Spooky Science

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Hello, curious-minded listeners.

This week's Inside Science comes to you on a dark, dark night in a dark, dark observatory.

We're bringing you a Halloween special from the glorious, if slightly drizzly, Jodrell Bank in Cheshire.

And I am here with resident space watcher and professor of astrophysics, Tim O'Brien.

Hiya, Tim.

Hello.

And the drip-drip that we can hear is actually the noise of rain on the tin roof.

Exactly.

It's very, very unusual to have this sort of weather here.

Yeah, we can't see that much in the sky tonight, but we will get to that.

In a bit, we are going to be finding out about the celestial origins of Halloween and what you might be able to see in the sky on this particularly dark night, if it's not completely obliterated by rain clouds.

Also, on today's gruesome programme, Blood Sucking Leeches, The Horror of Pumpkin Waste, and Could Zombies Ever Be Real?

No tricks here, just scientific treats.

Now, Tim, Halloween has its roots in an ancient Celtic tradition that I'm not all that au fa with, but I understand it has some celestial origins too.

No, I believe so.

I think it's

the Celtic festival.

I think it might be pronounced Sauhon, that is at the time of Halloween, and it's one of what are called the cross-quarter days, which is sort of you know about equinoxes and solstices.

Yes, so we had a September equinox, the autumnal equinox, basically when sadly for us the sun sort of passed the equator heading into the southern hemisphere, so it's our winter.

But basically, between the equinoxes and solstices, you've got these cross-quarter days, and the one that's roughly between the September equinox and the December solstice is this

ancient Celtic festival of Sowhan, which is now what's become Halloween in modern terms, yeah.

I guess we get a lot of that association of festivals with their celestial points in time.

Yeah, I mean, people obviously, in the past, thousands of years ago, would have been very au fait with events in the sky, probably more so than modern people are because of the light pollution we have these days.

So, yeah, a lot of these sorts of

timings of events would have been very familiar with people and they assigned various you know traditions and things to them.

So, I think that's where you know Halloween came from

via a Christian sort of tradition of All Souls' Day and All Saints' Day, and eventually Halloween.

Yeah, are you a Halloween fan?

Oh, yeah, of course, yeah, particularly, yeah.

I mean, I'm a big horror movie fan, so I love the idea of Halloween and all the things associated with it.

It's a particularly spooky setting in this kind of machinery shed in Georgia Bank, it's good, it's giving us a really good Halloween soundscape.

Um, now, thank you very much, Tim, and we will be back with you to talk a little bit more about what you might see if you look up tonight and if the weather's a little bit better than it is now.

But as promised, we're now going to pay a visit to some blood-sucking creatures, leeches, because London Zoo and the Freshwater Habitat Trust are working together to breed these infamous parasitic worms.

Why, you may ask?

Well, producer Ella Hubbert visited London Zoo's leech population to find out.

First box down for everyone.

So this is the oldest bunch.

They're about four months old currently.

I'm behind the scenes at London Zoo's Tiny Giants exhibit where aquatic species keeper Aaron Harvey has just pulled out a tub full of wriggling baby leeches.

There we are.

Wow, this is so great.

So amazing.

The last time I saw, well, the parents of these guys was two years ago.

For me, this is the first time ever seeing a leech at all.

But for Dr.

Naomi Ewold, an ecologist with the Freshwater Habitats Trust, this is the first time seeing the babies of the parents she collected two years ago.

Oh, they look so beautiful.

They've got really distinctive red running stitch down there.

Yeah.

So in the box we have two small moss hides just for a bit of land for our leeches to kind of wallow in the nice cool damp moss.

They actually get out.

Yes.

Yeah and that's true in the wild as well.

And what type of leeches are these?

These are Hirodi medicinalis and this is our native leech and they have jaws inside their mouths which have got three serrated teeth and that's how they feed.

There's a clue in the name of this species of leech, Hiridomedicinalis.

These are medical leeches and they have a long history in the UK.

It's a fascinating history.

In this country and in Europe as well there was sort of a leech craze around the 18th-19th century for using leeches to cure everything.

So, leeches were collected in their hundreds of thousands, and leech collectors was a profession.

Unfortunately, obviously, it was the poorest paid job because you'd go and stand for 20 minutes in a pond waiting for them to come and feed on you and then bleed afterwards.

And it's that bleeding afterwards that makes them such an important use for medicine today.

They are still used in medicine today, then.

This isn't just some strange medieval treatment.

They are very much still used in medicine today.

They sort of became more popular again in the 1970s and 80s when they realised that this saliva actually had multiple benefits.

