The Science Behind “Project Hail Mary”, Ghost Elephants, And Womb Transplants

0:00Hello and welcome to the second ever video episode of our now monthly podcast break it down. If you're watching on YouTube, we are very pleased to have you. If you're listening on any of the other podcast platforms, we invite you to check out the video on youtube.com for slash IFL science official as it will include extra videos from the subjects we're about to talk about. I'm your host, Eleanor Higgs, digital content creator for IFL science, and I'm joined as ever by Senior Science Router Rachel Funnel. And we've got a whole four weeks of science news to discuss. So let's get started. Break it down. This is my first story this month and it was written by Steven Muntz and we've got a new probably world's largest choral colony, which is very exciting. I saw the diagram and it is quite hard to get ahead around. It's pretty impressive. So this was found actually by a mother and daughter team of citizen scientists

1:03and it's a single choral colony, try saying that five times fast, on the Great Barrier Reef and basically it stretches more than a hundred meters, which makes it the longest ever documented. And if you look at the pictures and the videos will put a little clipping, it is vast. Like a hundred meters to me doesn't seem that far. I think Usain Bolt sprinting. It's at the London Olympics where he likes roasted fame, but that's what I think of it doesn't seem that far, but it just goes on and on and on and it covers an area of 3,973 square meters, which again doesn't mean that much to me, but Steven is a football fan and he's converted it into football pitch size. So it's longer but smaller than area for a standard football pitch or soccer pitch if you're in the US and Rugby pitch is bigger apparently, according to Steven, and then apparently the ovals for Australian rules, football are three to six times the colony size.

2:04So it's fast, but it's not as big as an oval for Australian rules, football in case you were wondering. But this is pretty amazing because the people that discovered it are called Sophie and Jan and like I said, they're a mother and daughter team, but they were doing a great reef census to sort of like monitor the reef, their citizen scientists, they're not sort of paid scientists at work. They stumbled upon this amazing, amazing coral and there's a great quote from Sophie that says, I knew right from the minute we dropped in, it was something special. When I got in the water, I never seen a coral growing like this before. It looked like a meadow of coral. It just went on and on. What is really impressive is that they had the previous sort of record holder is only a third of the size. So it's like really trumped it. And then they discovered another one in Bali, but covers a similar area, but it's not as long. So this one is, is the true winner.

3:05And it's a species of pavona and it sort of looks like kind of not very tall, white, little marshmallowy bumps that go on and on and on. Yeah, well, I like the sporting comparisons that you think are might short work of it. It might not look like much on an Australian football game, but three times bigger than the previous title holder. I think that's what you need to know. That means that we have vastly increased our understanding of how big these things can be. Yeah, and they, what they're doing is they're keeping the location secret. And you might think it'd be quite hard to hide the giant coral. That sort of size, but given that the Great Barrier Reef is absolutely vast, it's sort of not too much of a challenge to hide it. It actually includes 2,900 reefs, which stretch a distance of 2,300 kilometers. So hiding this one in the middle doesn't seem to be too much of a challenge. And it's absolutely amazing. The good thing as well is that this reef seems to be thriving,

4:06like especially in these times of coral bleaching and acid ocean acidification events. This one seems to be doing really well. And I think it's because it's in quite deep water. So it's sort of a bit less funerable to extreme temperature fluctuations. And it's full of fun little fish and all sorts. So yeah, I'm very pleased that we found it and that it's thriving. And that we have citizen scientists that can discover stuff like this. It's a strong start for Mother-to-Water Father-Son duo, so far. Yeah, absolutely. What have you got up next? Well, I've got some science news that, you know, sometimes we get these stories and they're quite hard to know how to handle. And I think this month's developments surrounding asteroid 2024. Oh, no. Incaptulates this feeling. So our space editor, Dr. Alfredo Carfinetti, has been giving us the updates on this. And it's taken us on a real rollercoaster. I mean, back in early 2025, we were getting worried that it might smack us.

