This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. So, we can now listen to your podcast. biggest river is making any difference to the decades of ecological degradation that's been suffered there. And combing through the rest of the science journals with me today is Caroline Steele. Caroline, welcome. Hello. What have you got for us? So I've got the results of an experimental fish disco. Well, I'm intrigued. I am all over that. And we'll hang tight. We'll be back with you shortly. First, though, will we have a city on the moon within a decade? Elon Musk certainly seems to think so. In a social media post earlier this week, he said that his company SpaceX had, quote, shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon and that this could be achieved in less than 10 years. But of course, on Inside Science, we don't take tech billionaires' word over scientific evidence. And we have Libby Jackson with us, who is head of space at the Science Museum. Hello, Libby. Welcome. Hi, Vicky. I know you have a bit of a cold today and you've still dragged yourself into the studio. And in the name of science, We really appreciate it. I will do anything in the name of science, always. I'll hold you to that. Can I just start with this comment from Elon Musk? Can very rich people just build what they want on the moon? No. The Outer Space Treaty, which is the international law that governs everything we do in space, clearly says that no nation can own any of space, including the moon. If Elon Musk really wanted to go and set up there, He probably could do that. But why would he do that? He's actually there. His SpaceX is a really key part of what NASA are trying to do in returning people to the moon and setting up some lunar infrastructure. Of that government space agency mission to go to the moon as part of that bigger exploration of part of the Artemis missions. Yeah. But even if he could or decided to, what would you have to do? You know, within 10 years, what would have to be in place so that people could live in a city on the lunar surface? The moon is a pretty hostile place to live. A day on the moon lasts for the same in total as a whole two weeks here on Earth. So there's two weeks, two Earth weeks of sunlight and two Earth weeks of darkness. There's no atmosphere. There's no protection from the radiation that the sun spews out. Here on Earth we have the magnetic fields which protect us from solar radiation, not there on the moon. So there are lots of challenges to contend with. You have to take everything that you need to live on the moon, to support human life on the moon. Elon Musk and SpaceX are developing their Starship rocket, a massive launch capability. And I think we'll see in time a launch cadence of those that is unlike anything we've ever seen before. But you've still got to get everything there. You've got to build everything. You've got to have power. You've got to have habitation. You've got to have transport. You've got to decide where you're going to go. The US NASA Artemis program is looking at all of that. And Artemis 2 is hopefully launching as soon as the beginning of March, might be in April. And then we will see perhaps lunar landings before 2030. But to my mind, there's a long way between the first landings and any kind of city. But I think actually what we're really getting to is that the term city is a headline grabbing concept. We will, I suspect, in the next 10, 20 years, see a sustained human presence. I don't think we'll see a permanent human presence because it's really expensive. Why has SpaceX turned their attention to the moon? His flagship interest has always been the colonisation of Mars, hasn't it? So why the focus on the moon now? For the Artemis programme, we need a lunar lander. and those lunar landers are being developed by two companies, by SpaceX and Blue Origin. And my suspicion is that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have been told in no uncertain terms to focus on developing that lunar lander so that Artemis 3, which is expected, planned for the next couple of years, has a lander and that Artemis mission to the moon can take place. Right, right. And so we'll come to the Artemis mission. Obviously, that's such a key focus. It's something that we've been watching closely. We're kind of, you know, on tenterhooks for that launch. But why is there a sharpening commercial focus as well as a government space agency focus on the moon? Is this the start of a lunar economy? The two are all intertwined. But scientists have now discovered that the moon has resources that could be interesting to everybody back on Earth. Back in the 60s, the moon was thought to be a very barren lump of rock, very uninteresting. But we now know that there is helium-3 trapped in the lunar regolith. There are what are called on Earth rare Earth materials. We've heard a lot about those lately. Yeah, things like lithium that are absolutely vital to all of the technology that we depend on every single day. And there is water ice at the poles. There are some who see that potentially some of those materials could be returned from the moon back to Earth where they could have some use and some value. The other side of the lunar economy, which some people I think are chasing, is the government contracts. and we are in a space race essentially between the US and China. So talk to me about what those governments want to do, what the next steps are for not just the US, but you mentioned China, you mentioned that we're in this space race, which is really quite, it a lunar race at the moment isn it Why It is a prestige There was a space race in the 60s because the US and the Soviet Union wanted to demonstrate their technological superiority And still the moon and the challenge of getting there remains iconic. It remains a statement. Coupled with these resources, it's FOMO, it's fear of missing out. If China are going, the US want to go, Just as we saw really with the International Space Station, which was conceived in the 70s and the 80s. Lots of countries at the time said they were