Is climate change to blame for Hurricane Melissa?

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Speaker 6 And today we're going to dissect a strain of bird flu you might not have heard of and find out why this one could be a candidate for a human pandemic.

Speaker 6 And there's an interstellar visitor wandering through our solar system as I speak. we will be debunking pseudo-scientific myths and revealing some real scientific wonder about Comet 3i Atlas.

Speaker 6 And Katie Seckles is with me in the studio, mathematician, broadcaster, puzzle maker, friend of the programme.

Speaker 7 Hello, Katie.

Speaker 6 Hello. Welcome.
It's nice to have you here. You've been combing through some discoveries we should all know about this week, haven't you? What have you got for us?

Speaker 7 Well, there is a cryptographical puzzle. Okay.
And some news on a breakthrough in that. A little bit about the maths behind animal patterns.
Ah.

Speaker 7 And a scientific way to tell whether your food is going to be too spicy.

Speaker 6 Food and animal print, two of my favourite subjects. I'll look forward to that.
Stick with us.

Speaker 6 First, though, we want to turn our attention to what's been called the storm of the century: Hurricane Melissa.

Speaker 6 As it barreled through Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas this week, we saw people sharing videos from Jamaica of roads turned into rivers, roofs ripped from buildings, and palm trees tossed around like toothpicks.

Speaker 8 It will take many days to assess the extent of the damage,

Speaker 8 especially in more remote communities inland.

Speaker 6 Today, we want to answer a question that many people are asking about this deadly storm. Was Melissa caused or made worse by human-made climate change? Or is this simply weather at its most extreme?

Speaker 6 And someone who can break that down for us is Hannah Cloak, Professor of Hydrology at the University of Reading, who is with me now. Hello, Hannah.
Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 9 Hello, it's lovely to talk to you.

Speaker 6 First of all, can you just walk us through what exactly made this hurricane so powerful? Is this the storm of the century and why?

Speaker 9 Hurricanes form when warm, moist air rises from the ocean surface and

Speaker 9 that starts the whole thing off. And this has been a beast of a storm, so we do have to look at, you know, why was it such a beast?

Speaker 9 And the main reason is that the ocean was warmer than usual, so it had more fuel, so it could turn into this huge, swirling storm with these huge, strong winds and unleashing all this rainfall and storm surge and ocean flooding on the islands.

Speaker 6 So that rising ocean temperature, we're going to get into that. But this was also a very slow moving storm, which sort of sounds like maybe it might be less harmful.

Speaker 6 Why was it moving so slowly and why is that something that increases its force and its destructive power?

Speaker 9 Paragons are really not very intuitive at all, are they? A slow moving storm you think wouldn't cause much destruction.

Speaker 9 But actually, it's like having like a raging bull, like in a tea shop, basically, just sitting in that tea shop completely trapped.

Speaker 9 So, all of that energy, all of those destructive winds, and all of that destructive rainfall is all falling over the same place really, really slowly. So, a slow-moving storm is really dangerous.

Speaker 9 It still has these very fast winds associated with it and lots of destruction in there, and it extends over a really wide area as well.

Speaker 9 So, we have to remember that. So, when it's slow-moving, it's even more dangerous.

Speaker 6 Why is it trapped in this slow-moving pattern?

Speaker 9 So, it essentially got stuck between two high-pressure weather systems. Um, and you could think of that a bit like an enormous sailing vessel.

Speaker 9 So, it had it hasn't got those steering winds up in the atmosphere that would normally drag the hurricane along, and instead, it's kind of just lost those steering winds and got trapped.

Speaker 9 And you could also think of that like a rolling pebble in a river between two eddies.

Speaker 9 You can see that, um, and it's got stuck and it can't travel along. And that's essentially it.

Speaker 9 And it was like that for several days, just hanging around, picking up all of that energy from that warm ocean that got transferred up into making it into this huge storm.

Speaker 6 At the moment, that sounds like a very intense, unlucky situation, a weather situation, but you also mentioned these ocean temperatures in the Atlantic being above average.

Speaker 6 What's causing that and what does it do to this hurricane?

Speaker 9 So the ocean temperatures have been above average and that has been quite concerning and it just kind of breeds these big storms. Why do we have this hot ocean temperature at the moment?

Speaker 9 That is, you know, partially to do with climate change. We have put extra energy into and warmth into that atmosphere which has been kind of drawn into the ocean.