So one, the anticoagulant would allow the blood to flow.

Secondly, they have a sort of an antihistamine effect.

So it would bring down the swelling and it would stop you feeling when they bit.

So essentially it would be numb to the pain of them biting.

So this is a fantastic remedy, particularly if you're trying to reattach limbs.

And that's what they're used for in modern medicine: to keep the blood flowing through those newly attached limbs, or fingers, or skin grasps.

But actually, what's really interesting is the ones used in medicine today are actually not our UK leech, they're a Mediterranean medicinal leech.

And our UK leech is incredibly rare.

And this brings us to why we wanted to partner with London Zoo as part of the recovery programme for them.

Medical leeches are on the brink of extinction, a decline which began hundreds of years ago and is intimately tied with our use of them.

Back when they were collected for bloodletting, it probably helped them in some ways.

Because if you're collecting leeches and you're using them and then you're dumping the adults back into a named pond, you're helping to spread that population around.

But when that kind of went out of fashion and people stopped collecting them and a lot of them had been exported, that really knocked the numbers back.

But to just blame collecting is a little bit misleading because, actually, around the same time, there was huge land use change in this country.

We stopped farming in the way that we used to, we started to drain fields, we lost a lot of our pond habitats where these would naturally have occurred.

And so, that really started the beginning of the end for them.

They're also really a bit of a glorified worm, bless them.

And in modern farming, a lot of animals are treated with worming treatments.

And when that passes through the system and then into the ponds, that probably knocked them back as well.

So, of the 150 ponds where we know they occur, that's really only in four locations.

So we might have to take a quick break because one is almost crawled completely out of the tub.

It's absolutely fantastic, isn't it?

He's quite right out.

And I love the way they look around and they're obviously sensing because they're so sensitive to movement, chemical receptors and heat.

And I imagine it's your body

that you're actually heading towards, which is really cool.

The way they move is incredible.

Yeah, it's kind of like dancing, wavy, and it's really elegant actually to watch them.

Neo, meet and Aaron could have watched the leeches crawling around for hours, but I had a burning question.

How does one breed a leech?

What we do know is that medicinal leeches are hermaphrodites, so you only need two individuals to create the next generation.

For breeding a leech, especially when they're coming out of the winter season and their dormancy, it's that temperature increase that starts to trigger their breeding response for the leeches to kind of come together and then produce their oofica.

What's euphica?

Ufika.

So that is their egg sac.

For the layman if you imagine an old-fashioned bath sponge like a loofah that's kind of what one of these looks like once it's hardened.

But yeah so the first thing for us was to mimic that temperature increase and decrease throughout the year.

Is the idea then to eventually release these back into the wild?

So step number one is to try and look after the populations that we have in the wild.

So these are really a backup And if they won't spread out naturally, we've got some parts of the country like Yorkshire where they've not been recorded for like 100 years.

The idea would then be at the right time and once we know enough about what we're doing, we'll be able to re-release them back into the world and increase the population again.

I have one more box as well.

Oh, have you?

I'll show you these ones.

So in the second box, we have

our slightly younger ones.

Oh, aren't they wonderful?

Look at that.

So adorable.

Aren't they just perfect?

Wonderful, adorable and perfect are not words I would have ever used to describe a leech before, though Naomi and Aaron's passion was certainly infectious.

But the need for a recovery programme for medicinal leeches goes beyond just an appreciation for the species.

So you could look at it in two ways.

One, I think that every creature intrinsically has a value and that we should make sure we conserve them for future generations.

The second argument would be that they are part of a food chain, so things eat them and they eat things, but also they're a really good sign of a healthy habitat.

Wherever you've got medicinal leeches, you know that you've got a lot of other wildlife as well.

So they're almost like a canary of the pond world.

If we can get it right for them, then we can get it right for everything else.

To keep our native wildlife happy, we have to keep our leeches happy.

It's understandable if you're still wary of leeches at the end of this.

I have to admit that I still am, but their long history in medicine, their role in our freshwater ecosystems, and their fascinating little lives are undeniable.

So thank you to Aaron Harvey and Naomi Ewold for giving me a glimpse into that wonderful world.

Thank you to our very own, very brave Ella Hubber there.

You are listening to a particularly spooky and slightly soggy Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

And if you have a fiendishly curious science question for us, please do send it in by Raven if possible, or just by email, to insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

Now, Tim, are you going to be going trick-or-treating this year?

I think not this year, I'm afraid.

I'm a bit of a, yeah, but we're sort of well away from the neighbours, really, so it's a bit hard to do that, yeah.

