How to Be Hopeful: Caitlin Moran and New Scientist Look to the Future

0:00Every Sunday we cover the week's tech news on This Week in Tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte from the TWIT Podcasting Network, inviting you to join me with Jacob Ward, Molly White and Harry McCracken as we talk about the end of the big lawsuit against Meta and what it means for us. NVIDIA spending lots of money trying to get into the AI software game and real details on that hugging face attack. What you hear will shock you. You'll find it at TWIT.TV and wherever you get your podcasts. At New Scientist, we're relentlessly optimistic. We're always looking for solutions to the world's problems. But we're not immune to anxiety or despair, which is why we're very excited to see Catelyn Moran's new book, How To Be Hopeful.

0:42Catelyn joins us today for a special episode, How To Be Hopeful With Science. Welcome, Catelyn. Well, I've invited myself on here, like some kind of cuckoo in the nest. I was like, because like, when I was writing a book called How To Be Hopeful, often I find that the thing that makes me most hopeful is the New Scientist. I've literally, I'm fangirling to be in the room right now. Now, I insisted on coming on here to talk about it. Subscriptions to the New Scientist have been a presence to all my friends. Whenever they say they're anxious, I'm always like, I hear your pen. You obviously can talk about this, but also read this.

1:08This will help you. There's always something in there every week that just makes you go. Because we're very, I mean, I write about this in the book, but when we talk about what the news is, we don't think about what the news means. And almost always the news is bad news. The equivalent would be like if someone goes in and shoots up or burns down a hospital and kills 38 people in it, that's headline news across the world. But if the day before a surgeon in there saved the lives of 49 people, we will not hear about it. It's that thing about, you know, we do not hear the forest grow, but we hear the fall of the axe.

1:36So and I can remember Nicholas Wichel in the 1980s saying we should be doing 15 to 20 percent of the daily news bulletins on hopeful things, legislations that have changed things, wars that have been solved, increases in medicine and medical knowledge. And he was laughed out of town at the time. And I can remember some of the bad boys of news like Jeremy Paxman just going, even if the news makes our listeners want to slit their veins, we should still be serving it to them. But 30 years down the line, we can see from the amount of fall off in audience numbers on news shows that audience members just don't want to hear relentless bad news anymore.

2:06So that's the thing I love about New Scientist. There is always good news in there. There's hopeful things and the quieter stories that are more like the forest growing. The story of progress that is happening often isn't one simple sort of one hit news story. It's a quiet story. And when you follow these every week, this is genuinely what gives me hope in the world. So we're going to try and distill that into a mega episode today where we're going to talk about eight recent developments in science that give us all hope. From New Scientist, this is the world, the universe and us. I'm Dr. Penny Sarsha.

2:35And I'm Dr. Roan Hooper. Before we get to our first item, Catelyn, perhaps you could set up the premise of your new book for us. Yeah. So, I mean, like almost everybody else, I've been incredibly anxious and despairing about the future. All the conversations all my friends are having, everybody just, you know, the recurrence conversation we all have. These are particularly terrible times. Conversations about the future, which even when I was a child were hopeful. When you talked about the future, you were talking about things getting better. That's gone into reverse. We presume the future is going to be worse.

3:02The statistics on the rise of anxiety and hopelessness are truly terrifying, particularly in younger generations. So I reached my apogee of hopelessness around about the time of my menopause. There's something about estrogen leaving your body, which makes you feel completely bleak. And the solution that I came up with at that time was that civilization was a busted flush. and I was going to do what the rich people did and make my apocalypse bunkhole somewhere in the countryside and get a polytunnel, have my own water source and just seed from civilization and form my own. So I went as far as putting a deposit on an isolated farmhouse in Wales where I could dig my own well and lake and then realized how incredibly expensive it is to do that.

