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2:00

No insects extremely exquisite animal they are so

2:02

well tuned to what they do and it

2:05

is really confusing behavior so it has to

2:07

be some way in which this makes sense

2:09

to them. Why moths and other bugs get

2:11

drawn to candlelight also

2:13

the virus that's also a

2:16

protein smuggler and deep concerns

2:18

about the misuse of genetics

2:20

in some Chinese research. Looking

2:23

at this type of research in

2:25

one out of every other publication there

2:27

is a co-author from the police forces

2:29

or the Ministry of Justice that are

2:31

part of the persecution of

2:34

these populations. To start

2:36

let's celebrate NASA's amazing

2:38

ingenuity drone helicopter which

2:40

snuck a lifter Mars'

2:42

Jezero crater aboard the

2:44

Perseverance lander and took

2:46

its first flight in April 2021. And

2:50

touchdown for the last time

2:52

last week while our previous

2:58

edition of Science in Action

3:00

was airing.

3:15

It is bittersweet that

3:17

I must announce that ingenuity

3:19

the little helicopter that could

3:21

well it is now taking

3:23

its last flight on Mars.

3:25

Altogether Ingenuity's many flights on

3:27

another planet has been fabulous

3:29

and far more than the

3:31

team expected. It was

3:34

intended to be just a brief demonstration

3:36

of how 1.8 kilos

3:38

of kit could fly on Mars and

3:40

what might be possible. So

3:43

with the end of the adventure

3:46

sadness that it's over or joy

3:48

at what they achieved for team

3:50

leader Ted Sathornos there's

3:52

no doubt. I'm overflowing with pride

3:55

is the best way to describe it at

3:57

first for the people that made this happen

3:59

and then of of course the spacecraft that's

4:02

just an embodiment or an extension of those

4:04

people over the last decade.

4:06

She's done a remarkable job at

4:08

A, proving that yes, we can

4:10

fly at Mars, and B, a

4:12

whole cascade of additional victories that

4:15

are going to help us in

4:17

the years to come when we build bigger,

4:19

more capable aircraft. I mean, do you remember

4:21

the feeling of that first flight

4:23

when you're still waiting for information to

4:25

come back, whether it had managed to

4:27

lift itself a few meters off the

4:29

surface? Yeah, that is not an

4:32

emotion I will soon forget, nor

4:34

will the rest of the team. We can

4:37

now say that human beings have

4:39

blown a rotorcraft on another planet.

4:41

Congratulations! It

4:45

really was the culmination of everyone's hopes

4:47

and dreams. You have a small, scrappy

4:49

little team working on this tech

4:51

demo. Tech demos are small things that if they're

4:53

on the rocket, if they're off the rocket, it's

4:55

okay, it doesn't really matter, to the main mission,

4:58

because they have important science objectives. But to us,

5:01

she was everything. We've dedicated our careers

5:03

to making this work, so seeing that

5:05

first flight happen was the

5:07

crowning achievement for all of us, and

5:10

everything after that kind of

5:12

sprinkles on top if you think about it

5:14

from the demonstration perspective. I think it was

5:16

only meant to do a few flights, five

5:18

flights or so, but it's been...

5:20

Well, you better tell me, because I've not been able to

5:23

keep up with the number. Correct.

5:25

Five flights, that's it. So all of

5:27

us had psychologically prepared for this fantastic

5:29

sprint that we were going to be

5:31

on, and we were all wrong. We

5:35

did that, and then she was just sitting on the surface, all

5:37

systems green across the board, and

5:40

NASA was also still supportive and saying, all right,

5:42

let's keep this thing going, let's see how long

5:44

we can ride this. And

5:46

that sprint became more of a marathon. For

5:49

you, was this a question of trying

5:51

to think up of new and clever

5:53

things to do every week? No, there

5:55

was no shortage of those ideas even

5:57

before landing and before launch. Our

6:01

engineers have been dreaming

6:03

up of all of the exciting things they'd

6:05

like to do aside from a simple pop-up

6:07

flight. You know, flying faster, flying higher, doing

6:09

system identification in flight, scouting out for the

6:11

rover. So when we had the chance to

6:14

go for it, we jumped on it. I

6:16

love those images of it, sort of the two of

6:18

them, scouring over this

6:21

amazing bit of Mars together. And

6:24

that was genuinely scientifically beneficial.

6:27

Yes, so it's important to couch this in terms

6:29

of the goals, right? The first goal was to

6:31

just prove that we can fly on Mars, check.

