'Beastly Bodies' Kids Special - Steve Backshall, Jess French and Adam Kay

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Hello, you're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Inks, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now, today is a first for us because we are opening the doors of the cage to the most fearless of Inquisitors.

Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage Kids Edition.

That's right, we are live at the Cheltenham Science Festival, and we know that these questions are going to be very, very challenging.

And also, it's a panel all about the biology of beasts and beyond.

And I know, actually, my favorite thing, I was doing a school talk this morning, and I asked them how many stars they thought were in our galaxy alone.

And one child went, more than five, which is the perfect answer because he's entirely correct.

But my favorite one I was doing at a primary school is a very, very, I don't know if anyone's ever done a talk at a primary school, you must have done them.

You know, when you've lost them, because one finger starts to just go further and further and further up their noses, doesn't it?

And if you see five of them sticking their fingers up the nose.

Particularly if that's the teacher.

Yeah, that's the.

And this child came up to me after so sweet.

Well, initially, she went, Miss, Miss, please, can I tell the man something?

Please, can I tell the man something?

And she went, well, you're meant to go out and play now, Emily.

She went, oh, please, I have to tell the man something and she went all right then and she came over to me and the first thing she said was hello man

and then she said have you ever seen the full moon and I said yes I have and she went it is brilliant do you know why it's so shiny I can tell you So I didn't have a clue.

She was far smarter than I was.

But that is one of the important things about today's show, which I really want to remind you all.

And I know that everyone here, because they write and present lots of shows for children, is never, however old you get, lose that kind of the bravery of asking a question because the most joyous thing is that chance to find out new ideas and to take that risk, I think, of being wrong.

You know, if we're not wrong some of the time, we learn nothing.

That's the beautiful thing about it.

Absolutely agreed.

Anyway, to answer questions from our young audience, we are joined by a doctor who is anatomical, an explorer whose bravery is astronomical, and a vet who's dissected an alpaca.

The point was, right, it's really hard.

We were going to start with the alpaca thing.

You just can't rhyme for it.

And we checked and vet-wise, there's just no ickle rhyme as far as we know.

Anyway, they are.

Steve Batchel, I am a naturalist and the most important thing that I learnt at school was how to set fire to stuff and how to sky.

And memorably, I had a report that once read, who is this boy?

But was that enigmatic?

Was it because it was so, who is this boy?

Or who is this boy?

I never considered that.

I think it's much more likely it was just, who is this boy?

Hi, I'm Jess French.

I am a zoologist, a vet, and an author.

And the most interesting thing I learned at school was where there was a little hole in the fence so I could get into this wildlife area that was next door and spend my days turning over stones and looking for creepy crawlies and critters in the wildlife area.

My name is Adam Kay.

I used to be a doctor, now I'm an author.

My latest book is called Kay's Incredible Inventions.

It's for seven to twelve year olds and it's about all the amazing stuff in the world, which I'm contractually obliged to tell you this evening.

Most interesting thing that I learnt at school, the fact that the microwave was invented by accident by a scientist called Percy Spencer in the 40s.

He was trying to work on a new type of radar, and then he noticed the chocolate bar in his jacket pocket had melted.

And he was obviously initially very upset by that, then was like, oh, actually, I've invented the microwave.

And this is our panel.

So, what we've generally found out there is the best way to become a science communicator is really don't obey any of the rules of school, crawl through a hole and set fire to stuff.

Please ignore every answer you just heard there.

But it is true, isn't it?

That excitement, that kind of joy, that is a wonderful thing.

I love your microwave story, by the way.

My favorite microwave story is sometimes at Jodrell Bank, late at night, they go, my God, we're getting signals from an an alien.

We're getting signals from an alien.

And then they find out actually what's causing that blip is someone is microwaving a Moussaka in the kitchen next door.

But for a moment, that Moussaka is alien life.

So let's go to the first question, which is from Alice.

My name is Alice, and I am 12 years old.

My question to Jess is: what sort of subjects do I need to study to become a vet?

Well, I know vets who've had all kinds of different routes into becoming a vet.

I think, you know, if you're prepared to take a sort of convoluted route, you could get there anyhow.

But if you want to take sort of the direct route and get there as quickly as possible, then really you need to be doing sciences, all of the sciences, really, especially biology, but you need a bit of chemistry and physics too, and then maths because there's a lot of sort of calculating doses and things like that.

What happens if you take the arts at A-level and then you decide you would like to be a vet later?

