New monkeypox virus strain, and Chernobyl's dome damaged

0:11Hello,

0:16welcome to the Naked Scientist podcast, the programme 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 and coming up, new strains of the monkeypox virus are emerging, but could a breakthrough vaccine help to tackle them? Also, drone damage to the dome over Chernobyl's nuclear site and how those of us in the northern hemisphere beat the winter blues on those dark wintry nights.

0:52Health officials have confirmed that a new strain of the monkeypox virus has arrived in the UK. It's in fact a mix of the two main circulating types of the agent, and it was found in someone who'd recently returned from Asia. Luckily, scientists announced this week that they have also developed a new way to engineer broadly acting vaccines for infections like monkeypox virus. So how does that work? and why are we seeing so much monkeypox virus activity all of a sudden in the first place? Bahuma Tatanji is an infectious diseases expert at Emory University and she's helped us to chart the rise of the outbreak here at The Naked Scientist.

1:30The infectious agent is an orthopox virus called the monkeypox virus, which is a zoonotic virus, so its reservoir is in animals. And human cases historically had happened when you had exposure to animals that were carrying this Othopox virus. But we know that in recent years, we've seen more and more human cases and more entrenched human to human transmission, with now outbreaks documented in the Northern Hemisphere as well as in the Southern Hemisphere and in countries where monkeypox virus has historically circulated in an endemic fashion. Why are we seeing more now though? Because in recent years we've gone from very few, just handfuls of cases in countries like the US, UK to frequently seeing this and in some cases outbreaks affecting thousands of people which that just hadn't happened previously.

2:25Why now? Yeah, the thing is that orthopox viruses and monkeypox virus in particular belongs to the same family as virulavirus, which was the causal agent of smallpox. And before we had smallpox vaccination on the global scale, before the elimination or eradication of smallpox. And that vaccine process against smallpox was protective against other orthopox viruses, including monkeypox virus. So while smallpox vaccine was ongoing, people had immune protection that made it difficult for other orthopox viruses to emerge. But fast forward in 1980, after smallpox was eradicated, the vaccination programs stopped globally.

3:16So what we had is essentially a whole generation of the population for the past 40 years that lacks immunity to orthopox viruses. And this has really opened a window of opportunity for an orthopox virus like monkeypox to be able to infect humans and establish itself as a pathogen. And now we're also seeing routes of transmission that make human to human transmission a lot more efficient, notably sexual transmission, as has been the case in the outbreaks reported in 2022 up until now. So we've taken our foot off the brake pedal in terms of the vaccine protection has gone. So that population of immune individuals has declined and been replaced by a susceptible population who are more numerous and they're travelling a lot.

4:05And we've got other possible routes of transmission. So you bring all that together and that's why we're seeing this evolution and these new strains emerging. It's just natural evolution of the virus. Now it can get to us more easily. Absolutely. The virus has a window of opportunity to really establish itself and spread because all of these factors coming together just make it a lot easier for the virus to exploit the cracks in the wall, as one could say. I was very buoyed up though to see this paper this week announcing a different approach to generating vaccines which might help for monkeypox virus.

4:41They've looked at that specifically. You've looked at that too. What have they actually done and will this help? This is actually very interesting work where the authors of the paper asked the question, which B cells produce antibodies that can potentially neutralise the monkeypox virus? And then using both AI and structural biology techniques, they were able to identify this viral protein called OPG-153, which is a protein that induces antibodies that are able to neutralize not just one single clade of the Othopox virus, but actually was able to neutralize clade 1A and clade 2B of monkeypox virus, which have caused the outbreaks we've seen recently.

5:29And this gives us a potential for therapeutics developing monoclonal antibodies that can treat people with Mpox. And additionally, also improved vaccines that offer broad protection against the circulating strains. That's very interesting, isn't it? Because they've almost gone at this in reverse, because normally when we want to make a vaccine for something, we start with the bug and then we either weaken it or brutalise it in such a way that it can't make us ill and then say, well, there we go, we've made a vaccine. Whereas here, they've said, let's start with the immune state and work backwards to work out, well, what antibodies are making that immunity and where did they come from what are they against and then make that into the vaccine so that's quite a clever approach yes it is it's actually very unique and i think that it really showcases where the field of vaccinology is going and how you can integrate modern technologies like artificial intelligence with existing structural biology to actually identify antigens and potentially antibodies that are even more efficient and more potent than the traditional approaches that have been used previously.