5:07This thing is slightly wider than an Olympic swimming pool, but that's plenty big enough to cause problems. Then that danger shrank, but a new possibility became quite likely that it might punch the moon in the face in 2032, which is really what we were all hoping for. I mean, I'm sorry, Moon, but it is true. Because I mean, you know, it might not sound great is our moon after all, but astronomers were pretty adamant that it would be a great opportunity because we get to observe this really big impact on the safety of our planet. And it would have had the potential to add new craters. So that's like changing the face of the moon, but alas, the dream has died. No, keeping an eye on this sneaky little space rock using JWST. There was like a really narrow window in February where we could spot it before it was going to disappear again until 2028. The measurements that they took then revealed that the space rock will miss the moon by 21,200 kilometers with an uncertainty of only 700 kilometers.

6:10So basically, there's just no chance. That's so sad. I know, I think it's horrible to the moon, but I was really rooting for like a 2032 viewing event where we all watched it smack onto me. I mean, I think I've been the only one in the team who's been sort of routinely being like, but guys, the moon, but I can understand the disappointment for scientists having read our update because he's talking about how, depending on the equipment that we could have used, it's possible that when it hit the measurements that we got from that, could have told us about like the moon's interior, which is something that we don't currently know that much about. And that's cool. We would have got to see the impact from Earth. It would have been visible as like a flash, one representing an impact equivalent to six million tons of TNT. Oh, Blaming. Yeah. And all of the stuff that all of that explosion like lifted up, that could have given us a mixture shower that would have lasted for days. But there is some good news.

7:11It demonstrates that planetary defenses are good and working because, you know, we saw this guy come in and we've been able to track its movements ever since. And they were where I remember back in 2025 when there was a concern about whether it was going to hit us. They were making plans as to how we could reduce the native impact of that. So, you know, good to show that that works. This is a really fun one that I actually wrote earlier in the month. And it's all about mistral, the whale shark. And oh, I'm going to be honest. I love him and his many adventures. But I will let past Eleanor take it away all about mistral because this is just so cool. Hi, everyone. Eleanor here just coming on to tell you all about mistral, the whale shark. So whale sharks are super cool anyway, but this one in particular has been up to all sorts. So it was first seen in Madagascar in 2019 when it was only four and a half meters long.

8:13I mean, I say only, but that is still a pretty big whale shark. And then it did whatever it wanted to do for a long time until August 2015 when it rocks up off the coast of the seashell islands, which for those of you not super into geography, is a journey of 1,200 kilometers across. And it also is the first verified reciting of a whale shark moving from Madagascar to another country in the region in the Western Indian Ocean. So this is really cool. He swam a heck of a long way. And what's also interesting about it is that he was first identified using like tour, operator photos, citizen science photos, some malagassy students took pictures of all different whale sharks in the area. So they knew what he looked like. And then they could compare that from all the way back in 2019 to the photos taken of him in the seashells last year. So then they could identify that it was the same whale shark.

9:15I also really want to know what he was up to for the six years in between. But I guess we'll never know. But it's really cool now that we can see where he's going and where he might go next. Back to future me. Okay, are you ready for human ancestors? Never, but take it away. So some big news that's landed this month is that we may have found the oldest human ancestors somewhere where nobody was expecting it. This news comes to us from writer Ben Talb and is big because we've long thought that our story, so that's that of the hominins, began in Africa around seven million years ago. But possibly not because we may have just found the remains of an even older hominin in Bulgaria. And so if this is confirmed as a hominin, this fine would suggest that our earliest ancestors emerged in Eurasia before migrating to Africa due to climate change in the late Myocene. So before this news came along and confused everyone, it was thought that the oldest hominin was the genus Arorin, which was found in Kenya.

10:17This was a prehistoric ape-like creature, but it had a key difference from chimps is that it walked on two legs. So this is known as bipedalism. But step aside says, I'm going to get this wrong, grace apithecus. Grace apithecus will go with one of those. I believe you. It's thy bone was found in the, as macarachological site in Bulgaria. It's important to know, as I said, that we are still waiting on confirmation that it is indeed a hominin. But it's thought to have come from a female individual who weighed about 24 kilograms. There are aspects of the leg bone that makes us think that she was walking up right. That said, they don't reckon she was doing it all the time. It was probably more of a combined approach. It's a kind of quadrupedal locomotion. So I mean, why is imagining I was like, okay, well, this is what then a sort of transitional stage. You're no longer really that good at climbing trees, but you're also not that good on the ground. And it kind of sucks for these guys. But that shift was probably driven, as I say, by climate change.

