War and the environment, and Neanderthal-human interbreeding

0:00¡Sofírete los veaños, Kathy! ¡Bien! ¡Feliz 11 años, Rafa! ¡Sopla, sopla! ¡Traigan la manguera que son 45! Cuando cumples 45, te toca soplar muchas velas y examinarte contra el cáncer de colon, ya que al detectarse temprano es más tratable en 9 de cada 10 personas. Usa la prueba de Cologuard en la privacidad de tu casa y envíala de regreso para obtener tus resultados. La prueba de Cologuard es una opción con receta para detectar el cáncer de colon en personas de 45 años o más con riesgo promedio. Resultados positivos deben ir seguidos de una colonoscopía. Pueden darse resultados falsos positivos y falsos negativos.

0:40La prueba de Cologuard no reemplaza la colonoscopía en pacientes de alto riesgo. No uses Cologuard si has tenido adenomas, si tienes enfermedad inflamatoria intestinal y ciertos síndromes hereditarios o un historial personal o familiar de cáncer de colon. Pide la prueba de Cologuard a tu médico. Para más información en español, visita cologard.com-prueba.

1:24y también se habla de los grandes movimientos y shakers en el mundo de la science, tecnología y medicina. Soy Chris Smith y el impacto de la conflicto en el Middle East en la región de la salud y la salud de la salud. También hay que encontrar la variación de la gente que dictó la adicción a nicotina y evidencia que los neanderthalos de los neanderthalos tenían un penchant para mating con la humana humana.

2:03Música Es thought that this is the consequence of strikes on Iran's oil facilities, which sent huge plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. Environmental scientists say these particles mix in clouds and can fall back to earth with the rainfall. Incidents like this highlight the damage to the environment in ways that last long after the fighting stops, and the impact on civilians, who often end up breathing in the suspended particles, both from fires, destroyed buildings and even chemicals from munitions, son un documento, pero también muy significativo. Dug Weir es el director de la Conflicta y Environment Observatorio.

2:41Dug Weir, le preguntó por su análisis. Israel chose a atacar cinco gas, gas y gas y gas y gas y gas, cuatro de ellos en close proximity a la ciudad de Teherán y otro de la ciudad de Teherán en un ciudadano. Teherán es una ciudad de 9 millones de personas. Es muy densamente poblados. Uno de los otros problemas que vemos es que es un problema de la Boundary Layer, que es como el bottom de la atmósfera. Durante la noche en particular, lo que se pusiera el aire down into la ciudad. Cuando hay pollutantes trapped en este bowl en Teheran, hay que tener el aire y mantenerlos en el sitio y hacer que las personas son exposed a la calidad de la calidad.

3:17Normalmente, eso es de los traficos y otros. En el caso de estos attacks, se took place a night. Están las grandes fires. We see estos tipos de fires en all conflictos, y que se ve muy ambientalmente damaging. Normalmente, hay un fuego de fuego y que pushes el pollutante up out of the ciudad. pero presidenta bestia las noticias por tanto puede haber damit Muniz está muy siendo un niño lo a la parte de todo mentora de Música y una mezcla stainless Penguin O Handicó Puedeатурах y lo un montón de Worksidades el concentration porque el número y el intensity de los fires y el modo en que el setting de Teherán concentró en el.

4:04Entonces hay un número de threats que se ha hecho en el aire antes de que se ha hecho en el aire, que se puede ser exposición a. Y luego, cuando se ha hecho, se ha hecho en el aire, y se ha hecho en el agua. Sí, y creo que la otra cosa que se considera es que, por días ahora, Teherán ha sido intensivamente bombed by US and Israeli forces. So we'd already seen a large volume of pulverized building materials, weapons residues, all sorts of things, particulate matter chucked up into the atmosphere and also all over Tehran. So yeah, this stuff has been rained out. You see the image of it landing on cars.

4:41The rainfall felt acidic, burning to some people. We think this was probably sulfuric acid or nitric acid from mixtures of these gases with water. And this pollution is now on the ground And that's an issue So in the summer this pollution may well be dry And redistributed by the wind as dust But it also may move from soils down Into groundwater around Tehran Many of these things if they're combustion products We might worry about chemicals that are carcinogenic So we've presumably got the immediate threat Of things like these acid and acidic gases That you've just been mentioning Carbon monoxide es awful as well Y también tenemos cosas que pueden producir un largo plazo Sí, esto es muy cierto Hay muchas cosas de cosas Con la polizclic aromátic hydrocarbons En addition, tenemos que verlos Tienen un montón de burning Potentemente de furans y dioxins Así que, bastante unpleasant stuff Creo que una de las cosas que tenemos Es que estamos monitando Estos problemas de estos problemas A lot de la vez There is very little evidence collected on air quality issues during conflict in urban settings like this Where we see the intensive use of explosive weapons or industrial incidents from burning oil And to be honest a lot of the time when these oil sacks are hit they're not located in cities They tend to be far out in the countryside so the direct human exposure risks are relatively low But here we have a city of 9 million people which makes it quite extraordinary in the history of these kind of events What sort of timescale would we expect to see the effects manifest?