6:44If we know what the target is on the virus that this approach is directing an immune response against, can we get the piece of genetic material that corresponds to that bit of virus and put that into an mRNA vaccine, a bit like we did with the COVID jabs, and therefore produce a much more agile and scalable and faster response like they did with COVID? Absolutely. And actually, in addition to that, I would say that there are already two mRNA vaccine candidates for Mpox virus. But these two mRNA vaccine candidates do not target just a single protein, They target four different proteins, so it's a lot less selective than this protein.

7:29So potentially, identifying this protein may simplify the mRNA vaccine development for a targeted vaccine at Mpox virus. So it does open a variety of opportunities that would be quite exciting to explore in the coming years. Mahuma Tatanji at Emory University commenting on the recent rise of monkeypox virus cases and also the new vaccine strategy which has just been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine this week if you want to check it out. The UN's nuclear watchdog has said the protective shield built around the Chernobyl site in Ukraine can no longer do its job to confine radioactive waste there.

8:10The dome, which was built recently over the reactor at the heart of the 1986 disaster, was damaged following a Russian drone strike on the facility earlier this year. Jim Smith is a professor of environmental science at the University of Portsmouth and an internationally recognised authority on Chernobyl. The Chernobyl accident was the worst nuclear accident in history. It happened almost 40 years ago now in what was then the Soviet Union, but is now Ukraine. The whole core kind of exploded and that destroyed the reactor building. The fuel melted down and into actually the basement of the site.

8:48site. And there's now a giant, what they call the elephant's foot, because that's what it looks like, a giant kind of molten nuclear fuel down at the bottom of the basement. In the weeks and months after the accident, destroyed bits were taken away, and a new building that they call the sarcophagus made of very thick concrete walls, was built on top of the old reactor building. And And that kept the radioactivity kind of confined up until about 2019 when the new shelter was put over Chernobyl. Why did it need a new shelter? So it was built very quickly in the months after the accident. There were various problems with the design.

9:27It was letting water in and it also had technically a design life of 10 years. And so after that 10 years, more work was done on it to kind of shore it up, strengthen it. but it wasn't supposed to be a long-term structure. So the new safe confinement, if you go to Chernobyl, you'll see it on the horizon. It's probably the biggest thing I've ever seen. It can fit the Eiffel Tower inside it and it looks like a giant aircraft hangar. And that was built at a distance from the old sarcophagus and then wheeled over to protect that old structure and begin decommissioning of the nuclear site. I think that cost a billion pounds, that structure, didn't it?

10:07It took a long time to build, but was the idea that would be semi-permanent then? It's designed to last, not to leak, and that that buys time to let things settle down, but also it protects the environment from any further escape of anything. That's right. If the old structure had collapsed, it wouldn't have been a catastrophic accident like the original accident was, but it would be a significant release of dust that had accumulated over time after the accident, which would be radioactive. the new safe confinement structure this giant steel hanger-like structure had a design life of a hundred years so the idea is that that will both protect the old structure and it has systems which will allow cranes to be put in to begin dismantling the old structure and taking the nuclear fuel away and burying that safely.

10:57And what's happened to it? So it was hit by a Russian drone and I find it hard to think that that was an accident. The outer new safe confinement was penetrated and so there was a hole and a small fire started which started burning some of the insulation inside the steel sleeve and it did significant damage but it didn't crucially get through the giant concrete sarcophagus which was protecting the reactor so it didn't actually lead to any leak of radiation and it didn't really lead to an immediate risk even for the people on the site so of course it was a very significant event. But this means that our 100 year structure now has a hole in it which completely undermines its whole raison d 'etre.

11:44Can it be repaired? Well it's been temporarily repaired. The International Atomic Energy Agency has just issued a report about what needs to happen in the longer term. And yes, it can be fixed. It's going to be... The problem with anything nuclear is it's hugely expensive because of all the safety issues. It can be fixed. I would tend to do the minimum to fix it until the war's over because it wouldn't surprise me if the EU and the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency go to great lengths to fix it. Putin flew another drone at it. Of course, the other big reminder is that there is still an enormous exclusion zone around the original Chernobyl site and downwind of it where the fallout from the explosion contaminated the ground and rendered it completely unsafe to live.