11:20So the forest would have been disappearing. Does it have attached to becoming more common? And so you had to either get up on your two legs or fall behind. She was also tiny then. If she was only 24 kilogram, she would have been really dinky little ancient. Yeah, I would have looked like a giant. Especially if she couldn't walk on two legs as well. Then she would have been like crouched. I think, yeah. I mean, it sounds like me on a tired day, to be honest. Yeah, so true. So pretty for these guys. But yeah, and then if these are indeed the earliest hominins, then it's possible that they migrated to Africa. And that is then where the aurora appeared. And all subsequent hominins, since including us. That is very cool that they can tell all that from like, well, potentially tell all that from one specimen. Like, it could just completely rewrite everything we know about really, really early ancestors. Well, this is the tricky thing you're working from fossils, right?

12:21Like, you find pieces you can anything around so much. A thigh bone is pretty useful when it comes to understanding how an animal was moving along. This spoke about something on it called the neck and how this is slightly longer. So that's something that you tend to see in animals that walk up right. So that's how this specimen has been able to sort of change our mind. It also, I know one of our other writers, Tom Hale, likes to point out how often we're thinking an awful lot from just finding a single bone. Because, you know, there is a lot of gap to fill in when you've got this just one speck of piece. But I think it's amazing because it goes to show you, like, statistically, how unlikely it is that we could have found that fossil and have a completely changed our understanding of the origins of ourselves. So let's send nice one, Bulgaria. Yeah, everyone to Bulgaria. All the archaeologists, let's see what else we can dig out. What's your next story? This is a very fun one. Written by Holly Lodge.

13:22We thought that these little tiny marsupials had been extinct for 6,000 years, quite a long time, turns out we were wrong and they've just been chilling in the forest. I always love it when animals do this. They're just like, yeah, just, just kidding guys. They've been here all along. Yeah, you think like, yeah, you could be good at avoiding detection. You know, you could be like hiding whatever. But to hide for 6,000 years is pretty impressive. So it's a bit like your ancient human ancestor. These two marsupials were only known from fossil specimens. So there's one called the pygmy long-fingered possum and that hailed from Pleistocene era, Australia. And then there is the ring-tailed blider which was known from Pleistocene or sort of early Holocene New Guinea. And they think that both of them vanished around the same time,

14:22except that they didn't. Which is kind of embarrassing, but very, very cool. So thanks to a combination of photographs from local people, fossil fragments and even a rare specimen that was collected back in 1992, they found them living on an island off the coast of New Guinea, I think. It's called Valktop Peninsula. So yeah, the relationship between the researchers and the local people was really, really important. And they basically set off into the forest, I think. But the return of both the possum and the glider, like back from the dead, as it were, has earned a membership to what they call Lazarus taxa. So these are species that they thought were like really long gone and they've been discovered. And like basically finding one Lazarus taxa is like exceptional. And then to find two is just like mind blowing to everybody involved. And these two little species, they have no close relatives anywhere else on New Guinea.

15:25And they don't really know how they ended up on the island. It could be that it sort of was an ancient piece of Australia that then eventually like broke off and became part of the New Guinea sort of area. But nobody is 100% sure. What they are sure of though is that they are absolutely stinkin' adorable. I love it when we find stuff and it's really cute. It also looks kind of equally shocked to have been found. Getting away with this for such a long time. The ring-tailed glider is literally like a chug. It's got huge eyes and it just looks really, really surprised to have been discovered. But yeah, but I think part of the thing that they found used by talking to local people is that potentially they could find even more. Because New Guinea is pretty impenetrable that's quite hard going to like discover stuff. So they wouldn't be now potentially as shocked if they found something else lurking in the rainforest. But yeah, absolutely amazing that these little species.