3:35There's a reason why it's generally only Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that have these bolt holes. So I had to pull out of that. Then I got some HRT. That really helped. A lot of the fury left me, but the despair was still there. And then I was like, OK, well, if I have to stay here in my actual life in the town that I've lived in for the last 30 years, is there a way that I can be more hopeful? And so I just started researching every single way, most of them really tiny and most of them free, that I could try and live a more hopeful life. And How to Be Hopeful is the memoir of the year that I ran this experiment.

4:04And by the end of it, I can genuinely say I am hopeful and optimistic for the future again because it's understanding certain things about the culture we're in and the way that we communicate, where we choose to find our news. We call it doom scrolling. You know, if we were buying doom shoes or eating doom food, we would have stopped. But we still cheerfully go, we doom scroll. So I came off social media. I got some beta blockers. I studied a lot about anxiety. And one of the main things that I realized is anxiety is supposed to be a transitional state. So if you're saying I'm an anxious person, well, you're not.

4:31You weren't born an anxious person. Something happened. And then, you know, and then the culture and society has continued to make that happen. But you need to learn something from the anxiety, make those changes, and then come out the other side of it. to stay in an anxious state for the rest of your life is a terrible thing. To say to someone, you are an anxious person. I hate that phraseology. It's someone who is experiencing anxiety that should be able to get past it and go back to the state that they were in when they were born. So I am now in that state. I am like a newborn child and not anxious anymore.

5:00OK, we're going to try and prolong that today. We're talking about anxiety and there's a subsection of anxiety, climate anxiety, which we're all really struggling with, which is why we've got Madeleine Cuff in today. because Maddy has been reporting on something which is so exciting that we have to talk about today. It's basically the unstoppable rise of renewable energy because it is unstoppable, isn't it, Maddy, at this point? Yeah, I joke that I'm often the resident doom correspondent of New Scientist because I so often pop up on here with very bad news about the climate. But solar is genuinely the beacon of hope, I think, for the climate movement.

5:38I mean, it has been going on an absolute tear in recent years. This isn't a flash-in-the-pan story that's come out of nowhere. We've known that solar technology has been improving steadily for the last two or three decades, and we're now really seeing it come to fruition. So as of 2025, these are the latest figures, solar now makes up 8.8 % of the global electricity mix, and it's growing every year. So last year, power capacity was up a record 30%, 30 % and it's roughly doubling in capacity every three years. So it really is taking over the global electricity supply. And that's because it is by far the cheapest electricity to build now.

6:19And it's very quick. You just have to throw up the solar panels. You don't have to dig the trenches for a new fossil fuel plant, for example. Well, they've got those new plug and play solar panels now, haven't they, which I think we'll be able to start buying here soon. And also, it's just quite shaming that in the West, we're still so far behind on this. When The rapidity with which they're adopting solar panels just puts us to shame. Yeah, I think there's a real tendency in northern countries, northern Europe, northeastern US to kind of dismiss solar as like, yeah, it's good, but the sun doesn't shine all the time.

6:51But actually, for vast, vast swathes of the world, solar will take over their electricity mixes. Like that's very clear. There's the Sunbelt countries all around the equator where you can basically, you get solid hours of sunshine pretty much every day throughout the year. And then you use battery systems to store that power for the evening. And that is your grid sorted. And I think we are very quick to only see things through a kind of rainy England perspective sometimes. And it hasn't been so rainy England this summer. I'm going to continue having suns like this. I think everybody was, you know, on the third day being burnt alive by the sun, everyone was like, yes, I could get a solar panel and put it on my roof.

7:28There's definitely enough sun. I actually just put down a deposit to put solar panels on our roof last week. Okay, tell me who you got it from later because I'm literally going to buy some this week. This is my next step. Me too. Maddy, what about when people say, what about China? What about China? So China is going headlong into renewables. Yes, it has quite a lot of coal, but it is pouring money into wind and solar. And this year, very excitingly, solar is expected to overtake coal as the largest source of installed capacity for power in China, which is really cool. And another interesting point is that last month, so July 2026, China announced its renewables targets for the end of the decade.

