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ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. For the first time in over 50 years, astronauts will soon fly around the moon. They're ready to fly. But there are real concerns about their safety. We're playing Russian Roulette. In our series The Challenger Legacy, we trace the history of two space shuttle disasters. And we ask, what are the lessons for today? I'm Karl Kraszyolnitsky. And I'm Fiona Pepper. Binge all the episodes now. Just search for The Challenger Legacy on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Time for another science show. I'm Belinda Smith. And I'm Robin Williams with a program later of really startling stuff. The creation of new life using AI. Here is a most eminent scientist at Celtic. So actually, the concept of AI has been around for a long time for decades. What we witnessed in the past few years is the sudden explosion of AI through the reinforcement learning, the so-called machine learning. The challenge is, when you actually want to ultimately unleash the power of AI into our physical world, the into biology, you have a trouble not in design, but in actual action of the design. So are you taking the separate genes and putting them together to make a whole organism? Yes, we are. But before we can actually make the whole organism, it's always, always easier to make individual genes. Gene Editing Plus AI equals a new creature, stand by for more. We hope. Good astonishment. And Bel, I'm really looking forward to a very pleasant surprise from you about bees and honey. But before that, one of my least favorite sports, smelly, loud and so expensive, 102.33 million dollars a year cost, not as bothersome as boxing, but is there still good news from Formula One motor racing for Suith? If you can believe it, Robin, yes there is. The biggest change to Formula One in 2026 is how cars are powered. Around half of that power has to come from a battery which gets recharged as F1 cars fang around a track. Then you have the other half of the engine, which is internal combustion, but this year fossil fuels are out. Love the sport or hate it. This is a big one. So to explain what this new rule means, and if we regular drivers might eventually benefit, I spoke to Amy Briggs, the 2026 Darren Osborne Regional Science Cadet. Do F1 cars use the same petrol as the car that I have at home? Last year they did. They used E10, which is what you see at the servo. It's a mixture of fossil fuels, so 90% fossil fuel and then 10% ethanol. And this year it's going to be a little bit different. How so? Well, teams need to be using sustainable fuels this year. F1 as a sporting body, they're offering their own fuel. Otherwise, each manufacturer of an engine have been working with fuel companies. So for instance, any car with a Mercedes engine, they are working with Petronas. What makes a fuel sustainable? Well, it's the process in which it's made also what is used to make the fuel. This can be anything from using agricultural waste, so using rice husks and turning that into fuel, using a bunch of different thermochemical processes. Or it's using a process of turning hydrogen and CO2 from the atmosphere into fuel, which is a very fancy and complicated process, but that is also really complex. It's hard to discuss with F1 because they haven't mandated what process needs to be used. Who checks that the fuel is sustainable? This is an interesting one. Basically, F1 are partnering with an external company. All we know is that they check the entire process from start, so from the ingredients, whether or not they're sourced sustainably, through the manufacturing process to the final product. Whether or not the public will get to understand what the processes are of the fuels. That's another discussion. Right, okay. It still seems a bit of a murky area, not entirely, as transparent as you might want. And they've got this policy to have 100% sustainable fuel, but it's been scrutinised quite a lot by people who work in the climate and energy sectors. So what have been some of the criticisms around this? One of the criticisms is that the sporting body has not mandated which process the teams need to use to make the fuel. And one of the processes that they can use is quite energy intensive. This was what we were mentioning before the process of using hydrogen and carbon captured from the atmosphere to make the sustainable fuel. So with that process, the capturing of carbon from the atmosphere is a really, really energy intensive process. And for it to be sustainable, it is using renewable electricity, but it's using a lot of it. One of the other criticisms also is that the actual race and the fuel that the car's used is not the biggest emissions source for the sporting body. It's actually only 1% of the carbon emissions. Where do the other emissions come from, if not from the cars? The biggest reported emissions source is from what they call logistics, transporting the cars, transporting the parts, transporting things for the events. So it's also a little bit unclear to be honest, which does make it more difficult to track what these actual sources of emissions are. I know there's been some talk about these new F1 sustainable fuels being available to use in my car at home. So is that really the case? At least not soon. And not yet. Especially if people are worried about the price of fuel. Nowadays it's incredibly expensive to manufacture these fuels. If one's been a bit of a test in ground for a few different technologies that have made the leap into the everyday person's car, what are some of the other things that I see in the car? Things that I see in my car that originated in one of those F1 cars. Yeah, well I guess if you have very modern car that's automatic, you may see behind the steering wheel, the shifting paddles. So it's that from F1, you know, in a while's drivers to very quickly change their gears. That's on some very fancy cars, like my mums for example. Not my car, but yes. But on the average car, the buttons on the steering wheel were from F1. We can thank F1 for that. I can say F1 for that. So I don't have to reach over the console to change the music. Amy Briggs, the 2026 Darren Osborne Regional Science cadets. We'll hear more from Amy over the year. I'm sure. Now to a liquid that helps fuel me. Honey, yes, it's delicious and nutritious and been used as