16:25I think it's really cool like the choral story in this story. This stuff has been there the whole time. And even now in 2026 we're discovering it. Which is just so fun for us. Yeah, I always imagined that there's nothing like that big left to find. And then you're just like, oh just lurking under the water. There was this enormous monster. Real life Pokemon. A real life Pokemon. Yeah, absolutely. So I was lucky to get to do quite a lot of cool interviews this month. Hard to pick a winner, honestly. But I was blown away by the chat that I had with Dr. Steve Boyz, who spent 10 years searching for ghost elephants in the Angolan Highlands. His story and that of the incredible master trackers who made his quest possible features in a new film with, well, directed and written by Werner Herzog. And it's called Surprise Surprise Ghost Elephants. It's an incredible film. There's so much history and culture and an amazing search with an incredible ending.

17:25But what I want to show you is a clip of our discussion talking about this insane group that the master trackers use for their poison tip arrows. It's tiny and yet it's powerful enough to kill an elephant. So here it is. It's a little beat up. It's about the size of a ladybug, a different shape. I've seen them. They will go for small marulla trees and euphobia trees. And you will notice that the trees been denuded of its leaves. Even the leaves look a bit smaller than they should because they've been nibbled on the edges. That's the groves, these tiny groves. They're almost going to like twice the size of a maggots. Now they will go then down the tree into the ground. They're about a meter below the surface and they make these little sand cocoons. Now, you know, I've held these cocoons. You take them up. I mean, it's like holding, I don't know, like plutonium or something. I mean, it's just, you touch that, you know, if you've got a scratch on your hand

18:25and that gets into the wound, you know, it's highly likely you're going to die. I mean, in the film, Venice is just a few of these groves. Good kill an elephant. Queen, when I asked him, he said, no, just one grove paint the insides onto the, onto the arrow shaft. If you shoot the elephant in its trunk because there's so many blood vessels and muscles in there, it'll just take four days for the elephant to die. For any other animal because they're much smaller, they die the same day or overnight. But it is extraordinarily potent. They use wild asparagus and one other who, those together, the one will shut down your kidneys. So if you are urinating, it's black with the blood vessels that are being exploded by the hemolytic poison, the grub's poison, just makes your blood boil in fall apart. And the other one is, it's like soap. It's a vine that grows on the ground. You can actually wash your hands with it. It's very soapy. But a tiny bit of that into your bloodstream makes your, your, your lungs foam.

19:28So, you know, when that poison arrow, which has got those three poisons on it, the primary one being the grub, when that pierces your skin, your lungs are going to foam up, your kidneys and your blood is going to shut down and your blood is just going to boil apart and you die very painful death. You know, we got shots in the arm and managed to save us arm by just cutting into the flesh to bleed it out before it got to his heart. Because once it gets to your heart, there's no hope for you to survive. The, you know, Ricardo, the translator in the film, you see him quite often. Ricardo, he retrieved, his him and his brother shot to Kudu, the big antelope. He retrieved the arrow just to pull it out of the flesh and then they slaughtered the animal and carried it back home. He didn't wash his hands before eating that night. But he had, you know, six hours prior touched, just touched the arrow. He ate his food with his hands with no utensils and he was bedridden for six months because of that. That's how potent it is.

20:31But yeah, I just think that quote about it's like holding uranium. I just, I would go nowhere near this thing. They were talking about like handling it and passing it around. I'd be like, thank you. No, thank you. When he was like, it just boils your blood and then your blood like disintegrates. I was like, you can keep it. You do whatever you want to do with that, but I'm going nowhere. Yeah. Absolutely killer, triptych of what was it? Something like asparagus that does terrible things to your kidneys. Yeah. The little poisonous grub and then a plant that on one side can, you can wash your hands with it. Yeah. But in the next moment, it's making your lungs all bubble up. I was like, wow, nature turns on you when it wants to. Well, it's also amazing that it's so small but it's so potent. It just, now I'm scared and go the highlights. Yeah. You can stay right where you are and give it very much. So just a reminder to everyone to be nice to beetles because you never know what they're packing. So up next on my list is a pretty incredible story. I'm absolutely blown away by this