6:15There's going to be the here and now because the air is full of the stuff but then longer term, do we have any data to fall back on? Because of course there have been other wars in the Gulf and during the Iraq war for example and in Kuwait there was a lot of oil fires from oil wells that were set ablaze. So do we have any data to fall back on in terms of the legacy effects of this on health and over what period it tends to occur? It would be incredible if we did. So I guess there's two things to consider. So, I mean, we heard a lot of acute health risks reported by people on social media, people with existing health problems like asthma and the elderly.

6:52One thing which was interesting, which came up in our research, was that when you live in a very polluted setting like Tehran, that actually increases your vulnerability to poor air quality events. And it's all very much about the acute. And our issue with conflict pollution and trying to understand the long-term public health effects es que hay un descanso que cuando se trata de la salud y la environment en conflicto de la situación. La focus es siempre en la salud de la salud. Y cuando se trata de la salud de la salud, como cancer o la otra, la data no está ahí. La ambiental data no está ahí, la exposición no está ahí.

7:25Populaciones son often desplaced o moved. En muchas condiciones, monitoreo sistemas collapse. Y creo que para la salud de la salud, como cancer, You would need to be following a significant population over many, many years to actually determine impacts. So we see this very clear disconnect in pretty much every conflict we look at. And it's something which we really need the health community and the environmental community to come together to start thinking about how we can work around it. But military organisations do appear to be aware of these sorts of impacts, don't they? Because I remember being a little bit surprised when I first interviewed a chap in America who works for the US Army.

8:00y su rol como profesional chemistía en el que se desarrolló la minería de munición y yo pensé que era muy divertido en un modo de manera cuando me first dijo que era muy preocupado sobre el ambiente así que era inventado la minería de ambiente de ambiente ambiente y munición y uno de los dos es designed para hacer enorme harm pero luego de los dos los dos los preocupados sobre la stewardship y mantener el ambiente safe hay un poco de vista uno es militares no van a disappear overnight hay un poco de la pregunta de ¿Can they be less environmentally damaging in what they do? Y cuando nos piensa en lo que hacemos, no es solo lo que hacemos en la guerra.

8:34La mayoría de los ambientales de los militares es en la guerra. Es durante la training, es durante la manufacturación, es durante la disposición de armas, durante todo esto, y es esta cuestión de ¿Can we reduce este footprint? Cuando nos miramos a la greenhouse gas emissions de militares globales, como hemos estimado con los colegas de scientists para global responsabilidad, a ser alrededor de 5.5 % de global emissions que se ven de militaría. Y eso no es warfights y emissions. Están a lot. ¿Me he escuchado a eso? 5.5 %? Yo, eso es cerca de concrete. Sí, 5.5 % de shipping y aviación combined. ¿Qué plans están en lugar o qué plans que se han hecho para que se limitar el mess que ha sido made?

9:17Creo que nuestro preocupación es que hay que tener reluctora de lo que viene de lo que viene de lo que viene regime to be open about the environmental damage cause, to let in people like the United Nations Environment Programme to do assessments on the ground, to actually do the sampling, to actually determine how bad the damage is. And then there's also going to be a lot of reticence from the international community, I suspect, in terms of providing capacity, technical skills or money to support Iran with post-conflict recovery. So a lot of times in the conflicts that we look at, environmental remediation is extremely expensive.

9:51There are a lot of competing priorities post - conflict and dealing with contaminated soils or sites is rarely one of them so it may well be the case that a lot of the damage which we're seeing may well last for years if not decades and may well go unaddressed in many cases. It is a very sad state of affairs out there isn't it? Doug Weir from the Conflict and Environmental Observatory. Gene variants are alternate forms of the same gene you can think of them as a bit like recipes for the same type of cake but one which differs in en términos de suficiencia de suficiencia. Ahora, algunos de nosotros necesitan una forma de un tipo de gene, mientras otros tienen un diferente.