Is that still possible?

Yeah, so there's sort of gateway courses where you can do a year of really intense science and maths, which sort of should replace what you would have learned during those A-level years, and then you, you know, you can move on to being a vet.

It's brilliant nowadays, I think.

It's much more open, and we're realising that there's a whole spectrum of people that would make excellent vets.

I don't think there's one singular way, but the quickest way is certainly doing A-level science and maths.

Did that help, Alice?

Yeah.

Good.

Oliver, let's find out what you would like to know from the panel.

My name is Oliver.

I'm ten years old, and my question for Steve is what inspired you to explore animals and teach children about them?

Thank you, Oliver.

To begin with, I have to admit, I kind of wanted to do this for completely selfish reasons.

I essentially wanted to go off and have amazing adventures and travel the world and see awesome animals.

And then once I'd sort of made my first series for kids, all of a sudden you start to get the responses and young people respond far, far more than an adult audience do.

And we were getting sacks and sacks of correspondence from young people who were sort of saying this is it this is the thing we've been looking for that is going to be my path in life and all of a sudden you realize that you've got this incredible opportunity because you have an audience of people who haven't yet made up their mind how they feel about the world and haven't made up their mind what their passions are going to be and that's why I believe that actually kids television and specifically kids wildlife television and science television is the most important area of the media by far.

It's massively underestimated and undervalued, but it's critical and now more than ever.

And so I'd encourage anyone listening to this who is a filmmaker, who has a story to tell, do it for kids because you will have more impact and more success and get far more back from it than you do from any other area of the media.

I remember when my son was little and he was watching you on Deadly 60.

They're my two favorite things, Deadly 60 and Octonauts.

I just the joy of going, the vampire squid is real!

You know, that delight.

Oliver, I hope Oliver's still got the mic.

Can we just ask, Oliver, would you like to make programmes like Steve?

Probably.

Excellent.

Oliver also uses exactly like.

You have a question now.

This is one of my favourite questions actually from Rhys.

Hi, I'm Rhys.

I am 10 years old, and my question to Adam is, how do Protozoa harm humans?

Oh, that is a great question.

Is that one of your favourites so you could just watch me struggle with it?

No, I think it's one of those because it should be as gruesome as possible.

Fine.

So, protozoa are types of germs.

Bacteria and viruses obviously get top billing, they're the headlining germs, but there's also other ones on the smaller stages near the loose, like fungi and helmets, which are worms, and protozoa.

Proto meaning trimordial, primitive, zoa meaning animals, because initially 200 years ago when they found them, they thought that these were the earliest animals, the sort of basically single-celled creatures, amoeba types of protozoa.

And how do they harm humans?

I mean, most of them don't, to be fair to them.

I don't want to slander protozoa.

Most of them hang around totally harmlessly in your gut.

They're in there because you've eaten poo at some point.

Not deliberately, necessarily, but that's...

Not necessarily a very important part of that sentence.

And so they hang around, they've all got sort of Star Warsy names like chylomastics and Endolimax and things, but some of them very much do harm humans.

So the most dangerous creature on earth, unless anyone disagrees, is the mosquito because of malaria, which is a protozoal illness.

How does it harm you?

A mosquito bites you, the protozoa goes from the spit in the mosquito into your bloodstream, which goes to your liver, where the bugs reproduce, and then there's loads of them and cause some potentially very serious illnesses, responsible for over 600,000 deaths a year.

The majority of them in under fives, and the vast, vast majority of them are totally treatable.

But it's not all bad news because, in the last couple of years, development of a malaria vaccine, which has got the potential to be one of the most life-saving medical interventions of the century.

It's already been given out to nearly 2 million kids, and hopefully that increases and increases and increases over the next few years.

Can I just add, I'm just interested in this because obviously that Adam was saying that protozoa get a bad rap though he may well I think be in the pocket of big protozoa.

But

you must find this as well Steve.

You know there are certain animals that people will say to you oh I've heard that's very dangerous.

You say well actually the danger is when you know it's it's humans who are more dangerous and and sometimes you have quite innocuous animals that for some reason so what is the animal that you you think is most maligned and doesn't deserve to be?

That's a big question.

Most animals that we're frightened of are misrepresented.

The group of animals that I've kind of most been behind trying to reframe are the sharks, this vast group of ancient animals that have been around since before trees.