6:34

But we did find, and we did prove

6:36

a handful of times here, that

6:38

we actually did provide some benefit for the

6:40

scientists, right? In Flight 13,

6:42

for example, we did a wonderful

6:45

job of taking stereo

6:47

images of a outcrop called Faiifu.

6:50

But this Faiifu outcrop was of

6:52

interest to the science team on

6:54

the Perseverance mission. And they asked

6:56

us, they said, hey, heli-team, if you guys

6:59

could fly up to it and fly horizontally

7:01

from left to right, as you're doing it,

7:03

take color images, and then we'll

7:05

download them back to Earth, and then we'll

7:07

try and stitch them together and form a

7:09

3D model. And we did just that. It

7:12

was the first example of an aerial 3D

7:14

reconnaissance at Mars. That really started

7:16

getting people's thoughts going here in terms of,

7:18

well, if we could do that, what else

7:21

could we do, right? It has been a

7:23

fantastic mission, but you've not been resting on

7:25

your laurels. You're already thinking about what

7:28

you could build for the next

7:30

mission to Mars. In particular, you've been thinking

7:32

that it may be a kind of courier

7:34

to bring some of the

7:36

samples that the Perseverance has put on

7:38

the soil to bring back. Yes.

7:41

So for the last year and a half,

7:44

we took the original ingenuity team and

7:46

bolstered it with a larger group here.

7:49

And we've been working on what

7:51

are called the sample recovery helicopters

7:53

to act as a backup for

7:55

a means to recover the sample

7:57

tubes that Perseverance has already deployed.

8:00

and then fly back to the lander and drop

8:02

it off. But that's also extra weight. Yes,

8:04

and it's extra precious weight for

8:07

such a mass-constrained helicopter, but

8:09

that's the benefit of having your tech

8:11

demo behind you now is you

8:14

can ground validate your models, right?

8:16

We actually know where the limits are. We

8:18

know where there was margin that we could

8:20

have taken advantage of, and we

8:22

know what needs to be done. So

8:24

that's our current effort for next-generation helicopters,

8:26

and then there's even a more future-looking

8:28

one, which is the Mars

8:30

Science Hexacopter. So six rotors, each of

8:33

the sides of ingenuity, in a ring

8:35

with a central body. The

8:37

size of this thing would be massive. It would

8:39

be about the size of two pickup trucks

8:41

side by side. The benefit of doing that is

8:44

you can now access areas of Mars and

8:46

carry science payloads up to a cliff

8:48

wall, down the lava tube, and

8:50

really get some of these scientists excited

8:52

about where you could bring their, you

8:55

know, favorite payloads to try and answer some big

8:57

questions. I was looking at your CV.

9:00

Before you were at NASA, you were

9:02

doing fancy stuff with drones hit

9:04

down here on Earth. I mean, how

9:06

lucky do you consider yourself to be to have

9:09

what must be for you the best job in

9:11

the world? Oh, absolutely. The opportunity of a lifetime,

9:13

job of a lifetime, and to be lucky

9:15

enough to have the chance to work on

9:17

this mission. You know, the stars aligned because

9:20

you don't get a lot of firsts anymore.

9:22

First flight, first aircraft. The Wright brothers did

9:24

it for us here on Earth. And ingenuity

9:27

is our Wright brothers moment for Mars.

9:29

And we're all incredibly lucky and grateful

9:32

to have been a part of that.

9:34

And I'm looking forward to

9:36

future flights on other planets.

9:38

Thanks meanwhile to NASA's Teddy

9:40

Tsatsanov for sharing those reflections

9:43

on ingenuity successes. What

9:46

in genetics have no doubt been

9:48

a scientific triumph? We're talking regularly

9:51

about breakthroughs here, whether it's genes

9:53

that keep us healthy, steps towards

9:55

gene editing to cure disease or

9:57

the story of our human race

9:59

as. recorded in the DNA

10:01

that we've inherited from our ancestors.

10:05

But there is a dark side too

10:07

given the amount of information a genome

10:09

can carry. And the

10:11

scientific equipment supplier Thermo Fisher last

10:13

month said it was halting sales

10:15

of kit to the Tibet region

10:17

of China because of concerns over

10:19

the way it's being used there.

