How can science help us fight wildfires?

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Speaker 4 Hello, you have downloaded BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton. This show was first broadcast on the 10th of April 2025.
Hello, this week I get to poke around in museum stores.

Speaker 5 I'm not a bad paradise.

Speaker 4 That iridescent green is absolutely fantastic. And find out how the specimens there might help save the world.
And.

Speaker 6 On my hen weekend, wanted to do something iconic and memorable. And yeah, I wasn't expecting radio finish, so it's just made the weekend even more special.

Speaker 4 The woman who came third in a marathon in the middle of her hen weekend. Iconic, yes, but scientifically advisable? We find out.

Speaker 4 And science journalist Caroline Steele is with me. Have you ever run a marathon hangover optional extra?

Speaker 7 No, never run a marathon, definitely not on a hangover. I don't think I've run anything on a hangover and never will.

Speaker 4 Okay, and

Speaker 4 you've joined us because you've been scouring the science journals this week, so we don't have to. What have you got for us later?

Speaker 7 So, Schrodinger's cat has warmed up. I found out what makes fruit flies sexy, and we've got some news about the first fermented food in space.

Speaker 4 Excellent, looking forward to that. But first,

Speaker 4 grim scenes of fires raging in southern California or the Mediterranean have become annual seasonal events.

Speaker 4 But all over the UK, wildfire hotspots are also cropping up.

Speaker 4 And in the past few days, we've seen crazy pictures of fires in the hills of Wales, western Scotland and Northern Ireland, which Northern Ireland has had 214 wildfires in the past few days.

Speaker 4 And in Galloway in Scotland, one fire burned so intensely it could be seen from space before it was brought under control by 100 firefighters with water-bombing helicopters.

Speaker 4 As global temperatures rise, fires are likely to increase in strength and number. So what is the best way to fight them?

Speaker 4 There is a surprisingly small sector of scientists working on this and one of them is Rory Haddon, Professor of Fire Science at the University of Edinburgh and he joins us now. Hello Rory.

Speaker 8 Hi there, good afternoon.

Speaker 4 Professor of Fire Science is quite the title. What does that involve?

Speaker 8 Great question.

Speaker 8 So my research and the research that we do up here in Edinburgh covers really all aspects of fire safety engineering and fire science.

Speaker 8 And that's really understanding how materials burn, how we can manage the hazards of fires within our built and natural environment, and also how we protect fundamentally people, property, and the environment from the effects of fires.

Speaker 4 Great. Well, we'll be getting into that.
Also joining us is Met Office meteorologist and weather presenter Aidan McGiven. Hello, Aidan.

Speaker 9 Hello.

Speaker 4 Aidan, why are we talking to you, a weather person, about wildfires?

Speaker 9 Well, the weather is so important when it comes to wildfires. And we've seen just how important the weather is in recent weeks.
The ideal storm in terms of wildfire development has occurred in the UK.

Speaker 9 A combination of winds, temperatures, sunshine, and low humidity. has led to ideal conditions for these wildfires to develop and spread.

Speaker 4 So, Rory,

Speaker 4 how can science help fighting wildfires?

Speaker 8 I think there's two kind of fronts that we work on here in terms of our research and understanding.

Speaker 8 One of those, most obviously perhaps, is trying to understand the conditions that will lead to these sorts of wildfires.

Speaker 8 As Aidan already mentioned, weather is of course a very, very important aspect of this. But it's not just the immediate weather that we've had over the last few days or weeks.

Speaker 8 We've also got to look at these longer-term climate kind of trends where we are forecasted to see more periods of more extreme weather.

Speaker 8 So understanding how that risk is evolving is part of what we do.

Speaker 8 And then we also look kind of fundamentally at what are the processes that govern how the fires will be ignited and then principally how they spread.

Speaker 8 That's really a key focus of the research in the UK and also internationally.

Speaker 8 You know, once a fire starts, in many cases it's almost too late.

Speaker 8 And really we need to be looking at how we minimize the consequences of these fires, not only directly fight them, because fighting a wildfire is extremely difficult.