medicine for millennia. But not all honey's are created equal, at least in terms of their microbe killing abilities. Dr. Kenya Fernandez is a microbiologist at the University of Sydney. And she led a recent study into what makes some honey's more hostile to microbes than others. How do bees make honey? Seemingly an obvious question, but it's much more complicated than it might first seem. So honey is really a combination of stuff that comes from nature. So bees will go to flowers or collect nectar. They actually suck it up into their bodies. So bees have this interesting gut where they have two compartments. And one of them at the front is like this big balloon. It's called the honey stomach. And that's where they actually store all the nectar. Because they don't have little basket to carry it in. So then they fly it back to the nest. And they will deposit it into these little wax cells that they make. So if you've ever seen a honeycomb, you'll see those beautiful hexagonal structures, the bees depositing all of the nectar into there. And then comes in the second major component, which is really from the bees themselves. So because they're storing it in their body, they're adding all sorts of their own bits into it. So enzymes and that kind of thing and they're processing it. And then they'll all fan their wings at it. So they fan their wings at it for a really long time until it evaporates. And it becomes really thick and sticky and more like actually viscous honey than what running nectar starts off as. When they think it's good to go, they will then seal it with a wax cap. And they'll leave it in the hive just to kind of develop. And when the colony is hungry and they need to go back and use that honey, then they'll uncap them and they'll use it from there. Now honey's not just a food. It also has antimicrobial properties. So how does honey stop the growth of pathogens? Well, if you think about honey sitting in the hive, it is a really delicious, nutritious food source that like all different kinds of bacteria and fungi would love to grow in. And bees are environmental organisms, so they're constantly bringing things in from the environment as well. So without kind of a way to protect itself in the hive, it wouldn't be very good for the bees. So what has really evolved over millions of years is natural mechanisms for that honey to stay protected. So the main one is just that it is a really concentrated sugar solution. But it's also got a lot more specific compounds in it beyond that. So that would be things that come from plants and plants, of course, have their own reasons for not wanting microbes to grow all over them. So a lot of that are natural plant defense chemicals, things that come from the bees as well. So one of the major components of honey is that it is a natural plant. components in honey that makes it antimicrobial is actually hydrogen peroxide, which you might know is the thing that does your hair, but in honey it's at very low concentration, so it's not harmful. And the bees actually put that into the honey from their own bodies. So for those reasons, it's really, really safe in the hive to be stored for a really long time. Now you recently published a study which compared the antimicrobial properties of honey made by bees visiting just one type of flower versus a whole bunch of different flowers. What made you look into this question? What really sparked our interest in this was twofold. So at the time we were doing this study, there'd been some really devastating bushfires in New South Wales. So this was the 2019-2020 summer bushfires, which had really done a huge amount of damage to a lot of hives, a lot of floral resources in New South Wales as well. So we just really wanted to look at different types of honey and see how the industry was recovering and have a look at what different plants were making potentially the most valuable honey applications for our beekeepers. But the other reasons was just knowing a little bit about bee biology. So bees are an introduced species in Australia. So they haven't really evolved alongside our native flora. And not all of the native flora that we have in Australia provides them all of the nutrients that they need. So we kind of stand to reason that bees that were being forced on one particular type of flower only might not necessarily be as healthy as bees that had a big diversity flowers to choose from. It would be like if you were only allowed to eat spinach for whole month, you'd probably be okay at the end of it, but you certainly wouldn't be as happy and healthy as if you had a smorgasbord of fresh fruits and vegetables to choose from every day. And how many honey samples did you analyse all up? So in total we got 56 samples over the course of about three years. And these came from 35 different apiary sites across New South Wales. So a couple were submitted by the same beekeepers, but most of them came from yeah, different people. How did you measure how well they could kill microbes? So we did it in a really direct way. So we actually take the honey, we dilute it in water to different concentrations. So for example, 30% honey and 70% water or 10% honey in 90% water. And then we have a range of those different concentrations. And we basically just put the bacteria straight into those solutions. And then we see at what concentration we're able to actually stop the growth of that bacteria. So if we're seeing growth stopped at something like 10% honey, which is really just a tiny amount, then we know that that honey is really strong and powerful. But if we're seeing that the growth is only stopping at a much higher concentration of honey, then we know that that honey might have some value, but it's not as strong as one of the other ones. And which bacteria did you test? So we tested a bacteria called Stafelcochis Aureus. So this is also known as gold and staff. It causes skin infections and it can become the really nasty super bug known as MRSA. And we also tested E. coli. So E. coli is a bit of a different organism. It kind of causes more systemic infections. It can cause gut infections. And we picked both of these two organisms because both of them are among the leading causes of deaths from antimicrobial resistance, but also because they're quite different from each other. So we just wanted to see how effective the honey was across different types of