MI6 pushes cyber security, and WHO warns of fat jab shortage

0:01All engine running. Absolute genius. Get this. Welcome. 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 Scientist. Merry Christmas and welcome to The Naked Scientist podcast. This is the programme that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine with me, Chris Smith. And in this, our final news roundup of 2025, according to the new head of MI6, our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades.

0:39We'll hear why she's signalling a ramp up in cyber tech. Also, how COVID changed the beaks of birds in LA. And NASA's new space telescope that's earmarked for launch next year in 2026 is 100 Hubble space telescopes all rolled into one. We'll hear what it can do.

1:06The UK's new MI6 intelligence chief has used her first public speech to warn of the digital and technological challenges confronting the UK and its allies in the years ahead, saying, Our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades. Conflict is evolving and trust eroding. It's thought that Blaise Metrovelli, who previously led MI6's technology and innovation branch, she was literally James Bond's Q, is eager to bring more coders into the service to tackle cyber threats coming from abroad. Experts believe Metrovelli's speech will also signal a technological shift at the intelligence agency.

1:46We asked Michael Clarke, who's a defence analyst for Sky News, to take us through what she said. Very clear statement of the tasks that MI6 has in front of it. And the key takeaways were that intelligence is still about human intelligence. There are still agents. There are still people in the field doing the things that people always thought spies did. But that has to be backed up by 90 to 95 percent of working with new technologies. I mean, most of what the intelligence services derive is open source intelligence, things that are publicly available. The technique is to synthesize them into a picture.

2:28The five percent that you can only get by genuinely secret work, you can't do without. You need that five percent to be efficient. but it is only a small proportion of the total. And what she was also saying is that our adversaries are working in the electronic spectrum on the internet in ways that are deeply disturbing to our society and that we've got to actually get hold of that. She was very clear that the chief most urgent adversary is Russia. There are issues with China, she mentioned those more or less in passing, but ultimately what we see on a daily basis across Western Europe is Russian aggressive behaviour right up to the level of violence in warfare.

3:08So it's all sub-threshold. She said we live in a world now which is somewhere between peace and war, which is a very chilling message to come from somebody who's so well-placed to make that judgment. I think she used the phrase, Russia is exporting chaos, exploiting many of these same things that we rely on in order to be disruptive and therefore cause a problem for a country beyond just what physical weapons would do. Sometimes they attack us directly. Their government attacks or government agencies attack our systems, particularly in the defence and defence-related sectors. But also they inspire others to attack, just freelancers, and in particular they inspire others to engage in ransomware attacks.

3:51And ransomware has increased terrifically in the last two or three years. And the Russians can keep an arm's-length relationship and say it's nothing to do with us, these are just criminals, but we know that they actually facilitate what they do. They encourage criminals to attack. It breaks into systems, it creates chaos, it creates vulnerability. And we've seen attacks on the cooperative organisation, we've seen attacks on Marks and Spencers, the Jaguar Land Rover was the biggest ransomware attack and cyber attack that we've experienced. And that's had a quantifiable effect on the national economic performance of the united kingdom there was one line that i thought was very poignant because she said the algorithms flatter our biases and they fracture our public squares and as trust collapses so does our shared sense of truth one of the greatest losses that society can suffer what she's pointing to there is things like you and i cease to trust each other we drive a wedge between people in our own country by using social media algorithms and so on and exploiting people's innate biases to actually be disruptive.

4:55So you actually fragment a country's society as well as its infrastructure. Most people, particularly younger generation people, absorb their news through social media, which is all geared towards what they want to hear and what they want to take an interest in, and it doesn't trouble them with inconvenient facts or inconvenient stories that atomises society. Now, this is not a problem which the autocracies and the dictatorships have, because they control social media and they create a very consistent message. And in Russia, that message has been communicated now for the last 25 years. And that message has got harder and stronger and more consistent as the Russians have moved from, as it were, a flawed democracy to a dictatorship.