Speaker 8 It's difficult for the fire and rescue service. It's resource-intensive.
It's difficult for the people on the front line doing it. It's really hard work.
It's a very unpleasant environment to work in.

Speaker 8 And very often, fighting a wildfire is not even the best strategy. And it sometimes is better to let the fire burn, let it burn out, but manage how that fire is going to burn.

Speaker 8 And the research that we do and international colleagues is really framed around giving the best advice and the best inputs into our colleagues in the fire and rescue service.

Speaker 4 Aidan,

Speaker 4 is there a fire season in the UK? Is that something that the Met Office might start predicting in the future, like the shipping forecast?

Speaker 9 Well, the fire season in the UK would typically be later in the spring and into the summer. Obviously, that can vary.
You can still get fires in the winter.

Speaker 9 There's a lot of year-to-year variation, tremendous variation. In the last few years, we've swung from some very wet seasons through to a much drier spell that we're experiencing now.

Speaker 9 And of course, the very wet weather that we saw last year, this time last year, we're in the midst of the sixth wettest April on record. That helped to promote increased vegetation growth.

Speaker 9 And in the last few months, we've gone back to dry weather. It was a drier than average winter and then an extraordinarily dry and sunny March.

Speaker 9 So we've seen these big swings in the last few years, and that's meant that we're seeing these fires develop probably a little sooner, a little earlier in the season than you'd you'd normally expect.

Speaker 4 So Rory, going forward, how can science and technology help firefighters tackle these fires?

Speaker 8 For me, there are some very high-tech solutions that get proposed, you know, swarms of drones and, you know, all sorts of satellite-based detection systems and things.

Speaker 8 And they are very interesting technologies with interesting use cases for them.

Speaker 8 Luckily in the UK we're quite a small country so actually detecting wildfires usually happens pretty quickly after they are ignited.

Speaker 8 But I think the main thing that we're interested in focusing on is how we manage the landscapes and the fuels on the landscape to give firefighters or landowners the best chance that they can if a wildfire does start.

Speaker 8 And that means things like how do we introduce fuel breaks, so literally areas where the vegetation has been either cleared perhaps by mechanical means, or also using something that's called prescribed fires, which is done in a huge array of countries around the world where fires are deliberately set where they can be controlled and it can be done in a safe way.

Speaker 8 And they're used to burn the vegetation and reduce the fuel loads in that way. I think there are those kind of practical, hands-on things that are really interesting.

Speaker 8 But, of course, we're always looking at new technologies and how we can use, for example, remote sensing tools.

Speaker 8 So, that's satellite-based images, satellite-based data to help inform fire fire danger risks, but also to look at tracking wildfires, mapping them, and feeding that information into our models and down to the people on the ground.

Speaker 8 So all that stuff is really evolving. It's really dynamic.
And as you mentioned at the beginning, we're a small team of researchers around the world, but it's a very exciting place to be working.

Speaker 4 Aidan, how are the forecasts looking for the fire season coming up? Will we be seeing the sort of weather conditions? conditions we'd expect to lead to further fires?

Speaker 9 Well, fortunately, we've got some much needed rain coming for the rest of April, so that will help to mitigate further fires.

Speaker 9 Into May and summer, of course, there's then the potential for the weather to swing back to dry and hot, and there's that increased chance now because of the global average warming that we've seen for hotter heat waves and more intense, longer-lasting heat waves.

Speaker 9 Too early to say for this summer, but it is an increased risk that we see conditions return to hot and dry after the wetter end to April.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much, Aidan McGiven and Rory Haddon.

Speaker 9 Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 4 This job comes with certain privileges.

Speaker 4 For most people, a trip to one of this country's natural history museums is an opportunity to gawp in wonder, but you're seeing only a fraction of what's actually there.

Speaker 4 Earlier, I got behind the scenes up in Cambridge's Natural History Museum.

Speaker 5 It's even more exciting if I turn it upside down because it's got these little iridescent green twirly wire-like feathers. So this is a king bird of paradise and not a bird of paradise with some.

