This week, playing bingo on an inflatable space station, a new way to attack the cause of Alzheimer’s and mending a broken heart with stem cells. Also, using bananas to speed up fruit ripening, leeches out of water and chemical tricks to stop smoking and iron out wrinkles. Plus, in Kitchen Science we vibrate our way to a fountain in a cup! Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/donate)
stripping down science The Naked Scientist hello welcome to the naked scientists it’s Chris Smith and Phil Rosenberg with you this week hi Phil hi Chris now coming up in this week’s program we’ll be finding out how Engineers have launched an inflatable space station apparently it comes complete with a bingo machine apparently also a new way to combat Alzheimer’s disease that’s that’s coming up and how to heal a broken heart using your own stem cells also this week we’ll be hearing about how chemical tricks to make yourself look younger and some stop smoking strategies that comes from our reporter from chemistry World Richard van nordon also on the way question of the week we’ll be solving this potential explosive problem hi I’m Sebastian from London I’d like to know what would happen if I was to fall out of a spacecraft without a space suit on would I explode as space as a vacuum sounds nasty we’ll also be finding out how red deare in Scotland as seen an Autumn watch last year are helping researchers to rewrite the scientific textbooks and in kitchen scientist week we’ll be showing you a really funky experiment to do with liquid in a cup you’ll need a polc iron cup some carpet and some water and if you’re the first through on the telephone with the correct results then you could win yourself a signed copy of our book that’s naked science it’s an all good book Job $7.99 another way to get a copy though is to have a go at this weeks teaser can you tell us on an average a day how many cigarettes and this is in the light of the fact that smoking is now banned in public places in the UK how many cigarettes are smoked all around the world worldwide on the average day and don’t forget this week it’s our sence Q xtravaganza we’re answering all your questions the naked scientists podcast powered by UK fast the UK’s best hosting provider on the web at UK fast.net have you ever wondered what would happen if you launched bouncy castle into space would it would probably go bang wouldn’t it well it would if it was just normaly Castle but Las Vegas based space company Bigalow Aerospace have actually just this week successfully launched their second inflatable spacecraft into Earth orbit it’s actually made of some rather high-tech tough material so it doesn’t go pop but presum you don’t launch it blown up though do you no it’s launched compressed and all basically rolled up around a central car it’s launched into space and inflated when it gets there how big is this thing it’s actually it’s a fairly large thing it’s a couple of meters across essentially uh and it’s sort of a ccal shape um they actually this is the first sort of inflatable space station uh commercial inflatable space station that they’re aiming to build up in space uh and they’re aiming to get the the whole thing up there by about 20110 and get some people on there uh and the actual final thing is going to be called Sundance so this thing like a hotel yeah essentially I mean the first one for 2010 is going to be able to hold about three people um and there be quite a party out there then yeah well Two’s A Crowd Three’s a three a is that the staff or there won’t be any staff well that’s about all you can get I’m afraid so it’s going to be basically a commercial sort of thing maybe to do microgravity research on it initially but in 2012 they’re going to be launching an extra add-on module and once it gets to that stage it’s actually going to be bigger than the current International Space Station that we’ve got in orbit at the moment around the earth so but but what’s the actual basis for this um and then how does it actually work is it just sort of bobbing around in space is in in orbit what what’s the basis to yeah basically it’s in orbit around the Earth at the moment um the it basically launched up into space and goes into orbit around the Earth and it’s inflated when it gets up there and this is basically a test run so at the moment all I’ve got on there is is some instruments essentially and a lot of cameras got 22 cameras on there on the outside and on the inside to sort of look and see how the things working and and take photos and stuff like that of the earth and actually of The Craft itself and actually uh one of the things they were doing this time was they had a a get your stuff in space uh sort of thing where you could pay to have them take stuff up there with them as they went so a lot of people sort of PID to have photos memorabilia and things taken up there and actually the first photos just come back and you can see all these little photos of various people sort floating around on the inside of the space station what’s this about a bingo machine well the idea is that they’ve got a bingo machine up there they haven’t tested out yet this was only launched just this week and we’ve only got the first sort of pictures back from it on Friday but within the next few weeks they’ve got this Bingo machine that’s going to start playing bingo in space so if you going for the sort of older audience an older visitor then absolutely maybe if you’ve got your blue rinse on you’ll be really Keen to get on this space station but essentially if you log on to their web page uh in the next few weeks you’ll be able to play Space Bingo uh and who knows maybe we yourself a few prizes I hope so watch this space I guess is way to come out the back of that but an interesting story back here on Earth is the scientists have come up with a novel way to tackle the problem of Alzheimer’s disease and this is something that really affects older people but it’s getting more common because more people are living longer in fact um more people than ever before are more than 80 years old now in the UK and it’s not just the UK everywhere in the world people are living longer because our quality of life is getting better and about 25% of people over the age of 80 are beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s and the drugs that have become available over the last few years to try and tackle it actually all they do is sort of put a sticking plaster over problem they tackle the symptoms they don’t tackle the root cause of the disease now what we know about Alzheimer’s disease is that it’s caused by the buildup in the brain of an abnormal or pathological protein called Beta ameloid And this is produced normally by nerve cells just because it’s an essential part of the brain we don’t know what the protein does but it does something important because you see even yeast cells and other animals having it so it obviously does an important job in the cell and when it comes out of the cell normally enzymes cut it to small pieces and then it goes away but some sometimes you switch on an alternative way of processing it and this is called beta secretes and this turns it into a form which forms these pathological Aggregates in the brain which then kill brain cells and so what researchers at Purdue University guod Aron go have done is to design a drug which can lock onto this beta secretes me mechanism and block it switches it off so you should actually be able to stop the formation of this beta amid protein the idea being that if you stop it forming you might be able to therefore prevent or slow down the progress of Alzheimer’s okay so this is a preventative thing rather than a cure then is that the idea yeah the idea is to stop it happening in the first place or possibly reverse the symptoms a bit because all the other treatments people have tried to unleash on Alzheimer’s have literally tackled the symptoms they try to boost the levels of a nerve transmitter in the brain called acety choline and that’s associated with when you have a reduction in that the symptoms of Alzheimer so boosting its levels should make the problem a bit better but at the end of the day the disease is still carrying on this approach which is now in