10:22

A couple of years earlier they had

10:24

limited shipments to Xinjiang province in north-west

10:27

China because of similar concerns it was

10:29

being used in the oppression of the

10:31

Uyghur minority there. These

10:34

are bands bio-informatician Yves Moro of

10:36

Leuven University has been calling

10:38

for for many years. He's

10:41

deeply worried by the use

10:43

of genetics and bio-informatics by

10:45

Chinese authorities, by what

10:47

looks like close cooperation between some

10:49

researchers there and the law agencies,

10:52

and by the use of imported

10:55

kit and know-how in obtaining and

10:57

analyzing minority genomes. Well

10:59

to actually do that you need to

11:02

buy what's called kits and

11:04

a key player in this market

11:06

was a US company, Thermo Fisher,

11:09

and the misuse of this

11:11

technology would not have been

11:13

possible without the large-scale sale

11:15

of those products. And

11:17

so back in 2017 I identified

11:20

that well the role of Thermo

11:22

Fisher in Xinjiang was questionable. That

11:24

was followed up by actually Human

11:26

Rights Watch and then this

11:28

was picked up in the US

11:31

politics and that created unusual

11:33

pressure on US companies

11:36

which resulted eventually in Thermo Fisher

11:38

saying that they would stop selling

11:41

their products to the police of

11:43

Xinjiang because of the ongoing persecution

11:46

of Ughurs and other Muslim minorities.

11:48

And the latest news is that

11:50

they're also now withdrawing it from

11:52

Yues in Tibet which I guess

11:55

is a very similar story. It's

11:57

a very similar story. databases

12:00

are just one modality of

12:03

law enforcement quote-unquote. Iris

12:05

scans for example, which is also a

12:07

big campaign going in the Tibetan region,

12:09

but basically they are part of a

12:12

strategy of social control. What

12:15

I looked into back then was

12:17

in fact the products of termofish

12:19

are also being sold to

12:22

the Tibetan police. Your concern is

12:24

also that it's not just that

12:26

these technologies might be used for

12:29

surveillance and for repression, but

12:32

that it's been given a

12:34

kind of academic veneer. Yes,

12:36

absolutely. These technologies are

12:38

really quite high-tech. What

12:41

I also saw was the role of applied

12:44

academic research towards the deployment of

12:46

this technology. When a new kit

12:49

comes on the market, you have

12:51

a lot of academic research, hundreds

12:53

and hundreds of papers that looked

12:56

at a kit of this company

12:58

and then use it to

13:00

do profiling of this and this and this

13:02

ethnic group. There is

13:04

a real cottage industry, which is very,

13:06

very active in China, of

13:09

such studies. It's one thing

13:11

to say that while DNA profiling

13:13

is used to catch the worst

13:15

criminal, it's very different when

13:17

this technology is part of a

13:20

system of mass surveillance and control.

13:23

What I also saw was that looking at

13:25

this type of research in one

13:27

out of every other publication, there is

13:30

a co-author from the police

13:32

forces or the Ministry of Justice or

13:34

similar institutions. This is

13:36

really, really striking, like studies

13:38

of DNA profiling of UGORS

13:40

carried out by researchers involving

13:42

the police forces that are

13:44

part of the persecution of

13:46

these populations. I wonder if

13:48

your objection to that, I

13:50

believe, is that the subjects

13:53

in these populations whose DNA is

13:55

being used probably don't have the

13:57

freedom to say no, they don't

13:59

have informed consent. Yeah. So,

14:02

I mean, the academic standard for

14:04

research on human subject is really

14:06

high. It's free, informed consent. So

14:09

informed means that you're telling the

14:11

participants all the potential benefits and

14:13

risks of the research for themselves

14:16

and more broadly. So

14:18

in a situation like in China, you

14:20

would have to disclose, well, you know,

14:22

this research might eventually contribute to a

14:25

mass surveillance system that might

14:27

be used to persecute your

14:29

community. And so it's not

14:32

enough to say, do you agree to be

14:34

part of some research or

14:36

do you want to help solve crimes?

14:38

That is not proper informed consent. And

14:41

then the second part is free and the

14:43

bar for free consent is very high. It's

14:45

not just that was the

14:48

consent obtained under duress. It

14:50

is that does the participant

14:52

agree completely freely without any

14:54

fear of possible retaliation? Now,

14:57

obviously, when you're in a place like

14:59

Xinjiang, where you could

15:01

be sent to a eradication camp basically

15:04

just on the whim in a situation

15:06

like that, asking people,

15:08

well, are you okay to

15:10

participate in research and expecting

15:12

that they will freely be

15:14

able to decline participation? That

15:17

is just not very realistic. I

15:20

mean, another aspect of your complaint

15:22

is that academics globally are being

15:24

too complicit effectively in this in

15:27

that these studies, they are being

15:29

published in academic journals

15:31

who you're saying should be rejecting

15:33

them because of these consent issues.