Speaker 6 So what is the cause of Melissa's intensity? It sounds like is it a combination of weather fueled by climate change and these above-average ocean temperatures?

Speaker 9 I think the key thing here is we're making them work, we've made them worse because of climate change.

Speaker 9 We've put that extra energy in, and also things like rising sea levels and holding onto more moisture so you get more intense rainfall out of the storm as well.

Speaker 9 But it's not just the strength, it's also that the way they intensify. What scientists call rapid intensification.

Speaker 9 So that's when, you know, over about a day, you suddenly get the storm changing from kind of a moderate storm into this kind of violent hurricane with very very strong winds as well so we know rapid intensification is becoming more common with climate change so does that mean that we can expect worse hurricanes in the future that's exactly right we should be preparing for more milissas um you know barreling down on on places perhaps that haven't even experienced them before as well because there is a possibility that they will also shift track into into parts of the world perhaps even polewards.

Speaker 6 And then prediction and forecasting,

Speaker 6 more difficult, but also more important.

Speaker 6 Where are we with that? How do we actually forecast and track these hurricanes so that we can prepare for them?

Speaker 9 At the moment, we use lots of different global weather forecasting models that suck in lots of data from satellites, from ground measurements,

Speaker 9 and to try and work out where those hurricanes are going to form, looking at the atmosphere in the ocean.

Speaker 9 And it is quite difficult. We do quite well this time with Melissa.
We, you know, captured where it was going to go, the fact that it was going to move quite slowly.

Speaker 9 And we didn't quite get the intensity right. So how strong it was in the middle and exactly where it was going to go kind of shifted at the last minute with all of our modelling systems as well.

Speaker 6 And are there things that research is working towards to try and improve that accuracy?

Speaker 9 One of the most important things that you need when you're doing forecasting is data.

Speaker 9 You need observations of what's going on, measurements of pressure, of moisture and temperature and things like that.

Speaker 9 At the moment, we've got like the Air Force hurricane hunters and they fly their planes into the hurricanes to drop little instruments into the middle of hurricanes. Sounds terrifying, doesn't it?

Speaker 9 They literally do this.

Speaker 9 And it's really key. It's really, really important in improving the forecast.
You get this profile, this vertical profile of the atmosphere inside the hurricane.

Speaker 6 And presumably that science gets more dangerous as these storms get more dangerous.

Speaker 9 Of course, it does. It does sound sound very dangerous flying planes into hurricanes.

Speaker 9 And I hope that we're going to come up with less people-centred approaches where we could perhaps fly drones into hurricanes rather than people.

Speaker 6 And what's the fate of Melissa, of Hurricane Melissa now?

Speaker 9 So hurricanes do lose energy as they go over land. So we've seen it drop from a category five to a category three, and it will continue to weaken, we hope.

Speaker 9 Although it will pick up energy again as it goes over the ocean, as it goes kind of polewards, it's not so warm, so we won't have that fuel.

Speaker 9 And we think it's going to go a bit faster as well, which again will help with some of the destruction.

Speaker 9 At the moment, it's not looking like it's going to hit the US or Canada directly, but you know, we do need to keep an eye on it because hurricanes can play tricks.

Speaker 9 Sometimes they can circle around and do quite strange, crazy things.

Speaker 9 For example, Cyclone Idai in 2019 went and hit Mozambique twice in very vulnerable areas. And so we do need to always watch to see exactly what's going to happen.

Speaker 6 So, you have to keep tracking it, have to keep following it. Thank you so much, Professor Hannah Cloak.
Great to talk to you. Good to have you on the programme.

Speaker 9 Great to talk to you, too.

Speaker 6 Now, as well as hurricane season, we're staring down the barrel of bird flu season right now.

Speaker 6 This month, the UK has had eight outbreaks of H5N1 avian flu, and we can expect more cases as the winter goes on. But there's something else this season.

Speaker 6 Scientists are now taking a closer look at another strain of bird flu, one that's been largely ignored until now, and this one appears to be more biologically predisposed to infecting humans.

Speaker 6 With me is Professor Ian Brown, avian virology lead at the Purbright Institute. Hello, Ian.

Speaker 10 Good afternoon.

Speaker 6 Great to have you on Inside Science. Thank you very much for walking us through this.

Speaker 6 Can I just start with the number of outbreaks of H5N1, the strain that we're sadly quite familiar with now over the past few weeks? How does that compare with a normal bird flu season?