clinical trials over in America uh just to test its safety actually tackle the root cause of Alzheimer’s disease and if it goes well and this drug turns out to be safe it’s a it’s a drug which is called CTS 211166 because it’s in clinical trials at the moment then they’ll have a clinical trial with actual Alzheimer’s patients next year okay excellent hopefully we should be look forward to a long and healthy retirement then in the future okay I’m going to go back up to space now quickly um if you’ve ever want to take part in astronomy research but don’t have a telescope I’ve got just the project for you now um this is called a Galaxy Zoo now essentially a galaxy is just a a cluster of stars billions of stars though a big cluster of stars essentially uh that are just swirling through the universe essentially now our sun for example is in a a Galaxy called the Milky Way uh and it’s basically the Milky Way is sort of a big flat pancake shape with sort of spiral arms on it uh spiral shape with lots of young hot stars in and because of that we call it a spiral galaxy essentially there’s a few of those on telly this afternoon the princess Memorial concer anyway sorry absolutely um so that that we call that spiral galaxy anyway but there are other types of galaxies out there as well sort of some some of them are called elliptical galaxies are sort of big amorphous Blobs of galaxies don’t have really much shape and not this spiral pattern on them uh and essentially a robotic telescope called the digital SL SLO Sky survey has actually been automatically going around and taking pictures of these galaxies and it’s now accumulated at 1 million galaxies that it has these pictures of but scientists actually haven’t got the time to go through them all and categorize them and actually work out what they are whether they’re these spiral types or these elliptical types why is that useful well it’s useful a simple question it’s useful because once we know what types of galaxies are out there we can actually try and work out how they’ve formed some people think that uh spiral galaxies if they collide with other spiral galaxies will actually become this Big morphous Blob and form an elliptical galaxy and by taking all these different pictures and looking at different ones we can try and work out if that’s the case or not if that’s so basically how galaxies are evolving over time absolutely work out how they’re farming and how they’re evolving um now essentially uh computers are really bad at doing this actually they found they really they are not made for telling the difference between a Galaxy and elliptical galxy but people yeah people are really good at doing that people are good at spotting patterns and actually as it turned out scientists are actually quite bad at doing it as well they found that people General members of the public are actually better at doing this than scientists so they’ve launched this web page called uh www. Galaxy zoo.org and you can go and sign up and you actually get to be the first people to look through these pictures of galaxies you actually get to be the first human eyes to ever ever look at these galaxies because no one’s ever had time to do it before do they get people to sort of double check it to make make sure that some people aren’t um getting it wrong and skewing the data well essentially the way we’re hoping it will work is that possibly not because there probably won’t be the enough enough resources for people to go through and check uh but hopefully if some people get it wrong one way and other people get it wrong the other way then it will all kind of cancel out and hopefully it will all all work out fine so if you want to really be keen on astronomy and get involved then just log on to www. Galaxy zoo.org and you can sign up there do you get to name one after yourself um no unfortunately not there’s a whole committee to go through to name galaxies and you’ve got to discover them yourself first that’s how it works I think oh well I’ll have to stick with this then which is that there’s a very interesting study which has come out of Purdue uh University uh sorry a group of researchers in the UK in the sorry it’s a group of us researchers but they’ve also done some work in the UK and one of the leaders is Douglas Lodo it’s very interesting they’ve been looking at repairing people’s hearts using their own stem cells and the idea behind this is that if you use your own stem cells the immune system won’t reject the cell when you put them into the body and they’re looking at people who’ve got very bad heart disease or angina so pain in the chest when you try and do anything and they took patients they took a small group of 24 patients who are 48 to 84 years old who had very severe heart disease and they gave them a hormone injection with something called gcsf which causes stem cells to come out of the bone marrow and into the bloodstream and they were then able to go to the vein and take a small sample of blood and collect these stem cells and then they isolated just the stem cells and then using a very clever technique a catheter threaded Into the Heart through a blood vessel they injected these stem cells into the wall of the heart into diseased bits of the muscle and then they followed the patients up for 3 to 6 months afterwards and the patients were divided into two groups they either had real stem cells or they just got a placebo some salt water injected and what they found was that when they had the patients who got the real stem cells their cardiac function what they could do what they were able to achieve went went up enormously they went from being barely able to get out of a chair to being able to manage flights of stairs so they very encouraged and they think what these stem cells are doing is releasing small amounts of growth factors into the wall of the heart and this is encouraging new blood vessels to form and this boosts the supply of oxygen and blood getting to the muscle and this means that muscle cells that weren’t working very well because they weren’t getting very much blood start to work better and this boosts the ability of the patient to do work so it’s almost like giving the heart a little bit of extra fuel by getting that extra blood there and extra oxygen there it certainly looks like it well let’s hope that it works anyway that’s just a small trial but it’s certainly a step in the right direction potentially well it’s is the Naked Scientist Chris and Phil and we have a teaser running this week what we want to know is because we now have a nationwide smoking ban right across the UK in public places uh how many cigarettes actually get smoked on the average day around the UK around the world how many cigarettes get smoked every day all around the world and the first answer we’ve got in so far is manget Wilson hindes from Peter and she says too many I agree with that one I can’t we can’t argue with that absolutely true the naked scientists supported by the welcome trust Nemo here from Steve Hughes and uh he says hi all just wanted to bang off a quick note to let you all know how much I pleasure I get from listening to your podcast I’m a homebased computer programmer I listen while I’m taking the dog for a walk every lunchtime I probably make a fairly peculiar S as I stroll Across The Meadows grinning from ear to ear as I learn about colliding galaxies or shortsightedness in Singapore but not at the same time jimbly and it’s also important to me to see how vastly entertaining I find your program and how bereft I would feel without it so thanks very much for that Steve we’ve got our first question in today for our Q Q&A show uh this is from PK sinner actually in India uh he says hi Chris my question is what prevents venomous animals being knocked off by their own venom for example as the Venom is being made in the gland if I inject a cobra Venom into a cobra would it die fabulous question um the reason that snakes don’t poison themselves the reason that scorpions don’t poison themselves from the Venom they make in their stings or in their fangs is because it’s kept in a very special compartment in the body that’s specifically designed not to let the venom out and not to be sensitive to the effect of the Venom now