Britain's smoking ban, and bumper sea beasts
In this edition of The Naked Scientists: MPs vote in favour of stricter smoking and vaping controls; but do we actually need this and will it work? Also, the remains of what’s thought to be the largest reptile to have roamed our “Severn” seas are uncovered on the beach in Somerset. And a tribute to the BA pilot who saved his air passengers from a volcanic ash cloud, but why are volcanoes so disastrous for jet engines?
In this episode
01:09 - UK bans smoking for anyone born after 2009
UK bans smoking for anyone born after 2009
Linda Bauld, University of Edinburgh
Members of Parliament have backed a UK government proposal to ban anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill - which passed with a huge majority - also places curbs on vaping. It effectively means that the UK's smoking laws will be among the strictest in the world. To find out more, we put in a call to Linda Bauld, a public health expert and a social policy advisor to the Scottish government…
Linda - The tobacco and vapes bill is quite an ambitious piece of legislation and it does two things primarily. It passes into law, or it will, raising the age of sale for those born after 2009 until effectively it'd be very difficult for people to buy tobacco. I think it'll come in 2027. That's quite a big change from at the moment where the legal age of sale is 18. The other things the bill does are a series of measures which are primarily around vaping. The overall bill applies to all four nations of the UK, but the independent devolved assemblies or parliaments like the Scottish Parliament have to endorse the legislation. But I think it's a good thing because it certainly means the main measure, raising that age of sale of tobacco, would apply across the UK.
Chris - What's the evidence this is going to work though? Rishi Sunak, when he was discussing this, used words like 'we know this works,' but actually some people gave him some pushback. 57 of the standing MPs also voted against this. They said, 'well no, we don't know it works. There's no evidence, no one's ever done anything like this.' The closest we ever came was in New Zealand where it was announced, but then a change of government saw the whole idea go up in smoke.
Linda - That's correct. So in New Zealand they were going to introduce it and it was passed into law. But then a shift in government has meant that they've, as you say, turned away from that. We don't have direct evidence of this precise measure. What we do have is evidence from a range of countries who've raised the age of sale of tobacco in the past. And let me just explain the evidence for the UK. So when we raised the age of sale last time from 16 to 18, I have to be honest that those of us in the nicotine and tobacco research community would not have chosen that as our top ask for reducing smoking. But to our slight surprise, it actually made quite a big difference. So we saw a statistically significant drop in smoking in young people between 16 and 18 in the couple of years after the change came into force. We've also seen other parts of the world raise the age of sale, for example, from 16 to 18 or even to 19 in some parts of the US. And again, you see a reduction in smoking. So I think it will make a difference. But this sort of stage, doing it year by year, actually hasn't been done in any country.
Chris - Do you think that that's maybe going a bit too far and being a bit too complicated? Because if we can get a win, as you are saying, with just a raise in the age, do we need the complexity of saying, well you are 14 and you can't do it, but someone who is born the year before you can and won't it just be a bit difficult? Are most people who are going to smoke not caught up by smoking when they're in a vulnerable age? We target that age, put it beyond their reach and then we just leave it be.
Linda - Like any legislation, the proof will be in the pudding and certainly we'll need to look at how it's implemented. And there's a variety of things that could go wrong. I completely agree with that. But we're kind of in an interesting position in the UK where actually we have prevented a lot of smoking uptake through a range of measures, not just age of sale. So we're down to very low levels of smoking amongst young people. And what we've actually seen is, in the past, it'd be very common for somebody to start smoking at 13, 14, 15. But now we're actually seeing that the age of uptake is going up a little bit. So it's not impossible that some people start even above the age of 18. But by actually changing it gradually, I think we'll even do even more for prevention and that means that we'll be kind of stopping the remaining teenagers who are starting. And I think additionally de-normalise the sale of tobacco. So I think it's an interesting policy. It's got widespread support, including from those of us in the research community who are interested, I guess from a research perspective, to see how it happens in practice. But I think we're so close to actually getting to almost no young people smoking that I think this will help as an additional measure.