You know, there are several hundred species, most of which you...

could not be harmed by them unless you were to try and eat one whole and choke on it.

I'm going to stop you there because the next question goes straight to this subject.

Right.

And so it's from Freya, who's 13 years old.

And my question to all the panel is: who would win a fight between a shark and a crocodile?

So there you go.

Well, I'm not going to start with you because I think you're the one most likely to know.

So let's find out.

Now, have you ever, Jess, had to, you know, deal with a pet crocodile, infection, a manicure or some kind of, you know, like kind of something unpleasant with a crocodile?

Well, I have dissected a crocodile and an alligator.

But the question was: who would win out of a shark and a crocodile?

And I mean, shark is a big group.

If you've got sort of like a dwarf lantern shark that could fit in your hand and a saltwater crocodile, I mean, that's lunch.

That's pretty obvious.

Should we go back to Freya and see if she wants to reset?

So, shall we get a scale of shark and crocodile?

So, the crocodile and the shark are like the same size.

Can I ask for further clarification?

Yes, coming back to you again.

This is about location, because if it's on a tennis court or something,

I think the money's got to be on the the very good fight.

Right.

This is both science and philosophy in action.

So, Freya, would you like them to be fighting on a tennis court or would you prefer a wide river, perhaps near an estuary?

Probably a wide river.

So we're going for a wide river.

Yeah, but now Steve's going to say that big shark, great white sharks, don't live in rivers.

No, an estuary, okay.

So it's where the great white sharks being distracted and ended up going up an estuary.

So I mean, there are real answers to this question because...

No, no, no, we don't want yours yet.

All right then, you see you're chomping at the bit now, so go on.

So there are a fair few places around the world where this happens.

It happens all the time and has been happening for a very long time because they're both ancient groups.

So the crocodile has been around for at least 220 million years, the sharks 440 million years, and sharks have been eating...

little crocodiles and crocodiles have been eating little sharks for all that time.

But there are places where, for example, you have American crocodiles and bull crocodiles intersecting in places like Costa Rica.

You have bull sharks going way, way upstream in Africa and coming into contact with sometimes big crocodilians, Nile crocs, black caiman.

And I say, when you say big crocodilians, what kind of size are we talking about here?

So the biggest are the salty, the Nile crocodile and the garriel, all of which exceed six meters at maximum length and can weigh more than a metric ton.

Compare that to the biggest great white, which is 6.4 meters and getting on for two tons.

So therefore, it is purely a question of scale.

The biggest is going to win.

Those battles are happening all the time, and you get different winners depending on who bites first, who's biggest.

It's all relative.

But it's a real question, apart from, like you say, unless it's on land.

Yeah, the tennis court.

No, I think that really would spice up Wimbledon as far as I'm concerned.

It's a slow game.

They're releasing the crocodile.

Jess, can I ask you, are there any animals, I know you've probably not said it, but that when they come in and you've got to to treat them as a vet, that you go, oh no, I'm going to get you.

What is the highest bite chance?

Are there certain animals where you just think, oh, this one's going to be the toughest enemy yet?

I mean, cats can be a bit spicy, but I think the one that probably makes me give the biggest groan, like, oh no, the zoo have called and they, well, can you guess what it would, what it would be if the zoo calls?

What do you think?

I would actually be worried about a chimpanzee because I think that they can, especially adult chimpanzees, I'll be quite wary.

Otters.

Oh!

Yeah,

otters.

They are so wriggly and they're so slippery and they have such sharp teeth.

Terry Nutkins can very much attest to that because he lost two of his fingers to being bitten off by Asian short-clawed otters.

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Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home.

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We the man to be

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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So next question from Kit B.

My name is Kit and I am 11 year old and my question to Jess is, if birds have backwards facing knees, can they jump further backwards than forwards?

Because people have forwards facing knees.

That is a beautiful.

That is an excellent question.

So what you're seeing pointing backwards in the middle of a a bird's leg, that's actually its ankle.

So birds walk on their toes.

We walk sort of on our whole foot and our ankles really low down, but birds just walk on their toes.

So you're seeing their ankle bone and they actually do have another knee higher up, sort of hidden under their feathers, which points in exactly the same direction as ours.

And so their jumping mechanism is largely similar to ours.

I mean, I've never got a bird into the practice and tried to question it if it could jump backwards or not.

But I would suspect that they would be much better at jumping forwards than backwards.

But there are some animals that do have backwards-facing knees.