21:38as I am usually with all medical miracles. I'm going to call it a miracle. I think it's justified. This was written by Laura Simmons and baby Hugo is the first UK baby born after a womb transplant from a deceased donor. Wow. I mean, congratulations, Hugo. Congratulations, mother of Hugo. Yeah. What a win. What a win. So Hugo's mum is a lady called Grace Bell and she was born without a womb because she has a condition. I'm definitely going to mispronounce. It's called Mayer Ratansky Coester Houser Syndrome or MRKH, which is a lot easier to say. And in this syndrome, it's a genetic condition where the uterus and the upper vagina don't fully develop. And there are different types and other organs can be effective depending like what sort of type you have. But mainly the sort of signal of the condition is the lack of a functioning uterus,

22:39meaning that it isn't possible to come pregnant, which is where these incredible uterine transplants have come in. And I'll be completely honest. I didn't even know that we could do this. I think it's... No, I was the same when I heard this story. I was like, I didn't realize we had begun. I let alone that we were near success, that this was working. So apparently the first birth following a womb transplant was in 2014. So we're we're way behind the mark. And in 2015, there was a baby that was born from the same womb that had carried his mother because the baby's grandmother gave her daughter her womb. If you see what I mean? Wow. Isn't that mind blown? Yeah. Yeah, so we have been doing this for a little while. Fortunately, the parents of the lady that died agreed to give the womb of that donor womb to Grace. And this is where it really blows my mind because you think, if you've never had a functioning uterus, to some then let your body to be able

23:43to receive one and then Grace underwent IVF and embryo transfer. And then she was pregnant. And then, you know, she had a C-section and now she's got a baby called Hugo. And it's just after your mind going to me that that could ever work and be successful. Yeah, I'm always amazed by the kind of cooperation of donor organs. Yeah. They were in a body. They were always in that body and they knew that body and they take it out and you put it somewhere else. And it's like, I guess I'll just get back to work. Yeah, I'll just carry on. Of all the things that organs can do, like building another human seems like a pretty sizable job. But then you can just get this incredible cooperation between a donor organ and the person who's received it. It's amazing. It's also amazing to me because Grace never had like a functional uterus. So it wasn't as if she had the like, I don't know, internal plumbing where it was all working. She just couldn't get pregnant for whatever reason. It never worked. So they just took out the old one, popped a new one in and then Bob's your uncle. She had a baby.

24:48It just, psh, medical stuff is just so incredible to me. Well, on that good news, what have you got coming up next? Well, I did say that I got to see some really fun interviews and here is another. I've been out and out about a few times this month doing some stuff ahead of the release of Project Hail Mary. I'll start by saying phenomenal movie. Oh my god. The first impression I got when I sat down watching it was like, it feels like I'm inside a big kaleidoscope. It's so like sparkly visuals, like space, cool lights. I'm going to see it next Wednesday. I'm so excited. Yeah, I thoroughly recommend one for the cinema. I have to say it was quite funny as well because I was sat in a tiny like press theatre watching it. So it's like you and three other people and you're all quite close to each other and like I was crying, laughing, both things happen several times. It's got everything. Yeah, such an experience and of course it's a phenomenal movie that comes

25:48from an equally phenomenal book by author Andy Weir. I just love his story alone. I mean he was a software engineer for like 20 years and then he had this huge hit success with the Martian and now we're going to see another of his books on the big screen. So I caught up with Andy to find how he approached creating Erid which is this habitable planet for these really weird aliens called the Eridians. So take it away Andy. Well I started off with a real exoplanet that I chose which has since been proven to not exist but let's get past that. At the time I wrote it, it was believed that it existed. It's a planet very very close to the star 40 Aradani so close that it orbits once every 46 days. I mean so it's what it's considerably closer to its star than Mercury is to ours. So I was like well that's where I want my that's where I want a whole active biosphere to exist. So and it needs liquid water so how can something be that close to a star and have liquid water and my answer was well it'll be really hot but it'll also have a tremendous air pressure

26:49because if you increase the air pressure you increase the boiling point of water. But it's kind of hard to have a really thick atmosphere when you're right next to a star because the solar wind acts like a sandblaster that'll pull your atmosphere off. So I said like there's two ways to fight that. One is to have really heavy molecules in your atmosphere as my Venus which is pretty close to the Sun has like a 90 atmosphere as a pressure at the surface because it's mostly carbon dioxide which is a really heavy molecule. I decided ammonia for Erid. Ammonia is going to be what that atmosphere is mostly made of because we see that all over the place in in our own solar system and like you know Neptune and you're in it whatever we see it in gas giants all the time. So I'm like okay so you've got like 29 atmospheres of ammonia plus you know it's really hot it's like 200 degrees Celsius and also to protect it you need a really fast rotational rate which gives you a really strong magnetic field which helps deflect it around the solar radiation all that. So then I'm like all right now that's the environment that at least has some liquid water.