Chris - Indeed, because you've put your name to a letter that was published in the Daily Telegraph this week, and one of the things you write there is 'the majority of tobacco retailers and the public, including people who smoke, support the legislation which will remove the blight of smoking for future generations.' Do you know that the retailers want this added bureaucracy? It sounds like it will be a headache for them. And is it true that smokers actually want to see this?
Linda - The advocacy organisation, ASH, did a series of surveys. So they've actually done and commissioned that polling very recently. So 69% of adults, including more than half of smokers, support the legislation and half of small retailers. And actually it doesn't surprise me because we and my colleagues here at the University of Edinburgh produced a paper looking at small retailers in Scotland and they found that actually small retailers were making very little profit from tobacco and it had gone down in recent years. So I think a lot of retailers are kind of seeing this as it's not a product which is really important for them. So it's part of that denormalisation. Now the public doesn't surprise me at all because in all my years of doing research on smoking, I have never met a smoker, an adult smoker, who wants their children to start. And the vast majority of smokers want to stop themselves, but they find it really tough. And so I think unlike a lot of other public health measures that we're debating at the moment, this one has pretty broad support.
Chris - Hasn't had support from all quarters though, including a couple of former prime ministers who have come out saying, this is the nanny state and it's an overreach. Is there a danger that if we do things like this, it might turn people against what public health is trying to achieve? There's a danger that it might make people feel that they're being controlled a bit too much and there's pushback and it actually de-powers other interventions.
Linda - I think that's interesting. I certainly think that if you look at different political colours, political persuasions, if you're a strong libertarian, as many of the MPs who voted against it will be, then you don't want the state to interfere too much in anything that people have in their lives. So I fully understand that and their fear as well is that if you do it for smoking, we often hear the argument when we brought in standardised packaging for tobacco, there was a big lobby that said, 'oh, you know, you're going to do that for sweets or soft drinks or donuts next,' they'll have to have scary warning labels on them. So the sort of slippery slope argument. Tobacco is quite an unusual product. The only consumer product when used as intended, is likely to kill you in the longer term. It's quite black and white, so understand where they're coming from. But I think there is pretty broad support and we'll have to see how it goes when it's implemented.
08:19 - The largest sea reptile ever found?
The largest sea reptile ever found?
Dean Lomax, University of Manchester
A father and daughter have discovered what could be a remnant of the largest known marine reptile. Justin and Ruby Reynolds found a piece of jaw belonging to an ichthyosaur, dubbed Ichthyotitan severnensis, on a beach at Blue Anchor in Somerset. It was then sent to Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist at the University of Manchester.…
Dean - To go back in time a little bit, not quite to the Jurassic of the Triassic millions of years ago. But I received an email initially way back in May, 2016 about a jawbone that was found in Somerset. And then after studying that specimen, which was found by Paul de la Salle, we described it in 2018 and we determined that it was a really unusual jawbone from a type of ancient marine reptile called an ichthyosaur. And because the age of which this comes from is about 202 million years old, right at the end of the Triassic, we knew then that it was something unusual and very likely came from a really big ichthyosaur. But we were kind of hesitant about giving it a name or working out exactly what type of species of ichthyosaur it was, and so entered this new discovery. Justin and Ruby managed to find my scientific study from 2018, reached out and were like, 'Hey Dr. Lomax, we think we found another one of these giant ichthyosaur jaw bones.' And of course you can imagine my huge grin on my face because I was like, 'absolutely, yes you have.'
Will - How do you then go from these two fairly abstract samples to being able to scale it up to make assumptions or predictions about the entirety of the organism involved?