Bats, for example, their hip joints are completely rotated so that their legs are pointing backwards and their knees face in the opposite direction.

And bats are terrible at jumping.

In fact,

they're terrible at doing pretty much anything, any movement apart from flying.

So I suspect that having backwards pointing knees does make it, in fact, very difficult to jump if bats are anything to go by.

Can I chip in on that?

Because that is a particularly excellent observation.

Because, yeah, obviously, the anatomy is different to what you're thinking, but the observation about the birds themselves is entirely accurate.

So, you take any bird that has particularly long legs, whether it be a stork, a heron, a crane, a bustard, they leap very well straight up in defense.

If they're being attacked at the water's edge, you see an egret and something comes to take it from the water, and they will leap backwards beautifully.

But if they're striking forwards, they'll do it with an elongated neck rather than with a leap.

Forwards is harder because of that anatomy, and it may not actually be a knee, but it functions in the exact way you observed, which is really cool.

I'm going to add that now to our sport.

So, we've got the crocodiles and the tennis, and I think, you know, who would win in the long jump?

A starling or a fruit bat?

That's my plan.

Now,

next question is from Leo, who's seven years old.

My question to Adam is: why don't we have tails like our ancestors?

Oh, so why don't we have tails like our ancestors?

Evolutionary biology question.

Yeah,

so

we all did have tails, and not just ancestrally.

When we were embryos, up until seven, eight weeks of age, embryos have tails which then disappear, but they don't fully disappear.

So you still slightly do have a tail in the form of your coccyx, or a tailbone, the bottom of your spine.

But no, as you correctly say, it's not been a thing for a good you know, 20 plus million years since we diverged from our monkey friends.

And so around the time that we became bipedal people, so just using our two legs, we don't need it for any of the balancing or the swinging on trees or the swatting away flies because we've got other things like hands to do that.

And also, even though it might sound fun, any extra bit of your body uses up energy in producing it in the first place and keeping it going.

And so, anything that isn't definitely needed unfortunately goes by the wayside.

Leo, would you like to have a tail?

Can I just find out?

Definitely.

Yeah, I think so.

Let's find that out for the panel.

Now, you know, Steve, you're going out to a lot of jungles, you're doing a lot of exploring.

Do you feel that a tail would be useful for you?

A prehensile tail would be astounding.

That would be amazing.

I can see myself brachiating through the forest canopy with my arms, and then with a tail, it would be genius.

And Jess, tail or no tail?

Absolutely.

I feel like I'm always trying to hold too many things in my hands and like juggling stuff and dropping stuff.

And if I just had a tail that could hold some of those things as well, absolutely.

I'm going to get on to the geneticists about this.

It's a good idea.

So we have a question from Ruby, who's 10 years old.

Hi, I'm Ruby.

I'm 10.

And my question to Steve is, of all the deadly animals you've seen, which are you most afraid of and why?

Most animals, their danger is massively overstated to us.

You know, sharks particularly are hugely overstated their danger to us.

Even crocodiles, bears, lions, tigers, the amount of people they harm around the world is almost incidental.

The one animal I am genuinely always frightened to be in close proximity with is the hippo.

Actually just come back from filming them in Zambia and we always talk about how fast hippos can be and talk about them being faster than an Olympic sprinter and we surprise one at night.

We were out tracking at night.

We came up on it without it expecting us to be there.

We surprised it.

It went off at full sprint and

when you watch it back you will think that we've done something with CGI.

You can't believe that an animal that is three tons in weight with those little stubby legs can run that fast over uneven ground.

They are grumpy, they're territorial, they're unpredictable.

The mothers with their calves are incredibly protective.

They are without question the most frightening animals to be alongside.

What about, I'm just interested in the pygmy hippopotamus because there used to be two at London Zoo, Thug and Nikki Nunu.

Thug yeah,

who I met and it was the most wonderful experience.

I had a friend who worked at the zoo and she'd used to go, damn where I got the keys, come on in.

And it was a really lovely thing.

And one of the things that I found fascinating was the contact with the skin because of, I'm not sure what it's produced on the skin, but it's basically the equivalent of a kind of sun lotion to protect it.

So pygmy,

should we worry about them at all?

I mean that they're very geographically isolated.

They're quite distinct from the common hippo.

That extraordinary substance that's exuded onto the skin, it has a kind of pinky, oily texture to it, is said to have both antibacterial and

properties.