5:38And now they're moving to full totalitarianism. And they control the message that in free societies, we don't try nor should we try to control the central message. But we do somehow have to deal with this atomization of our own social fabric because it is very dangerous. And the Russians know just as well as all of our adversaries in the world know that liberal democracies can appear extremely weak because they find it difficult to create consensus until there is no other alternative but to unite to meet some sort of common challenge. And that point gets later and later in a democracy which is fractured inside its own social sphere.

6:20Why is Xi using this opportunity to say these things and push this up the public agenda? What are we being effectively prepared for? On a daily basis, the Russians are our adversary and they're trying to push us into a situation where we are blackmailed by them and frightened by what they do and what they say. That's the first point. And the second point that I think Xi and other ministers have been making is that we have to be more resilient. So we have to be more resilient against natural disasters like flooding and energy outages. And those natural disasters may be compounded by sabotage and hostile action by our adversaries, many of them driven by Russia.

6:58And we've got to be more socially resilient about that. It's no good panicking or complaining about it. And as our parents and our grandparents did, we find ways of getting on with it. So behind the scenes, having said that publicly, what will she be instructing people to do? What's she going to be investing in or where are they going to be pushing things to tool up effectively to head off these threats? She was head of Q Branch. It's not quite full of exploding pens and fast cars as in the films. But Q Branch is the branch that works on technology and innovation. And that's her particular strength.

7:33And that's one of the reasons why she's now director general of MI6. So a lot of it is to do with employing artificial intelligence, getting ahead of the algorithms, being able to penetrate other systems. And we're actually quite well ahead of that, at least in technology terms. And working with our partners through GCHQ, working with the United States, with the National Intelligence Agency, very, very close relationship between the NSA in America and GCHQ, which we hope is still as active as it used to be. and the natural relationship between our other intelligence arms, like defense intelligence and American Armed Services intelligence.

8:10So those relationships have to be strengthened. And, you know, there's a sort of a story that goes around MI6, almost like a parable. There's a big cocktail party in the top floor of MI6 where the Director General in the dining room where she gave her speech. And they're all there. And James Bond is there. And he's moving around with his Beretta in his shoulder holster and he's having drinks and chatting up the girls and so on. And the room is full of agents. And as the evening goes on, the room seems to get emptier and emptier. And eventually, James Bond realises he's on his own. He's the only one still there.

8:44And the answer to that conundrum is that he's an agent, but all the real agents are back in front of their computer screens. They're the ones who are doing the real work these days. Sobering times we're living in, aren't they? Michael Clarke there from Sky News. The World Health Organisation recently warned that there's a huge shortage of weight loss medication with fewer than one in ten people able to access drugs like Wagovi. The WHO added that around a billion people worldwide are currently living with obesity and there needs to be greatly improved access to the medication. Naveed Sattar is Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow and he's also the UK government's obesity czar.

9:25These are drugs that actually help weight loss. The way they do it is that they mimic a chemical that is released in our gut after we eat, which then signals to the brain to tell you you're going to start to feel full. And once you've eaten enough, you have enough of that signal and you feel satisfied with the amount you eat. What these drugs do is provide extra of that chemical to make you feel full sooner, so therefore you eat less, and therefore by eating less, you reduce weight. But they weren't invented in the first instance to treat obesity, were they? I mean, they started off as diabetes drugs.

9:59We have a range of drugs that we use for diabetes. And we thought that these drugs, which we call incretins, what they do is that they make the body make more insulin. And insulin is the key hormone that places sugar into the cells. So after a meal, you want to keep the sugar levels in the blood down. You make more insulin. These incretins help the body, the pancreas, make more insulin to get the sugar into the tissues faster to keep the sugar levels normal. that's why we developed them but then we discovered that if you put the doses a bit higher they also signal to the brain to make you feel full and therefore by doing that reduce your appetite you eat less and they also reduce weight and companies have now made a range of drugs that gives us a range of these chemicals that can help substantial weight loss of the order of somewhere between 10 to 30 percent weight loss which is remarkable thing is though if you and And I don't want to make light of it.