what happens in in a snake’s poison glands is that there are specialized cells that have got genes turned on in those cells that tell them how to make the cocktail of proteins because snake venom is a protein which they then squirt out into a special system of ducts that are lined by these cells that are designed not to be sensitive to the Venom so the the Venom gets produced in these cells it trickles down these ducts and into a special band bag which holds it and keeps it safe and out of the rest of the snake’s body until it’s needed and then when the snake wants to bite somebody of course it’s teeth are Hollow and if you look at a cobra it’s got curved teeth and the idea of this is that these very sharp teeth which are curved mean the snake can lock onto something hook its teeth in and then muscles around the bag containing the Venom contract and it squirts the venom out of that bag down the hollow teeth and inside the tissue of the victim and that means that when it gets into normal tissue there are no defenses in the normal tissue against the Venom like there are in the specialist tissue in the glands that make the Venom I suppose you can think of this as being identical to your stomach because we make digestive juices in the stomach including acid and enzymes that can break down our body but they don’t break us down they just break down our food because the stomach has a special lining that protects it from the effects of the of the digestive enzymes and the acid so in other words it’s it’s is pretty much the same thing going on in the snake’s glands so that it doesn’t actually get the poison coming out of the gland and into the rest of the snake great question so if that cobba if you did inject a cobba with C of vom would actually really suffer so if it sort of bit its own tongue or something then it really would be in trouble I’ve got a caller here Andy is on the phone hello Andy hello mate what can we do for you uh the Sun what is the surface made of and does it actually have a surface okay well the sun itself is actually basically made of gas it’s not got a solid surface at all it’s just literally made of mostly hydrogen and a bit of helium and some really Trace Amounts of other stuff as well uh so essentially there’s no solid surface there however if you look at a photo of the sun you will see it’s got a very definite Edge to it and the reason why it’s got that edge is not because the gas just stops at that particular Point actually it kind of carries on diffusely out to you know thousands and thousands of kilometers uh but essentially there’s a point where the hot sun is hotter in the center and cooler on the outside and there’s a point where that hot gas becomes uh cool enough that it becomes transparent and that’s what you see as the surface of the Sun how hot’s the outside bit the outside’s a few thousand degrees maybe 5,000 de C so pretty hot inside is millions it really is absolutely colossal temperature um and that’s why produces so much energy CU these high temperatures you can get nuclear fusion happening which is the same sort of thing that you get in a hydrogen bomb essentially and that’s going on all the time in in the center of the Sun and that’s what gives it it energy and gives it the heat you you also get that it’s quite interesting because you’ve got material St streaming off the surface of the Sun as the solar wind don’t you yeah absolutely the sun’s actually quite an active star it’s throwing Material off all the time in these solar winds just blowing material away you also get sort of prominences and uh really big storms that blast large quantities of material and charge material as well and sometimes they can hit the earth and actually can be quite devastating it can take out power lines take out satellites in orbit it can be quite a problem in this Modern Age when we rely so heavily on satellites and electricity can we go to the quiz Andy yeah go m the waste produced by one chicken in its lifetime can supply enough electricity to run a 100 watt light bulb for 30 hours fact or fiction fiction absolutely true uh chickens produce a lot of waste but not quite that much they could only run a light bulb for about 5 hours from a lifetime’s wst good one Andy you’re on a roll a pearl is an intuned parasitic worm what do you think of that fact or fiction fiction unfortunately not actually it’s uh pears form when the lvy from a parasitic flatworm carried by seabirds actually be into the oyer and the oyster responds by turning it into a pearl cover it in the stuff cheers Andy one out of two cheers not too bad K Kai is on the phone hi Kai hello how are you doing I’m very well thank you thank you for joining us on the Naked Scientist what do you want to talk about um well my question is about tea okay and I hope it doesn’t sound too trivial compared to global warming in other other the world’s problems but um if you make a cup of tea and I leave it for you few minutes and drink it all and if you look back in the mug you see a te- ring a tea stain only around the surface of where the teas bean and my question is why doesn’t it stain the hole of the mug instead it just stains the ring on the top okay KY let me ask you a question um when you look in your Kettle which you’ve used to boil the water have you got lots of calcium on the element does it fur up um not really I don’t think so now I don’t really tend to look inside okay do have you got a hard water in your area um it’s in Manchester so it is a bit hard there and the thing about um hard water is it’s got a lot of calcium and this is in the form form of temp what’s called temporary hardness calcium hydrogen carbonate CA and then H3 * 2 and this is temporary hardness because when you put hot water when you put heat into the water this breaks down and it produces carbonate calcium carbonate chalk and also some more water and why I’m telling you all this is because those calcium salts can bind to tannin in the tea and produce an insoluble precipitate and that’s called scum and if you if you put soap into water you get scum on the surface don’t you you notice that you you end up with this layer on top of the water well what you’re doing is is producing natural sort of soap scum in your cup of tea because the tannins and other things that have also got the dark pigment the tannin in them float to the top of the the tea and the calcium binds onto them and makes this insoluble sort of precipitate these particles which float to the top of the tea and therefore where the tea is interfacing or hitting the side of the cup they stick and that’s why you get those Rings a bit like you get rings on a beer glass as you drink a bit drink a bit drink yeah I saw a great ad actually for beer glasses and it was um I can’t remember which type of beer it was Phil but it said it had uh he says something and then there’s this like one in high sort of drink down the side of the glass this sort of Tide Mark and then it says she says something it’s most of the Pint oh God Kai do you want to go to the quiz um yes we you do sound travels 14 times faster in water than it does in air fact or fiction um say fact unfortunately not sound does travel uh faster in water but only four times faster okay got to get this one right okay there were 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee more than a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee fact or fiction um I’d say there’s more yeah absolutely he says more absolutely uh and all of those out of all of those only 26 have actually been looked at and analyzed and actually half of those tend to cause cancer so maybe we should be wey about our cups of coffee nice thanks for your call Kai okay thank you so naked scientists through Chris and Phil and it’s our science Q&A show now for kitchen science this week Ben and Dave were attempting to make a fountain using AP poyene cup and they’ve recruited the help of students from Parkside Community College in Cambridge what are you up to Ben hello there welcome to Kitchen science I’ve come to Parkside Community College where of course I’ve met Dave anel hi there and I’ve met Ellena hi and today Dave said that we are going to make a fountain in a poyene c it’s not very complicated at all all you need