Speaker 4 The colours, I'm sorry that this is radio. That iridescent green is absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 5 Stomach and pouch of a thylacine, the largest marsupial carnivore of modern times. The last known individual died in 1936.

Speaker 4 Who are these little guys?

Speaker 5 These are Galapagos finches that were collected on the voyage of the Beagle. Incredibly scientifically and historically important specimens here.

Speaker 4 The chance to see the birds and the bees and the extinct thylacine innards was thanks to my experienced tour guide.

Speaker 5 Hi, I'm Jack Ashby. I'm the Assistant Director of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge and the author of Nature's Memory Behind the Scenes at the World's Natural History Museums.

Speaker 4 Many think of natural history museums as

Speaker 4 dusty Victorian buildings full of stuffed animals. In this book, you make the bold claim that they can help save the planet.
How?

Speaker 5 Well, we are trying to do better at showing that the world's natural history collections as a whole are the world's best evidence for how the planet has changed over the last 200 years since we've been collecting material for our museum.

Speaker 5 So they show the best evidence we have for climate change and the impacts of people on changing distributions of species.

Speaker 4 And these museums are... treasure troves.
This museum is a treasure trove. I believe you've got a couple of treasures out for me.
Should we go and take a look?

Speaker 5 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 It's always tricky to say out of our two million specimens here in Cambridge, which are the highlights, but I've given it a go, so let's go.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 we're walking through the gallery. This is very much what I

Speaker 4 expect from those two museums.

Speaker 5 The point of the book is that all the natural history museums more or less look the same. We don't display those animals evenly and equally.

Speaker 5 There's a set of specimens that form what we call museum bingo that you'll find everywhere.

Speaker 5 It's only really when you go behind the scenes that you see that there's quite a lot more going on to naturalist museums.

Speaker 4 And you are taking me

Speaker 5 into the bird store.

Speaker 4 This is behind the scenes.

Speaker 5 This is behind the scenes.

Speaker 5 So yeah, I've pulled out a few treasures here and all but one of them are type specimens, which are the scientific treasures of any museum.

Speaker 5 So they are the specimens that underpin the definition of a species. So, when you describe a new species, you have to assign a type specimen.
You have to say this is the physical definition.

Speaker 5 And effectively, taxonomy and science of classifying species is impossible without museums. So, we keep the evidence of what life on Earth looks like, and it's in the type specimens.

Speaker 5 So, incredibly important, but also there's many other stories to attach to these specimens.

Speaker 4 Okay, Jack's just gone to get gloves, and on the table in front of us are one, two, three, four,

Speaker 4 nine dead birds as far as I can see. What are the ones with the beautiful green colours?

Speaker 5 Blue-green parakeets, they're called Rodrigues parakeets and they are an extinct species of parrot that lived on the island of Rodrigues which is near Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.

Speaker 5 And what we're looking at here, these two birds are the only physical evidence on the planet that this species ever existed. It's also called Newton's parakeets.

Speaker 4 Why Newton?

Speaker 5 Oh, why Newton?

Speaker 5 So Edward Newton was the colonial administrator on Mauritius and his brother was Alfred Newton who was the first professor of zoology and comparative anatomy here at the University of Cambridge and an expert on extinct birds.

Speaker 5 And so here is, this is the type specimen that I'm holding here. Alfred was disappointed that the specimen that he had to describe as a type specimen was a female.

Speaker 5 So the vast majority, I think it's two-thirds, about two-thirds of type specimens are male, which is really interesting because that

Speaker 5 suggests that kind of males are used as a zoological standard and females are the other.

Speaker 4 I'd push back against that, that with birds, aren't the males the more interestingly coloured ones? Although that said, that is a beautiful blue-green parrot.

Speaker 5 Often the males are more brightly coloured than the females, but it's still, if you're going to define the species, you don't have to say it's the male fancy one that is the definition of the species.

Speaker 5 You still need to describe both the male and female. So there's no real scientific reason.
And to be honest, we've got a male and female here. And the only difference is one of them has a red beak.

Speaker 5 They're both pretty beautiful.