And for an animal that's living its entire life in skanky swamps, that's incredibly valuable.

But it does also, it's believed to have basically natural sunblock properties as well.

Do you have, Jessica?

Is there any animal that you know you think, oh, do you know what?

You're gonna ask me, do you have any natural sunblocks?

Exactly.

Whatever any of this panel exude from their skin is entirely their business.

But I know, I've wondered about that bit where you sometimes think, I would love to get a call.

You know, is there an animal that you really would love to treat?

Actually, weirdly, hippo is one that I've always really, I've never been close to a hippo, I've never been in close proximity.

And I think I haven't really had much to do with elephants either.

I think that would be really impressive to do.

I mean,

I know of a vet who does fertility stuff in elephants.

And he,

well, you know how if you're treating a cow, there's that classic thing of putting a hand up a cow's bottom when you're doing the reproductive stuff.

Well, with an elephant, he literally disappears.

He's like his whole body with the ultrasound.

You were not expecting that to go in that direction, it appears from your face.

And you say your next book is a pop-up book.

So that's going to be very interesting.

Okay, so the next question is from.

Can we just repeat that tone of okay that you did there?

Okay.

I decided, move it on.

So the next question is from Rowan, who's 14 years old.

Hi, I'm Rowan.

I'm 15 tomorrow.

And my question is for Adam.

Happy birthday for tomorrow.

Thank you.

My question is for Adam.

If you could make one change to the human body to make it even better and more evolved than it is, what would that be?

Tail!

Yeah, that would have been a tail.

We've done tail.

I think the brain we think of as the zenith of the human machine, but it's got an amazingly problematic defect with it, which is that it doesn't regenerate.

We don't have the ability

to create new brain cells, new neurons.

So, if you, you know, if you cut your knee or something when you fall over, your skin will create new cells and it will heal over.

But the brain can't do that.

I mean, you pretty much are born with the brain cells that you're going to have for the rest of your life, with the exception of certain bits relating to memory.

And there are various animals that can regenerate their neurons, axonuts and salamanders.

I'm sure there's loads of others.

But that would be the most amazing development in terms of human well-being, not just in terms of traumatic brain and spinal injuries and strokes, but potentially in terms of conditions like depression and psychosis.

So, that I think is probably one thing that we could really work on.

Failing that, I'll take like flying or invisibility.

There's a few animal superpowers that I would love to be able to try on for a limited amount of time, one of which would be the colour-changing ability of the cuttlefish.

So, being able to have chromatophores and iridiophores below the surface of the skin that could flex and tighten and completely change your colour and then the skin being able to pucker up to change its its visible form so that you could become invisible, you could blend into your background, you could put on a complete disco display of lights if you were attracted to someone or an angry rage display to frighten someone off if you've got in a scrap in a pub.

I would love that for a limited period of time.

Why would you limit it?

It tends to be in most animals that have that ability to change colour.

A lot of it is involuntary and it can be in regards to your emotions.

So you would no longer be able to mask how you're feeling.

You know, a chameleon, yes, can change colour to a certain extent to camouflage into its background, but you put a male chameleon in front of another male chameleon, and those colour changes are instant.

Anger, rage cause the most dramatic colour changes, and it happens instantaneously.

Is that why they're so bad at poker?

Yes.

So it would be great to try it on, but I don't think you'd want to have it for life.

Jess?

I think I'd quite like to have a dive reflex so I could just, you know, swim down to the depths of the ocean.

There's so much that's unexplored in the depths of the ocean, and so many incredible animals down there.

To be able to just swim among them and not be limited by scuba equipment, you know, and just a dive reflex, there's not that many changes we'd need to make, and we'd be good swimmers.

Rowan, what would you change?

I think penguins have like see-through eyelids for when they dive in the water, so probably that, so that you don't have to wear goggles.

That's nice.

See-through eyelids.

And then nobody would know if you're sleeping as well.

I'm concentrating.

The next question, I think, we've uh is Lola.

Hi, my name is Lola.

I'm nine years old, and my question is for Jess and Steve.

Horses have the lowest heartbeat.

How when they're so big?

Okay, so Jess.

So horses have the lowest heartbeat.

So horses have a very slow heart rate.

There are animals that have slower heart rates.

rates, for example, when whales are diving, it can go down to something like two beats per minute.

And you tend to find that the bigger the animal, the slower the heart rate.

And there are a couple of reasons for that, really.