8:09And for the first time, they announced targets for firm capacity for wind and solar. So that's wind and solar plus some kind of storage so that it's reliable power. so I think that shows the kind of next evolution of solar that we're going to see solar paired with battery systems or other types of storage so that it's a really reliable share of the electricity mix rather than just being this kind of fluctuating power that comes on and off as and when the sun shines. And that's great because one of the things you often hear when people are talking about renewables in this country is it doesn't matter about what the UK does because it's such a small country what about the rest of the world and that sort of allows everybody to just sit back and do nothing again but when you've got the nudge effect of like you know the biggest growing economy in the world yeah go that quickly towards renewables like suddenly it's like okay well we should join in the rest of the world is doing this it's it's you know the us and england and some other northern european countries that are behind on this we're not leading the way yeah thanks maddie now catelyn your book starts with anxiety talks about how anti-anxiety medicine has been increasing and the mental health crisis in general yes yeah so um anti-anxiety medication has doubled and then doubled again since the pandemic.

9:15I don't want to boast about being an early anxious person, but I'd like to think I was anxious before most people in this country. I was two things in the 80s. I was fat before everybody else was obese. And I was anxious before everybody else was anxious. And at the time, whenever you heard anxiety talked about, it was just in Woody Allen films, like I have anxiety. So it seemed almost aspirational. It was like having a bagel. But yeah, I had my first panic attack when I was 13. I didn't know what it was. And then that stayed with me until very recently when I decided to tackle it. But yes, I was raised on cortisol and adrenaline and noradrenaline and I can spot someone else who's had it from an early age from across a room.

9:48But it's not all just doom and gloom. There are some sort of glimmers of hope on the horizon and to tell us about that we have new scientist editor Kat Delange. Kat, what's the hope? You know I don't want to undermine at all the mental health crisis that we have but personally I'm really excited and hopeful about the state of brain research and neuroscience science research and my parents generation the thought of putting somebody in a brain scanner and being able to see what's happening in their brain in real time while they're doing things I mean that was completely science fiction back then so just in one generation we've made so much progress in understanding the brain so I'm very hopeful about where we're going with understanding the brain and mental health and anxiety and depression the more we understand about the brain the more we can understand these conditions dementia as well so much research going on.

10:37So I feel very hopeful about that and the pace of change. But something specific that I wanted to talk about today is actually weight loss drugs. I was speaking to a scientist called Paul Kenny, who studies appetite and hunger, but also the connection with addiction. And we've seen anecdotally that people taking drugs like Azempic and Wegovi, as well as the effect on obviously diabetes and weight loss, which is what they're designed for, often it makes them less likely to want to consume alcohol and other addictive drugs. And it seems to be sort of very powerful on those like addictive motivations.

11:19And one thing that really surprised me, so Paul Kenny has done this research with rodents, and he found that when they gave the rodents these drugs, they just didn't want addictive substances anymore. And what seems to be happening is that it's like we have an appetite for addictive substances. And when we kind of feel satiated in our normal appetite, then we just don't have that hunger for the addictive substances so much anymore, which was quite surprising to me because it's literally an appetite for them. And so we need to work out what's going on in the brain. We don't really know what these pathways are.