27:52Now now what what life can I do and I'm like well life would be that the atmosphere is so thick I don't know if they if the sunlight would get to the surface so instead their atmosphere would act kind of like an earth ocean there'd be things in the upper atmosphere that absorb light and reproduce that way and then things below them that eat that and then things below them that eat that I mean light only gets what like 20 meters or so into our ocean but we have things living way further down than that that's why all the way to get all the way down to the surface you've got the irradiant which is like the apex predators of their planet just like where the apex predators of ours and yeah so I had to design their morphology and biology around those constraints because I've already defined that their atmosphere is like ammonia like they're not they're not exchanging gases with the atmosphere it's not like there's plants doing their thing and animals doing their thing like we have on earth so the only way to exist would be to have plant like cells and animal like cells doing that doing that exchange internally like so basically an irradiant's body is like

28:58a little bio like a little biosphere internally and like I said it only opens up to like gather food as long as it can keep getting energy it can maintain everything it needs for that biosphere he just seems like an absolute delight I love that he's so enthusiastic and he's like really thought it all through from a science perspective as well well I'm always impressed with authors because you know like I'm a writer we spend all of our days like sat away working on our things in private and then something big like this happens and now Andy's being wheeled out of his writing room and having to perform in front of all of these press people but no he was so nice and so like the enthusiasm for the science just comes like spilling out of him and he's talking so I just loved it and they were saying like that detail from the book helped to make the movie what it is because there's so much to build upon so yeah you got to read the book got to watch the movie just excellent I think for a book would literally like two characters it's so good

30:02yeah it's always like thrilling because it's one of the first questions I asked him I was like what's with all the like person alone in space and he was like I just like to take them somewhere where they can't call for help immediately um it's like it's a very good story right yeah it's a good point to buy it's working for him clearly yeah and it just I he said he finds it thrilling I find it terrifying but whichever way you go it makes for a very thrilling experience yeah a hundred percent I can't wait to watch I'm so excited gone and rage what's this week's or this month's even I'm still not used to this feature so this month's feature is a sort of intersection of got bit neuroscience but technology bit of futuristic weirdness I mean I love this because I feel like at RFR science we all kind of fall into our natural niches like based on our degrees and expertise but at the same time I feel like everyone in the team has a few like bonus areas that they kind of randomly

31:03we've definitely carved out in my authority yeah strange things and I mean for for me one of those weird niches is whether or not we can bring a brain back from the dead someday it's something that I've spoken about a lot with Dr. Ariel Zaliznikov-Johnston who is a neuroscientist and author of the future loves you how and why we should buy death so it's all about this like trying to figure out a reasonably feasible way that you could if someone dies preserves their remains so that one day you could bring them back and sort of a leading part of his theory is well all of the connections in your brain form the sink with the connectome and essentially who you are your personality the how you make decisions of that kind of stuff is like preserved within those connections so if you can lock the brain like that and find a way to maybe digitize it then you could put that

32:05person online and have them as like an online personality oh my gosh is there a way of preserving it so that the brain tissue doesn't die and then you could bring them back that way and so you can understand well you get to catch up with him when I spotted this new study talking about how a team of scientists they've been able to vitrify a mouse brain freezer at minus 196 degrees Celsius defrost it and then they still saw neural activity and it's gone by the way that they preserved it yeah so vitrification is really weird and called is this technique where you replace the fluids in a tissue with chemical solvents so that when they freeze they don't freeze into like crystals oh very sharp and different things apart instead it solidifies into a kind of glass like substance so this overcomes the thing where like with some cryopreservation horror stories you can freeze