15:35

Yes. So we're not talking about

15:38

some dark corner of the Internet and

15:40

predatory journals. We're talking about

15:42

mainstream journals by mainstream Western

15:44

publishers. And so that

15:47

is certainly an issue because why

15:49

do millions of academic researchers

15:52

have to comply with fairly

15:54

heavy and complicated procedures if

15:57

where those procedures would need to help? they

16:00

don't really function. So that is

16:02

a huge frustration that has built

16:04

up in me over the years.

16:06

I mean, we are focusing on

16:08

China. Is this limited to China

16:10

or is it a particular issue

16:13

in China? Because it's partly because

16:15

it's a very large country, a

16:17

quite close country and a very

16:19

diverse country. Yeah, so this issue

16:21

is certainly not limited to China.

16:23

We have seen a normal deployment

16:25

of DNA databases in the United

16:27

States, for example, at the US-Mexico

16:29

border looking at refugees and asylum

16:31

seekers. There was a trend to say,

16:34

well, I just put all these people

16:36

in DNA databases just in case they

16:38

turn out to be criminals. In

16:41

Europe, the Roma population is studying in

16:43

ways where you can sometimes question

16:46

whether the research is actually respectful

16:48

of all basic human

16:51

rights. So I would say

16:53

that the magnitude of the problem in China is

16:55

way beyond what we see elsewhere, but

16:57

that the problem is not just

16:59

unique to China at all. Eve

17:02

Morrow on the dark side of genetic

17:04

knowledge, he received the 2023

17:06

award from the Einstein Foundation for

17:09

his advocacy on these matters. Proteins

17:13

are the other dominating kind of

17:15

molecule in biology. So next, an

17:18

unexpected, at least for me,

17:20

story of protein smuggling conducted

17:22

by a virus we've been

17:24

talking about loads recently, flu,

17:26

in particular, bird flu. When

17:29

the virus crosses from birds into

17:32

mammals, it faces two barriers. First,

17:34

it may fail to latch onto

17:36

the new host cells to start

17:39

an infection. But second, the biological

17:41

machinery inside the cells may not

17:43

be compatible with the viral life

17:46

cycle. Even if the

17:48

virus does get in, it may

17:50

do nothing, never replicate. And that's

17:52

what the new suggestion tackles. A

17:55

paper in Science Advances argues that

17:57

bird flu viruses hijack a whole

18:00

protein from bird cells which

18:02

will be essential in their life cycle

18:04

to give them a kick start when

18:07

they arrive in a new host. Wendy

18:10

Barkley first identified this critical

18:12

protein and she finds the

18:14

hypothesis intriguing so I

18:17

asked her to help me understand how

18:19

it fits into the complexities of a

18:21

viral life cycle. All viruses

18:23

are what we call obligate

18:25

intracellular parasites. They're tiny beings

18:28

that are so simple they don't own

18:30

everything they need and so they come

18:32

into a human cell and inside

18:34

that cell they have to grab hold of whatever

18:37

they can find to help them make

18:39

hundreds if not thousands of copies of

18:41

themselves which will then leave that cell

18:43

and go on and infect the next

18:45

one and we know now that

18:47

there are hundreds of different proteins inside the cell

18:49

which actually are all part of our own healthy

18:51

cell and they're sitting there getting on with what

18:54

they need to do and then along comes a

18:56

virus and grabs hold of them and pulls them

18:58

to do what it wants to do. There's

19:00

this one protein which you've pointed out

19:03

is slightly different between

19:06

humans, between other mammals and

19:08

between birds and

19:11

that makes it quite hard

19:13

when a virus first gets into us from

19:16

a bird to actually start replicating and

19:18

doing its life cycle. Yeah so this

19:20

is a protein we described a few

19:23

years ago now called ANP32 and this

19:25

is a protein which is sitting inside

19:27

the nucleus of our cells and influenza

19:29

viruses get into the nucleus to do

19:32

their replication and they grab hold of

19:34

this protein to help them do it.