Speaker 10 Well, in fact, actually, we had another case overnight. So Great Britain's now at nine cases.
That represents quite a significant increase on the period before.

Speaker 10 We do generally expect to get an increase in cases around this time of year, sort of October, particularly it starts taking off, if we're going to end up with a large flu season.

Speaker 10 That's because migratory waterfowl come into the UK in substantial numbers at this time of year and they carry and bring the virus with them, which they shed into the environment and then it finds its way into domestic poultry or kept bird settings.

Speaker 10 We know that there have been substantial events going on on the continent.

Speaker 10 We're at the benefit of being at the far end of the migratory flyway, so we normally get a bit of an early warning that things are changing by looking at what's happening on the continent.

Speaker 10 And indeed, in the Baltic Sea area, there have been a substantial number of cases in recent weeks, including some large bird die-offs.

Speaker 10 So, that's a very strong signal that we're at much increased risk, and that's why, sadly, we've had these cases.

Speaker 6 And so we have quite a bad start to the bird flu season. And what about the risk of spread to humans or from human to human?

Speaker 10 The risk to humans is deemed very low for these viruses. So we do constantly track them in the science community and monitor them for changes that might signal an increasing risk for humans.

Speaker 10 And although there have been over many years a number of cases in humans, these viruses are not able to replicate in the upper respiratory tract, which is where influenza viruses replicate in humans.

Speaker 10 And they need to replicate there in order to go from one human to another.

Speaker 6 So the virus can get in if you have direct exposure to a lot of virus, but it's just not structurally equipped to actually replicate within that respiratory tract in human cells.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so this virus is what we call an avian virus. It is finely tuned and adapted to replicate optimally in birds, which means that it's not fully equipped to replicate to the same level in humans.

Speaker 10 That's why we don't see particularly severe infection or indeed more importantly human-to-human transmission.

Speaker 6 That brings us on though to another virus that there's an article in Nature this week that suggested that a strain H9N2, so we've all heard repeatedly about H5N1.

Speaker 6 Now H9N2, what is that? How is it different and why is that a concern for humans?

Speaker 10 Yeah, so H9N2 has been around probably for the last 30 years in bird populations around the world.

Speaker 10 It's not particularly prevalent in Europe, but in some parts of the world, such as Asia and Africa, it is quite common. Now, this virus is not as lethal as the H5N1.

Speaker 10 It's what we call a low pathogenic strain, which means whilst it infects and transmits between the birds very efficiently, it doesn't actually cause such severe clinical disease.

Speaker 10 It causes enough severity of infection to affect the production of those birds and the welfare of those birds, which is why many countries actually choose to vaccinate against H9 virus in order to sort of limit the impact.

Speaker 10 But the virus itself has been associated with just under 200 cases in humans. It has got some characteristics that suggest it could be on a ladder of acquiring the ability to infect humans.

Speaker 10 So what we refer to is as a staircase.

Speaker 10 So if you can imagine the avian virus is sitting at the bottom of the staircase, in order to get to the top of the staircase, it's got to make a number of changes.

Speaker 10 And at the top of the staircase means it can actually successfully infect humans.

Speaker 10 So this particular group of viruses have acquired one of these steps, one of the early steps, and that is to actually bind to the receptor on a human cell.

Speaker 10 That is different to the receptor on a bird cell. So that gives it the first sort of leg up, if you like, in that it can actually get into the cell.

Speaker 10 In order to be able to successfully replicate in that cell though it has to undergo some other genetic changes and although these viruses are constantly evolving there is not yet an h9 virus that has acquired all of those changes to climb the staircase to successfully make it to the top so these hurdles are i suppose the reassuring facet of avian influenza in that not a single mutation will lead to the virus being able to infect humans.

Speaker 10 It has to have a series of mutations in tandem in order to make that jump. So, the difference between H5N1 and H9N2 is what we call the external glycoprotein that's a projection on the virus.

Speaker 10 And this is the main target for the immune system of the affected host. And they are different because they're so different, we classify them into different what we call serotypes.

Speaker 10 So, immunity to an H5 wouldn't protect you against an H9, and vice versa.

Speaker 10 Likewise, the neurominidase or the N number, the N1 and the N2, they're also glycoproteins that have a function in virus infection cycle and they can induce immunity as well.

Speaker 10 And they can also be used for classification of viruses because they are different serotypes.