Speaker 4 What's the importance of having them here?

Speaker 5 Museums hold the receipts for biodiversity.

Speaker 5 We also can tell social stories, so the kinds of biases that museums like ours have, like this gender bias against type specimens, and indeed against specimens in total, that most specimens in museums are male.

Speaker 5 And endlessly, new kinds of science are done on these collections. So people that collected these in the 19th century would have no idea what we could do with them now.

Speaker 5 And indeed we have no idea what people will do with them

Speaker 5 in 100 years' time.

Speaker 5 And we're in the bird room and it was discovered back, I think it was 2017, that they took the soot off of the feathers of the birds and it proved to be the best evidence for the use of black coal in America over the last 100 plus years.

Speaker 5 So it proved to be the best climate record. Ignoring the birdiness of the specimen, but just taking the pollutants that the birds experience in their lifetime.

Speaker 5 That's just one example of the kind of science that gets done on these collections today.

Speaker 4 So capturing one of these parrots and then labelling it and illustrating it and then sort of putting it in a drawer at the museum is not the end of the journey for this specimen.

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 5 They are much more than kind of just them physical cells. We call it the extended specimen concept that there is literally infinite data attached to

Speaker 5 billion plus specimens that are in the world's museums.

Speaker 4 And now for all you lovely podcast listeners, some extra nuggets from behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum, Cambridge, where Dr.

Speaker 4 Jack Ashby had just told me how the females of many species are underrepresented in the collections around the world.

Speaker 4 So out of interest, if only sort of 20-25% of all the species are female, does that mean that researchers are now collecting more females of more species, kind of plug the sex gap?

Speaker 5 Yeah, so it's been this research in the gender bias in museums is really new.

Speaker 5 So Natalie Cooper particularly at the Natural History Museum in London has been doing a lot of research on this and suggesting that if so it's the type specimens are 20-25% but there is also just across the whole collection there is a gender bias and she's saying that perhaps we should think about are we targeting if we're if you're going out collecting perhaps you should try and rebalance that but more importantly it's about acknowledging the fact that your data is biased so if you are doing a study on stomach contents of whatever species you're studying or just the behaviours of them, it's possible that obviously males and females are different.

Speaker 5 So if you're not taking into account the fact the collection is biased, then you might be misrepresenting what female animals are up to.

Speaker 4 This species, this specimen over here with the amazing red velvety plumage, what's that?

Speaker 5 This is even more exciting if I turn it upside down because it's got these little

Speaker 5 iridescent green twirly feathers just at the end of these wires, basically, wire-like feathers. So, this is a king bird of paradise.
The other bird we've got here is another bird of paradise.

Speaker 4 The colours, I'm sorry that this is radio. The colours, that iridescent green is absolutely fantastic.
Yeah, indeed.

Speaker 5 So, this is another one labelled by, collected by Alfred Russell Wallace.

Speaker 5 So, this is the type specimen of what we call Wallace's standard winged bird of paradise, Semioptera wallisii, so named after Wallace.

Speaker 5 And he would consider it the absolute zoological treasure of his eight years.

Speaker 5 If you read the Malay Archipelago, Wallace describes how it was another 15-year-old called Ali who collected this bird and not only collected it but described how it danced.

Speaker 5 And it's got these, you can't see it in this in this study skin, but it's got these long feathers that stick out sideways from the rest of its body, the standard wings, and how it danced when you used them.

Speaker 5 And what the point is here is that we, you know, museums for a very long time have been celebrating a certain kind of person, someone like Alfred Russell Wallace.

Speaker 5 But it is so much more powerful to say that a far greater diversity of people were involved in major discoveries in the

Speaker 5 history of natural history than have traditionally been given credit.

Speaker 5 And we're just doing the work now to try and demonstrate this, to prove that there are these Malay teenagers who made these hugely important scientific contributions and they deserve some of the credit too.

Speaker 5 And that doesn't do anything to diminish Alfred Bussell Wallace's contribution to say that he didn't work alone.

Speaker 4 Jack, if you could save one species, one specimen from this museum, what would it be?