going to go and have their own space station. We ended up seeing in the end that the spacefaring nations came together and built the International Space Station because it's really expensive to do things in space. Let's see where it goes to on the moon. Briefly, we're looking ahead very soon within the next few weeks to the launch of Artemis 2. As someone whose whole career is focused on human space exploration, how excited are you? My whole life has always been inspired by human space flight. I saw Apollo 10 in the Science Museum when I was about five years old and the stories of astronauts captured my imagination. but I've never seen astronauts on the moon. It happened long before I was born, a decade or so before I was born. For me, to see humans go to the moon, it's spine-tingling to talk about. Back on Earth, as we look out at the slightly gloomy streets of Salford, you're up in Greater Manchester for a new exhibition. Tell me why you're here and why we've had the pleasure of your company in person today. Yeah, tomorrow, Friday the 13th of February, the amazing Horrible Science Cosmic Chaos exhibition opens at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. This is collaboration with the CBBC's Horrible Science. Dr Big Brain himself is going to be there. And we have this amazing, fun-filled, fact-filled exhibition that is all about space. you can try and experience a moonquake you can spaghettify yourself you can go and find out what the surface of mercury is like Fantastic, and that is a particularly beautiful museum the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester Well, Libby Jackson, thank you so much for joining us and battling through a cold to walk us through that's been great to chat to you Thank you Now, our society would not function without altruism if humans weren't wired to think of others but exactly how selfless are you? Well, scientists have now discovered a way to make humans behave just a little bit less selfishly by directly stimulating two specific areas of the brain. It's a study published this week by neuroscientists in Switzerland and China, and it involved volunteers playing a game where they had to decide how to divide an amount of money between themselves and a stranger, how much to keep and how much to give away. Sounds simple enough, but the participants then had to make those decisions while their brains were gently being electrically stimulated. We spoke to the professor who carried out these experiments. But first, I wanted to find out what this kind of brain stimulation actually feels like. So I spoke to someone who's tried it out, and their words are spoken by one of our producers. At the beginning, there's a bit of tingling under the electrodes and a bit of warmth. But this faded out after seven to ten seconds. The experience is not painful at all. It feels like a warm shower or small drops of rain. Immediately after starting the stimulation, I was making the decisions displayed on the screen. And at no time did I have the sensation that the stimulation was impacting my decisions. Professor Christian Ruff, thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to Inside Science. Hello, Victoria. Very nice to be here. You were essentially asking participants to play a game. Fundamentally, you're choosing how to divide a sum of money. And if you're getting more, the other participants getting less. So then comes in the brain stimulation. You're actually doing something to the participants' brains to test if that affects their decision. What is happening there? What are you doing? So we're fixing two small sets of electrodes on the heads of people. And what we're doing is we're running very weak electrical currents through them. So the participants just feel a mild tingling on the head. So this is totally non-invasive. It's essentially wearing a cap with wires that trigger some electrical activity from the outside of your head. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's completely non-invasive. We just put these electrodes on the head and we fix them with some paste. And then we run these currents through. And these basically trigger a particular brain rhythm in the areas under the electrodes. And by doing this, we're basically stimulating these two parts of the brain in synchrony. And so we can compare how actually simulating these areas with different rhythms leads to changes in behavior. So you've seen in a previous study that those two areas of the brain show this synchronistic activity when people are making more altruistic decisions. So they're giving more money away. So this test is is seeing if you cause that that synchronous activity, can you cause that altruistic behavior? So what did you see? How did people change? People actually gave away more money so that the other person was better off. So it was not a huge effect, but it was very consistent. So you can make people less selfish. Exactly, exactly. That's the logic. This specific rhythm that we stimulated with is known to be very important for communication between different brain areas. So we're really thinking what the simulation does is it strengthens the communication between the area of the brain that computes the welfare of others and the decision area. So it helps you to integrate your concern for others stronger into your own choices. There's a real sort of mechanism logic there. But some people might find the idea of influencing people's decision with brain stimulation, you're actively influencing the way people's brains work, quite an unsettling scientific approach. What would you say about that? Why would you want to influence the way people's brains are actually activated in this experimental way? So whenever we can see that there are brain mechanisms for specific aspects of our behavior, we know that somehow evolution must have endowed us with this particular mechanism. So it's part of our nature. So one reason for us doing these experiments is showing that altruism is part of our biological nature, right? that we have such a mechanism. But the second reason, of