is a poyene cup some water to fill it with and a carpet we’ve found office carpets definitely work you the very short pile hard wearing carpets and that’s all you need do you do experiments like this in school very often Alena um well we do some but I haven’t done one like this before how do you think Dave is going to make a fountain out of a cup and a carpet don’t really have a clue okay then Dave what are we going to do well what we want you to do at home and ELD to do in a minute is push this cup across the carpet going fairly slowly and we found that it seems to work better if you push it with your fingernails about a centimeter up from the bottom of the cup you find it vibrates a lot you’re trying to get as bigger vibration as possible try not to knock the cup over otherwise we’ll just make make your carpet wet and that just make a mess and that’s it really see what happens well it’s just as well we brought our own carpet so if you are trying this at home you need a polyyne cup fill it with water and then put it down on a carpet and push it from towards the bottom of the cup push it along the carpet and see what happens call into the studio email in let us know and we’ll get back to you later in the show thank you very much Ben and Dave so have a go you could win yourself a copy of naked science $799 or book shops that’s our book and I’ll sign it for you if you would like to have a copy if you can tell us what happens when you push that cup along the floor now very interesting because if you watched Autumn watch from the BBC last year you’ll have seen some Red Deer they in Scotland and a scientist from the University of Edinburgh which here Lisa crook has been studying them and they’re helping her to rewrite I suppose some of the scientific textbooks lisica what have you found by looking at these deer well what we found is that the genes that make a successful male do not always make a successful female what does that actually mean so successful fathers those who s many offspring will have daughters who actually have relatively lower breeding success because Darwin would have had us think that as you breed populations then you get Survival of the Fittest and so everyone should get better as time goes on exactly but what our results are suggesting is that maybe the idea that some genes are better than others that we can have a single measure of Fitness may just be too simplistic and that it may depend on the sex of the individual animal carrying the genes so so when you look at a male deer for instance what makes a good male is going to have big muscles big antlers for fighting that kind of thing those genes wouldn’t help a female very much is that what you’re saying exactly um there are very different traits that contribute to breathing success in males as you say fighting fighting ability and antler size and also their skills at roaring as anyone who will who watched Autumn watch will have seen they spend a lot of time during The Mating Season this apply to football Hooligans as well May well do um but those are very different traits from those the traits that determine breeding success in females with females uh those who produce the most number of carves across their lifetime um will have the highest Fitness highest breeding success how did you actually do the study and find these results well we have data from more than 30 years of very intensive study of this population of Red Deer and as anyone who saw it and watch um will have seen we can recognize all the indiv individual deer in the population it is an entirely wild population have you named them we do have um names for um every animal in the population yes um and your favorite oh well there was Caesar on Autumn watch as people um will have seen that’s a kind of dog food isn’t it um yeah and many other attributes as well uh there have been some very successful females along the way as well um Aphrodite was one with a very nice name too she was very popular with the males presumably um she did very well yeah so why is it that the males have unfit daughters why should why why does the same work in the reverse direction do you end up with females that are very very successful and they have lots of offspring are their offspring in the same way as the male’s daughters are compromised to the female Sons compromis then it’s slightly more complicated when you look at it that way around because with females they contribute not only their genes to their offsprings um later performance but they also provide maternal care so in the Red Deer all that the males contribute to their offspring are the genes with females they provide both genes and maternal care so a good quality female although she may be passing on genes that are detrimental in a sun in a male offspring she will also have provide very high quality maternal care to both her daughters and her sons and those two effects seem to balance each other out when you look at the performance of The Offspring of the females so we don’t quite pick up the same relationship the other in relation to Mother’s um Offspring performance so what would you say the bottom line is with this study that because of these effects you found that actually this mechanism contributes actually to a huge amount of genetic variation and diversity in a population yeah I mean it’s intuitively a very appealing explanation for a lot of the biological diversity that we see in nature and this is important because the genetic differences that we see between individuals within a single species have always actually been quite a puzzling fact for evolutionary biologists because as you mentioned the process of natural selection is expected to favor only the best adapted individuals Darwin survival of the fittest but what we’re suggesting is that maybe the this idea of um a single fittest genotype is a bit too simplistic lka thank you very much okay thank you that’s lisica crook from the University of Edinburgh with the BBC’s Autumn Watch Deer crop if you like uh which have helped her to effectively rewrite the scientific textbooks in terms of her understanding of how genetics and evolution work and now don’t forget our teaser question for today uh if you want to win a copy of Chris’s book uh The Naked Scientist then all you got to do is give us a call and tell us how many cigarettes are smoked every day worldwide coming up in a second we’ll be hearing from Richard van nordon from chemistry World about how you can quit the cigarette packet he’s got some interesting anti-smoking strategies up his sleeve and also how chemistry can help you to look years younger what’s all that about also we’ll be finding out uh about bananas and ripe fruit in just a second time now to cross the Atlantic and join our friends Bob and Chelsea for this week’s science update this week for the naked scientists we’re featuring babies I’m going to talk about their extraordinary ability to recognize languages even before they can talk but first the sound of a baby crying is said to be one of the most disturbing in the whole world but Chelsea has found a scientist who can turn it into beautiful music don’t you sometimes wish crying baby sounded more like say pianos well you have your wish at least temporarily thanks to acoustician Kelly Fitz of the starky hearing Research Center he says morphing sounds together makes for cool sound effects and in inative music I always wanted to be a a composer and I thought this way of working with sound uh directly with recorded sounds uh was of interest but the tools just haven’t haven’t really been strong enough his new technique first breaks down two sounds into their component tones like this trumpet then he adds the components of one sound to the other to make a seamless transformation [Music] oh so we’re back to the baby again I guess in the real world there’s no substitute for just changing the diapers thanks Chelsea babies can barely do anything for themselves but those as young as four months can tell their native language from a foreign tongue even if they can’t hear a word of either this according to a study led by psychologists Whitney weom and Janet worker of the University of British Columbia in Canada worker says past research has shown that babies can