If you're a huge animal and you have a huge heart, you know, I could kind of almost get inside a blue whale's heart.

So a big heart like that with every beat is pumping out a lot more blood.

So it doesn't need to contract so quickly to move a large volume around the body.

And also, different animals have different metabolic rates.

So that's basically how quickly they're creating energy, how fast everything in their body is working.

If you're a tiny, tiny little mammal, one of the hardest things that you face is staying warm.

So you have to have a really high metabolic rate to keep yourself warm.

You're going to have a really high heart rate.

And bigger animals have a slower metabolic rate, so their heart rate is slower.

Can I ask you, you talked about the size of a blue whale's heart.

So give me an idea of what kind of size would you need to be to be able to climb into a blue whale's heart.

Just so people get some kind of like, not because I'm suggesting they do that, it's very problematic.

It's about one and a half meters high.

Right.

So, and then sort of heart-shaped from there.

So, I don't know, a metre wide.

It's kind of a small dinner party in there, if there's a few of you sitting down.

That is such a beautiful thing to think of.

When you talk about that size, that magnitude, I think that bit of being able to place that in your mind, because they are so magnificent.

And then to think of what lies within and the pumping of that, beautiful.

Steve, do you have anything to add?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that as you've said and responded, Jess, there are animals that have lower basal resting heart rates than horses do, and they tend to be the big ones.

But the most interesting things for me are the way that those resting heart rates can change in certain environmental conditions and with certain activities that an animal may be doing.

So, you know, hibernation and estubation being classic ones where an animal might be actually below freezing and cryoprotectants in its cells are the only thing preventing it basically being ripped apart by ice as it freezes and its heart may barely be beating at all.

And then the really, really interesting one for me is that mammalian particularly dive reflex, but I mean vertebrate dive reflex really, which is where purely immersion in cold water can result in that heart rate dropping dramatically and all of your blood just being taken away from the extremities.

So the important parts of your bodies that are going to be functioning when you're diving.

And certainly a big sperm whale that could be diving for two hours down to well over a mile in depth, its heart is going to be beating once or twice a minute, if that.

And the blood, the oxygenated blood, is going to be only in the absolutely essential places.

It just is withdrawn all away from the skin and other parts of the body.

And I think the most remarkable thing is, is that we have that reflex too.

So if you put your face into a bowl of cold water, then your heart rate will drop involuntarily because your body is preparing itself for immersion.

It's preparing itself to be better at exactly what you were talking about, Jess.

Being able to withstand the buildup of carbon dioxide, being able to better store oxygen, being able to stay submerged for extended periods of time on just the breath of air that you take at the surface.

And this led to a whole now sadly debunked but incredibly entertaining hypothesis, the aquatic ape hypothesis, which was one that stated that way back in evolutionary history, we spent an awful lot more time in the water and an awful lot more time under the water, and that we may have been this almost amphibious ape that moved backwards and forwards from the shallows and you know spent all our time in estuaries and was hunting and fishing and diving, and that that's where we came from.

Sadly, that is now believed to be bunkum because I think it would be so exciting if it was real.

Can I just say, by the way, because the passion that you talk about these things, definitely the tone of who is this boy has now changed.

Who is this boy?

That's beautiful.

I love that.

So, we now have a question from Daniel, who's 11 years old.

My name is Dan, I'm 11, and my question for Adam is: What is your opinion on the future of bacteriophage and virophage treatments?

And could improvements in these mean that we can better deal with any future global pandemic?

Wow, great question, Adam.

It is.

I'll be honest, Dan.

When I agreed to do this, I assume that most of the questions will be like how many legs have I got.

so this is it's really pushing me a bit so bacteriophages we'll start with virophages are a bit more conceptual but bacteriophage from the word bacteria meaning bacteria and phage meaning to eat so these are viruses that eat bacteria.

Basically viruses are much much much smaller than bacteria which means they can get inside them, infect them, replicate, kill them.

And bacteriophages occur naturally.

Everywhere there's bacteria, there are huge numbers of bacteriophage viruses around them to the extent that bacteriophages are actually the most abundant organism by number on Earth, outnumbering absolutely everything else by a long way.

Anyway, start of the 20th century, there was a guy called Ernest Hanbury-Hankin, back in the days when everyone had all these amazing names.

who noticed there was literally something in the water of the Ganges River in India to the extent that not enough people were getting cholera around the Ganges.