12:35And then there's a bigger zone around that where it's still radioactive, but there are people in there. That's right. So the exclusion zone is about 30 kilometres in radius from the plant. there are hot spots in it so for example the red forest which is a an area of trees that died after the accident because of the intense radioactivity that's about 10 square kilometers which is less than one percent of the whole area of the zone that is really radioactive and then there's things like the cooling pond and the site itself but much of the zone now could be used again although of course what we found after the accident is that the wildlife has come back so when people left the zone it became a really important nature reserve and that's what it is now it's been estimated to be about the third biggest nature reserve in Europe so there is that main exclusion zone and then there's a second zone where people are actually living it was it was supposed to be fully evacuated but it never was we've been working in a town called Narodichi where there's a council there's a school people go about their normal lives but there's no official use of agricultural land again and ukrainian colleagues have been saying for a very long time that that land is safe to use didn't i see somewhere that you've got an exciting project where you are putting your money where your mouth is and making making vodka and other spirits and interesting things from there?

14:05Yeah. So as part of our studies into transfers of radioactivity to crops in the long term after the accident, we decided to do an experiment. So we grew crops and the grains, those are barley and wheat and rye, were just above the Ukrainian limit for consumption. But when we fermented them and distilled them to make a kind of vodka, we couldn't measure any of the radioactivity in the final product. So that led us to think, well, maybe we can make products from these areas. So we set up a social enterprise and we now sell an apple schnapps and an apple brandy made from apples grown in these semi-abandoned areas.

14:46So again, the apples, they're not dangerous, but they're slightly radioactive. But when we ferment and distill them to make an apple schnapps, which actually is nicer than a vodka to my mind, we can't find any radioactivity in the product. And we sell sort of 1 ,500 bottles a year, so it's very small scale. But we've managed to raise£45 ,000 to donate to Ukraine and support these communities that have been affected. What's the brand name? Strontium 90 or something? The brand name is Atomic. We didn't really have much of a choice. So the brand name's Atomic and our website's called www.atomic.com.

15:26Brilliant project. We'll definitely be drinking to that. That's Jim Smith. He's at the University of Portsmouth. The 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, what's the basis of the winter blues and do dogs get seasonal affective disorder too? The answer might surprise you.

16:07But first, lighting the wood burner or the barbecue is thankfully pretty straightforward these days, but deliberate fire making was much more of a challenge for our ancestors, of course, who initially had to rely on local lightning strikes to start a convenient fire for them. but at some point they must have mastered the art of starting their own fires although exactly when and how they did that was a mystery. We know from evidence in Europe that the practice of deliberate fire making was underway by 50 ,000 years ago but how much farther back in time do we have to go before then to see the start of it?

16:42Well now, thanks to remarkable finds uncovered from a dig in Suffolk in the south east of England and published this week in the journal Nature It looks like our early ancestors had mastered the art of fire starting by as early as 400 ,000 years ago. Rob Davis at the British Museum has the story. So we have uncovered the earliest evidence anywhere in the world for humans making fire. So this is 400 ,000 years old. That's 350 ,000 years older than the previous earliest evidence. So the previous earliest evidence, which was from France, was about 50 ,000 years ago. so that's roughly the time that homo sapiens, our own species, were leaving Africa.

17:23This pushes it back by more than 350 ,000 years. Because there are reports of people, as in our early ancestors, using fire going back maybe a million years or their-ish in the past. Is there a distinction then between using fire and making fire? Is that the point you're making? Exactly. As you say, we have evidence of humans using fire potentially up to a million and a half years ago. But there would have been a process of developing the relationship to fire, which may have started with finding natural sources of fire, so wildfire. Great when you can find it, but it's hard to maintain. It would only take a big downpour and your fire goes out and then you have to wait for the next time you have a lightning strike.

18:02So the ability to make fire, to be able to have fire where and when you needed it, means that you can enjoy the benefits of fire all the time. And then that has implications for human evolution. where have you found what you found and how can you make the distinction between a fire that's cropped up because some lightning hit a tree and the fire was used and someone deliberately started a fire yeah that's the challenge we've been working on so the site is in suffolk a village called barnum we've been excavating there for a number of years encountering early stone tools these stone tools made by neanderthals neanderthals being a kind of an evolutionary cousin to homo sapiens.