Speaker 6 So it's these structures essentially on the surface of the virus, how they're latching onto, interacting with the immune system and kind of latching onto and interacting with the cell.

Speaker 6 They're different in H9N2 and H5N1.

Speaker 10 Yeah, correct. So H5N1 has a different glycoprotein.
It still attaches to the cell in the same way as the H9,

Speaker 10 but it's subtly different. Its makeup is genetically different.
So it's recognised as a totally different protein.

Speaker 10 But because it's on the outside of the virus, it's the bit that the host immune system sees most readily.

Speaker 10 So the H9 virus and the H5 viruses are two serotypes of influenza in birds that the World Health Organization tracks and monitors working with the veterinary community to understand how it's changing such such that they can adapt and prepare potentially vaccine strains if they need to.

Speaker 6 Well, thank you, Ian Brown, for walking us through that. Please do keep us updated as we head into this bird flu season.
Ian, thank you.

Speaker 10 Thank you.

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Speaker 6 Now we have an interstellar object, a comet called 3E Atlas, currently streaking through our solar system. It'll actually reach its closest point to the sun around now.

Speaker 6 Being able to see an object that's come from interstellar space is a rare event and astronomers are very excited. But this event has also inspired some more bizarre theories.

Speaker 6 Science journalist Roland Pease has been watching these kinds of objects for almost 30 years, and he has some strong views on these astronomical rumours.

Speaker 3 There was a time when it made sense to view a newly appearing comet with awe, even as some kind of divine portent, good or bad.

Speaker 3 The unpredictable arrival of an intruder, tail glowing high in the sky, into the stately cycles of the planets demanded a superstitious response.

Speaker 3 The long-haired star that King Harold's troops saw in 1066, shortly before the Norman invasion, is a justly famous example. But science has brought a different kind of wonder.

Speaker 3 In the 18th century, Edmund Halley used that 1066 comet as a test of Newton's new law of gravity, correctly recognizing its long orbit far beyond the known planets, and correctly predicting the date of its return to our skies in 1759.

Speaker 3 Alas, too late for him to see it himself.

Speaker 3 By the 1950s, the underlying physics of comets' behavior was being unraveled.

Speaker 3 The idea that they are dirty snowballs that start to boil off gas and dust as they become warmed while closing in on the Sun from the cold outer reaches.

Speaker 3 Also, that those molecules and grains preserve deep frozen evidence of the conditions at the time the solar system was formed. A good reason for a closer look.

Speaker 3 And indeed, we landed a space probe on the surface of one not quite 11 years ago. So, plenty of scientific reasons to celebrate what we understand of comets.

Speaker 3 And yet, it seems comets can't escape the shadow of superstition and pseudoscience.

Speaker 3 Right now, on the far side of the Sun is passing a comet that comes not from the outer reaches of our solar system, but from another unknown planetary system somewhere else in the galaxy.

Speaker 3 Having travelled through the depths of space for billions of years, it came into view for the most powerful telescopes at the beginning of July.

Speaker 3 It's called 3E Atlas, Atlas after the Chilean telescope that first captured its faint light, I for interstellar, and 3 because it's the third interstellar body to have been detected.

Speaker 3 Astronomers are thrilled. There's so much they want to learn of 3E Atlas before it races back into the interstellar darkness.

Speaker 3 How similar is it to comets that they've studied that formed in our own solar system? Are there universal rules? And how similar is the chemistry?

Speaker 3 But go on to social media, and you'll see a very different story, though more Asimov than astrology. It's an extraterrestrial probe, according to a post from one Modern Magus.

Speaker 3 It shows organized energy patterns that suggest an artificial or intelligently controlled object, opines another.

Speaker 3 There's a Harvard professor with an obsession with alien intelligence who's helping fuel this nonsense. The latest I've seen is a claim that CERN has been communicating with 3I.

Speaker 3 What puzzles me is the stickiness of these musings when our understanding of humble comets is so solid.

Speaker 3 But we have been here before with Hale Bopp, the only impressive comet I've witnessed, hanging over the evening horizon in spring 1997. I was entranced.
Others were disturbed.

Speaker 3 Some Christian fundamentalists, noting the nearness of the millennium, anticipated the second coming.

Speaker 3 More tragically, there were the 39 members of the Heavens Gate cult persuaded by their leader to commit mass suicide on the understanding they'd be teleported to a spaceship said to be hiding behind Hale Bop.