So he thought there's something in the water, and he was right because there were, he didn't know it at the time, but there was a lot of bacteriophage activity there that was active against cholera.

It wasn't until the 20s and 30s that that was able to be turned into some kind of treatment that could be used in humans.

It was particularly popular in Russia and in France as an alternative to antibiotics.

But overall, as a planet, we went for antibiotics.

They're basically easier to produce, easier to store, and things like that.

And how can they be useful in the future?

Well, you ask about pandemics.

Obviously, the last pandemic we had was a virus.

Bacteriophages are effective against bacteria.

Viraphages, which you mentioned, are still at the lab stage at the moment.

But there's a huge amount amount that they could be used for, not just pandemics, but there are a huge number of viruses which currently don't have any definitive treatments, whether that's you know Ebola or rabies or HIV.

So, there's a huge amount of potential there.

Bacteriophages, I suspect that one of the most important things they could possibly be used for in the future would be with respect to antibiotic resistance.

I mean, this is a terrifying number, but there's over a million deaths a year attributable to bacteria which are resistant to antibodies.

So, any new way of getting one up on bacteria is a good thing, and this is definitely a route that can be explored more.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for that excellent question, Dan.

The next question is: I'm intrigued because I know what this question is.

Ernest, can you tell us what your question is?

Hi, my name is Ernest Ball.

I'm eight years old, and my question is for all of you.

And my question is, why do dogs not sweat like us?

So, that's a great suggest.

Why don't dogs sweat like us?

So we sweat from a lot of places, and the point of sweat is that it evaporates from our body, taking some heat with it and cooling us down.

Dogs have a brilliant other way of cooling themselves down, which, if any of you have a dog, I'm sure you'll know that, especially on a hot and sunny day, it spends a lot of time panting.

That's sort of the main way that dogs cool themselves down.

But they do actually also sweat just from a few parts of their body.

So obviously, that evaporation is not going going to work very well on parts of their body which are covered in hair, which is a lot of a dog's body, unless it's a Chinese crested or you know one of those hairless types.

But they will sweat from their pads, the pads of their feet, and also from their nose.

And quite often, because dogs get really stressed when they come in to see me at the vets, you'll see like a little trail of sweaty paw prints across the floor or across the table as they leave because they've been sweating onto my table.

Your tone there changed.

Initially it was a rather sweet story and then you went, because they've been sweating on my table, which I'll have to clean again now.

Beautiful transference from compassion to the pragmatism of gay cloths.

Steve?

I mean I guess the question more is why we sweat in the way that we do because that's not massively common in the natural world and that's one part of the big hypothesis which is another thing that we may have done an awful lot more of in our sort of ancestral primordial human state, which is long-distance pursuit of animals.

And that that ability to be able to regulate your body temperature over long pursuits of other animals could be one of the reasons why we do sweat in the way that we do when a lot of animals don't.

I would say,

speaking as, I should say, as a dog owner and a dog lover, Dogs are pretty disgusting already.

If we added huge amounts of sweating onto that, I'm pretty sure no one would have a dog.

Evolutionary.

We have a final question.

Who are we getting that from?

From Kit.

Hello, Kit.

What's your question?

Hello, my name is Kit, and I'm currently 10 years old.

And my question is.

Can I just say, what a brilliant way of doing that.

I am currently 10 years old, just so you know, scientifically, there will be some changes in that over the next few years.

And Kit, already, I can see you're a physical.

You're working on becoming 11?

Sorry, Kit.

Yes, what would you like to ask?

And my question for Jess is: Do you think that advances in AI mean that in the future we will be able to communicate more with animals?

Beautiful.

So

yes, I think at some point in the future we are going to be able to communicate with animals and potentially, you know, a dog's gonna come into the vet and instead of having a conversation with its caregiver, I might just be speaking directly, maybe through some sort of technology to the dog.

But at the moment, we're still quite far away from that reality.

And I would say we are in the listening phase at the moment, so we're collecting loads and loads of data about how animals communicate, which is not always just through sounds, sometimes it's through body language, so it might be through the movement of a tail or ears.

So we're analyzing loads and loads of data.

And there is, you know, there's loads of this analysis going on all over the world.

We're listening to whale calls, we're listening to bats, we're listening to well, to all animals, really, you know, this is it's happening all over the world.

And we already know lots of incredible things about animal communication.

We know that cetaceans, dolphins, and whales will sometimes refer to themselves by name.

They will have a name that they call themselves, and also other dolphins or whales will call them by that name.