33:09a human but when you defrost them they're just going to turn to goo oh nice you do it properly that's horrid it's making me think of those creatures that like survive extreme cold because they have some sort of like anti-coagulant gene or like feature in their blood where it doesn't yeah you're right it forms the crystals and then it just shreds through the DNA but if it doesn't do that then you're under a window yeah I think you're thinking of there's wood frogs isn't it they've got anti-freeze in them yeah so they can just turn into little rock but no crystals form so when they defrost they haven't ripped up all of their cells inside yeah but yeah so this vitrification process this team on this news daddy they vitrified a whole mouse brain so that's something that's never been done before we've done it in slices but not like a whole brain they then sliced it afterwards and so they could monitor the kind of activity within the tissue and I mean it's worth noting that not every sample tested came back but some of them did and not only did the cells survive the home vitrification freezing defrosting process and they actually retained the

34:14core features of their function so that included neuronal excitability synaptic transmission long term potentiation and that last one is a central cellular mechanism that underlies like learning in memory so these are like important processes that were able to survive this incredible technique so Dr Alexander German was one of the study authors and he told me that this technology could kind of have a lot of applications in research but also cryomedicine so advances in vitrification could make us better able to preserve organs and other complex tissues and then they could be transplanted because obviously it's always that thing you see I remember when I was still living in London you used to see these bikes with like donor organ stickers on the back because they got fly through town really fast or to get to the place in time so if you could preserve them you could effectively have like a whole bank of them rather than having to ferry everything around you see what you mean like it wouldn't be like a two-hour window whatever it is now you could keep it in a freezer

35:18yeah yeah exactly and then you just like I'll just grab you one of those brains which are like pop it in this person I mean we had womb transplants from a dead donor so I feel like obviously clearly the next logical step is breast and brain transplants well actually I spoke to Ariel about why a brain transplant is probably never going to be a thing there's actually a podcast for that so I'll link that in the episode description but I mean you know all of this obviously without is caveats the study itself points out its own limitations I mean for starters it was only done in mouse tissues there's always that scaling it up for larger organs and organisms it's not a small step so we have no idea if it's going to work any bigger than that but yeah as for Ariel's take on what this achievement means for the future potential of reviving a preserved brain he said that it's very impressive because it is the first work to show any recovery of electrophysiological function so brain waves from a brain that has been vitrified which is you know that process of

36:21basically turning it to glass and then rewound and while the study does make it clear that you know we're a long way from doing this to to larger mammals it strengthens the case for sort of two key things so one is the brain activity can at least be partially restored after a brain has been completely inactive and solidified and the other is that it may be possible eventually to develop a protocol that can reversibly place an animal in stasis where it's then vitrified at low temperatures and for whatever period of time you like and then rewarm it and have some behavioral function which is very sci-fi and very cool that's very sci-fi I'm just imagining if people have to leave earth and colonize another planet and they always have those like sci-fi things of people that impods and then they like get working up when they get there now next to everyone is going to be like their cat or their dog they're going to do the whole lot somebody's horse just like floating in space well i mean we were just talking about project how merry and there's this is not spoiler because it's literally that opener to the movie like long-term space travel it's involved for him a lot of

37:28tubes in places where one would not like tubes maybe it could be nicer for the astronauts of the future they just freeze them completely yeah then there's no aging there's no that's so true tubes tubes I think the less tubes are better yeah so come on you're inside this we need you to get on with it so so cool like as a concept just really really weird let's be honest but also possibilities are endless exactly I think I like uh my niches are kind of like zoologies obviously my main one but then weird death creating neuroscience stuff that inspires like books and things like that you're definitely deaf deaf correspondent i don't know i'm proud of it i don't know your joy all right we'll go on to this month's shout out so i will kick off with a mention for curious i have our sciences e magazine which is out on sunday 29th March and it has all sorts of puzzling