18:43So as our own species was evolving in Africa, Neanderthals were evolving in Europe, and this is who we're dealing with. But associated with their stone tools has been lots of evidence of fire. So the challenge we've had is trying to understand, well, first of all, was the fire made by humans or could it have been a wildfire that swept through after the humans had been there? And then if it was by humans, was it humans making use of a natural source or was it humans making fire and what's really clinched it is kind of a trio of evidence so we found a campfire so a patch of baked sediment about half a meter in diameter which we've been able to demonstrate was the results of humans using fire and then associated with that we found lots of stone tools around the fire so evidence of kind of humans gathered around the fire kind of fireside activities but then what really clinches to making fire is fragments of iron pyrite and this is a material that can be used for lighting fire by striking the pyrite with flint, creating sparks, you can use that then to light tinder and to build a fire.

19:43Would they have had to bring that pyrite to that site? Because obviously if it was there naturally, that would be less of a dramatic finding. But if there's evidence they've gone to the trouble of bringing something from farther away to that site, that is much more compelling as an argument. Absolutely, that's been a critical part of the study because if it occurs naturally at the site, then we can't be sure whether they were actually using it for making fire. It could just be there by chance. We've done a big geological study. We've drawn on a database of different stone types that have been recorded in the local area over a period of about 37 years.

20:19So this is work that's been undertaken at 20 different sites, some of which are the same age as our site, some of which are from our site, some from older, earlier in time, some from more recent. and in total 121 ,000 individual pieces of rock have been identified and not a single one of them is pyrite. So essentially over the course of 37 years of work in this area the only pyrite we've ever found is in this particular layer with this Neanderthal fireplace with these burnt stone tools. So the evidence is very strong that this is material that's not local and it's been brought to the site by these early humans to light fires.

20:57What are the implications of this then? Because my mind is boggling at this because of course we know Neanderthals left Africa a lot sooner than our direct cousins, the anatomically modern humans did. We know they were very successful for a really long time until we possibly got rid of them. So is one of the reasons why they were so successful because they had made this discovery and they'd made this discovery already and it got them out of Africa and across Europe where it was cold? It's hard to be absolutely sure where it originated as a technology. We found evidence of 400 ,000, which has pushed it back by 350 ,000 years.

21:34But of course, it's very unlikely that we found the first instance. So this is likely to have been a more widespread technology. And it's just due to the fortunate circumstances of preservation at our site that we've been able to find it. There's certainly a shift in the archaeological record in Europe around half a million to 400 ,000 years ago where we see kind of more, we have more sites, more artifacts. It sort of suggests that these kind of early Neanderthals are succeeding at colonizing kind of new environments, places like Britain, sort of more northern places where it would be colder. And fire may well have been an important component of that, an important technology.

22:13I mean, it provides all sorts of benefits. So, of course, warmth and light, protection from predators and cooking of food so you know it makes humans more adaptable more flexible but also potentially I think it has really important evolutionary impact it can accelerate certain processes that may have already been underway but it kind of intertwines them and kind of gives them a boost so on the one hand through cooking you can widen the amount of different foods that can be eaten so certain food stuff certain plants which would be toxic if eaten uncooked by cooking them you remove those toxins things like tubers and roots there's more food available within a given area but also by cooking you can make food more digestible which then provides a greater amount of nutrients and energy for another very expensive part of the body which is the brain in our species we use about 20 of our energy to fuel our brain so through cooking we can imagine this was part of the energy for actually you know helping push brain growth in these early humans towards modern levels and then the secondary second aspect is that from the social aspect another great benefit of having fire is it extends the waking day so it gives you flight after dusk this provides a social hub it frees up time during the day for doing things like hunting and gathering and tool making and resource procurement and then you have this intense socialization time after dark where you know this has implications for the development of language of myth making and storytelling having.

23:41Absolutely fascinating. Rob Davis there from the British Museum. Now in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are currently getting shorter. The nights are arriving earlier, and although Christmas is only just around the corner, we can't all help but feel a little bit glum. Now you might have heard it called the winter blues. It's a phenomenon that tends to happen in the autumn and winter as the days get darker. We're here to tell us what is actually happening and why, and also why our canine companions also seem to be affected, is circadian biologist at the University of Warwick, Robert Dowman. The winter blues is probably the more colloquial term for how many people are feeling in the winter in the northern hemisphere, having less energy, being a bit more tired and having a more gloomy outlook on life altogether.