10:53If you only lose, say, 10 % of your body weight, but you're double the weight you should be, it's perfectly possible to still be very obese, but having lost a lot of weight and on one of these drugs. So are there not limits to what you can achieve with this anyway? The average weight losses will apply for the majority of individuals. Some people do lose even more weight, some obviously less. But what we're discovering is actually as we've got more of these new molecules coming, which is not just targeting one chemical but has a range of two or three chemicals that we're actually able to get more than 99 % of individuals to lose more than 5 % of weight.

11:28Stronger drugs do help people with higher levels of obesity but you're completely correct. The ideal target would be to prevent people getting to the levels of weight which are extreme leading to multiple issues for that individual and that's the target in the future. Who falls under the purview of these sorts of drugs then? Who is an appropriate person to use them? So effectively, the trials have been done in people who have what's known as a body mass index, which is a measure of obesity above a level of 30. And therefore, these drugs are licensed for all those individuals. But that actually amounts to a billion people around the world.

12:04And we simply don't have enough drugs for that number. In the NHS, for example, we are currently putting in very high thresholds. So a body mass index of 40 plus that individual has to have four conditions linked to their excess weight before we will even think about prescribing the drug. And the reason being these drugs are currently very expensive. So at the moment, whilst licensing allows to treat a billion people, we're probably only treating a tiny fraction of those individuals because of the cost of the drugs and also because access to the drugs is relatively limited at this moment in time.

12:35The UK National Health Service estimate they spend about£1 in every£10 that they spend on diabetes. It's a huge spend. It's between£10 and£20 billion a year is the estimate, isn't it? So is the argument then that although these drugs are very expensive, diabetes costs even more? So if we can stop someone becoming diabetic, this still adds up to good value for money? Now, that's a really important question, Chris. So the answer is probably not the case at the moment in time. The reason being the drugs are too expensive to be able to treat everyone with diabetes. If we treated everyone with diabetes, which is several million people, it would fast exceed the savings at this moment in time.

13:18So what's happening currently is we're treating the people at the highest risk where the net savings are matching the net costs or as close to. So we're getting value for money. as the cost of the drugs comes down we will widen the threshold to treat more people with diabetes and I guess in about 10 years time perhaps or maybe 15 when there's several more drugs in the market we might actually be using these drugs at the diagnosis at the onset of diabetes to delay and reverse the diabetes for a period of 5 to 10 15 years I think that's the direction we're traveling in it's just going to take a bit of time as the cost of the drugs needs to come down before we can achieve that level of care.

13:59It's interesting though isn't it because in this report where the World Health Organization are advocating for equitable access to these agents across that billion people around the world that we acknowledge at the moment are obese, set to double they're saying by 2030 might be two billion people who are obese, a quarter of the world population. Can the world possibly afford that? I know that they're saying there's not enough of the drugs around but surely the cost of that is so preclusive there must be other things that we could get even bigger health wins from if we spent the same amount of money than trying to give a quarter of the world's population fat jabs.

14:34I think that's a very fair point and actually many people do not want to see a world where two billion people are on these medications and we certainly don't want to see a world where we have to give these jabs to many children or to women who are in the reproductive age. That becomes a very difficult concept. The hope is when more people are on these drugs that that actually helps people suppress their appetites, that they buy less of the adverse foods. The quality of the food environment will gradually improve. So it means that in two or three generations' time, children are born in an environment which is much less obesogenic and without much conscious effort, children are able to lead healthy lives and not gain weight as fast.

15:16That is the hope. What an interesting conversation. Naveed Sattar there from the University of Glasgow. He's also the UK government's obesity czar tasked with tackling what many regard as the worst pandemic that humanity has ever confronted.

15:49Music 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. And still to come, we explore NASA's next generation telescope, said by some to be Hubble on steroids. So why, we want to know, is it still sitting in a warehouse? Before that, though, US scientists have made an extraordinary discovery that some birds that hatched in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have significantly different beak shapes and sizes compared to birds that hatched before or after the pandemic. But why?