Speaker 5 Yeah, we get to ask that question, you know, if there was a fire, we do have a plan obviously, but I would say these Rodriguez parakeets...

Speaker 4 Because they're beautiful, but also because they are the only physical evidence that an entire species ever existed.

Speaker 5 Yeah, like I say, it's quite a lot of responsibility.

Speaker 4 Okay, so

Speaker 4 Those are the birds. Where are we going next?

Speaker 5 We're going into our insect store, which has has by far the biggest collection, over half our collection, so around a million specimens.

Speaker 5 What we've got here is this is a draw of bees and wasps, and it's part of a collection of about 20,000 insects that were collected in the 1820s by a man who very few people have heard of, called Leonard Jennings.

Speaker 5 And Jennings is an interesting footnote in the history of science, in that he was the first choice to be the naturalist on the beagle. And he said, no, why don't you ask Darwin?

Speaker 5 And if he'd have said said yes, then who knows where we'd be if Darwin hadn't been on the beagle.

Speaker 5 But more importantly, for the kind of sake of science, that he collected about these 20 odd thousand specimens across the east of England, across particularly Cambridgeshire.

Speaker 4 So, this is why he wasn't on the beagle, because he was hanging out in the fence.

Speaker 5 Exactly, far too busy for any of that.

Speaker 5 But what we're doing now is because this was collected 200 years ago, before the fence, the big wetlands in the east of England, were drained during the Industrial Revolution, it gives us an amazing baseline for conservation today.

Speaker 5 So, our ecologists here are working with the wildlife trusts in our region to kind of inform them based on the data on our specimens and in Jennings' notebooks of what species lived in different habitats so that when they're restoring those habitats, which they are, they know what to introduce and how to manage those habitats for exactly the right conditions for these species.

Speaker 5 So, they're incredibly important for rewelding efforts and habitat restoration efforts today.

Speaker 4 So, each of these specimens is not just an animal in its own right, it's also a kind of hiding an ecosystem

Speaker 4 on it.

Speaker 5 Exactly, yeah. That's so many more discoveries are made by looking at what is attached to the specimen.
So, a lot of these are fluffy bees.

Speaker 5 So, beyond the fact that this is, you know, this is a bee that lived at this point in time, and we know that that species lived there, we could also swab it for pollen and work out what plants it was feeding on.

Speaker 5 So, that adds even more environmental data.

Speaker 5 And we can work out what the exact environmental conditions were like on the day it was collected, which will be in Jennings' notebooks or on the labels pinned under the insects.

Speaker 5 And that means that if you know if the place it was collected is now tarmaced over or in the middle of a town now, we can work out where else will be suited for it, particularly considering that the climate has probably changed over the last 200 years.

Speaker 5 So we can create what we call habitat suitability maps for these specimens.

Speaker 4 What just from analysing the pollen that's collected on these fluffy bee bums?

Speaker 5 Yeah, the pollen plus the data on the labels and in the notebooks.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's like I say, endless, endless opportunities for discovering things about the world from museum specimens.

Speaker 4 What do you want people to take away from reading your book?

Speaker 5 I think when people visit a naturalist museum, you know, naturalist museums have been shown time and again to be people's favourite kind of museum.

Speaker 5 When people visit them, I want them to be thinking about what's really going on in what they're looking at. Why has that specimen been chosen for display over another specimen?

Speaker 5 What are the stories behind the specimens on display? They are more than just the animal that they represent.

Speaker 5 And I think about what has been left out because we're all effectively all naturalist museums are trying to say the same thing, which is to make people care and be inspired by the world around us, particularly biodiversity.

Speaker 5 Our museum galleries don't look like what the natural world really looks like.

Speaker 5 So, I think it's interesting to be thinking about those questions and to be thinking about what is going on behind the scenes.

Speaker 5 You know, we have hundreds of scientists in our naturalist museums working on challenges that affect literally everyone on earth, so particularly the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis.

Speaker 5 So important. That science is being done, and these collections, I think,

Speaker 5 these collections are the best evidence of what's happened to the planet over the last 200-plus years.