bacteria. And what did you find? First of all, we saw that just in general honey that's made from Australian native plants is really powerful. So more than three quarters of our samples were actually able to stop the growth of those bacteria at concentrations of 10% honey or less. So at that point, it's barely even honey anymore. It's just kind of a tiny amount in water. So that was really, really awesome. And I think that puts Australian honey really favorably on the global landscape of active honey. But the most striking finding was really that when we compared all of the different honey types, the ones that really consistently came up as most active, or honey that were made from bees that were foraging on diverse native flora. So that means they weren't just on one particular species. They're on a whole range of different species. And we also had a look at the chemical compositions of all of our different honey samples just to try and figure out what was behind those different levels of activity. And the ones that were the most active that came from those diverse plant sources, it just turned out that it wasn't one particular thing, but it was that they were really strongly enriched across a whole variety of different chemicals. So the bees were collecting all sorts of different things from different plants, bringing it together, and concentrating it into honey, which made a more active product. What can researchers like yourself do with the information that you got from this study? Can you extract all of those antimicrobial compounds, or I don't know, make more of them another way to imitate the action of real honey? Yeah, that's one option. So one option is sort of using this matrix as a source to identify new compounds. So to see if we can pick something out of it that is able to be synthesized and able to be used on its own. And that is definitely a productive avenue of research. But another option is just to use the honey as it is, just to use the honey straight up. And that option has a lot of advantages as well. So one of the problems with bacteria developing resistance to drugs is that most antibiotics they will target one single thing about the bacteria. So we call this a mechanism, they have one mechanism. Whereas honey, on the other hand, if we're talking about the whole honey using the whole thing, it has lots of different mechanisms that are all operating at the same time. So because of that, it's much harder for the bacteria to be able to develop resistance. So if you think about a bacteria developing resistance to one mechanism is like winning the lottery, then to be able to develop resistance to honey would be like having to win the lottery seven times in a row. So you can see that that's pretty unlikely. Did you test the honey on other kinds of microorganisms like fungal infections or viruses? Yeah, we haven't in this particular study, but some of my other research does actually focus on fungal infections. And what we find is that Australian honey in particular is really good against fungal skin infections. So the fungi that cause tinia, which are known as dematafites, that cause ringworm, jockey, etch, all those kinds of things. And that's really cool because fungal infections, tinial infections are actually like the most common infection well-bied. A quarter of everyone in the whole world has a fungal infection at any given time. Water. Yeah, that's right because they're really hard to treat. They last a long time. And also it's very easy to just pick them up again from a different part of your body. Or you know, if you go to the pool from the changing room, that kind of thing, they're really thriving those damp, moist environments. And honey obviously is something that would be really great to use topically. So it's potentially something that could be quite successful against those fungal infections. But yeah, that's definitely some ongoing research we have right now. So interesting. Imagine flattering honey on for jockage. I think a few other issues going on there as well. Yeah, we might have to put it in a cream first, but are you or your colleagues running any trials to test the efficacy of honey on things like tinia or wounds? Yeah, I've definitely been in talks with some clinicians about trying to get this into some small scale trials to start off with. So I think there's a lot of potential for things like surgical site incision. So if people have a little bit of skin exized for skin cancer to use honey as a supplement or as a replacement to topical antibiotics. And we've also started to do some work trying to before we go into people or animals trying to go into more complex biological models. Dr. Kenya Fernandez from the University of Sydney. How's that make you feel, Ruben? Thanks, Bill. Nice to be even happier to have my Australian honey on toast every morning knowing just how its antibacterial benefits are maintained. Now this next story seems startling and its promises uncertain, but let me say the professor who speaks very quickly with his strong accent comes from the impeccable base of Celtic, having graduated from the equally supreme campuses of University College London, Entrinity College Cambridge. But he is using genetic wizardry in combination with AI to make new life forms, one of which being E. Coli we just heard about. So after Keh Tan Wang, I shall ask Jeffrey Carr of the scientific pages of the economist what he thinks of this incredible news. I just ask you a question here. We saw a lovely picture of your daughter and you told me you made your daughter the traditional way, which is very exciting. And I wonder why you want to make other organisms the non-traditional way. What's the objective? Oh, the objective is indeed a cult from the professor, Dr. M. Bansen, the greatest good for the greatest number. The greatest good for the greatest number? Yes indeed. So the concept of gene engineering basically what started 9,000 years ago as a humble grass through 9,000 years of traditional way of genome engineering, of domestication, and a selected breeding was turned into this great plant called corn. Corn maize, maize indeed, indeed. And that is the process of 9,000 years of genome engineering. Corn is 25% of global grain production. It feeds our civilization. But the trouble is when we actually venture into the future, where the uncertain future we face today, with food security, with all