19:36

The important thing that we showed was

19:38

that the avian version of this protein

19:41

is a little bit longer than all

19:43

the mammalian versions. All bird flus use

19:45

this avian longer version of the protein

19:47

quite happily but when they come inside

19:50

a human cell and they want to grab hold

19:52

of their favourite host protein they can't find the

19:54

exact match they grab hold of the human version

19:56

of it and it's not as

19:58

good and so they go very slowly. inside

20:00

that human cell and then our own healthy immune

20:02

system will pick that up, shut them down and

20:04

that's the end of it. So what

20:06

I find interesting in this new paper

20:08

is these authors say that the virus

20:10

comes along not just with its normal

20:13

package of proteins and RNA and so

20:15

on, but it can actually sort

20:17

of borrow some of the

20:19

bird version of this ANP32 protein. Have I

20:21

got that right? It comes along sort of

20:24

with a pre-packed sort of bit. Yeah,

20:26

it's not too amazing. We know that

20:28

virus particles, which are what move the

20:30

virus genome from one cell to the

20:32

next, they're sort of like a bag

20:34

and as they're being made from the

20:36

old cell that the virus is leaving,

20:39

it's not surprising that a few bits

20:41

and bobs that were in that old cell

20:43

get packaged inside the bag along with the

20:46

bits that the virus really wants, which are

20:48

its own genome. And what the authors are

20:50

suggesting is that because of this incompatibility between

20:52

these ANP32 proteins, maybe it

20:54

can overcome that barrier by pulling some of

20:57

the avian protein with it to use for

20:59

the first few rounds of replication. I

21:01

mean you sound not so surprised, I'm amazed by

21:03

this, but you know how much of this protein

21:05

does it have to bring in? Is it just going

21:07

to be one copy of it

21:09

in each viral particle or could it be

21:12

lots of them and do they survive very

21:14

long inside the human cell? Yeah, I

21:16

mean I love the story and it's sort

21:18

of part of what we think makes biology

21:20

so amazing that a virus could do this,

21:23

but you're asking exactly the right questions and

21:25

we really need to sort of get some

21:27

more answers about this because what the authors

21:29

suggest is that each copy of the virus

21:31

that comes into the cell brings one copy

21:33

of the host factor with it and

21:36

I would think that would be the absolute

21:38

minimum that the virus would need because once

21:40

it's inside the cell, it's going to make

21:42

perhaps thousands of copies of its own genome

21:45

before it can select the

21:47

mutation that it needs to adapt it to

21:49

the human version of this protein and

21:52

one can imagine then this chicken protein

21:54

sort of falling on and off and

21:56

on and off each time a copy

21:58

is made of the viral genome. which

22:00

in itself is amazing to visualize and I'm not

22:02

saying it's not what happens it just really sort

22:05

of opens your mind to thinking about how these things

22:07

are happening. With the highly

22:09

pathogenic H5N1 flu, I guess 20

22:11

years ago now when it was

22:14

spreading quite worryingly in

22:16

parts of Southeast Asia, people

22:19

were being infected directly by ducks or by

22:21

chickens and so on but they were never

22:23

passing it on but they were getting so

22:25

ill that a lot of them died. Does

22:27

it make sense, this hypothesis, in terms of

22:29

that kind of history? Yeah, I mean

22:31

what we know in those individuals who

22:33

got those zoonotic infections after exposure to

22:35

very high doses in poultry markets, for

22:37

example, is that if you look at

22:40

the virus in them, even in

22:42

one, two, three days, mutations

22:44

have appeared which adapted that

22:46

virus for replication in

22:48

human cells. So what was always

22:51

clear, what this news story is

22:53

about is that very first exposure and

22:55

what happens in a very first cell

22:57

that gets infected. Very

23:00

assuming is that the virus itself hasn't

23:02

mutated yet, it's still avian-like,

23:04

so how on earth can it work? Well

23:06

maybe it can overcome that barrier by pulling

23:09

in this host protein. As I

23:11

said, it's all a very nice story

23:13

and where this becomes key is that if

23:15

we wish to understand why some avian

23:17

viruses cost into people a bit more regularly

23:19

than others, maybe it's their

23:22

ability to pull through the avian protein with

23:24

them to help them in that first cell

23:26

that they infect. And so there could be

23:28

a rather simple assay that we could set

23:30