discriminate the sound patterns of different languages from a very early age but because speech is so richly multimodal and because there had been some research showing that babies pay attention to both the visual and the auditory aspects of speech we asked gee can they use just the visual information alone and can they use that to help identify speakers of their native language her team showed babies silent videos of bilingual adults speaking alternatively in English and French wum says that babies attention instinctively perks up when they detect a language switch so we found that at four and six months babies from a home where only English is spoken can tell the difference between the languages but their ability to tell the difference between the languages declined by 8 months of age on the other hand babies raised in bilingual homes showed no such decline suggesting that this ability persists only if it’s needed just as the ability to discriminate between certain vowel and consonant sounds Fades away if those differences aren’t important in one’s native language as for the ability to distinguish between Languages by sight it’s not yet clear whether this is merely a phase of normal language development or the result of an evolutionary Advantage for babies who could recognize other members of their Community thanks Bob next time we’ll talk about how scientists are trying to kick the healing process up a notch until then I’m Chelsea Wald and I’m Bob hon for Trias the science Society back to you nicked scientists thanks B Chelsea and you can find more about that on the web at science update.com it’s the Naked Scientist with Dr Chris Dr philit our science phone in email christh scientist.com quick question from Keith in Watford by tville he says Phil an inflatable Space Station what happens when one of the thousands of P sized meteorites punctures it well actually it’s supposed to be incredibly tough it’s it’s made of multi layers uh and the idea being that if something hits the first layer it makes a punch through that but it breaks up the meteorite and then it leaves like a powder that then hits the next layer and you’ve got basically 12 layers I think on this particular space station and actually they claim it’s actually harder and tougher than the International Space Station that’s up at the moment they think it’s that it’s that tough maybe we should make bulletproof vests from it then possibly oh it might even be the other way around it might be that they’ve utilized bulletproof best test bulletproof vest technology to make the space station H’s on the phone hi har hi there what would you like to know well I was wondering about bananas because I had always heard that if you put it in a brown sack with uh any other kind of fruit that it would ripen the other fruit that was in the bag mhm but I thought that really wouldn’t taste as good like as a peach that you just let ripen on the tree in the sun H and you’re thinking what should I go for brown bag or natur oh natural right well the reason it ripens is because bananas happen to produce a huge amount of the ripening chemical that fruit uses and that’s called ethylene it’s the same stuff that when you feed it into a chemical process you can turn it into uh polyethylene plastic and banana secrete loads of this stuff they put it onto uh any fruit that’s near them in the fruit bowl and because fruit all use this chemical to get ripe if you put a banana near the other fruit then it makes the other fruit ripen as well in sympathy so actually it’s a natural way to ripen fruit it shouldn’t actually affect the flavor at all oh okay do any other fruits do that yeah pretty much everything uses ethylene um in fact when you traumatize a plant or if you if you actually pull leaves off and things they also scream a bit of ethylene because it’s used as a sort of growth signal plants use it to form each other as to whether they’re being eaten or not ripe fruit make more of it than unripe fruit so there was a few years ago a guy come up with a sort of handheld detector the idea being that you could wave this at fruit in the supermarket and work out how much ethylene was coming off and therefore whether the fruit was overripe or not oh I don’t think it took off though do you want to go to the quiz oh sure I’ll try dear mice you’ve heard of them La a collar bone fact or fiction I I don’t know much about Mouse Anatomy but uh let let’s just say a fiction oh no unfortunately they actually haven’t got a collar bone so it makes them really good at getting in and out of tight spaces oh okay that makes sense you got to get the next one right okay the hottest planet in the solar system is mercury cuz it’s so close to the Sun Factor fiction fact oh no sorry afraid not although Mercury’s closest to the Sun Venus that’s a bit further away has got a runaway greenhouse effect and actually gets to 460° C okay well you got zero there so you did very well uh oh well you know it’s a good question though enjoyed enjoyed the question it was really interesting okay great to have you on the show thanks for thanks for dropping us a line okay Sally don’t forget that we’ve got our teaser running this week up for grabs copy of my book naked science uh we want to know how many cigarettes get smoked all around the world every single day now if you are a smoker and you’d like to know how to quit the Habit then perhaps help is at hand because joining us from chemistry world is Richard van nordon hi Richard hi Chris you’re going to tell us about these chemical strategies that can help people quit yeah I mean in the beginning it all seems so simple if nicotine is the demon driving tobacco smoking then you just give smokers a nicotine fix and that’ll keep your hands off the pack but it’s actually 30 years ago since the first nicotine replacement gum was developed in Sweden and still according to the US Centers for Disease Control only 5% of those who try to quit smoking succeed in a year with that gum with that gun which is not much better off than willpower is it yeah but uh fortunately uh chemists have got some new drugs up their sleeves so number one marketed in the UK as champex and it actually got draft approval on the NHS in March uh and I think they’re making a final decision in July so this month and uh what it does is it cuts the pleasure of smoking and it reduces the withdrawal symptoms it’s a bit like nicotine it binds the nicotine receptors in the brain uh it does produce dopamine the pleasure chemical just like nicotine does but in a very slow longlasting small sort of seep whereas nixen gives you that rush so you can use it to sort of alleviate your withdrawal systems but don’t you get hooked on the champ piix then well as as far as I’m aware it’s such a a small um seepage out that it it’s like nicotine replacement gum but it’s always there but the clever thing about this is it’s a bit like the gum but if you lapse if you decide to smoke a cigarette this drug is already blocking the receptor that nicotine would normally go to so you smoke a cigarette and you don’t get the nicotine Rush hasn’t it got an interesting history this drug didn’t it come from somewhere in Eastern Europe where um it was it was from a tree originally the idea or the chemical clue that led to it came from a tree in Eastern Europe I think yeah the chemical came from uh the Golden Rain Tree which is a beautiful name and it’s that’s been used in Eastern Europe since the 1960s by smokers wanting to quit I mean the chemists actually changed the struct of the molecule slightly so it’s not the same as the molecule you’ll find in the tree but as with so many chemicals it I mean you know aspirin came from willow trees aspirin is totally different synthetic but the the chemical clue was was the willow bar wasn’t it absolutely so how does the the benefits on champix compare with say zyban which made headlines about 10 years ago eight years ago and and other things like hypnotism and that kind of stuff well they’re all actually fairly similar um no one has ever managed to breach the ceiling of 30% long-term uh giving up on smoking so all of these drugs are you know pills that you can take that might help but we’re not very successful so far one other strategy you could try uh