. So we use a lot of satellite data and a lot of helicopter photography. So we can go around and quickly photograph an area of spruce from the air. And we'll keep an eye on that over the years to see if there's storm damage or if there's any decline. But what helicopters struggle to do, obviously, because you don't particularly want to be flying a helicopter too close to any trees, is give us really sort of high resolution data, and in particular, looking beyond that to the ground floor.

30:10And that's where drones come in. So we're able to use drones to more quickly survey some of these areas. The other area that's got significant potential is using sniffer dogs. Sniffer dogs are fantastic trying to detect ips in timber stacks. So if you've ever been to a forest, someone's decided to fell part of the forest or thin it, you can have these huge timber stacks, which are themselves very dangerous. Of course, each log will weigh a couple of hundred kilos. You don't want people clambering over that to try and find small galleries. And also a lot of it is inaccessible, but it's not inaccessible to a dog's nose.