Yeah, it's difficult if you've not got people's doors to actually knock on.

So at the moment, what are you studying at Jodrell?

Because Jodrell is much more about listening.

We just walk by the beautiful Mark II telescope, this gorgeous dish that's pointed at a particular angle.

What are you listening for at the moment?

We're actually, right at this minute, we're collecting radio waves from a stellar explosion that happened about 2.4 billion years ago.

So it's 2.4 billion light years away.

It's called the gamma-ray burst, an incredibly bright one, the brightest one we've ever seen, and for that reason, rather unusually goes by the name of the BOAT, as in, you know, GOT, greatest of all time.

This is BOT, brightest of all time.

Oh,

and so

how are you studying that?

We're actually linking this telescope up, which is part of the e-Merlin network, so I can't offer you a witch, but I can offer you a wizard.

So, Merlin is a network of telescopes around the UK, but we're linking those up with telescopes right the way across Europe, and also a whole network that's spread across the USA, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, and another network that's in Australia.

And with that, we're creating a radio telescope that's effectively the size of the whole planet.

So, almost like an enormous dish that's just that's like taking in all of that data,

the kind of the most intense signal that you could get.

Yeah yeah and the real power of it is that by spreading these telescopes far apart or you know as far apart as the diameter of the planet then you actually get a sort of zoom lens effect.

You see the fine detail when you make the images of these radio objects in the sky you see very fine detail and we really need to do that with an object like this because it's so far away it's going to be very very small on the sky.

And the wonderful thing is you you can actually see through the clouds with radio waves.

So you don't need the weather to clear up.

That is the great.

We probably wouldn't be here in lovely sunny Cheshire

if we couldn't do that.

Yeah, radio telescopes, that's the power

we can observe through the clouds.

We can observe during the day as well as at night.

And so it's really a

24-hour operation here.

Ah, working through the nights, even on Halloween.

Thanks, Tim.

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Now, here's a disturbing question.

Could zombies walk amongst us?

Frank Swain has been looking into the science of the undead.

When the folklorist Lafcadio Hearn went searching for zombies in the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1889, he found them curiously difficult to pin down.

A zombie, one young woman told him, was an uncanny and unsettling event.

A three-legged horse passing in the road, or a great fire at night that recedes into the distance as you approach it.

It was only when US troops occupied Haiti in 1915, bringing with them the return of forced labor, that the zombie coalesced from an unsettling idea into a tangible calamity.

A zombie was henceforth a pitiful creature, one raised from the dead, and enslaved by a malign authority.

But if Hearn had instead turned his attention to the natural world, he would have found endless examples of real-life zombies, every bit as terrifying as one of his ghost stories.

The beautiful emerald wasp, for example, stupefies a cockroach with a sting to its brain, turning it into a docile living larder for the wasp's hungry young.

Crickets laden with aquatic horsehair worms find themselves compelled to leap into ponds of water, where they drown, releasing the worms inside.

And mosquitoes infected by malaria are induced to starve themselves until the protozoan inside is fully developed.

Why risk your host being swatted before you're ready to be passed on?

There is no evidence that we are immune from this kind of microbial meddling.

Meet Toxo.

The single-celled Toxopalasma gondii is common in mice but can only complete its life cycle inside a cat.

To get from one to the other, Toxo will rewire the mouse's brain, turning it into a thrill-seeking, if slow-witted, rodent.

The host's new live-fast-die-young attitude soon delivers it into the belly of a passing cat.

Toxo can also live inside humans and seems to treat us as an especially large mouse.

Czech researcher Jaroslav Fleger found that people carrying the microbe have slower reaction times, and a study at a Prague hospital found those responsible for car accidents were two and a half times more likely to test positive for toxo than the general population.

Around half of Brits show evidence of toxo infection by age 50.

Just as well there are no big cats stalking the streets of London or we might be in real trouble.

Benjamin Franklin famously said that nothing in life was certain except death and taxes.

And so far there's no sign that nature has found a way to raise the dead.

Yet in 1929, reports surfaced that Soviet scientist Sergei Bryokenko had used his autojector, a kind of primitive heart-lung machine, to do just that.

Films shot in his laboratory shows dogs, or rather just their heads, kept alive by a whirring contraption of glass vials and rubber tubes.

The film culminates in the death and then minutes later resurrection of a small brown dog.

Bryokarenko even claimed his machine had successfully revived a human test subject.

While his results were no doubt sensationalized, such work helped build the foundation of emergency medicine that today has returned millions of patients from the brink of death.