Dean - Being completely honest, with just two giant jaw bones, it is impossible to say with absolute certainty just how large our new species of ichthyosaur was. However, there are other ichthyosaurs that have been found that are on the kind of size range lengthwise between like 15 to 21 metres. The biggest one was in the region of maybe 40 to 50, maybe a little bit more percent complete. And this ichthyosaur, which has a name called Shonisaurus sikanniensis, has an estimated skeleton length of 21 metres. Now by comparing Paul's original 2016 discovery and Justin and Ruby's discovery with the same bone, which is called a surangular, which is a bone right at the back of the lower jaw, we can work out that the specimens are about 25% larger. So by doing a little bit of kind of like quick maths and using a simple scaling factor, we can estimate that our ichthyosaur is upwards of about 26 metres. And then comparing it further with other ichthyosaurs, smaller species and those kind of bridging the gap between the very small ones and the really big ones, we can basically work out that our ichthyosaur would've been around about the 20 to 26 metre mark with most of the averages coming out at 25 metres.
Will - It's a very exciting finding, but I still do need some reassurances because growing up my hero was of course Liopleurodon, another marine reptile which, originally, thought to be 20 plus metres. And in the years since has been revised down to six, which is a remarkable shrinkage. It should probably be about three feet by next year. How can you assure me that this isn't going to happen to this as well?
Dean - <Laugh> I kind of anticipated this question would come at some point that makes me laugh. At the time, if I remember rightly, it was based on some really fragmentary vertebrae and then there's been a few other kinds of scalings up of Liopleurodon based on their teeth. To be honest, teeth and vertebrae are not the best bones to try and scale up an animal in size. Because just for example, I studied a whole bunch of different ichthyosaurs, thousands of them now over the years. And by looking at, say, some vertebrae of an individual that's 10 metres long. Those vertebrae may only be say, 12 centimetres across, versus you might find another iau that's like eight metres long and those vertebrae may be 15 centimetres across. So vertebrae aren't ideal. That's why we have much more confidence in our scaling of that kind of 20 to 26 metre mark because we know that we have an ichthyosaur from British Columbia that was definitely at the 21 metre range. So looking at our new specimens, Paul's and Justin and Ruby's, we have something that we definitely can compare to, and we have the same bone that's preserved in that animal as well. So it gives us a much, much, much more reliable estimate and scaling factor.
Will - Okay, well I'm ready to love again. But it does make you think, given that the fossil record is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what was actually alive at the time, what could be out there still ready to be discovered and something really could perhaps have the potential to knock the blue whale off its giant perch?
Dean - That's quite right. And I said for a little while, especially off the back of Paul's discovery in 2016 and our research in 2018, that we think that in time potentially maybe we'll have a skeleton or at least a big skull of one of these giants found. As part of our research in this new study and the 2018 study, we also looked at some bones that were found here in the UK. And these bones were originally over 150 years ago. They were very similar. They're big cylindrical chunks of bone. But back over 150 years ago, the scientists then, and even right up to this day, almost to a point about 10 years ago, people were still considering them to be the upper arm bone, say a humerus or upper leg bone or a femur of a terrestrial animal, like a dinosaur. But in actual fact, they are also bones from the lower jaws of giant ichthyosaurs. And one of them is about 30 to 40% larger than the bone from the one in Canada. So that's when you start to get to the realms of are we dealing with something that was even maybe 30 plus metres? And then are we dealing with a thing that could take the blue whale off that very top of the largest animals ever? Maybe, maybe not. This is the thing, as you say, this is the fossil record and that's why it always reveals its kind of secrets and things. And this is just a little bit more of that kind of tantalising evidence of one of these mysterious giants that lived at the very end of the Triassic period 202 million years ago.
14:56 - Colouring crops to weed out weeds
Colouring crops to weed out weeds
Michael Palmgren, University of Copenhagen
Farmers have long been wrestling with the question: how do you weed out the weeds from the crops? With 8 billion mouths to feed and climate change to wrestle with, we need to make farming far more efficient and a lot more sustainable. So scientists like the University of Copenhagen’s Michael Palmgren have been looking at ways to cut chemical use by making crop plants far easier for robotic farmers to tell apart from the nuisance weed seedlings they need to remove…
Michael - Agriculture is looking forward to some tough times because we have more mouths on this planet that has to be fed and at the same time climate change will maybe make lower yields. Another problem that we face are the weeds because many weeds are very resilient. So if the predicted climate change scenarios come, then we will maybe have weeds that are much tougher than the crops we grow. So the weeds will take over. So how do we compete with the weeds? One solution is of course to use herbicides, but in a sustainable agriculture you don't want to use any herbicides or pesticides or as little as possible. So a solution could be to develop new resilient crops that can be detected at a very early stage, mechanically not by chemicals.