which won’t be available yet is actually a smoking vaccine which I think is incredible how does that work uh well what you do is you you take a molecule that again looks a bit like nicotine and it’s a vaccine so a very small amount and it stimulates uh antigens antibodies antigens do I have the right word and uh so when you then smoke and nicotine enters your bloodstream the Nicene is swallowed up by the antigens in a big complex antibodies I’m so sorry Chris and those are in fact too big to cross the blood brain barrier so uh the nicotine just doesn’t activate the receptors it normally does now this isn’t you know this is still in clinical trials but it’s proved promising so far there’s a similar technique to treat people who are on cocaine I think they’ve they’ve done the same chemical trick where you take the cocaine and Link it to a molecule that makes the immune system react to it and you make antibodies against cocaine and I think that the way it works is it sort of blunts the delivery of the drug to the nervous system so you don’t get that big chemical surge of pleasure and so you you forget to associate taking the drug with feeling good and so it kind of breaks the addictive cycle yeah I mean the only problem with vaccination is that um the antibody concentrations might not be large enough to counter a serious relapse where you you smoke lots deter smer determined smoker it may not put them off another 20 cigarettes in the mouth at once well I mean another problem is that you may actually not just be addicted to the nicotine when you smoke a cigarette you’re probably also addicted to the to the irritating Rush of smoke against your throat so uh just taking nicotine replacement gum doesn’t stop you wanting that that Rush of smoke um so some scientists told us the best anti-smoking strategy is to smoke uh a cigarette that doesn’t have any nicotine in it and at the same time take your nicotine replacement gum and that way you’re actually uh you’re sort of decoupling the two uh mechanisms one the nicotine withdrawal symptoms that that that’s what the gum is is doing and the other one is that sort of pleasure you associate with the the smoke and the the sense of a cigarette and that’s what the nicotine free cigarette is providing well one problem with smoking is it makes people look a lot older than they really are and there’s a medical phenomenon called smoker’s face and one of the things that doctors look for in a patient and they come to see them is lines around the mouth and the obvious complexion of someone who smoked for a long time now chemistry has a few things that it can throw at the aging process now I I understand yeah I mean you might remember earlier in May that there were huge cues outside of a boot store uh when Shoppers were Keen to get their hands on this anti- wrinkle cream which Manchester researchers had apparently shown was actually worked um in fact this anti- wrinkle cream uh contains Pro retinol an active ingredient it’s not new it’s not exclusive to this product it’s in it’s vitamin A isn’t it it’s it’s it’s vitamin A it’s a preest of vitamin A and vitamin A does in fact you know in it has study support that it um uh it increases the amount of collagen under your skin that kind of stringy fibrous protein that makes your skin Supple and elastic but Cosmetics are not drugs uh a drug with vitamin A in it uh something like a treatment for acne or something like that you know you’re you can put in a lot of active ingredient a tightly reg regulated cosmetic can only really change the appearance of your wrinkles there there just simply isn’t allowed to be enough active ingredient to actually do something to your skin very briefly Rich what sorts of chemicals can you put into your skin to Iron Out wrinkles in a hurry uh well we already mentioned uh vitamin A uh you’ve also got vitamin C that’s also a co-actor for collagen production the uh the alpha hydroxy acids that you get from fruit they’re just acidic and they just break down your dead skin cells to leave the new ones underneath uh then there’s also your antioxidants that perhaps prevent skin aging by Scavenging up the free radicals uh and uh then you’ve got these peptides which are copies of the precursors that go towards producing collagen protein so they’re the kind of thing you can put in and that’s all fairly well understood it’s just a case of how much a cosmetic can have in it now what’s quite interesting is that um a new branch called uh cosmetical industry is trying to create much more bioactive products much more like drugs much less like cosmetics and they’re trying to inject fillers into your skin which perhaps stimulate your cells to produce more collagen and whether they’re going to succeed in that which would be a whole billion dollar indust indry if it ever succeeded uh we’ll see thank you very much Richard that’s Richard vanon from chemistry World from the raw Society chemistry you can find out more about what he’s been up to on the web at chemistry world.org The Naked Scientist podcast brought to you by the naked scientist.com now if you want to find out more about science there’s no better way to do it than listening to us here at the naked scientists we would say that but what can you do between shows well how about seeing some historical medical artifacts and then admiring some classic and Contemporary Art whilst you’re thumbing through the human gen well the welcome trust invited our own Ben vler the kitchen Science Guy to to the welcome collection down in London to see where science meets art hi Ben on the 21st of June the welcome collection opened to the public cited on Houston Road in London the welcome collection combines three contemporary galleries together with the world famous welcome library and a new forum for public debate on science they offer a fantastic lineup of events including music storytelling and even live surgery I spoke to Dr Ken the head of public programs for the welcome trust about what to expect the welcome collection has somewhere near 1,500 exhibits so this is a gallery full of treasures and Curiosities they are arranged in three galleries one of them is called Medicine Man where we look at the life and work of Henry welcome alongside that an exhibition that looks at medicine now so the human genome malaria obesity and the quest to pick picture of the human body and then in our temporary exhibition space we’ve started with the heart which looks at both the history of how we’ve understood the heart but also not forgetting that the heart is absolutely at the core of our emotional response so exhibits from around the world that show that sense in which the heart is just as important as a symbol as it is a pump keeping us alive visitors will be entranced by the range of unusual artifacts on display in the medicine man Gallery consisting of hundreds of examples from Henry welcome’s Personal Collection Medicine Man offers a glimpse of the history of medicine and of attitudes towards the human body we came here deliberately because we’d heard good things about the collection that it was a bit odd quite eclectic maybe Henry welcome was a bit of a weird Chap and I think I’ll probably beginning to agree with that some very very weird things here but it’s really interesting certain items in the collection are intrinsically fascinating as explained by visitor Services assistant Britany Hudak I think that so far people have tended to Gra gravitate towards the Peruvian mummy or even people coming in the door have asked where’s the mummy which goes to show that the fascination of the mummified body is apparently still alive and well this is a mummified male figure in a sort of fetal position it’s very delicate skin drapes over the skeleton it’s between 5 and 700 years old and one of the things that I’m sure intrigued welcome was that actually this is completely naturally preserved it’s wrapped in textiles and then dried so it shows that the people who did this had a strong understanding of how to preserve biological material and then also of course what we’re able to do now is apply modern scientific techniques to study objects like this I spoke to some of the visitors on the opening day to see what aspects of the collection had caught