16:24The study, which has been published in the journal PNAS, tracked dark-eyed juncos at the University of California Los Angeles campus before, during and after the lockdowns. Ellie Diamant is a biologist at Bard College. So these birds are dark-eyed juncos. They're a common sparrow that lives in North America. They have these blackheads, white bellies, and brown and gray backs. They typically like forests, but now we're seeing them in cities across the west coast of North America, starting in San Diego and then in Los Angeles and now going up the coast. So that led us to really wonder, how are they living in the city?

17:02Are they adapting to the city? Are they different? And is that similar across different cities? The present paper that caught my eye, how did that come about? So we were looking at these birds starting in 2017, 2018, trying to understand how they might differ from the local forests. So basically, do they have different shapes of their beaks? Do they behave in different ways? And is that the same in different Southern Californian cities? And then we were trying to connect that with their fitness. So basically how successful each of them are at producing chicks, at fledging those chicks, and how those traits might transfer in the next generation.

17:41So we'd been doing that since 2017, 2018. And then COVID hit, obviously, as we all know, in 2020, and the campus shut down. But we had also been aging these birds so we knew when they hatched. We knew when nests on campus were expected to hatch. And that was actually serendipitously two days after the lockdown started in Los Angeles. So we managed to get permits. We managed to get permissions to continue studying these birds over the course of the lockdown while campus was closed. And what did you find? We found really interesting results. we noticed that the birds in Los Angeles had these different shape bills than the ones in the local mountain forest areas, where they were shorter and stubbier, more square than their wildland neighbors, so to speak.

18:30So the ones in the woods typically have these longer, slender bills, but the ones in Los Angeles have these shorter bills. What we noticed was that during the lockdowns on campus or campus closure, by the second year of the closures, Birds that hatched that year as adults had these more wildland type bills. So they reverted to these longer, slender bills. And then after campus reopened, within two years, the shape of the birds that hatched after campus reopening had shorter, more urban-like bills again. So we saw this rapid change occur during the pandemic and then back after the pandemic to this urban type bill.

19:08Now is that because the urban population via some amazing mechanism very quickly changed the way they look or did the lack of people and people activity mean that the non-urban populations ventured into the towns more often? That's a good question. So we think that it's because the resources changed on campus or in Los Angeles, but specifically where we studied. So we noticed that other kinds of traits didn't really differ. We have been tracking their fear response, for example, so how afraid they are of people. And we noticed that that didn't change over the course of the pandemic. So urban birds tend to be less frightful of people.

19:50You can think about that as like it's an essential trait to live in a city because there are humans everywhere. But in forests, that's not the case. We noticed that during the pandemic, that trait did not change. And we've been tracking their aggression as well and their nesting behavior. And we didn't see a different kind of reversion back to wildland traits in those different traits, which suggests this is something that is occurring in Los Angeles at UCLA with these birds. We also, just to mention, the Los Angeles juncos and urban juncos tend to stay really in the same place, and the territories are quite filled up.

20:26So we see really a spreading of the population out rather than individuals coming in. We have had individuals come in and we can't really rule that out per se, but we're now doing genetic testing to try to rule it out. But we think that the pattern suggests selection in the population rather than individuals coming and changing what the average is. And do you know what that selection could be then? What could drive the birds to be more successful if they have this stubbier beak pattern when people are about compared to when we're not about? What we think is that it has to do with human waste. So in Los Angeles, we noticed the juncos like to hang out on trash bins.

21:05They are in patios. They're also in areas that are lawns and bushes and trees. But we do see them eating human waste as well as seeds and insects. And we think that what happened was during the pandemic, restaurants closed down. People weren't around. They weren't really littering around. And so some individuals that might be better at eating human waste, maybe they had these shorter bills, didn't do as well. And those differences accumulate. So those that are maybe better eating seeds would do better during the pandemic. They might be in better condition to breed and raise chicks in the next breeding season.