Chris - So you are saying in order to make agriculture more efficient, what we should do is have plants that are easier to grow because we can get a machine to spot and tell apart weeds from plants we do want and rather than use enormous doses of chemicals, we would just weed them out mechanically.
Michael - That would be a sustainable solution. If we can find ways to detect weeds at an early stage before they grow too big and then beat them out mechanically.
Chris - How would we do that then? How could we mark or earmark plants that we do want so that machines are better at telling what we do want from what we don't want?
Michael - There are reading robots now that are quite good at taking out weeds between plants and in some cases they can also have sensors. So they can detect weeds that look very different from the crops. They can move around in the fields like a lawnmower. But the problem comes when the weeds look very much like the crops that we grow, especially at a very early stage. Our proposed solution is to introduce mutations into our crops or newly developed crops that makes them distinguishable, maybe not by the naked eye, but from a robot trained by sufficient intelligence that has specific sensors that can detect these subtle changes. And we have several examples for what you could do and not by introducing new genes, just by making mutants.
Chris - I presume that to make those subtle changes that would just give a crop plant a characteristic that a robot could spot easily. That's what you're advocating for, isn't it? That must be a lot easier to do than to try to engineer into a crop plant some other trait.
Michael - Yes, and a new trait can develop even from a small mutation. So for example, leaf shape can change from a mutation. That could be one trait that you modify slightly the leaf shape at an early stage, but also colour. And the colour doesn't need to be something you can see with your naked eyes. It could be a colour that only specific sensors can detect.
Chris - And if this were to come to fruition, what sort of a difference to agricultural productivity and solving some of those things you highlighted earlier would this make?
Michael - It would contribute to a more sustainable agriculture and less use of chemicals and would open up the field for making new crops developed from wild plants, but can now be used as food stuff.
18:60 - Eric Moody, pilot who saved plane from ash cloud, dies at 82
Eric Moody, pilot who saved plane from ash cloud, dies at 82
Rory Clarkson, Rollys-Royce
Tributes have been paid to the former British Airways captain, Eric Moody, who has died at the age of 82. Captain Moody saved hundreds of people from certain death after the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines were paralysed by a cloud of volcanic ash. Rory Clarkson is a senior engineer at Rolls-Royce, who makes sure that the engines function in challenging weather conditions...
Rory - The flight we are talking about was a British Airways flight from London to Melbourne. But in those days, in 1982, they didn't do it directly, they would do it in legs. So the leg they were on was between Kuala Lumpur and Perth. And from Perth that they'd fly out to Melbourne and they were totally unaware that they'd been a volcano that erupted. All they knew was that strange things started happening. The cabin started to fill with a smoky like dust that smelled a bit acrid. And then they started to see St. Elmo's fire, which is an electrostatic discharge on the windscreen, lights flickering in the night. And then they started to pick up that the engines were starting to misbehave, and within a few minutes, one engine stopped and then the other three stopped in sequence. And they were then essentially in a glide.
Chris - I think Captain Moody calculated they had about 20 minutes of glide time before they would end up in the ocean or something. Wasn't it?
Rory - It was of that order, yeah. So they were at 36,000 feet, so they had some time to react. Eric Moody issued a famous warning to the passengers, 'ladies and gentlemen, that I'm your captain and we've got a bit of a problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again'. To their credit, and this is what saved the day, they didn't give up on the engines, they kept trying to restart them and eventually they could restart them.
Chris - What did Eric Moody do that meant they did get them started again? Is there a kind of protocol under these circumstances that you can resort to and did they do that, or did they end up resorting to other measures to try to get the plane flying properly again?