There is perhaps a danger.

So, some people are saying, you know, we've collected this information, maybe we should start to play these recordings back to the animals and see see how they respond.

But while we don't know what exactly we might be saying, I think that's quite a dangerous thing to do.

Whales will sometimes take a message and spread it across the ocean, across the globe, and we could be spreading all kinds of whale fake news.

So,

you know, I think at the moment we are still listening.

It's a lot of data sorting at the moment.

Steve, what is the most communicative animal that you've encountered?

If you were to take it completely on anthropocentric terms, it's the orca.

And there's been some massive leaps in understanding orca communication in recent years.

It seems that different groups of orca, which we have known for a long time, may have different morphology, may live in different areas, may feed on different things, also have completely different languages.

There's an amazing organisation, Project SETI, which is, or CETI, which is working on a lot of whale species, predominantly at the moment on sperm whales, and they're developing this exact technology using AI to analyze sperm whale coder which is very much chatter.

Sperm whales are very well known for their echolocation and for using sound potentially as a weapon but they also have the ability to chatter to themselves particularly when they're at the surface in large social groups and they've been breaking down those coder and starting to find patterns in them that are inevitably going to lead to us understanding to begin with as Jess says simple functions in their language and I think that what we are going to discover in the future whether or not it enables us to talk back back to them, and as Jess says, that is a long way off in the future.

The tantalizing possibility that we could find out what they're saying is to me one of the most exciting areas of whole organism biology.

Brian's got off scot-free because we didn't have any physics questions.

I'm just going to quickly throw one at you because I met a young man called Dylan this morning, nine years old, had a brilliant question which I didn't understand at all.

So you can at least explain the question to me.

At the end of a black hole, would we find a white hole?

So first of all, tell me what...

That's so great.

I find these all the time.

Incredible minds.

It's a wonderful question.

So

all the way back 1916, just after Einstein published his general theory of relativity, a man called Karl Schwarzschild found how space and time are distorted by the presence of a star.

It's a tremendous discovery, which he made, by the way, whilst he was serving on the Russian front in the First World War.

So he did it in his spare time.

Incredible story.

But it's this mathematics that he found, which tells you how space and time are distorted by the presence of a star, also describes a black hole.

And in 1935, I think it was, Einstein himself discovered that buried in this little piece of mathematics, if you allow time to go on forever, so essentially you extend time into the infinite past and the infinite future, you get what's called a, well, you do then get a description of a white hole and a black hole together, connected by a wormhole.

So the wormholes of science fiction.

So they were discovered in this mathematics essentially in 1935 by Einstein and a colleague Carl Rosen.

So we don't think in our universe, which began at a finite time in the past as far as we can see, the Big Bang, then such things exist.

But they do exist in the mathematics.

And nature, we've been talking about nature tonight, so nature does have a tendency sometimes to

use things.

And so there are now very advanced theories of space and time which may have something to do with these wormholes.

So they're in the mathematics, but we don't think,

maybe they're, we don't think they're present in nature, but they might be.

And I know that Dylan will have understood that answer a lot more than I did.

So thank you so much for all your questions from Oliver, Alice, Reese, Freya, Leo, Ruby, Rowan, Lola, Daniel, Ernest, and Kit.

And thank you very much to our guests, Adam Kay, Jess French, and Steve Batchel.

Thank you very much, everyone.

Next week, we are going to be talking cannibalism.

Yeah, so it's another kid's special.

Hang on a minute.

Basically, actually, it's not what we're meant to be talking about.

The theme is the Explorers' Club.

We're going to go to the Explorer's Club.

But having been to the Explorers Club, what you generally find is that almost every single expedition eventually ends up with people having to eat each other.

So

I sometimes think some of those Victorians only went to exploring because they enjoyed the snacks.

It tastes like chicken.

Anyway, thanks very much for listening.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

In the infinite

Hello, I'm India Ackerson.

And this funny thing happened to me once.

I was born, and so were you.

And the thing is, from the moment Egg met sperm, we've been shaped by our world in so many more ways than you think.

And our series, Child, from BBC Radio 4, gets into that.

The extraordinary life events of pregnancy, birth, and the first 12 months tell us a lot about ourselves, our society, and where we might be heading.

The brain of a baby holds the secrets to the origins of human thought.

Mothers undergo transformations we are only just comprehending.

And the way attitudes to birth change affects every single one of us.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

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