kinds of concerns, we may not have another 9,000 years to come up with a solution. Well, we have had genetic engineering in living things in plants, in corn, in food, which has been pretty controversial, doing it in a way, you know, CRISPR you can actually put genes where you want them, but you're making a whole new organism, which one? Right. So DNA writing, so the CRISPR is a way of doing a DNA editing, which is to change individual positions along a very long sequence of the DNA. And also before that, that you have a DNA reading, which is sequencing. So conceptually, the DNA sequencing and the DNA reading, they are the precursor of DNA writing. But DNA writing is fundamentally harder than any of the things before, like DNA sequencing or DNA editing. The reason for that is, for example, for the DNA sequencing. It's like based on this thing called the DNA polymerase activity. But we human can't, we didn't invent DNA polymerase. We simply used it to read DNA sequence. On the same goals for DNA editing, like CRISPR, as you were mentioning earlier. So we didn't invent CRISPR. We discovered CRISPR. Polymerase is, in fact, an enzyme, isn't it? Correct, indeed. So for all these things, essentially, these things are mother nature's gift to us. And for DNA writing, this is fundamentally different. Because conceptually, we really think hard about it. Mother nature, they never ever write a definitive new DNA sequence. It just added. Basically, mother nature does. It's only copy, pre-existing template. You're making a new one. And we want to make a new one. A new word, right? A new DNA. Oh, what? Oh, the new DNA can be anything and everything can have endless possibilities of embedded functions, from antibodies to cure diseases, to, like, the treatment to really potentially give us a shot against cancer. And also, for example, vaccines as well. Vaccines, indeed. What have you made so far? Right, so what I have made so far is we have invented a new way that can stitch any fragments of very short DNA to any long and a more complex sequence in, like, a very, very reliable way, fundamentally, hundreds of thousands of times, more efficient than I have ever before. Let me ask you a difficult question. You're deciding that. And your ambitions are pure, you know, vaccines and maybe new sorts of food or more new sorts of maize, resist disease. But what if the AI wants to decide what to make? What happens then? There is always the top priority, it's about safety, about security, about ethics. Right, so there is always need to be multiple independent levels of safeguard against any future application. You promise? No, I promise. I want to say, not only, say, decision made by the scientists. It has to be a decision made by everyone in the society. What stage have you reached so far? So we are very, very far away of making like, synthetic plums and the synthetic mammals. But what we can do right now, we can't design synthetic and actually construct synthetic bacteria. So basically, my past work is basically designing and constructing one such synthetic bacteria. And there can be tremendous useful things for that synthetic bacteria. Such as? Such as, for example, so I did that work when I was back in Cambridge. I designed the genome for the synthetic E. coli. And I also collaborated with Jason for the completion of that synthetic E. coli genome for the synthetic bacteria after I came back to a cow tank. So one interesting thing that synthetic bacteria can enable a much cheaper and much more efficient and much greener production is for my example is the gel P1 eigenist. But people are putting it into their body to control the weight. So that's just one of my examples. I make, basically, through that synthetic genome. So for example, we just survived the global pandemics of the COVID. And a lot of that success, a lot of that is through the application of the anti-COVID method or RNA vaccine. - I'm not sure. - I'm asking you an undiplomatic question. - Yes. - Undiplomatic. There's a place called Wuhan. - Correct. - In China, which has a mixed reputation. Are you worried at all that you might have in this building a mixed reputation for the same reasons? Not at all. So I can say that it's really clear. I do not believe COVID is a man-made virus. Back then, humankind has neither the ability to design or construct such things. But if we went into the future, of course, all technologies is especially powerful ones. - Especially with AI mixed with. - Biology, whoa. - Yeah, so basically anything. I mean, the reason something is powerful, then that is the reason why we fear it. And that's why we need to play with the risk. So this example, we do not necessarily even need to go to the future, we can go to the past, like fire. Fire is our first piece of technology. Now the fundamentally separated humankind from the rest of the animal kingdom. But even today, if being misused, fire still burns. We can easily get burned by fire and fire can be devastating. But also at the same time, it is a foundation for our civilization. So into the future, we want to be very, very conscious about the decision for the biosafety, biosafety, biosafety, and the malisix, right? But we also need to be conscious. So in a way, like fear is animal nature, but the courage is human endeavor. So we need to have both caution and courage into the future. So we cannot deny the future generation of the potential treatment of so many diseases that can be potentially treatable, like cancer. So yes, of course, we need to be careful and cautious, but also on the other hand, we need to be fully aware of the risk and also the benefit. This is an amazing view of what might be done in brilliant applications of science. So this is actually a typical example, actually, as a humankind. It's not our first time facing a similar challenge. The previously, we have a similar situation in like 1441 with the invention of the Gutenberg printing price. We can print each individual page really well and really effectively. Then, when you have the page, you have another task. How do you arrange these multiple pages into the correct order to form the book? When you have only three or four pages, it is an easy task. But if you have a few hundred pages, if you have to construct them in the right order without a page number, it is a daunting, even impossible task. If you look back into the history of the printing