Speaker 4 Jack Ashby's book, Nature's Memory Behind the Scenes at the World's Natural History Museums, is out later this month.

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Speaker 4 You're listening to the podcast of BBC Inside Science. I'm Marnie Chesterton.
Over the weekend, some dedicated athletes took on the grueling 26 miles that makes up the Brighton Marathon.

Speaker 4 One of them, sporting a chicken hat, tutu and dark glasses, was Emily Marchant, who was midway through her hen-u and had had more drinks and less sleep than your average runner.

Speaker 4 She smashed it coming third, with an amazing time of two hours, 58 minutes. Emily says it was good vibes that got her through.

Speaker 4 Inside Science is here to probe that claim pedantically, and to help I called up Dr.

Speaker 4 Anne Catherine Stock, a neuroscientist at Dresden University Clinics and a member of the pleasingly titled International Alcohol Hangover Research Group.

Speaker 4 We started with the definition in scientific terms of a hangover.

Speaker 10 We define the alcohol hangover as the combination of negative mental and physical symptoms which can be experienced after a single episode of alcohol consumption, starting when alcohol, blood alcohol concentration approaches or reaches zero, which means that the actual alcohol hangover you have is experienced in the absence of the substance itself.

Speaker 4 So it's how you're feeling physically and mentally once the actual stuff that you drank has left the body. Indeed.
What impact could that have on how well we exercise?

Speaker 10 The studies that have dealt with it showed that the impairments people experience are especially in the field of vigorous exercise.

Speaker 10 So if you do anaerobic exercise or if you you really, really work hard at your workout, that's when you see the biggest drop in performance.

Speaker 10 But if people do moderate exercise, for example, we've written a paper where people did a hike, this does not seem to have an impact that is big enough to actually show in our statistics.

Speaker 4 What could the consequences be of doing heavy exercise while hungover?

Speaker 10 Well, you're asking me to speculate a bit because there's not so many studies about this. But what I'll say is that there are some risks we should be aware of.

Speaker 10 The The first of which is that alcohol hangover often comes with some form of dehydration.

Speaker 10 So, if you're working very hard and if you break in a sweat while working out, you can dehydrate yourself further, and that doesn't really help and might exacerbate the symptoms you're already having.

Speaker 10 Plus, it could be dangerous if you're doing something like hot yoga or something where you really excessively sweat on top of being overly dehydrated.

Speaker 10 Another thing is that alcohol hangover can come with mild hypoglycemia, so you have a bit of a lower blood sugar, which might leave you less energy to exercise and if you have a pre-existing condition like diabetes it might put you at greater risk of adverse outcomes I think if you do sports when you're diabetic and last but not least we don't really know and this is really fascinating all of the different changes in the body that actually lead to hangover we know the symptoms well and we know that some of the mechanisms for example the disrupted sleep really have a big role but since we don't conclusively know all of the mechanisms that they are we can't really say for certain whether it's really safe to work out.

Speaker 4 I'm just going to get you to watch a surprising data point in the heavy exercise category that hit the news at the weekend. Take a look at this.

Speaker 6 I woke up on Sunday morning. I think I had three and a half, maybe four hours sleep, felt very ropey, very questionable.
Tried to get some breakfast down. Wasn't going in very well.

Speaker 6 Ran down to the star, which was such a blur because I just didn't know what was going on. Didn't feel too great.
But the sun was out and I thought, you know, it's going to be fine.

Speaker 6 Get loads of water in, ease yourself in and just try and soak up the crowds.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 10 First of all, congratulations to her.

Speaker 4 She apparently did really well.

Speaker 10 under the additional strain of a hangover.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 10 So that's very respectable, for sure.

Speaker 4 Well done, Emily Marchant. Two hours, 58 minutes.
Is it surprising that Emily did so well in the marathon after a heavy night?

Speaker 10 It's impressive for sure. But she has a few things going for her, which also might have made it possible for her to achieve this marathon despite being hangover.

Speaker 10 And what we typically see is that people who are fitter and healthier, especially those who do highly vigorous exercise, as well as people who claim to have a good immune system.