And while we can't raise the decidedly dead, Some still choose to have their remains cryogenically frozen in the hopes that one day reanimation science will succeed.

Be warned though, some early patients were unceremoniously thawed out and disposed of when they fell behind on maintenance payments to the cryonics firm.

Proof that even if death isn't certain, there will always be taxes.

Thank you very much to science writer and author of How to Make a Zombie Frank Swain.

Finally, to this celebration's iconic fruit, the humble pumpkin.

You may have visited a pumpkin patch to pick your own this year, or perhaps you're carving and decorating one as I speak.

But what happens after Halloween?

I spoke to Dr.

Alice Brock, who's been looking into the environmental horrors of pumpkin waste.

I started by asking her just how many pumpkins are thrown away each year.

So it's about 18,000 tons of pumpkins.

Maybe around about 13 million pumpkin are going to landfill.

They think it could be kind of 27 million pumpkins are being purchased.

It's kind of hard to estimate because every pumpkin weighs slightly differently, but it is about 18,000 tons of pumpkins going into waste.

And how much of a problem is that?

I mean,

they'll just biodegrade away, won't they?

So the problem is actually that.

What happens is when food waste goes into landfill, it will biodegrade, but it degrades anaerobically.

So it's not using oxygen.

It's trapped in plastic bags under other rubbish.

And that produces methane.

Methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide in terms of its global warming potential.

So a ton of carbon dioxide compared to a ton of methane, that methane is 25 times as bad for the planet in terms of warming.

So why is it going into landfill rather than compost?

Do we have a good measure on just how much?

Because it sounds like the problem is landfill rather than the degradation process.

Or is it what happens when these pumpkins go into a compost heap?

So, composting will release a little bit of kind of greenhouse gases, but it's not as bad.

There have been studies that have kind of compared these things.

Composting doesn't have as high a kind of global warming potential because it's a different kind of process.

So, when it goes into landfill, it's particularly problematic because of the environment it's in.

It's also contributing to landfill gas, which is mostly methane, about 60%.

So, all of those pumpkins going into landfill, do we have a measure on how much greenhouse gas comes from that?

Yeah, so I can give you the numbers on food waste, but I don't have exact pumpkin figures because it turns out there aren't that.

I was like, this is a whole area of research.

I'm now going to know and nag my colleagues that we should go and do.

But a ton of food waste, according to DEFRA, is about 627 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent.

So, carbon dioxide equivalent is the unit we use for all kinds of greenhouse gases.

So, if we consider our 18,000 18,000 tons of pumpkins, that's about 11,200 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

So if you look at your pumpkin, around about 60% of that is then going to become a greenhouse gas when it goes into landfill, essentially.

Right.

More than half of your pumpkin is going to be transformed into planet warming gases if it goes into landfill.

Yeah, I mean, essentially.

Right.

And what about the resources that it takes to grow each of those pumpkins?

Yeah, I mean, a pumpkin itself actually isn't that bad.

You know, most vegetables compared to say meat, fairly low carbon.

It's the fact that it's then going to landfill.

It's that kind of waste aspect that's the real problem when it comes to pumpkins.

And they're not necessarily going into food waste.

Now, some local councils don't collect food waste.

In my city, they don't currently.

That is going to change by 2026.

But at the moment, it might be that people can't put it into a food waste bin.

I kind of think it might just do because pumpkins are really big.

So you might kind of go, oh, I guess I've got to just put this in general waste.

It might be something as straightforward as that.

It might be that you're just thinking of it differently because it was kind of a decoration.

Yeah, you're not eating it, so you're not thinking of it as food.

I know, my food waste bin is probably not big enough for our pumpkin.

It's really quite small.

So what about just, are there other ways to dispose of it?

The best thing to do with a pumpkin is to just eat it.

Right.

It's food.

You could could just cook it and then we don't have any of this problem at all because suddenly it's not actually in that waste stream anymore at all.

Okay, so is it does that change how we should be treating pumpkins then?

So you wouldn't necessarily suggest that we just just we should stop picking and carving pumpkins decoratively for Halloween, but that we should treat them as food as well as decorations?

Oh, definitely.

I mean, if you're kind of looking at this from a sustainability perspective, the social side of pumpkins at Halloween is massively important.

You can still do all of the messy fun bit.

You can still carve it.

You can still decorate it.

And then you could just roast it or you can turn it into my colleague makes really good pumpkin blondies.

You know, it is food.

It's still something that we can get nutrition from.

Okay, so talk me through a more sustainable and still fun Halloween journey with your pumpkin.

So, I mean, some people don't even cut up the pumpkins.