10:26Y esto es lo que nos significa cuando hablamos de genética diversidad. Y estos variantes pueden afectar la susceptibilidad de un individuo a ciertas diseases, o, como se puede decir, cómo heavily they might smoke. Como Gonzalo Abacacis, de la Regeneron Genetic Center en New York, explíso. Our main trust, our main approach in trying to understand biology and human genetics is to study these experiments of nature. So each one of us has a few changes in DNA that make us unique. And the particular type of change that's very informative is when we modify a protein, perhaps by even disabling it. We like to search for examples of these proteins that have a medical consequence or a health consequence because they give us a very clear path for drug development.

11:16If we can then develop drugs that mimic these naturally occurring variations, we can then treat disease. In this particular case, we were applying this general approach to study smoking and to understand what makes some people smoke more or less than others. And specifically, what were you targeting? ¿Cómo estás haciendo eso? Porque hay 3 billones de letras en la humana genética, dí o dí o dí. ¿Has visto todos los de los que o no? ¿Has visto un aspecto específico de eso? Así que, nuestro general es que intentamos leer cada protein encodado letter. Así que, la genoma, como you said, es de 3 billones de letras.

11:52Una vez de los letras encodan proteínas. La resta de la genoma encodan regulación de esos proteínos. It decides which genes get turned out on and which cells and how much of each gene to make. But more fundamentally, the proteins are the ultimate effectors of things. And so we try to sequence every protein and make a catalog of the small variations, which we call missense variations. These are small alterations, one amino acid for another, and also a catalog of all the loss of function variations. These are the ones that maybe introduce an early stop in a protein or another drastic change that completely disables it.

12:34Once we do that, build that catalogue across all 20 ,000 proteins of the genome, all the variants they carry, we were relating variations in each protein to the amount of smoking that individuals do. So you're looking to tie a change to a behaviour? Exactly. ¿Quiénes han estado viendo en qué tipo de números? En este estudio, empezamos con un población de alrededor de 150 ,000 personas en México. En el caso de 40 ,000 de ellos fueron los consumidores. Y por cada uno de esos consumidores, nos conocíamos cómo se los consumidores en el average. Y nos tratamos de tiee variaciones en individual genes a la cantidad de smoking que cada persona se hace.

13:23¿Y fue el relación? Yes, there was. So it was pretty interesting. So, for example, we found that a particular variant in one of the subunits of the nicotine receptors in your brain was associated with a very drastic change in the amount of smoking that people do. So whereas the average smoker in this set of people smoked about a little bit over five cigarettes per day, if you had one of these changes that went down to about four cigarrillos per day. And if you had two of them, because obviously we each have one chromosome from our moms and one from our dads, then you went down to just a single cigarette per day.

14:03And so in our speculation, we think that this is probably pretty key to mediating how long-lasting reward you get from each cigarette. But the end result was that with this change, your level of smoking went down almost 80%. Were there, conversely, any individuals where they went for five to ten cigarettes a day not because of this particular change but sure there are genetic variants that also can increase your amount of smoking that was not our focus here but those do exist out there but what do you think the mechanism is you're speculating perhaps it's the enjoyment or the reward that the nicotine gives the brain but what is the mechanism for augmenting or reducing according to which form of the gene ¿Qué es lo que se sabe?

15:22Entonces, con verdad, es que si se intenta Serga el Posto del Juan. how much you smoke seems to relate to genes that both regulate how much reward you get from it. If you get a bigger reward, a bigger hit, you might be more prone to smoking more heavily and there's also genes that regulate how long each hit lasts. Some of these genes mean that the hit you get from nicotine lingers for longer. That also might affect how often you smoke. So we don't know exactly if this is about the hit lingering for longer or a la mejora. El dato que tenemos no es específico pero no sabemos el resultado y es posible que sea por uno de esos dos mecanismos.

16:03¿Puedes esto tener implicaciones para ayudar a la gente a no ir a smoke? Si entendemos más sobre este particular target de nicotina y cómo estos genes cambian en algún modo, ¿túes que nos ayudan a ayudar a la gente a dar porque sobre 75 % de los smokers dicen que no se quiera. Exactamente. So I think one of the things we would like to do is to say, mimic this effect in a drug. Have a drug that gives people who don't have this particular subunit that made you smoke a lot less, have that same benefit. And, you know, although that might not help you quite fully, it might take you from, again, from smoking those five cigarettes a day down to one, you know, which would already be quite a big health benefit if you could get it.

16:50Gonzalo Abekis from the Regeneron Genetic Center there. That study just came out in Nature Communications.