up to try and help risk assess. Is

23:32

that something you'd be interested in trying yourself? I

23:34

think there are some much better qualified people

23:36

than me to set the assay up and

23:39

I think what the next step following through

23:41

what's reported in this paper now is

23:43

to say how does this vary between

23:45

different strains and subtypes of avian flu

23:47

and does it fit the picture that

23:50

this could be an important factor in

23:52

which ones actually get going in humans

23:54

and which ones don't. What I love about

23:56

this story, what caught my eye is the fact that no

23:58

matter how much I talk about it, these viruses

24:00

and so on. There's always a surprise around

24:02

the corner. Yeah absolutely and obviously I'm

24:04

a virologist. I think viruses can teach

24:07

us so much about the

24:09

way biology works and they're sort

24:11

of classic examples of how things

24:13

evolve and work and come along

24:15

with so it's critical. Indeed and

24:18

we've put a link to the

24:20

paper describing this hypothesis and the

24:22

evidence for it on the Science

24:24

in Action webpage at bbcworldservice.com. That's

24:26

a link to Wendy Barclays Lab

24:28

at Imperial College of London. We

24:31

started the program with feats of

24:33

flights on Mars. Let's finish with

24:35

the mystery of insect flight down

24:38

here on Earth. Like me you

24:40

may have heard the popular explanation

24:43

that moths get drawn to bright

24:45

lights during the night time because

24:47

somehow they're actually trying to reach

24:49

the moon. Did Neil

24:51

Armstrong find any up there back in 69? Well

24:54

Sam Fabian is a specialist in

24:56

insect flight also at Imperial College

24:59

and couldn't find any good evidence in

25:01

the literature for this explanation or for

25:04

a clutch of other alternatives. So he

25:06

decided to do the experiments for himself

25:08

and the answer he says is

25:11

way more interesting because we

25:14

actually tend to underestimate what insects

25:16

can do. Oh insects are dumb

25:18

they're silly they don't understand what's going on. No

25:20

insects extremely exquisite animals. They are so well tuned

25:22

to what they do and there's this really confusing

25:24

behavior so it has to be some way in

25:26

which this makes sense to them and

25:28

we took a look around at the current explanations that are

25:30

out there and we thought well do

25:33

these make sense in terms of what we know

25:35

about insect biology and then furthermore do

25:37

they fit the data and what data is actually out there and

25:40

we found that there wasn't that much

25:42

data certainly not free flight data out

25:44

there. So you set about trying to

25:46

recreate actually real data. For one thing

25:48

they're erratic the way they move but

25:50

also they're very fast so this was

25:53

actually a bit of a technical challenge.

25:55

Not exactly right I mean filming any

25:57

insect is actually pretty tough and we're

25:59

fortunate. to be able to use

26:01

some really high-end technology in order to

26:03

kind of get at this problem. So

26:05

presumably that includes very high resolution cameras

26:07

but very high speed cameras. I've been looking

26:09

at some of the videos but they

26:11

are very impressive, the detail that I'm

26:13

seeing. Those videos will be shot at 500

26:16

frames per second. Your kind of

26:18

relatively high quality television will be shooting at 50 or

26:20

60 frames per second. So we're shooting quite a lot

26:22

faster than that and that allows us to slow the

26:24

action down and really see what the animal is doing

26:27

in the air. But we also at the

26:29

same time, we're running motion capture. Now

26:31

motion capture is something we use in cinema or

26:33

maybe in video games to capture the way in

26:35

which somebody or an animal is moving around by

26:38

attaching little markers all over their body. And we

26:40

can do that to the insect. If we miniaturise

26:42

and make it small enough, we can glue it

26:44

to the back of the insect. What, these are

26:46

little sort of white dots effectively? Yes, that's exactly

26:49

right. Tiny little dots but actually these dots are

26:51

a bit like cat-sized that you get in the

26:53

road and they bounce light back along the way

26:55

it came. And that allows our camera system to

26:58

see where those markers are in space and really

27:00

accurately position them in 3D. So

27:03

we get down to about a quarter

27:05

of a millimetre. And you describe in

27:07

the paper three clues as to what's

27:10

going on in the way that these

27:12

insects approach the light, fly around it

27:15

and basically get a bit confused.