Speaker 10 So people who rarely fall ill, who have good wound healing, who feel generally well protected against all kinds of infections, those are the people who tend to be less impaired by hangovers.

Speaker 4 I'd say that Emily Marchant is an outlier and for most people having a hangover and a heavy night is not going to help their marathon performance.

Speaker 4 Are there any sports that could actually benefit from us having a drop or two of alcohol?

Speaker 10 For your Brits, there's a sport that most of you like. It's darts.
And in darts, there might actually be a slight advantage if you are drinking moderately.

Speaker 10 Every one of us has the tendency to have a very little tremor, so a little shake and imprecision when we try to do things with great precision with with our hands, for example.

Speaker 10 And if you have a little bit of alcohol, this shake lessens.

Speaker 10 So, if you're aiming at a very small target or if you're trying to do some very intricate work with your hands, it can actually convey a small advantage, which might also be one of the reasons why it's so popular as a game in pubs.

Speaker 10 The advantage clearly vanishes after you've had more than a pint. So, it's half a pint to a pint that'll give you that advantage.
If you drink more, well, you're on the downward slope again.

Speaker 4 Dr. Anne Catherine Stock, thank you so much for coming on to Inside Science and sharing your expertise.

Speaker 10 My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 4 And I should also say well done to Emily Marchant for her marathon feat. Joining me now to sprint us through the best of this week's Breaking Science is science broadcaster Caroline Steele.

Speaker 7 Hello. Hello.
What have you got? I thought we could start with some exciting news that scientists have managed to create Schrödinger's cat-like particles at unusually warm temperatures.

Speaker 4 Okay,

Speaker 4 so Schrödinger's cat is...

Speaker 7 So it's a thought experiment that Erwin Schrödinger, who's a physicist about 100 years ago, came up with to kind of explain this bizarre thing that we see in quantum physics, where one particle can be in more than one states or places at once until you look at it and then it has to pick a state, which is like a completely bizarre idea, right?

Speaker 7 It's like imagining a particle that's both next to me and next to you until one of us looks at it and and then it picks where it is. Right.
But it's a it's a true thing.

Speaker 7 But to kind of highlight exactly how weird that is, Schrödinger came up with this thought experiment where he basically said, that's equivalent to putting a cat in a box with a vial of poison, which may or may not break and poison the cat, putting a lid on the box and saying, hey, until I lift the lid off that box, the cat is both dead and alive.

Speaker 4 Weirdly, that helps me with the multiple state of particles thing. Okay.

Speaker 7 What picturing picturing it as a cat? Yeah. It's easier to picture it as a cat than a particle, right? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so you said it just got warmer.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so this idea of a particle being in two states at once, which is known as superposition, is really important in things like quantum computers, which are super powerful because unlike regular computers, they don't rely on ones and zeros, they don't rely on binary.

Speaker 7 This superposition of states, where particles are in more than one place or state at once,

Speaker 7 so far can only happen at absolute zero, which is kind of the coldest temperature physically possible, which makes quantum computers really expensive because you have to keep them super cool and like quite difficult.

Speaker 7 You can't just, you know, have one in your kitchen.

Speaker 7 In this paper published earlier this week, scientists have managed to create this superposition of states at a temperature warmer than absolute zero.

Speaker 11 How warm are we talking?

Speaker 7 1.7 degrees Kelvin, which is minus 271 degrees Celsius, I think. So it's not warm, but it's warmer.

Speaker 7 So if we can keep bringing this up, it might make quantum computers cheaper and more readily available for people.

Speaker 4 Okay, moving away from quantum superpositions.

Speaker 2 Back to alcohol.

Speaker 7 Yes, so fruit flies. We're about to get into the season where they buzz around your kitchen, eat your fruit in your fruit bowl.
They're quite annoying.

Speaker 7 Male flies in particular, they're attracted to the alcohol in the rotting fruit. And scientists have long wondered, why are they so attracted to alcohol.