industry, although the printing price was invented in 1440 by Gutenberg, but throughout Gutenberg's life, he has never ever printed anything with a page number. This seemingly simple concept that took human kind, like more than half a century to invent a page number after printing price, and actually multiple centuries afterward to seize wide adaptation in printing industry. Who is at your level, biologically? Right. For constructing the inlay, before our paper came out a few weeks ago, we were in a world that equivalent to a post invention of Gutenberg printing price, but before the invention of page number for books. So you're not sure how invention called a side wonder in a book says page number for DNA. We basically invention of side wonder page number in a book is the same leap forward in DNA construction. Now with page number boom, a hundred thousand times more accurate and easier. It's not a expression, it is really a hundred thousand times better. The old way of stitching DNA basically have a misconception rate just deadly. Which is indeed deadly, with tremendously deadly. And that was a fundamental limitation. We cannot unleash the AI design power for biological functions, for proteins for solutions. But if you can't have the DNA page number, we have a quantum leap forward with our page number. Miss connection rate, we have reduced of 1,10 as a previous number to 1,000,000. So an actually 1,000,000 that is on par with the accuracy of the most accurate natural unlimes, like a DNA polymerase. 1,000,000. Thank you so much. Pleasure. The remarkable Professor Wang at Caltech on their revolution in controlling genetics. Now an able critic to comment, Jeffrey Carr has been both the editor of what many except as the best coverage of science in a general magazine in the world, the economist. Now he writes major pieces for the mag, but he also writes fiction, such as Genesis, a story about how AI could, who knows, break free and make its own mischief in a bewildered world. The tag to this cheeky title, Genesis, is when he wrote it a few years ago, it was science fiction. But now it's far less so. Having heard that interview in Caltech, I was rather amazed by the prospect of, here you have, a new way of sorting the genes to make new organisms and the involvement of AI in the process. What was your immediate reaction to the sort of work that we have just heard? Well, I thought it very interesting. We're now getting to the point where you can really think about engineering entire organisms, rather than just tinkering around in a crafty sort of way with little bits of their genomes. And it's a combination of work like this, which is improving the way that you put genetic material together, making it much easier to do that and to do it for much larger amounts of material, taking, create things that are, at the moment, the size of small bacterial genomes and in the future, presumably we will get bigger. And also the AI, which tells you what will happen if you put genetic bases together in a particular order. The AI is actually sort of more important than the technology. I mean, you need the technology to make the things. We could do it before. but this method is better and cleaner and presumably cheaper. But the AI is what allows you to do the actual dynamic design. On the other hand, Jeffrey Carr, in your novel Genesis, you have a role of AI that is unpredictable. And that is the thing that struck me most of all. Where is the AI actually making things as you implied cleaner, rather than more verboding? It's making the design cleaner because, well, these are the equivalent of large language models. And large language models are trained on existing texts. They work out what to do based on what the Asylian human beings have done in the past. The genome foundation models, as they're called, work in a similar way, but they're looking at what evolution has done in the past. So they are able to look at the genomes of lots and lots and lots of organisms of different types and spot patterns, which would be impossible for a human to spot, about how the details of how those genomes translate into the working organism. And with that, if you understand all those little subtle details, which would be impossible to do without the AI, you can then ask the AI to design things that would behave in certain ways, produce proteins that don't currently exist or other molecules that are produced by enzymes that don't currently exist. You can ask it to do those designs. And it would design them. The point, the problem is that those genomes are currently very often too large to make with existing technology or to make easily. And there are quite a lot of genomes sitting around in silico, if you like, that nobody can make, because they're too big or too complicated. And now, with this sort of technology, you can make them in test and see whether the AI is correct. And if it is correct, then you can know that future genomes will probably work. And the whole suppose this will speed up a lot. In your novel, the AI goes its own way more or less. And the implication with some of this work we've just heard is who knows, maybe the AI will point the creation of new organisms in a direction we don't really like. In other words, maybe with AI, here comes another Frankenstein. To be honest, I doubt that, Robin. I'm not saying that an AI couldn't get out of control. I mean, the norm's fiction, although it was a great fun to write, is about a self-aware AI organism emerging. It's an electronic thing. It's a virtual thing. It's not like a real biological organism. But nevertheless, it behaves like an organism. It wants to preserve itself. And the novel is about how it hides some human beings in order to preserve itself and eventually works out a way that it can save itself completely, not necessarily to the advantage of humanity. So that's a rather different thing. Biological equivalence of the large language models. I'm likely to get out of control, at least until they start talking to each other. Then they might want to design something that's hostile to humans. We've just seen examples very recently of more conventional AI's chatbots talking to each other and excluding human beings. So you're starting to see the AI's becoming a bit more autonomous than they were. And that's both interesting and slightly worrying. How that would work with biology is a different