Speaker 3 You have to hope no one swept up by three iMania will do the same.

Speaker 3 But I can't help relate the appetite for these cosmic speculations to more dangerous unscientific trends, like, for example, suspicions of vaccine science that are leading to a rise in measles cases.

Speaker 3 The poet John Keats warned against unweaving the rainbow with dull philosophy.

Speaker 3 But I'll argue, a better understanding of the world not only protects us from misinformation, but opens up deeper beauties, like the icy messenger from another star.

Speaker 6 Thank you, Roland Pease, for debunking some interstellar nonsense for us. And as Roland said, this is a fascinating object.

Speaker 6 We will be taking a closer look at the real science of what we've learned from its journey when it emerges from the other side of the sun. And Katie Seckles is still with us.

Speaker 6 Thank you very much for being here, Katie. What have you brought for us today?

Speaker 7 I've pulled out a couple of maybe maths-related stories. That's my kind of area of-wheelhouse.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so one of them is about a, it's actually a piece of art, it's a sculpture that was put up in 1990 outside the CIA headquarters.

Speaker 7 And it's kind of a big kind of metal swoopy sheet, but it's got loads of letters cut out from the metal. And it's actually got secret codes in it.

Speaker 7 And it was kind of put up in 1990 as this sort of challenge, I guess, to code breakers to see if people could decode what some of the messages said.

Speaker 7 And there are four messages on there, three of which were broken almost immediately within a couple of years. And they used kind of very interesting classical ciphers.

Speaker 7 So the Visionnaire cipher is one of the historical ciphers that involves kind of doing a letter shift using a keyword.

Speaker 7 One of them is using a transcription cipher where they kind of shuffle the letters around. But the fourth one has been uncracked since then.
Really?

Speaker 7 And every so often the artist, who obviously knows what the message was, puts out a little bit of a hint.

Speaker 7 So he was like, oh, this bit of the message translates to the word Berlin, or this bit says clock. Even with those hints, still no one's managed to find it.

Speaker 7 And the big news is that someone's actually found what the message is. Crack the code.
Well, sort of, but not technically.

Speaker 7 So he made an announcement earlier this year that he's decided he's going to auction off the message.

Speaker 7 But when this announcement was made, there were a couple of journalists who realised that he'd mentioned in this announcement the Smithsonian archives.

Speaker 7 And they went there and dug into the archives at the Smithsonian Museum and found some scraps of paper, including one with the original message on it.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 7 Actually, just essentially cheated and found out. They just found the message.
Yeah. So I don't think they've released it because no one, it's not kind of public knowledge what the actual message is.

Speaker 7 So it's still an ongoing puzzle if anyone wants to try and crack it.

Speaker 6 So that was going to be my next question. What is the message, but we still don't know?

Speaker 7 They're keeping that a secret.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it kind of mirrors quite nicely the way that a lot of code breaking cryptography in practice works because a lot of these kinds of codes are almost theoretically unbreakable.

Speaker 7 So things like the Enigma code in World War II. if used correctly, is a completely unbreakable code.

Speaker 7 But actually, a lot of the progress that was made by code breakers, as well as the mathematical understanding of how these things worked, was due to being able to intercept code books or due to people kind of sending messages again.

Speaker 7 So human error, I guess, has always been an element of code breaking. And it turns out this is what's happened again here.

Speaker 6 What was the gist of the first three messages? Is there a running theme that we could sort of take any clues from?

Speaker 7 I mean, it's a work of art. So they're obviously quite interesting and different in different ways.

Speaker 7 So the first one was kind of a short sentence that said, between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion. But there was a Q instead of one of the L's.

Speaker 7 And, you know, whether that was deliberate or whether it was meant to mean something, or

Speaker 7 it's a bit of fun, I guess.

Speaker 6 Yeah, fascinating. I'm dying to know what this message actually is now.
And what else do you have for us? You promised me food and animal print.

Speaker 7 Yes, again, I've managed to somehow link this to maths, but there is a way to kind of mathematically model the patterns that you see on animals. So, things like leopard print and zebra stripes.

Speaker 7 I think last time I was on, we mentioned leopards briefly. There was a story about a leopard who'd been recognised by its pattern.

Speaker 6 Identification of a leopard that broke a travel record, I think, wasn't it?