17:20de cada 10 personas. Usa la prueba de Cologuard en la privacidad de tu casa y envíala de regreso para obtener tus resultados. La prueba de Cologuard es una opción con receta para detectar el cáncer de colon en personas de 45 años o más con riesgo promedio. Resultados positivos deben ir seguidos de una colonoscopía. Pueden darse resultados falsos positivos y falsos negativos. La prueba de Cologuard no reemplaza la colonoscopía en pacientes de alto riesgo. No uses Cologuard si has tenido adenomas, si tienes enfermedad inflamatoria intestinal y ciertos síndromes hereditarios o un historial personal o familiar de cáncer de colon.

17:52Pide la prueba de Cologuard a tu médico. Para más información en español, visita Cologuard.com-prueba. ¡Escuchamos a todos!

18:22Music 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, interbreeding between us and Neanderthals. There's evidence that Neanderthal men preferred anatomically modern women. But how do we know? First though, vitiligo Is a condition where pale white patches Emerge on the skin where the immune system Attacks certain groups of cells that produce The pigment melanin It's not life threatening, although The white patches are more susceptible To sunburn and therefore skin cancer But it's also not Something that we can currently cure And the disfiguring effects it can have on people Can lead to significant mental health problems Michael Jackson famously developed the disease But was nevertheless accused of skin bleaching y la model Winnie Harlow a child was excluded by other kids porque no quería que quiera la skin problem Así que anunció el aprobado de una medicación repigmentation llamado Ruxolitinib que puede hacer que la skin regale some de su color por el NHS marcar una gran gran milestone para el vitiligo community Pero ¿cómo funciona?

19:33Y por qué ha sido solo approved for use ahora? Victoria Elotheriado es la dermatología y la spokeswoman for the British Association of Dermatologists. Bucillaga is a skin condition where essentially one develops white patches on the skin. So, for example, if your skin was brown, then it loses its colour, what we call pigment. You have these completely white, like milky patches on the skin. The skin is otherwise normal and it can affect any part of your body, pero muy frecuentemente afecta visible áreas como la cara, la cara, la cara, la cara. Así que es muy prominente cuando alguien se ha. ¿Y qué es el mecanismo de la enfermedad?

20:19¿Qué es lo que está pasando en la piel para producir esa depigmentation? Nosotros tenemos células en nuestra piel que son melanosides. Entonces, ellos hacen melanes y esta melanesión que le da color a tu piel. So when we do not have melanin, that's when we have white patches. And that is because our own defence system, called immune system, is making the antibodies and instead of killing viruses and bacteria, they essentially attack the melanocytes. Apart from the obvious visual impact, which can be presumably very socially stigmatising for people, are there any other consequences, any other health problems that can arise through having this happen in your skin?

21:01Yeah, that's a very good question, Chris And what sometimes people forget is that the reason we need this melanocyte is to protect us from the sun So the white patches, because they lack of melanin, they lack colour essentially They are more prone to burn in the sun So for example, if someone has vitiligo on face and hands, which is the most common areas When they go out in the sun, they can burn very easily because there's lack of melanin. And that means that someone cannot play sports for a long time. They can even not do gardening or any sort of other activities outdoors and they have to cover themselves up.

21:42And the second thing is that vitiligo being an autoimmune condition is make people be more prone to other autoimmune conditions donde su propio cuerpo puede atacar no solo los células en tu skin pero también otros células y otros órganos en tu cuerpo como la enfermedad, por ejemplo, incluso diabetes type 1 y otras condiciones que pueden afectar el gut. ¿A los lesiones permanece? ¿Pero que hay patches de depigmentado? ¿Es que es? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? ¿Es que? el pachyste repigment, que significa que se hagan el color. Normalmente, se hagan los pachyste durante un tiempo y la condición también se hagan los pachyste, que significa que se hagan los pachyste.

22:35Y el nuevo que se ha anunciado o ha sido aprobado ahora para uso, ¿qué es eso? ¿Cómo funciona? El nuevo tratamiento es called Obzalura y es un creme. El activo ingrediente en es es ruxolitinib, que es lo que se llama un inhibidor. Cuando se aplica en la pared, la pared puede llevar el color de la pared. Pero, tú tienes que tratar tu pared con esta pared por varios meses, por un año, para ver el resultado. Y cuando se trata de la pared, ¿es eso porque el melanin es el mismo? No es solo cubrirlo, no es solo de la piel, el skin, es realmente bringing back lo que has lost. Yes, lo que el creme hace es que reduce el inflamatorio de la señal, que calma la defensa del sistema en esa área.