24:30So it's of a mood dysphoria, if you so will. This might be something that is totally physiological to a degree where just because you get up, everything is dark, you come back from work, everything is dark. The light has some acute effects on us, but this can be a sign if it recurs and if it's more severe of something called seasonal affective disorder or SAD, and that is then beyond the winter blues. Is it just the light that does it or is it the change especially if you're at high latitudes you've got very long days and they change to be very short days is it just the light intensity and the amount of light or is it the fact that things are changing that upsets the apple cart?

25:16That's an interesting question it's not necessarily the intensity although that might be part of it but it's also when the light is present right so because our days get so much shorter and the sun rises so much later. The subjective night, the time where there is no light present, is so much longer and that might be the actual reason why we have these sort of more dysphoric feelings in the lower mood. And that might be something that has something to do with the circadian clock and how the circadian clock synchronizes us to the day, how the circadian clock takes a hint or takes what we call the German word Zeitgeber, which means a time giver.

26:03We are taking a cue from the rising of the sun for our clock that now it is time to get up and be rounded about. Whereas in the summer, this comes up early. And there are many studies that suggest that despite our alarm clocks and whatnot, we still get up with the sun to a degree. And in the winter, this becomes much later. And that changes the relationship of the clock with sleep and with other physiological events. Is it the light per se that does it? Or is it the fact that we're active, we're eating at a different time, we're doing things? Does the brain bring together all of that to decide what time it is?

26:48Or is it all about light? It is certainly not all about light, but light is a quite dominant factor in this. And one argument why this is so is that for this winter blues, dysphoria, seasonal affective disorders, there's a possibility to treat them with light. So if you leave everything else the same and you now change the exposure to light, so you give, for example, bright light in the morning treatment for 30 minutes or 30 to 40 minutes of a certain brightness to people, you can help quite a number of sufferers of SAD with that. And it is light of a certain quality. If you make the light less bright or have a different colour, now this effect is gone, suggesting this is an effect of the light and it goes through the circadian system.

27:41Are some people more susceptible to this or is it just that some people have down days? There seems to be a genetic component of this, which might make families more susceptible. And this could either be certain variants of genes. For example, one of the genes important for the core clock function called period 3 has a possible role in this. But there might also be sort of multigenic reasons. And some people we know are early risers, whereas other people by their biology are more likely to get up later in the day. So it might be that these early rises are more affected by seasonal affective disorder or have a higher prevalence and more people of that chronotype might develop this.

28:33And what about our pets? Do they get the same thing? Because they presumably have very similar brain structures to us. They've got the same brain wiring that gives them a body clock. So do they get this as well? There have been actually studies on depression-like symptoms in dogs where tail wagging was taken as a sign of if the dog was depressed or not. And they have shown that in the winter there is a slight tendency to have less happy dogs, let's say. However, according to sort of what we know about circadian clocks and how they work where there is a central pacemaker in our brain in an area of the brain and the so-called hypothalamus that gets direct input from the from the eyes through the light this is all the same in all of our pets now some of our pets for example cats have very different daily rhythms compared to us if you have a dog this might actually be quite beneficial for not getting the winter blues in that you do one of the things that is advised for preventing this by going out in the early morning.

29:41The amount of light that you get is so much higher than what we get inside that that is an inappropriate measure to counteract this. So if you go out in the early morning with your dog on a walk, that might be an excellent way of preventing you and your dog to get the winter blues. So rise and shine, walk the dog in the brightest light that you can in the morning to ward off the winter blues. That's the advice of the University of Warwick's Robert Dowman there. Well, that is it for this week. Do join us on Tuesday, though, when we're going to be dreaming of a white Christmas. No, I'm not going to sing it for you.

30:19We're going to be exploring the science of snow, the latest weather forecasting, and we'll assess the likelihood of whether we're going to see snow on the 25th of December. thanks to all of you who are continuing to support the program here at the naked scientists we couldn't do it without you we really appreciate it and when you do give us some donations and put comments with it we read all of them and we do write back to you it really means a lot if you like this program you appreciate what we do and you'd like to show us your support too we've made it really easy you just go to nakedscientist.com forward slash donate and you can do one-off or regular contributions we really really are grateful the Naked Scientist is also generously supported by Rolls-Royce I'm Chris Smith the program was produced by Rhys James thanks for listening and until next time goodbye