course, is more medically oriented. I mean, one example is psychopathy, or then there's autism spectrum disorder, for example. So we need to find out what it is that could be, you know, different in the brains of these people, and perhaps also what to do about that. I think in these science fiction movies, you know, where there's kind of these remote-controlled insects, or humans even, right, where people take control of their brains. This is not what the stimulation does. The stimulation basically, that's my view it basically biases brain activity one way or another in situations where you unsure yourself what you want to do The potential for influencing people without them knowing or against their will is minimal And that very very different from many other ways that people have to influence you for example by advertising or also on social media, right? We're exposed to lots of influences from other people that we're not so aware of and that are not so heavily regulated. So I think people really shouldn't be afraid that this will be misused. And what does it feel like? Have you have you undergone brain stimulation that's influenced how you behave in a certain setting? What does it feel like? These types of stimulation, you usually have a feeling on the head of some sort because you have nerves in your skin. So for this type of stimulation, it's like some kind of tickling or tingling. We just apply it for 30 seconds. And afterwards, people can't really tell anymore whether it's switched on or off, right? Pretty much like you habituate to a nasty smell in a room or something, right? I mean, for the types of choices that we take, you don't really feel whether you're being stimulated or not and how your behaviour changes. You don't feel like a different person or anything. Christian, fascinating to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. A reminder, you're listening to Inside Science from the BBC World Service. I know you want to listen to your podcast, so I'll keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a lot of choices, maybe Acer can help. Now, do fishing bands work? This week, Roland Pease has been speaking to researchers about China's biggest river. Not quite 20 years ago, I was in Wuhan, China, to witness the state of the 6,000-kilometre-long Yangtze River, where overfishing, pollution and the three gorgeous dams were having a dire effect on the fish and animal populations. An extensive mission just the previous year had utterly failed to find a single example of the iconic Yangtze River dolphin since declared extinct. In 2021, the Chinese government ramped up their conservation measures to include a complete 10-year ban on fishing on the river to restore its ecology. And a report in Science this week says it's already showing benefits. I spoke to study leader Wuxin Chen of the Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan. I think since the 1950s, the largest scale of commercial fishing started because at that time, people relied on the food for fish, mainly from the natural rivers and lakes, not from agriculture. So the commercial fishing was very heavy. We over-exploited. So since then, fish resources have been dropped very rapidly, especially in the mainstay. And it's at a very lower level, you know, in the basically no fish level. I mean, the fish resources and biodiversity is very, really low. And also, in addition, there are some other human activities, such as the larger dams, you know, for example, the Three Cordiers and the other mainstone dams. very huge and blocked the migration routes for many of the species such as the sturgeons, the Chinese sturgeon. And this is why these very drastic measures were brought in in 2020. That's right. Yeah. The government put a lot of money to have those fishermen back to the bank. They found some other alternative jobs for them and solved the living problem and some of the health insurance problems as well. It's a very big investment. And it seems to, well, in your study, you think it's showing signs that it's working. You're seeing some improvements. Yes, yes. The improvements, you know, we observed mainly the biomass, the total biomass. So it means we can catch many more kilograms of fish per time compared with the pre-fishing period, especially for the larger-bodied ones. Many of them are predators, you know, because they have more food and they were not harvested by fishermen. So they can eat more fish and grow very bigger. So that's one of the important things. So it's not that there are more fish necessarily, but the fish that are there are able to survive more healthily. Yes, not all the species are recovering. But the good thing is there are some endangered or very rare species. For example, the tube fish, it's been lost for many years. We have not observed them from the field sampling, but it comes back, you know, after the full fishing ban. You've seen them? Yes, yes. Many? Not too many. For example, in some of the river reaches, we can catch one or two or even three, sometimes, but not all the time. But this is a good sign for the recovery. Absolutely. Can you describe this fish? Yes. We call it the tube fish. It's very long. It's like a tube, you know. And this fish, it was a very important economic species in the end, but it has been reduced a lot in the past. So in the commercial catch or our sampling, we have not got them in the past several years. But after the fishing ban, we really don't know, you know, how this fish came out. Basically, they can reproduce well, you know, when the fishing pressure was removed. And are you seeing this recovery along a large length of the river? As far as I can tell, you're looking at the river from the mouth near Shanghai up to the Three Gorges Dam. Are you seeing similar recovery all the way along there? Overall, I think the majority of the villages are recovering, but not all of them. Some of them, some of the salmon sites, we still see they are like equal or doesn't change too much. But on the other hand, it hasn't got worse either, which must be something you worry about. I