27:17

That's absolutely right. So you can

27:19

just look at the video so you can

27:22

see three clear things that are weird and

27:24

we didn't really understand it. And the first

27:26

of those was that animals were orbiting the

27:28

light. So they don't beeline straight to the

27:30

light. They're kind of flying circles around it when they

27:32

get close to it. Then we saw

27:34

that they were stalling and that's as they fly underneath

27:36

the light. They begin to fly away from it and

27:38

they're pitching up and they're pushing their head further and

27:41

further up and they're climbing and climbing and they're slowing

27:43

down. And then they tip onto a new flight course

27:45

and go a different direction. So in other words, what

27:48

their intention and their aerodynamics didn't match

27:50

at that point? That's exactly what we

27:52

thought was going on. And then that

27:54

finally, really, the least we think they

27:56

know what they're doing of

27:58

these behaviours was that. insects flew directly

28:01

over a UV or a bright light

28:03

they would flip themselves upside down and

28:05

much like flying an aircraft flying upside down is not

28:07

a great idea for a long time and they would

28:09

plummet straight out of the air and crash down onto

28:11

the ground and that really is

28:13

not what we would expect insects to want

28:15

to do so that suggests something's going wrong

28:18

for them and we had to really work

28:20

out what that was. Well you make a

28:22

really interesting point which I'd never thought about

28:24

with insects somewhere in the paper you say

28:26

that they're basically very light relative to the

28:28

air that they're flying through and they

28:30

can be buffeted around by small currents and so on

28:32

so that their flight control is

28:34

very active and depends on the visual system.

28:36

That's exactly right so there's going to be

28:39

lots and lots of small air currents and

28:41

things that can knock them off course and

28:43

so they have to constantly tilt themselves to

28:45

keep themselves facing the right way up and

28:47

not end up upside down but actually

28:50

working out which way up they are they don't

28:52

seem to have that many different ways of doing this

28:54

and one key way in which they do this

28:56

is where's the light coming from? If you say well

28:58

if I see something bright it's probably the sky

29:00

and I treat that as up that

29:03

allows you to navigate just fine for 370 or odd million

29:06

years you've been able to cruise around just

29:09

assuming that and unfortunately we've gone on and

29:11

ruined that. Does that mean that when you

29:13

see the orbiting behaviour that these insects tend

29:15

to have their backs to the light so

29:17

they think that their backs are to the

29:19

top of the sky? That's exactly right and

29:21

so what you can think of is if

29:23

the insect thinks it's just flying in a

29:25

straight line it should be generally symmetrically putting

29:27

all its forces down to cancel out the

29:29

acceleration due to gravity and a little bit

29:31

to cancel out drag so they just keep

29:33

moving forwards but actually if they're wrong about

29:35

that and actually their body

29:37

is tilted to one side that's asymmetric and that's

29:40

going to mean that they're going to start to

29:42

just gently curve in these circles where they're keeping

29:44

the light at the centre of the circle. I

29:46

mean how many insects did you look at? It's

29:49

a come to these conclusions. So we looked

29:51

across 10 different orders and that was what

29:53

really I found fascinating time and again you

29:56

could take a dragonfly you could take a

29:58

moth and you could take time tiny little

30:00

flies and all of them shape the same

30:02

as bots because it's just a really smart,

30:04

robust, simple little way to solve this problem.

30:06

A simple, wonderful way to do it until

30:09

somebody invents streetlights. I mean there's one thing

30:11

I'd really love to come out of this

30:13

study is some way that we

30:15

didn't interfere with insects' behaviour at night. It would

30:17

be absolutely lovely to tell you that it was

30:19

a simple little thing and now we understand it

30:21

we can just, oh we can fix it and

30:24

these insects won't be affected. Unfortunately that's not reality.

30:27

Light at night is pollution but

30:29

we can't really live without it. But

30:31

what this study does tell us a little bit is

30:34

that the direction for light matters and

30:37

so if we can try not to shine light

30:39

directly up into the sky that's going to be

30:41

helpful because we'd expect any insects that are flying

30:43

over that, maybe even migratory species to flip upside

30:45

down as they go over those bright patches and

30:47

crash down into the ground and get stuck. And

30:50

also we try to limit how far your

30:52

light is going out sideways and try not

30:54

to throw light where you don't need it.

30:56

That will just help not confuse the insects

30:58

as to which way is up. Sam Fabian

31:00

who must have been very patient to film

31:02

and analyse all those insect flights. The details

31:04

are in Nature Communications and the video is

31:06

on his website. You can

31:08

find that via bpcworldservice.com and

31:11

that is it for Science in Action this week. I'm Rowan

31:13

Pease, the producer is Ella Hubber. Time for us

31:15

to buzz off.