You could just leave it as a nice decorative pumpkin.

That's not very fun.

you might want to kind of just not cut it so you've not got like exposed bits to the air and you know maybe do something like edible paints i've seen people do that it can look really really cool you might want to still carve it but then only have it out very briefly sort of in the evening um and then put it in the oven which i think would probably be quite a horrifying halloween experience if you've given it a face

um sounds quite fun a sort of a carved halloween feast yeah so once you've roasted your pumpkin you can either eat it roasted or pumpkins can be used in all sorts of recipes.

As I said you can make pumpkin blondies.

There's always things like pumpkin pie.

There's a ton of different foods once you start looking into it.

So it's just sort of rethinking a little bit like what you're doing with this thing.

And yeah, if you don't put a candle in it, because that's not going to be good for human consumption if you've burn a candle in it and don't put it outside, you can still do sort of something with it and then eat it.

Thank you very very much to Alice Brock there, who's from the Sustainability and Resilience Institute at the University of Southampton.

I am definitely going to be looking at my pumpkin in a different and hopefully delicious way, although I've got to admit I am not a very good cook.

But if you have any recipe suggestions for your Halloween leftovers, please do get in touch at insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

I'm still here with Professor Tim O'Brien at Jodrell Bank, hunkered under the tin roof of a machinery shed.

But we can see a little bit of sky, but it's looking pretty cloudy.

You're not going to be able to see very much tonight.

But at this time of year, are there astronomical events that we could be looking out for?

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's very appropriate actually that this is what we call dark time in astronomy at the moment.

It's very sought after by visual astronomers.

So, astronomers who use optical telescopes because it's when the moon's quite close to the sun.

So, as the moon orbits the earth, it's sort of sometimes it's very near the sun at the time of new moon, and then at other times it's on the other side, so full moon.

So now we're near new moon, which means that the moon's not up during the night and therefore the dark, the very dark skies.

So anybody who wants to study faint objects would be interested in using a telescope around the time of

dark time.

Yeah.

But yeah, if we have clear skies,

it's a great time of year.

If you look straight up, you'll see Cassiopeia.

It's a classic W-shaped constellation or M-shaped.

You need to know your Greek mythology, don't you?

So yeah, actually, my Greek mythology is a little bit pitiful, probably a lot less good than yours, but yeah, I'm vaguely aware of who's related to who.

What's the story of Cassiopeia?

Yeah, she was the mother of Andromeda, the princess that they decided to sacrifice to a sea monster called Cetus.

Brutal.

Yes, and these are all constellations.

And she was saved by Perseus, who had gone and sliced off the head of Medusa, you know, the snake-headed gorgon.

Yeah.

And he then

flew in on the winged horse,

Pegasus, and he flew in and sort of saved Andromeda.

But all these constellations are basically up in the night sky this time of year.

And one of my favourite sort of Halloween-y things about those constellations is that in Medusa's head, which Perseus is holding

in the night sky, in that sort of Greek constellation picture,

the eye of Medusa is a star called Algol, which is an Arabic word for al-ghul, as in ghoul, the demon, the sort of demon star.

And this eye winks, So every 2.8 days or so, it goes down in brightness by a factor three or something, because it's actually a star that has a binary system in it, where one star goes in front of the other and it blocks out the bright star.

And so it very noticeably, even just to the unaided eye, it dips in brightness significantly.

So

the eye of the Gorgon Medusa winks the algol, the demon star, and that's overhead at the moment.

That's amazing.

So whereabouts in the night sky should we look for the eye of the Gorgon?

Yeah, what I would, I mean, mean, if you can find the W of Cassiopeia, it's a classic sort of W shape, then below that you see Perseus.

And to the right of that, if you like, if you're looking at that, is the head of Medusa.

I mean, I would recommend getting hold of one of these.

I'm a fan of free apps.

I'm not saying I'm tight or anything, but there's a very good one called Stellarium, which I would recommend downloading.

I'll give you a guide of what you're doing.

of exactly where you are.

They're really handy for that sort of thing if you want to find the exact position of this star.

Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming out on this slightly gloomy evening.

We didn't get much of a night sky, did we?

But I will be looking out for the Gorgon's blinking eye.

Thank you so much, Tim O'Brien.

No problem.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, the ghoulish Victoria Gill.

The producers were the haunting Ella Hubber, the sinister Sophie Ormiston, and the horrifying Gerry Holt.

Technical production was by the menacing Cath McGee, and the show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

And away from the overworked Halloween adjectives, if you want to discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

Until next time, from the rainy gloom of darkest Cheshire, thanks for listening and

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