mean, you are quite pleased, are you, with what you've seen? This is only a few years into the pan That right That right We were very pleased to see the jump of the total biomass and the large ones come back And in the past we did not catch too many large ones You know we all catch, you know, small ones, very small fishes. But when you see in your nets, you see very big ones, you are very excited to see them, you know. That's fantastic. When I visited Wuhan and the River Yangtze many years ago, about two decades ago, the other issues which they were very worried about was the health of the lakes all along the river and if they're connected. And there's also problems of pollution and agricultural runoff. There are other pressures. Are they being tackled? Yes, the issue associated with lakes are still there, but the water quality in the whole basin is improving, especially in the mainstay and for some of the lakes as well. But for some of the tributaries, there's still some water quality issues there. And also the connection of the lakes to the main stand. You know, we still have two of the largest lakes, Poyang and Dongting. They are connected to the main stand. So the fish can, you know, move in back and forth between the river and the lakes. So that can help them survive as well. And these are all part of the ongoing plan, are they, to improve this kind of geography, should I say, of the river? Yes, they are in the plan for the hole because the fishing band is not only tugged on the main stem. They include all the tributaries and the associated lakes as well. If other stresses can continually be controlled well, and the fishing ban continues as well. So we will be very optimistic on the more recovery of the Yanzi River. Yu-Shin Chen of the Institute of Hydrobiology who also mentioned another emerging issue to me, extremes of drought and flooding arising from global warming. Reasons to be cautiously optimistic nevertheless. Thank you, Roland. Caroline Steele is still here. She has been ploughing through the plethora of scientific publications that have been out this week. Hello again, Caroline. Hello. I don't even know how to segue into this one that I wanted to talk to you about. This is a biomaterials study that was published this week from scientists at Northwestern University in Illinois. And it's about spinal cord regeneration. And I just think it's fascinating because we're so desperately short of good therapeutics to treat spinal cord injury. But what these researchers have managed to do, it's sort of a double-sided breakthrough. they've created what they call organoids. They're kind of stem cell engineered into organs that recreate the structure and the makeup of a human spinal cord. And what they've then done is tested this organoid, this spinal cord organoid, and it responds to the recreation of a spinal injury in the exact same way as a human spinal cord. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's extraordinary. There could be huge potential there in the future. Yeah, exactly. This team at Northwestern led by a scientist called Samuel Stupp, I spoke to him yesterday and he said that this is just one of the most devastating injuries that you could possibly have. You know, people's lives are changed in an instant. But he's been studying therapeutics and now has this kind of double-sided breakthrough where he has these organoids that are a model of a human spine or a human spinal cord, I should say. And he has this topical treatment that they call it dancing molecules. Essentially, it's a multifaceted treatment that builds a scaffold, a healing scaffold with all these molecules moving around it that get the cells to talk to each other and kind of rebuild and reconnect and repair the spinal cord. So that does seem to be effective on the organoid. But what he was saying was that this just this model of a human spinal cord could be game changing because we kind of have nowhere to go between animal models of spinal injury and clinical trials. Yeah, that's a lovely bit of positive science news. Yes, quite. And then I don't know how to segue into a fish disco. We are just wildly skimming from one field to another, but I am very intrigued. So trials for a £50 million underwater fish disco have been a success. Explain more. So basically, scientists have been looking at an underwater ultrasound system, which is designed to stop fish getting stuck in the cooling pipes. of a huge new nuclear power station in Somerset. It's called Hinkley Point C. Yeah, so it's actually kind of the opposite of a disco, really, because the point is to repel the fish rather than attract them and keep them hanging around. Because the issue is that these cooling pipes are using water from the Severn Estuary, which is a really important habitat for lots of different fish. Right. And so you don't want the fish to get sucked into the cooling pipes. You want the water, but you don't want the fish to go in. Exactly. Yeah. So this ultrasound system has basically been sort of lowered down onto the bed. And scientists at Swansea University have been studying how well it works. And they found that only one tagged twate shad came within 30 metres of the opening to the cooling pipes compared to 14 in the same time period before. So it's looking like this expensive system is working. But, you know, a lot of people are saying, is this worth it? You know, it's a lot of money. how many fish is it going to really save. But, you know, different bodies are sort of estimating different numbers of fish will be saved. But all of the estimations are in the order of millions a year, which feels, you know, quite worth it. But if you compare that by weight to the catch of a fishing boat, that could be the equivalent to the catch of one fishing vessel after just one day, which is mad. Thank you so much, Caroline. And that is all we have time for this week. BBC Inside Science was produced by Claire Salisbury, Kate White and Alex Mansfield. So until next week, it's goodbye from all of us. Start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