their eye at the moment I’m stood in front of a bunch of nipple shields which is quite interesting I certainly haven’t seen any of those before I think just all the old medical instruments are very interesting and a bit gruesome as well dissection models and things like that I find it very interesting to see the changes in different cultures and over time that medicine has progressed so looking at things like the artificial limbs they’ve had in the past and how much better RS are nowadays it’s interesting to see in contrast to Medicine Man the medicine now Gallery focuses on issues in contemporary medicine in this exhibit installations of provocative Modern Art add an extra Dimension to an otherwise clinical though fascinating display of the tools of modern medicine I asked Dr Arnold to pick a highlight this exhibit here is the human genome printed out in all its Glory all 3.4 billion letters of it so we’re standing in front of a bookshelf which is almost 5 m tall about 2 m wide and it has 120 volumes all of them about the size of a telephone directory and to print the human genome in these books we’ve had to reduce it to 4 and 1/2 Point types it’s a type that’s maybe a quarter of the size of an average newspaper type and you open a volume and you find just millions and millions and millions of C’s of T’s of G’s of A’s and as a source of information this at once seems like the most extraordinary Book of Life both literal and metaphorical and yet in a curious way it also means nothing to uh the average person on the street and there is then this kind of tension here of being the richest source of information that we possibly have and yet also maybe at the same time the deepest mystery in addition to the two permanent galleries the heart exhibit is the first to fill the temporary Gallery exploring both the anatomical function of the heart and its powerful cultural symbolism this exhibit includes ancient Egyptian artifacts Leonardo da Vinci drawings Through The Cutting Edge cardiovascular imaging technology it even detours through the music of Hank Williams this is the most recently added exhibit to the heart show it is a human heart it doesn’t look too healthy it’s got lots of yellow tissue on the outside of it and remarkably enough this heart was beating inside the chest of Jennifer Sutton just a fortnight ago so she had a heart transplant operation and was good enough to allow us to put it on display so we have the remarkable possibility that Jennifer could when she’s feeling a bit better come in and actually look at her own Old Heart by marrying science with art historical with contemporary the welcome collection provides something to engage everybody I I rather enjoyed today watching people kind of looking at an object and then going and opening one of the cabinets and learning about it and going oh my gosh do you know what that is so I do feel like light bulbs are going off all over so it really is an individual experience I think everyone in here could find something different that they would enjoy for more information about how to find the welcome collection its opening hours and details about upcoming events you can visit the collection’s website at www.welcome collection.org and that’s it from me now back to the Naked Scientist thank you very much that was our own Ben vler who we sent to the welcome collection down in London that opened a week ago just gone and you can find it’s actually on the Houston Road and it’s opposite the station quite conveniently okay a quick update on our teaser now uh remember the question we’ve asked you this week is how many cigarettes are smoked every day worldwide so a couple of updates here John in warington thinks 40 billion Tony thinks 2.25 billion Alan in LOF thinks 15 billion um and 1 billion 6 today says Andy and hoit on last week show we asked you if you would explode if you fell out of a space rocket without a space suit we had lots of emails about this one so saina’s taking a look at it for us this week hey there welcome to question of the week this week we’re naked in space hi I’m Sebastian from London I’d like to know what would happen if I was to fall out of a spacecraft without a space suit on would I explode as space as a vacuum this is a popular question Milos also posted this on our Forum you can check it out at www.the nakedscientists docomo going on there to answer this week’s question we have a whole constellation of Stellar experts to kick us off here’s Australia’s Dr car they got it right in Arthur C Clark’s 2001 A Space Odyssey the 1968 movie where where David Bowman the astronaut is locked out by the crazy how 9000 and he bursts into his spaceship by leaping through the vacuum of space from his own space pod and is exposed to that vacuum for about 10 seconds and survives now that’s pretty accurate there was a case back in 1982 where a technician testing a vacuum chamber got exposed to something pretty darn close to vacuum it was a pressure up at around 222 km about 3 4% of the pressure at sea level in other words close to zero and sure he was pulled out he wasn’t looking good blue in color frothing of the lips and bleeding from the lungs but he had not exploded and also recovered fully now you’re thinking hang on you’ve got about 2 square m of surface area and your air pressure is 10 tons per square meter so that’s 20 tons how does your skin survive well luckily skin is made of leather and it doesn’t split you do expand roughly twice your usual volume but you do not burst the under and provide hiding that you haven’t tried to hang onto the air in your lungs and thereby rupturing your delicate feathery lung tissue just open your mouth and let it all go go unconscious you’ve got a good chance of surviving providing the time period is short enough 10 15 seconds you’ve got a good chance 2 minutes not looking good at all Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester has an extra point to add it would somewhat depend on whether you got out of the spacecraft on the sunlight or in the dark side if you got out on the sunlight side without your space helmet on you get the most tremendous instant dose of sunburn because of the exposure to the ultraviolet light from the sun and that would do you no good at all but then unless you manage to get in again and repressurized you’d have a very short time to enjoy your Sun toown as always we’re keen to hear your ideas when it comes to solving question of the week Todd is one of our listeners who got in touch the answer he gave was identical to Dr Carl’s but but being a high altitude physiologist who trains Pilots Todd was speaking from experience hi I’m major Todd Dart with the United States Air Force I’m an aerospace physiologist with the Air Force research laboratory San Antonio Texas I have an answer to the question of the week will you explode if you suddenly found yourself outside a spaceship with no spacit well the shorter answer is probably not believe it or not skin is fairly tough so while you would swell up your skin would act as his own SPAC suit and limit the amount of swelling due to what is called eism or the boiling of body flu fluids fortunately for me I haven’t had any firsthand experience with this however there have been a few instances where people have been exposed to near vacuum for example in 1960 Air Force Captain Joe kinger lost preure suit in the area that covers his right hand during a blo assent to 103,000 Ft well his hand swelled up it certainly didn’t explode and he’s able to successfully complete a record high outed parachute jump thank you and have a great day okay space cadetes if you ever find yourself naked in space well it might happen space ISM the 100m high club and all that breathe out and get back into the rocket quickly mind you’ve got less than a minute next week we’ll be staying in space for some sightseeing hi this is Kevin Kenny in planfield Indiana and I’d like to know what shape black holes are they’re always depicted as though they’re flat is that correct thank you think you know what shape of black hole is and why or perhaps you’ve got a question of your own let me know by emailing question of the week at the naked scientist.com but for now it’s back to the studio thank you very much to Sabina