11:54But it's just so exciting because it's such a big problem. We've got this opioid crisis. Addiction has been so hard to treat. And now we've got this whole new way and this whole new understanding of what's going on in the brain, which could lead to new ways to tackle it. I wonder if GLP-1 drugs stop you gambling, you know, gambling addiction. And if gambling and all addictions are somehow similar things going on in the brain. So a Zen pic might stop gambling. I've seen stuff about that and sex addiction as well. It basically seems to stop want, which then brings about a really interesting cultural almost moral and philosophical thing as well like kind of like what we would be as a species if we are all taking drugs that stop us wanting anything obviously if it's things that are taken to excess or addict us you know to have a solution to that is amazing but if we stop wanting to build things and make things and creating things i think there's a balance to be found there and also to realize how much of it is in response to our environment i find it really interesting that food companies for instance have spent years trying to make food as addictive as possible fast foods and upfs and then we've had to come up with a medication that will battle that but already those fast food companies are trying to find ways that will get around gpl1 now we're getting all the mini portion things right also as well i've got a friend who's um just been recently diagnosed with maloma uh the smoldering kind and she's been recommended gpl1 for that which is interesting because it's a big inflammatory problem yeah and they're starting to see that there are they're doing experiments now to see if it works across all inflammatory problems including cancers yeah and we know that inflammation is involved in dementia it's involved in depression and if these drugs can help to dampen down inflammation which is what they think it's really interesting what you say around sort of want and I think that comes down to kind of motivation and what Paul Kenny said was that maybe what's happening is when we're really craving something those circuits are sort of hyper activated and these drugs can just pull them down to a normal level without affecting our motivation for other things so it's not necessarily that we're just going to feel like completely dulled and everything but that if we could just tweak down those things that we that we don't want to crave so desperately because a lot of the research does find that people are still motivated to do other things and the brain is smart and nuanced but I think it also speaks to like something much bigger which is that these drugs it's really rare to see a class of drugs just have such a profound effect on the brain when I spoke to Paul he said the words he used was it's like a rosetta stone and it's going to kind of crack the code for all sorts of other sort of decode the way that the brain works in other ways and also he can see it spurring he said a renaissance in our understanding of the brain and behaviors and all the research around how our brain circuits affect our behaviors so that could include things like anxiety so I just thought it was really exciting that there is this new this new drug that is illuminating the brain in a way that we just didn't expect.

14:41Thanks Kat. Yeah. OK, let's go back to environmental issues for our third item. Rowan, you're really hopeful that we can get rid of synthetic fertilizer. Yeah. So fertilizers cause so much damage just in production of them and then in deployment of them. They pollute our fields and our rivers when they run off. And they're driving dysbiosis in our soil, in our crops, which is the breakdown of symbiosis that we need to grow everything. So what I'm hopeful for, though, is that we can make crops, cereal crops that can grow, that can make their own fertilizer. So legumes, as you know, Penny, already do this.

15:21So chickpeas, peas and pulses and lentils, they form this symbiosis with bacteria. And this bacteria, rhizobia, they're the only thing that can get nitrogen from the air and turn it into a biologically accessible form that we can make proteins from. So all the proteins that we use are fixed by these bacterias. It's super important, but only legumes can do it. But if we could move that ability from legumes into cereals, we could certainly massively scale down the use of synthetic fertilisers. And that's what people are starting to do, being able to take this toolbox that has evolved in legumes and put it into cereal crops.

15:58That's got so many knock-on effects as well, hasn't it? Like just that brings the economics down for farmers, then having to buy in fertilisers. and also sort of politically, globally, like the fact that we're having to import so many nitrates into this country means that we're very vulnerable in terms of our food supply. So if we can start making our own and they're environmentally friendly, that is good news. It's amazing. And it's happening in labs all over the place. I went to visit some in Oxford and saw others in Reading and in Cambridge where they're growing these things with their own, making their own fertilizer.

16:27The people are super hopeful. You should meet them as well. they're like this one guy who's like I'm super optimistic that we're going to get there in my lifetime so that is really amazing if that happens that is a game changer for agriculture and for for the whole you know terrestrial ecosystems is there an organization within kind of like science and all these experiments and stuff that's basically called the hopeful league that get together and only talk about good things I'm just thinking like once a year there was some kind of happiness symposium that just that that would make the headline news just Here's the 20 biggest things we've had this year.

16:58We were actually just talking about a newsletter about that, that we could do that. People are so desperate. I do think we've reached past peak despair now. People are just, people are done with despair. They want to move on to the next mood. And I think the next mood has to be hope after despair comes hope. And something like that would be amazing. I will host it in my house. Fantastic. We'll all be there. We'll be there. So as Kat alluded to, there's a lot of innovation in healthcare and medicine at the moment that, you know, is a real source of hope. and we've picked out something else today that so it could be a real game changer and Michael Michael LePage you're here to tell us all about it.