38:31questions to give you pause we have dr alfredo carbonetti exploring how do we actually know the earth is tilted i've always thought this like how do we figure that out with that all your marbles are just running off the table now we'll explain all for you i also dive into what the science has to say about what came first the chicken or the egg and oh i believe you had a very curious conversation with some people about flamingos yes i posed the hypothetical question could you turn off flamingo blue to some very lovely uh people from whipsnade zoo so i spoke to Amanda Ferguson who is the diet management officer for whipsnade and zeditha london zoo and then also tim sabbage who is the section manager of birds so he is sort of day-to-day caring for the flamingos and it was such a fun conversation and they should they really humid me or my uh silly little questions i won't spoil it because it's in the magazine and it's also going to be a podcast coming out later

39:33this year but it's it's really fun to kind of dig into the nitty-gritty of why flamingos a pink and whether we could have sort of any influence on that i'll get our editor christ to put in a cheeky a cheeky little short snippet of a little part of the conversation and so Amanda this is probably where you come in how do you decide what you're going to feed a group of about 40 flamingos at the zoo now well we kind of gather data really um the most important thing is looking at what these animals would eat in the wild looking at their natural diet uh looking at the kind of nutritional composition of that diet and so that gives us a really good idea about what the animals should be eating when we have them in managed care we also look at what others use have done what others use that have been very successful with their birds so they've kind of kept them a long time they've kept them healthy and they've bred them successfully um so we would use that information as well and of course we've got a lot of information from all the keepers that have been at London and whips nae to do as well and they've worked with different birds they may have

40:36tried different diets so um they've got a lot of really useful information as well so we kind of bring all that together and then decide kind of what kind of food items we want we do some calculations to work out how much they need to eat depending on their kind of metabolic rate and their body size and their activity so we get a vague idea of how much to eat because we don't want to waste food and we don't want to encourage pests by having too much but of course we want them to be a really lovely healthy weight good body condition so it's kind of a mixture of all those things that help us decide what we feed them and then of course we're relying on the keepers and like Tim's brilliant team to look at the birds like every day and assess and tell us you know how they're doing are they looking a bit thinner they looking a bit overweight are they that they're in good condition they breeding are they behaving in the way we'd expect them to do so all of that feedback again means that we can give like a little adjustments to the diet as well to make sure we get it just right then just finally there's also a fun

41:41accept in the magazine about why seeing magnolias is a bit like being in Jurassic Park this is taken from a book called How Flowers Made Our World by biologist David George Haskell so I feel like there's some some lovely stuff for spring yeah I love it Magnolia there's quite a lot out right now it's the perfect time of year absolutely and what's going on I believe you've got some weird freaky robots for us yeah this is just a little shout out because I love a silly video we all know that and any excuse to talk about this this is Tom's article Tom Hale and it's just they look bizarre imagine like a ball with a stick coming off it out of both ends not that unusual but these have actually been developed inside a computer they were evolved and they sort of used an AI driven program that mimics natural selection so their team plugged in loads of like super simple robot designs built on this sort of modular approach with the ball and the sticks coming

42:45off it and then the algorithm generated these wacky wacky body types and if a human did this they would probably come up with something a little bit like a dog or something like really recognizable but this algorithm had none of the same ideas and they look super weird but also they move in a super weird way I think they sort of wanted to break the mold of like what a robot could be or how it could move so it's not necessarily about whether it's moving in an efficient way it's just about the fact that it's been designed by this algorithm and yeah then built by these roboticists I think it's the University of Northwestern and yeah it's really fun they're very strange I don't know what you would use them for but they're they're doing all sorts they're doing the most I don't think the algorithm took into account like suffering these robots they look like they need the mercy rock it's just struggling struggling along like they just look a bit nuts

43:48I I don't know what it is it doesn't know what it is yeah everyone's frightened are the other good thing is that they don't move that fast so you can be frightened but you can you could like it a lot quicker than make out yeah if this is the AI takeover we're going to get out fine guys don't worry let's find the first set of stairs is that everything is that all we have to say for four weeks of science I mean there's so much more but people need to get on with their lives they can't listen to us do a job at the whole time but as ever thank you very much for listening if you want to look at read listen to see a lot of the things we've talked about will be in visual form in the YouTube version of this podcast but if not all the links will be in the episode descriptions and we will see you next month for another episode of Break It Down. Catch you next time. Bye!

44:52you