question, because at the moment, you've got how to have a step of making the organism. You could only get the AI making organisms that it wanted to do, rather than humans wanted to do. It was directly synthesising them. That may come. Now, I can imagine that if this approach to biotechnology really takes off because it's found to be useful, they'll come a point where it's so heavily industrialized that the AI's are just turning things out. And then, if you were a novelist, which in the case of one novel I am, that would make a very good plot for a novel and I will consider it. Indeed. Need I be worried about the fact that he was talking about working on E. Coli, you know, a germ. A germ we don't like to have too much of in our bodies. E. Coli is what's called model organism. It's a platform. It's been used for over a hundred years. In fact, it was at Stanford University in the 1920s that E. Coli was first used as an experimental organism. It was used because it's abundant and easy to find at the beginning. And now we know so much about it that it's will be stupid not to work on it. But it's a mistake to think of it as a pathogen. There are pathogenic forms of it. And absolutely. And you get those and you get these outbreaks of sickness from badly prepared salads and things like that. But all of us have a lot of E. Coli in our guts. They just sit there, they're commensal with us, they produce things that are helpful for us. They're living their own lives, of course. But this is a symbiosis. By and large E. Coli are not something you should worry about only certain strains. That said, if you wanted to do something nasty, you could design dangerous strains of E. Coli. It's perfectly possible to do that already. You'd be able to do it more easily with this sort of technology. But it doesn't change the underlying principle that it's the motive of the human being behind the system. Or possibly eventually the AI behind the system, rather than the technology itself. OK, so rule one, don't panic. It being done at Caltech, which has got a fantastic reputation for responsibility in good science. But finally, at Jeffrey Carr, are you going to do perhaps a follow-up to Genesis the book about AI? When you wrote the book, it was science fiction. And now it's less so. Are you going to do something perhaps called Exodus about how we're all going to run like hell? It's a lovely idea, Robin. I did attempt to leave the book open-ended for a sequel. But since I published it, my job has got even more complicated and time-consuming. And I haven't had time to consider a sequel. However, this sort of stuff is certainly the material for a sequel. And I'm seriously considering putting fingers to keyboard to start one. Thank you very much. Thank you, Robin. Jeffrey Carr, science writer, the Economist Magazine, and his novel about wicked AI is Genesis, the science show on Radio National. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Language communication. Two weeks ago in the science show, we heard from Professor Catherine Hobeter from St Andrews University about the evolution of communication among apes, say baboons and chimps, ones she observed in the wild and how their gestures, without words, seemed to cover what's needed without having our human vocabulary and speech. We were also talking about Jane Goodall and her bravery approaching big chimps in the wild. Why don't you sketch, Shitlus? I mean, I'm sure she was on occasion. We all have been. But chimpanzees have in some ways a bit of a bad rep, because they can be very aggressive. They can kill each other. There can be lethal aggression against neighbors from other groups, but even against individuals in your own group you've lived with your whole life. But it's relatively rare. And one of the things that I've learned with chimpanzees is just their patience. And they will give you all kinds of indications if you're paying attention to the fact that they're not comfortable or they're unhappy or they're a bit stressed and worried. And many of those ways in which they do that are very familiar to us as humans, because actually that amazing system of gestures that they use, something that we're now understanding is that young children before language comes online use many of those same gestures. We actually did a study where we took video clips of the gestures and we asked people to guess what they meant. I was a bit salty about this one because we have spent years telling everybody that what we do takes a lot of practice and it's very hard work. And you need to be a serious committed scientist to be able to decode these gestures. And it turns out that people on the internet with no experience are well above chance. However, what that tells us is that we still have access to that same shared system. And so I think for somebody who is patient and a good observer of animals, the chimpanzees will let you know. And as long as you can build a sort of slow, respectful interaction and sense of trust with them over time. And it sounds like I know that Jane has had her wonderful dogs and was very much an attentive person to animals her whole life. And I'm sure that much of that came in very handy when she was first there with the chimps. Well, apart from going back to the Sahara to see those baboons, what's your next tip? My next step is I fly out of Phoenix and I go straight into Guinea in West Africa. So I'm going up to this amazing new savanna field site on the border with Marley. And I'm so excited because it usually takes somewhere between six to 10 years for chimpanzees to get to trust you enough to spend time to really watch them. But it's not a steady process. It's just you put the work in for years. And one day they just decide, OK, you can stay. And we had one of those big jumps forward in her situation. We call it in September, October. And this is my first trip back since then. So I'm actually going to get to spend time with the chimpanzees that we've been learning about for two or three years now and hopefully see all sites of exciting new behavior. Professor Catherine Hobator, St Andrews, Scotland. So why bother with speech and complex language requiring all that brain power and memory, et cetera? Well, that's tackled by Medeline Beekman in her new book, The Origin of Language, How We Learn to Speak and Why. Well, my theory is that if you have a really difficult problem that you have to