Speaker 7 Yeah, it was a swimming record. But yeah, this science was all done in the 1950s by Alan Turing and mathematicians working on this.
And there are ways to kind of mathematically model these systems.

Speaker 7 So if you imagine a kind of tub of chemicals mixing together, it's called a reaction diffusion system.

Speaker 7 So you have two chemicals, one of which is called the activator and the other one is the inhibitor.

Speaker 7 And the kind of final arrangement of where those chemicals are determine what the pattern of colour will be, because it activates the colour-producing cells in the animal's skin.

Speaker 7 But the activator produces more activator and produces more inhibitor, and the inhibitor stops the production of activator.

Speaker 6 Okay, I can think I'm keeping up.

Speaker 7 Yeah, they're both kind of in competition with each other in some ways. And they're also diffusing around.
So the process of spreading and diffusion is, I guess, a physical process.

Speaker 7 And if you have particular diffusion rates for the two different chemicals, the way that they mix together, if you model that mathematically, you get things that look remarkably like animal patterns.

Speaker 7 The stuff that Turing did was absolutely incredible it kind of produced diagrams that looked like leopard spots and things that people were like, oh, this must be how this happens.

Speaker 7 But they weren't a complete model. So the news is that some scientists in Colorado have done some kind of more recent work on this to try and improve the model and get something more accurate.

Speaker 7 They discovered that if you consider that there's maybe a third chemical involved, and it's a chemical that kind of causes the things diffusing around to sort of drag each other and adhere to each other in different ways, in the same way that detergent diffusing out of a piece of fabric will drag the molecules of dirt with it.

Speaker 7 And it gives you a much sharper pattern. So the original Turing models gave a slightly fuzzy version of these images.
This gives a much sharper pattern.

Speaker 7 It was determined this is probably what's happening in animal pattern production.

Speaker 7 And the same team have now been looking at potentially the way that some of these models produce patterns that are very regular and quite sort of symmetrical, which you don't necessarily see in real animals.

Speaker 7 And they've tried a model where the cells are different sizes. Right.

Speaker 7 So if you have mixtures of different sizes of cells and then you run the model again, it actually gives you something really, really accurate to animals with those sort of natural imperfections in there.

Speaker 7 So this is maybe an even better model for how these things work.

Speaker 6 Okay, so we're sort of building up components of this animal print-making model all the time. Fascinating.
And finally, you promised me some food science news.

Speaker 7 Yes, so the exciting news is that scientists have developed an artificial tongue that can taste spicy food.

Speaker 7 So the molecule that causes you to kind of perceive something as being spicy is called capsaicin.

Speaker 7 It's a particular chemical which, when it comes into contact with mucous membranes, it causes this sort of burning sensation.

Speaker 7 People have potentially known for a while that there are things that can neutralise this. So casein is the protein found in milk.

Speaker 7 It's the thing that lets milk turn into cheese and it also bonds with capsaicin. So this is why if you're eating a very spicy meal and you want it to not be spicy, you can drink some milk.

Speaker 7 So they've developed developed an artificial tongue, which uses an electro-gel, which contains milk powder.

Speaker 7 When the chemicals react with each other, it changes the conductivity of the gel, so they can actually detect when something contains capsaicin and in what quantity.

Speaker 6 My key question is: why?

Speaker 6 What is the usefulness of this artificial tongue?

Speaker 7 I mean, I guess it's a sort of taste tester, so you can check whether something's going to be too spicy without having to taste it yourself.

Speaker 7 I don't know whether a chef would probably prefer to actually taste something themselves, but the fact that we're able to detect this now artificially is quite quite interesting.

Speaker 6 Yeah, fascinating. It's making me hungry for spicy food.
Well, Katie Seckles, thank you very much indeed for joining us. It's always a delight, always illuminating to talk to you.
Do come back soon.

Speaker 6 And that is all we have time for this week. You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.
The producers were Ella Hubber, Jonathan Blackwell and Tim Dodd.

Speaker 6 Technical production was by Dovan Rose and Natalie Ladley. The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.
Do you think you know space?

Speaker 6 Well, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University to try the Open University Space Quiz. Until next time, thank you for listening and bye-bye.

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Speaker 1 Learn how the tires you want tackle evasive maneuvers, drive and stop in the rain, or just handle your everyday commute.

Speaker 1 Go to tireraack.com to see their tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews. And be sure to check out all the current special offers.

Speaker 1 That's tirerack.com, tirerack.com, the way tire buying should be.