good to know that you could survive in a vacuum of space even if it is just for a few seconds so if you know what shape of black hole is or if you’ve got a question you want us to tackle and look into for you let us know email question of the week that’s all one word at theed scientist.com and we’ll have an answer for you next week sorting out the Sparks from the quarks the naked scientists and this is the naked scientists with Dr Chris and Dr philp been our science Q&A show and right now we’ll head back to Ben and Dave and find out what they’re doing making a fountain in a cup hello again welcome back to Kitchen science we’re still at Parkside Community School I’m with Dave and Ellena and we’ve got a hard wearing office type carpet here we’ve got a poling cup full of water and we’re going to make a fountain of it by pushing the cup along the carpet is that right Dave that is the plan yes Ben okay then Ellen well if you wouldn’t mind pushing our C along and let us know what you see okay so I’m just going to push it along my hands about halfway up to the bottom and sorry we’ve just managed to spill water so again it’s good we brought our own carpet with us Dave what went wrong I think possibly we’re pushing too close to the bottom of the cup you’ll find that the cup tends to vibrate and you want to just adjust how you’re pushing it trying and get the biggest vibration you can well we’re very sorry if we’ve got wet carpets at home now but let’s have another go and see if we can make a fountain what it’s another wet carpet okay then Ela one more try okay so I’m just pushing it along and it’s start to vibrate oh you can see the water sort of rising up and like bumps on the surface there were little sort of spits of water jumping out of it is this what you mean by a fountain yeah maybe it’s not 30 foot spout into the air but you’re getting like spurts of water out of the thing in a kind of fountain-like manner and you’re getting a really pretty pattern on the surface which I like personally so why are we getting patterns on a cup full of water well first thing as you’re pushing it along the carpet it tends to stick and slip and stick and slip you may have notice it vibrating yeah you can feel it so when it vibrates the water starts to slush backwards and forwards and you start getting waves across the surface and it also tends to change the shape of the cup so the Cup starts to wobble gets narrower and wider and narrower and wider so lots of different sets of waves coming from lots of different directions and sometimes those all add up so if two wayes meet together they add up and get a bit higher and if three wavs meet together they get up even higher if you got four or five all coming in in a circle they’ll form this kind of spurt upwards sometimes a droplet will come off the end of that and fly up into the air out of the cup making the carpet slightly damp so all the waves going in either Direction that’s what forms the pattern on the top and it’s only when all of those waves add up together that you get this little Spurt of water the fountain effect that’s exactly right okay everyone well we’re terribly sorry if your carpet at home is as wet as our carpet here at Parkside college but for now from Kitchen science from Dave goodbye and from Ellena bye it’s goodbye for me thank you very much ben so pushing a cup along a surface like a carpet it starts vibrating and this vibration makes waves on the water in the cup and if enough of those waves meet in the then you get a little squirt of water upwards bit like a fountain and this experiment along with loads of more like that you can find them on our website hundreds of them naked scientist.com forkit science and now it’s time for the answer to our teaser uh that was this week how many cigarettes are smoked every year worldwide and Allan’s in lowestoft oh good evening to you sir um 15 billion 15 billion did you say so so how did you get out that number then um the population of the world is 6 billion un Rising indeed it is y one of us if you assume at an assumption that 25% of the people smoke yep 25% of of 6 billion and the average smoke smoker smokes 10 cigarettes a day y you have uh 6 billion * 2.5 which is 15 billion indeed you’re absolutely correct there we’ve got the same answer 50 billion cigarettes smoked by smokers worldwide well done Alan I’ll give you a copy of my book and I’ll sign it for you science in the post you now thank you for calling in great to have you on the Naked Scientist and our other quiz winner this week for fact or fiction was Kai he got one out of two and he came out of the Hat uh one out of two on fact or fiction so well done to him a quick email here from Spar I don’t know how you’d say Spar Spar Ral he says nak scientist Rock keep it up I want to join you guys excellent thank you very much uh We’ve also got listener here from Edinburgh he loves the show uh or fell in love with it in Edinburgh and he’s now over in the us your podcast is amazing this is what we’ve done to him we’ve sent him away he loves it that much and that’s s she my apologies that’s from Ellena in Newport News USA Jason flakes wants to know from you Phil what Flames are made of uh well actually Flames themselves are just essentially so particles that are made when the candle or whatever it is Burns and they’re lifted upwards by the hot air from the flame so that rises up takes the sub particles with them and because these so particles are so hot they’re glowing just like if you have a p in a fire it glows red while the so particles in the Smoke uh glow yellow color and that’s how you get the flame genius I’ve got a question here from Amy she says I found two leeches in my garden we don’t have a pond for them to live on uh and we live on an estate so what should I do with them I’ve got children I don’t really want to put them back do you have any suggestions um intriguing um I was actually looking this triggered me to go and do a little bit of research on leeches because I thought leeches had to live in the water and they don’t really you can get some leeches that will quite happily crawl out of the water and on the ground surface as long as they’re not they’re not going to risk dry out because they’re a member of the worm family oh okay so maybe a little bit like you get slugsy you find in damp spot and you can get slug there even though it doesn’t die yeah they’re quite happy actually suggesting living outside of water if they have to so uh they probably won’t harm you um but medically speaking leeches have been a marvelous thing because of course they have this saliva which has got a natural anti-coagulant called hodin in it and this stops your blood from clotting and people are using it as a sort of clot Buster and plastic surgeons love them because when they reattach a a severed body part what you can do is it’s very easy to reattach the tiny arteries that bring blood into an organ but it’s much more difficult to find the delicate veins and so you can end up with a problem where lots of blood goes in and none can get out and this all clots off and you end up with a piece dying so if you attach yeah you attach them leeches they suck out the Venus blood and the result of that is that lots of blood can flow in it can get rid of the blood coming back out again so the tissue doesn’t die excellent I don’t like the sound of it myself though to be honest okay well that is it for this wig thank you very much for listening next time we’ll be journeying to the the center of the brain to find out about epilepsy degenerative diseases and also outof body experiences so if you got any questions about any of those things or if you just want to say hi please send them to miss Chris nakedscientists docomomo Awards that’s at podcast awards.com and we really need your support to secure a voting place in the final so please if you like the Naked Scientist consider dropping by podcast awards.com and nominating your favorite Science Show hopefully that’s us thank you very much to our wonderful production team Ben and Azie Sabina and Dave thank you to you for listening and do drop by nature.com sl/ podcast for some additional science in the meantime until next week have a great week and [Applause] [Music] [Applause] goodbye