Speaker 7 So previous researchers observed these males who are heading for the alcohol in the fruit and saw that the ones that don't have as much luck with mating are more likely to drink more alcohol and basically sort of concluded that, you know,

Speaker 4 the constellation problem.

Speaker 7 Yeah, exactly. These flies are sort of self-medicating.
They're being like, oh, I didn't find a mate, but oh well, I'll go sip on this peach and I'll feel a bit better.

Speaker 7 But a new study published in the journal Science Advances earlier this week completely throws that theory out the water.

Speaker 7 So researchers added alcohol to male fruit flies food and found that it increases their release of the chemicals that attract female fruit flies and then gave them a better chance at mating.

Speaker 7 So the males that aren't doing so well at mating might go and drink alcohol to make themselves smell better and then they might have a better chance of mating in the future.

Speaker 4 So it's the equivalent of a really good aftershave.

Speaker 7 Exactly, yes. But it is toxic to the fruit flies, right?

Speaker 7 So, you've got this kind of interesting risk where it's like, if alcohol makes fruit flies more attractive, why don't they just kind of keep drinking it until they're so drunk that they die?

Speaker 7 Scientists have managed to have a look inside the brains of fruit flies and have found that they have two circuits which sort of attract them to alcohol and then another circuit that repels them.

Speaker 7 So, they have this interesting kind of risk-reward balancing thing going on in their brain. So, they drink enough to be attractive and sexy to a female fruit fly, fly, but not so much that they die.

Speaker 4 So, one glass, two glass, good, three glass, bad.

Speaker 7 Bad. Okay.

Speaker 4 And finally, you mentioned space, space food.

Speaker 7 Yes, so astronauts have fermented the first food in space. Do you want to have a guess as to what they've fermented?

Speaker 7 If you were going to think it's going to be alcohol, it's not alcohol, it's something very tasty and culturally specific to Japan.

Speaker 4 Miso.

Speaker 7 Exactly. So, miso is the first intentionally fermented food in space.

Speaker 4 Why?

Speaker 7 Good question. I think partly because we can.
It's an exciting proof of principle because space and the International Space Station where this happened is a pretty sterile environment.

Speaker 7 So it's quite cool that you can ferment anything.

Speaker 7 And it's exciting for astronauts who usually rely on, you know, freeze-dried food that we could ferment stuff in space and, you know, make more tasty, diverse meals.

Speaker 7 Basically, a miso kind of like starter kit was made on Earth and frozen with two portions kept on Earth, one sent into space.

Speaker 7 They were all then defrosted at the same time, fermented for 30 days, frozen again, brought back to one lab and then analysed for their microbial and chemical composition.

Speaker 4 You know what I say analysed?

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 4 Like analysed with people's mouths?

Speaker 7 Well they came to the conclusion that space miso tastes nuttier and has more roasted notes than Earth miso.

Speaker 7 And that's because of a particular compound called pyrazines, which Space Meso contained more of. So, we don't know why that happened.

Speaker 7 It might be that the ISS has slightly warmer temperatures than on Earth.

Speaker 7 But interestingly, all three mesos, so the two Earthbound ones and the space one, had similar microbes, but there was one bacterial species which was only found in the space miso.

Speaker 7 And the fermenting fungus involved in making the miso had more genetic mutations in the International Space Station MISO.

Speaker 4 Oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and that's we don't know for sure, but it's probably because when you're in space, you're subject to more radiation because you've not got the protection of the Earth's magnetic field.

Speaker 4 I mean, this sounds like the beginning of a very niche horror story.

Speaker 7 It does, or I can see, you know, going to a Michelin star restaurant being served Space Miso and being charged £200.

Speaker 4 Thank you so much, Caroline Steele, for that summary of this week's best breaking news. Comments, queries, and suggestions for foods to send into space should be sent to inside science at bbc.co.uk.

Speaker 4 And next week's show is a special answering listeners' questions, so you might get an answer on air. And that's it.
You have been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

Speaker 4 The producers were Dan Welsh, Claire Salisbury, and Jonathan Blackwell. Technical production was by Rhys Morris and Giles Aspen.
The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

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