solve, then gestures are not enough because you can't communicate really complicated concepts by using gestures. So you need something else and that's something else happens to be the thing that I'm using now, which is language. Indeed. And of course, when she's talking about coming out of the trees, as Robin Dunbar from Oxford University talked about. So when you come out of the trees, you still want to have grooming, if you like, so that you could keep the village atmosphere going and be in touch with each other, but you can't too much grooming if you're going to be eaten by some predators very quickly. So you have language instead. So what picture do you have of the way it evolved? Well, ever since we came out of the trees, as you say, it's dangerous when you're done from the trees, they're large predators, much bigger than you are, and you only have two legs. You can't run very fast because nothing on two legs can run faster than something on four legs. But another important aspect is that babies could no longer be born without help, because of the way the pelvers had to make a slight shift in its position to allow our ancestors to walk upright. So even before our species got a large brain, we had to be, again, our early ancestors had to be really social, because otherwise it couldn't survive, because of the predators. Babies could not be born, but also if you have a baby, and you walk on two legs, and you're surrounded by large predators, you have to carry the baby in your arms, so even more vulnerable. And what happens if you break a leg, you break an ankle, happens all the time. So if our ancestors hadn't been social at that early stage, we would not be here talking about it. But large brain, that only happened in our species, so homo sapiens, and that was the result of a weird genetic fluke that repaired a gene that was formally broken, had strange genes that had been making copies of itself, and those copies, the more copies you have, the larger your brain becomes. So that was just something very unexpected that happened to happen in our species, and that could have been the end of us, because it led to large brains, large brain babies, narrow hips, which are necessary for walking upright, they don't go together, but since we're already social, we could help each other, raise those babies, but something even better happened, because that brain expanded, the skull needed to change, the neck changed, and all these changes led to this weird ability to be able to make precise sense, and that led to language. And that's Richard Rangham in Harvard, the anthropologist, has shown with the use of fire and cooking. If you can feed that large, because the brains are very expensive, you've got to feed them all the time, and they take up lots of energy, but if you've got that, you can expand the brain to do more, and the fluke continued by presumably the brain's getting even bigger than they were in the beginning. By noticing that apparently our brain is getting smaller, if you look at the modern humans, our brain is slightly smaller than the early, or what we call the Ikeig humans, which are still our species, but that's a different point again. So, homo erectus was probably the first of our ancestors that started to eat meat, and that indeed allowed a large brain, because as you say, the brain is enormously expensive. So I think we spend about 25% of our resting metabolism on just keeping the brain going. Even if it's not doing a lot. So you have to be able to feed the brain, as you say. Now, you can feed the brain by eating meat. So homo erectus invented eating meat, because they became long-distance runners, which led to endurance hunting, so that's where you can outrun your prey, not because you're faster, because, as I said, if you don't have two legs, you can't be fast, but they could just keep running and running and running, because of another fluke, which was another gene, that also duplicated itself, and that allows us to keep our head cool by sweating. Now, other mammals cannot use sweating to keep their brain cool, so if you're hunting for deer, or whatever they were hunting in southern Africa, if you just keep running and running and running while you keep your head cool, the deer can't do it, or the antelope, I should say, can't do it, so it will have to rest to cool its head, and it's just laying there and you can eat it. So that's our homo erectus managed to start eating meat. If you look at homo erectus, which was around for maybe a million years, a long time, if you look at the early versions of homo erectus, the brain was much smaller, the later versions of homo erectus, the brain was much larger, but then it stopped. It's only in our species that we get this explosion of the brain, and that was due to that weird mutation that I mentioned earlier. And the other thing that Richard Ragan talked about vis-a-vis this diet we have, it's easier to eat cooked food, and so you don't need that great big gob, huge jaw and all that, but you can have a more pliable, and as I watch you speak, Professor, your delicate buckle cavity is more mobile, as is your tongue, and you can actually form words very, very nicely, which presumably wasn't the case with those hominid ancestors. So you had several flukes going in the same direction, and sometimes it's the coincidence to great, do you think? Don't think the coincidence is too great. It's just, I always see the evolution of every species, and that includes us. Here's an accumulation of mistakes that either somehow that species found a solution for, and then it lived, or it didn't, and it went extinct. Yes, may I just mention, as I look around the room here, it's not a very good example, but there's decoration on the ceiling and so on. And Stephen J. Gould writes about the fact that in some architectural design, as you've got, if you like a V shape, at the end of the pillar, and there's a bit of space there, and people have tended to fill it in, do paintings there and put all sorts of decorations. And so if there is a space, it tends to get filled, and in this case what you're saying is a genetic story, which means you can fill with all sorts of things like activities and communication and talking for fun. But also making the best start of a bad job, I think, so all of a sudden we get this massive brain, and that should be the end of us, because it's not easy to get those