17:33Yeah so what's making me hopeful is a new kind of drug and I'm not talking about an antidepressant or anything like that that I'm taking it's actually a whole new way of designing drugs and it makes them much more powerful and it could help us treat conditions that we can't currently treat. So to explain it a normal drug you've got a sort a small molecule and it binds to a protein and it stops it doing what it's supposed to do. But you need one drug molecule per protein. And also it's got to stick there all the time. If it falls off, it doesn't work. So it's one-to-one. And the other problem, it's also got to bind to the active region of the protein.

18:10It's got to bind to a specific part of the protein or it just doesn't work. Now, this new type of drug is called a protac. The first part of it binds to that same protein just like the other one but it's got two parts to it and this other part binds to another protein that adds recycling labels to the protein so now the cell takes this whole protein demolishes it into tiny bits and meanwhile the protac still floating around inside cells so it can go now bind to another protein and another one and another one and another one so A single protec can destroy hundreds of proteins per molecule. So these are like bad proteins that are causing some...

18:52Yeah, so imagine the first protec that's just been approved targets estrogen receptors in breast cancer. And so it's destroying those estrogen receptors that are making breast cancers grow faster. So a single protec molecule... That's been approved now. Yeah, it was approved earlier this year. So it means you don't have to make quite as much as the drug because it gets used multiple times. I guess you can also use lower doses, which has benefits. Yeah, so the reason why it's been approved for breast cancer, so we've already got drugs that target that receptor, but cancers can develop resistance by making more of those receptors.

19:28And then you can give more of the drug, but if it comes to a point where the drugs becomes intolerable, the side effects become too bad. But with the protac, because each protac is destroying hundreds of proteins, you can give an equivalent of a much bigger dose, destroy way more of those proteins. Oh my gosh. So what other illnesses and diseases are caused by proteins then? What other things? Is this in Alzheimer's? Pretty much every disorder you can think of, there's a protein of some kind involved. And the thing is, we can't make drugs that target all of them because you've got to target that active site.

19:58But with a protec, it can bind anywhere on a protein because as long as it gets that label stuck on, it works. So it's a new kind of delivery system that would work across the board. Yeah, it's a whole new way of tackling diseases. And so we've got one approved already. We've got hundreds more in development. And so this could be helping billions of people. And what's been the breakthrough, Michael? Because you've been on at this for quite a while, but suddenly it seems to have gone up a gear and actually now it's working. Well, it's just, you know, biology is complicated and it takes time. So this was the idea came about as a researcher called Craig Cruz, who had the idea back in 1998.

20:37and then it took them a few years to show that it actually worked. But the first prototypes were these big, they were actually these big bulky molecules that would just never work as drugs. So then it took, you know, about another decade of work to actually create sort of small protein molecules that you could actually swallow as a pill and get inside cells. And then I think the first trials began in 2020 and now we have the approval. Amazing. Why do we not have statues? Why are these scientists not more famous? This is one of the things I do not understand. Like, you know, we've got, like, statues up for footballers everywhere.

21:15We know the names of sporting people in, like, the third division. But why is there not a system whereby we know more about these people who are literally going to change lives and the course of human history? Like, can we not? That's our job. That's what we're trying to do as a scientist. But there needs to be special medals and stuff. Like, the Nobel isn't enough. Like, kind of, like, there should be, like, you know, like the end scene of Star Wars where they're pinning the medal on the Wookiee. We just need hundreds of scientific Wookiees lining up, having medals pinned on them by Princess Leia at the end of every year.

21:42We're definitely up for that. That's a great idea. Penny, item five now we're on our list. It's about food. Food that gives us hope. Yeah, I mean, food gives me hope. Is this just generally crisps or is it something more? I'm afraid it's not crisps. but one thing that does inspire me about food is that if you look at the science time and time again when we try to look at what's good for your health we keep coming back to just one diet and I think it can be really confusing ketogenic gluten-free the fads come and go and it makes it seem like we don't know what's good for us but we do the science is unapplicable Mediterranean diet.