21:44So one thing that we noticed, for example, is that after the pandemic ended, the first breeding season, we saw those differences persist. So the birds that hatched just after the pandemic had those more wildland type bills, which might reflect that the parents are really the ones that are more successful or at least successful over the course of the year. So we really think it has to do with trash and it has to do with these accumulated differences over the previous year to breeding. Given that this emerged so quickly, do you think there's something special about the ability of the birds to adapt this bit of their anatomy and the genetic system that underpins that so that they can adapt to environments really quickly, because that would be really advantageous.

22:31And hence that bit of the bird changed, but other bits didn't so much. So there are a number of different birds that we've seen adapt and adjust to human supplementation, whether it's feeding, whether it's urbanization, and see their bills change as well. And juncos specifically, we just see a lot of variation across the species, across populations. So they might be particularly suited because they have so much variation to adapt rather rapidly. So not all of the juncos, for example, in Los Angeles right now have these short, stubby bills. It's just that the average in the population is more short and stubby.

23:04But we do see that there is variation and that might allow them to change more rapidly and to adapt as well. Absolutely fascinating. That was Ellie Diamant. And there are some great photos of the birds that Ellie studied on our website. if you'd like to see what she sent us, then head over to nakedscientist.com forward slash podcast and you can check them out. Now here's something to look forward to in the year ahead. NASA is finally hoping to get a new space telescope off the ground. Named after astronomer and former NASA chief of astronomy Nancy Grace Roman, it's hailed as the next generation successor to the James Webb space telescope and is said to offer 100 times the power of Hubble and many of us are very well aware of the transformative impact that that space instrument has had.

23:53So what's in store? Well Matt Bothwell is the public astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy. Yeah so the the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope or Roman to its friends I guess is the latest and greatest space telescope that's going to be launching at some point before 2027 and the amazing thing about it which we've never had a space telescope like this before is that it has this unbelievably wide field of view and in terms of like the collecting power of its mirror and like the resolution it's pretty similar to hubble but what sort of blows everything that's come before it out of the water is the fact that its field of view is about a hundred times the hubble space telescope so using this thing it really is basically as if you've got a hundred hubble space telescopes strapped together looking at the same thing all at once it's it's like something from science fiction honestly So it's going to be a space telescope.

24:44It will be up there in orbit. That's right. Yeah, it's going to this place that astronomers call L2, which is a very popular place to put telescopes. L2, which is the second Lagrange point, is about one and a half million kilometres away from the Earth. Essentially, this thing will be orbiting the sun rather than the Earth, but it will be orbiting the sun once a year. so you can imagine it orbiting along with the Earth and just sort of sitting behind the Earth as we go around the Sun. What's the attraction of putting it there then? Why have they picked that point? It's a really stable environment.

25:21So the Hubble Space Telescope is orbiting around the Earth and that has a really big pro that it's serviceable. If you want to fix a problem with it you can send up some astronauts and just tinker with it. But the difficulty is, as you go around the Earth just a few hundred kilometres above the surface, you're going in of shadow and out of shadow and in of shadow and out of shadow, and that heats and cools the instruments and puts all kinds of thermal stress on your components. If you're out at L2, you're about one and a half million kilometres away. The Earth and the Sun essentially stay at the same point fixed in the sky, so you can just point your heat shield towards the Sun, and just everything stays exactly the same temperature all the time, which is just much better for all of your components.

26:04And is this optical light, like we can see? Yeah, it is exactly right. It's very similar to Hubble, yeah. So it's mainly optical. It squeaks a little bit into the near-infrared in the same way as Hubble, but it's not doing what James Webb is doing. So listeners might be familiar with the James Webb telescope, which sees way deep into the infrared. And therefore, what will researchers be looking at with it? It's due to address a whole range of science goals, all the way from very big to very small. On the very big side of things, it's going to take advantage of that whopping field of view to make enormous maps of the universe, just looking at the positions and the distances to hundreds of millions of galaxies, and using that to understand models of both dark energy, which is this weird stuff that seems to be expanding the universe faster and faster, and also dark matter which is like the sort of the glue that holds galaxies together.