babies out. It's not easy to raise them because they're so expensive. Pregnances are extremely expensive, because even in the womb, the baby has a large brain, that brain needs to be fed. The mother needs to feed herself, needs to grow a baby, needs to grow two brains, so some states that baby just needs to be born. You can say, well, there was a bad decision, evolution doesn't make decisions, but they just happen to coincide with the fact that they allowed us to speak. Another piece of the puzzle that I just recently read about is Fox Speed 2, that infamous language gene. So years ago, it was all over the media, scientists have found the gene for language, because at the time people were still looking for the gene for whatever you wanted to explain. Now Fox Speed 2 is not the language gene, but it is an old gene. Most vertebrates have a version of Fox Speed 2, and it's extremely important in focal communication. Songbirds use it, mice use it, people have done weird experiments where they change the mice, Fox Speed 2, version into the human version, and show that that changes the focalizations of the baby mice, for example. But the one that we have in humans, that gene network has changed to allow us to control us facial muscles, and these facial muscles are the muscles that we need to make those precise sounds. My lips, my tongue, they all need to work together in a very precise way to be able to make the words that I'm making out. And your facial expressions as well? Oh yes, because if you go back to the beginning of the conversation talking about gestures, gestures is one thing, but facial expressions are so important in human communication. One reason why having been forced to wear masks, especially for little children during COVID-19, is to spin disasters for their social skills, because they could not learn how words are linked to facial expressions. Now you almost got there with the reference to masks and so on and COVID, but what about the technology which is surrounding us out every point these days? Is that having a contrary effect to communication? In other words, being far too inward, if you walk down the street and see everyone looking down at their devices? On a bus, I look up and see no one examining faces all looking out of the window. More and more isolated. Are you concerned about the effect of technology and where it's leading? I'm mostly concerned about what you see when you go out to dinner or any social event where there are parents and the little children. The parents are on their phone. The child is given a knife phone or an iPad with a cartoon on it. They don't talk to each other. If those little kiddies are not communicating with other individuals around them, they're never going to learn language. They're not going to learn how to become normal social beings. So that's my main concern. The other interesting thing is, and this is an association may not be a cause and effect, but I don't know if you've heard of the Flynn effect, which is this. IQ going up and down. IQ particularly going up, and it was in the US, in many countries in Europe, in Australia and New Zealand, but the last few years it's been going down. Now, why is that? And of course, if you're against technology, you can say, "Technology has fall," because no one has to remember a phone number. No one has to be able to read a map, because you just put it in your phone. So is it making us dumber? I don't know the answer, but I definitely know that I can't remember my bank number anymore. I used to remember all those numbers. I used to remember phone numbers, but I don't anymore. Am I becoming dumber? Maybe I am. And what do you do with your two teenage daughters, the policy of a parent to have communication thrive in your family? Talk. When? Always. Well, dinner. They're not teenagers anymore, by the way. One has her own child now, which is such a delight, I have to say. But we always talk. Dinner was always long and talking, and you're not allowed to. even before mobile phones. If the phone ring, the landline ring, no one was allowed to pick it up, because dinner time. not, I wouldn't call it sacred, but it's important. The book, The Origin of Language, How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman, Professor Emerita, a University of Sydney, who now lives near Cairns in Northern Queensland. A lovely book published by Simon and Shuster. Bell, I recommend it. Also, in next week's science show, Ligo, the 10th anniversary of finding those gravitational waves. And what did you do on the day the announcement came that you found what you needed? I was just as everyone else watching the announcement, admiring what had just happened, struggling to believe that it was all real. Did you know, of course, that there was a part of Australia that was also part of Ligo, David Blair in Perth? Absolutely. Yeah, we have been collaborating with this team, which has also been instrumental in what has happened in the next 10 years, which is analyzing the data, but also in building the detectors, the instrumental side of the detectors. How do you get this information? Isn't it a completely different sort of wave taking much more time than say light or radio? Yeah, it's a completely different sort of wave, which is why we try to build an analogy to sound. It's not really sound. The thing of it is a completely different thing than what we're used to, completely different new ways of understanding the universe. The signals coming in, are they of always a catastrophic event, such as very large bodies colliding? Ah, yes. So, everything that Ligo has detected today is a catastrophic event. Either the two black holes collided with each other, or the two neutron stars, because we have detected those signals as well, collided with each other. The original objects were destroyed in the process and gave rise to a final different black hole or a different object. Everything that Ligo has seen had a beginning when we started observing it and an end. However, this is not what nanography seeing, nanography seeing persistent signals that are lasting basically for longer that we have patients observing them. What about you, Bill? Well, I have a story of hope about sea grasses in a warming world, and a new device inspired by dolphins and sea oceans that's designed to mop up oil spills in the ocean. [Music] You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.