22:21It is the Mediterranean diet. But even if that feels familiar, I think it's worth stepping back and saying, OK, well, we know that this diet is really good for you. But how lucky are we that it's also delicious and good for the planet? So it's not given that all three of those would line up. So Mediterranean diet is lovely olives and vegetables and legumes. Yes, legumes, back to the fruits and nuts and yeah whole grains um i think are i um that's going to be key um you can have some fish and the idea is to keep meat and dairy to a minimum although you know cheese is pretty nice um but i think the really key components in there are probably fiber and olive oil so if you're eating mostly plant based on a lot of whole grains then you're getting loads of fiber and increasingly we just see that you know the really good olive oil stuff is is very beneficial for your health?

23:12The introducing of leafy greens into your diet, because that's often the hardest thing to do. So one of my biggest side quests in my life has been trying to get cabbage in as many things as possible, because it's the cheapest kind of leafy green ever. And I found out recently, if you shred it very finely and just stew it, it has the same kind of consistency as jackfruit. It's almost like a kind of meaty thing. So I put that in everything. I did a pie for some friends a couple of weeks ago, a mushroom pie that had loads of cabbage in it. And at the end of it, they were just like, that's amazing.

23:37What's the secret ingredient? I was like, it's cabbage. and the guy across the table, who's a very famous artist, spat it out and went, I don't eat vegetables. And I was like, but you loved that, didn't you? He was like, yes, maybe I do love vegetables. And I literally changed his life overnight. Identity crisis. Yes, yeah, yeah. He was like, I'm a vegetable-loving man now. What are you doing to me? Well, my equivalent of that is also very cheap because cabbage is super cheap, which is great. Legumes, lentils, since I've been reading about this for years, I've been trying to just put chickpeas or beans in everything.

24:05They're so cheap and they're so good for you. and essentially anytime there is a new idea in healthy eating you know the diet that supports your microbiome the diet that reduces your inflammation whatever is sort of faddy on social media slowing down your aging essentially inevitably it always actually comes back down to whole grains pulses olive oil vegetables yummy and also because that just really gives all these niches for those lovely microbes to get going and increase the diversity in your gut and and that's what we want all these lovely microbes the more the better yes more the diverse the better and they are relatively cheap as well i mean thank god that the most healthy things are you know they fill you up really quickly imagine if we found out that it was caviar and very expensive croissants that were the thing that would maximize i would be broke but thankfully you know you can pad anything out with some lentils and cabbage and and you know we are seeing farmers in the uk trying to embrace chickpeas this summer as well it's the chickpea summer it was brat summer last year chickpea summer this year isn't it and and you know that is a much more efficient way of growing protein?

25:01Well, okay. So if you want to talk about efficiency, I've got to mention precision fermentation. So this is the way of genetically engineering microbes to make, so they make animal proteins. So you just cut out the animal. So the first one I think that will happen on scale will be milk. So you can make milk from microbes. The microbes just make the milk proteins and then you just add water and you've got milk. And then you can make cheese actual cheese not fake cheese but it comes from microbes it tastes the same uh or it will taste almost the same you may be able to tweak it um but then you cut out animal agriculture and all the huge welfare issues the waste that that is that you know that all the land that we well yes suddenly the whole planet's reconfigured right if you haven't got like cut down the rainforest so this is huge and um so i went to the the bezos so it is the bezos center the bezos center for sustainable protein at imperial college um and they showed me around what they're doing there It's absolutely amazing stuff.

25:58And it's happening all over the place as well. So this is another, I think, another game changer that we're going to see happening. I mean, if you just take soya, right, there's 350 million tonnes of soya grown every year. And 80 % of that is fed to animals and made into animal products for us to eat or drink the milk. So you could just cut out all of that, give that land back to nature. Well, in terms of my favourite story ever in The New Scientist, which I always bore people about, is when they discovered a bacteria that consumes CO2 and then turns into an edible protein, which, again, you can feed to fish and feed to animals and stuff.