23:28Esto permite la luna de los sites de literalmente crawl in de la normal surrounding skin into la white patch y start making el color again. Y la forma que bring el color back es literalmente por tiny, tiny little dots que se Y si maintenance, no solo tiene forming 12 meses, Pero que debería estar con Mother ,ED efectos que ya esperamos. repigmented normal healthy skin again or can you still see the patch but it's not as bad? Yes, the skin is absolutely normal in colour in that area when you have complete repigmentation sometimes the repigmentation is not complete which means that you can get about 90 % of the pigment back and you still have a slightly speckled appearance but it still looks better than a completely large white patch.

24:25Victoria Gloria Elotheriado at the British Association of Dermatologists. Some great news for people with vitiligo there. When anatomically modern humans, homo sapiens, left Africa 60 ,000 years ago or so, they encountered another human species that was already living outside Africa, which was the Neanderthals. And we now know that the two groups interbred. That's why so many people today from outside the African continent still carry small amounts of Neanderthal DNA on their chromosomes. Pero hay un excepción. Porque relativamente a los demás genomes, la X chromosome contains muy poco de este neanderthal DNA.

25:05Previously, los científicos han hipótesis que esto es porque hay algo sobre el neanderthal de los genes de la X chromosome que hacen los toxicos y que han sido weeded por la evolución. Pero si neanderthal y anatomicamente modern human X chromosomes son incompatible en este modo, you'd surely expect modern human DNA to be correspondingly scarce on neanderthal X chromosomes too, wouldn't you? Well, it's not. And in fact, as researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found in a new analysis, it's actually the opposite. It's enriched. So, this leads to a tantalising social explanation for why there is in fact no neanderthal DNA on our X chromosomes.

25:49Neanderthal males may have preferentially been mating, as Daniel Harris suggests, with anatomically modern humans. Because males pass on fewer X chromosomes to their children than females do. So over time, a bias like this would emerge naturally. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, there were multiple different human-like species or subspecies. So we had our species modern humans and then we also encountered another one called Neanderthals. And upon encountering Neanderthals, we know fairly well that humans and Neanderthals mated with each other. And so modern humans today, if you have your ancestry coming largely from outside of Africa, then you have about 1 to 3 percent of your genome actually coming from having a Neanderthal ancestor.

26:42So you have actual Neanderthal ancestry. And one of the dynamics that we've wanted to look at is what about ancestry that's gone the other way? So mating between humans and Neanderthals such that Neanderthals actually have modern human ancestry. And so the main focus on this analysis was looking at how that ancestry is distributed across the Neanderthal genome. We've actually got the genome for Neanderthals, have we? Yes. So we have three really high quality Neanderthal genomes. Y así, ¿cuál es la calidad de la DNA? La DNA ha sido isolada de los fossils que han sido en caves por 50 ,000 a un poco más de 100 ,000 años.

27:22Y así, la DNA degrada a la vez. Y así, en la de la fossils que se encuentran, la DNA es muy degradada. Pero en la de los otros fossils, la DNA es mucho mejor preservada. Y así, la Neanderthales que hemos visto en este estudio han mucho mejor preservada. Así que, realmente, tenemos un buen sequence de mayoría de su genoma. Which is presumably how we knew that anatomically modern humans like us have got that small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in us. We can see the correlation of the genes from Neanderthals matching up with what's in us. We can line up effectively the genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals and we can find there are regions in our genomes that look really, really similar to Neanderthals.

28:02Now it's relatively easy if we've got a huge pool of anatomically modern humans to look at and we've got this Neanderthal data to say well look it looks like some of that has come into our gene pool. But how do we know that things have gone back the other way then? How are you able to look at that? Yes, so one of the ways that we can look at this is the lab that I'm in at the University of Pennsylvania. The leader of our lab, Dr. Sarah Tishkoff, has spent a very long time sampling a very diverse data set of modern humans that come from throughout sub-Saharan Africa. And the reason that that's important to telling this story is that it's thought that most of the Neanderthal ancestry in modern humans, as I've mentioned earlier, are in people who have their recent ancestry from outside of Africa.

28:49Y así es general presumed que en los humanos que la mayoría de su ancestros de su Sahara de Africa no tienen actual Neanderthal ancestros. Porque eso sucedió cuando anatomicamente modernos humanos dejaron african y metan los Neanderthals que estaban ya de african. Eso es donde la matinga sucedió. Correcto. Así que la Neanderthal ancestros que modernos humanos tienen hoy en el mundo de la mezcla de los 40 ,000 años de tiempo. tiempo. ¿Cómo se usó que eso, entonces, para resolver este problema de que la gente ha ido y lo que hemos putado en Neanderthals? Lo que hemos terminado es que tomamos este diverse set de sub-Saharan African genomes y lo que esto hace es que se busca por regiones de modernas humanas que son realmente similar a Neanderthals.