Rory - There was a protocol, the appropriate one, when you lose power on all engines to follow, which is what they did, which was to turn left and descend and try and find a suitable place to put the aircraft down as safely as you could. But as I said, the key thing was they kept trying to relight the engines. And because of the effect volcanic ash has on the engines, how it stops them, it meant that by the time they were getting down to about 16,000 feet, it was actually possible to restart the engines. And having restarted them, they gained enough power that half an hour later they could get and land at Jakarta.
Chris - Was it that at that altitude and with that change in direction, they just left the ash cloud, so they're actually feeding fresh air back into those engines again. So they had a better chance of getting them to restart?
Rory - No, it wasn't to do with that. We need to understand why the engine stop in the first place. And then you need to understand a bit about how a jet engine works. So it's a bit like a propeller aircraft, but a bit more complex in the middle. So the air comes in at the front and it has to be compressed to high pressure. It's about 30 to 40 times the pressure of the atmosphere, and then you put fuel in it, and then you double the temperature of the fuel, of the gas. And then you put that through what we call a turbine, which is like a windmill. And it extracts energy from that high pressure hot gas. And that's used to drive the compressors at the front. To keep that whole system going. Once you've ignited it, you don't need to keep reigniting it like you would in a car petrol engine. It's more like a gas hob on a gas cooker. But the amount of air that you are pushing through the engine is controlled by a key component just downstream of where you're putting the fuel in and burning it and it controls the total flow of air through the engine. And it's so hot that it would melt the volcanic ash and it would build up on those surfaces and it would start to restrict the flow through the engine. And if you lose about 10 to 20% of the flow through the engine, the whole engine stops working. And that's what happened. They were in the ash sufficiently long, about four minutes, that they built up enough ash on that critical flow area to stop it working. Now, they didn't completely block the flow area, they just reduced it by that amount so that at 36,000 feet, the engine wouldn't work. And by the time they got down to 16,000 feet, 13,000 feet kind of range, they could get enough air through the engine because the air's thicker at those altitudes compared to 36,000 feet. They could get the bunsen burner flame lit and stabilised and pull away to power. So that's what saved the day.
Chris - Those engines were Rolls Royce engines that were on that plane that day. So I don't know if you actually worked on them or one similar, but when something like this happens, do you get to then take them to pieces to work out what had happened and then use that as a learning opportunity?
Rory - Fortunately, the industry's not had an incident like that really since the 1990s. But what was great was in the 80's and 90's when these incidents happened, they did return the engines to the overhaul shops and they stripped them right down to the part level, component level. And they took a lot of photographs and they wrote up what they found in reports. So I had access to those reports. And although they, at the time, didn't fully understand the evidence that they were looking at, fortunately with the advances in science we've had since then, I was able to piece together what had happened in detail and relate that to modern engines, the engines that are powering aircraft today. We've demonstrated the level of volcanic exposure they can tolerate in which it's safe to fly.
Chris - And you also spoke to Eric Moody himself a couple of times. Was he the cool customer that he's conveyed as being? He joked when they got off that plane, when he landed it, the engineer kissed the ground and said, 'the Pope does this.' And Eric Moody said, 'that's 'cause he flies Air Alitalia' <laugh>. But <laugh> was he as cool on the phone to you when you spoke to him?
Rory - Yeah, he was, he was incredibly relaxed and philosophical about it. But he was great to talk to. I I had two long conversations with him because I wanted to get as much technical detail about what he remembered from the flight and immediately afterwards and it was really, really useful to my work. But yeah, he was charming. There was a sense of humour about what he said, and I think that's probably what helped on the day because he could keep calm. He kept everybody on the aircraft, his flight crew, he tried to keep them as calm as he could. And, yeah, he was a great guy to talk to.
25:25 - What language do deaf people think in?
What language do deaf people think in?
Thanks to Bencie Woll and Victoria Mousley for the answer!
Will - Profound deafness is when an individual can hear nothing, save for occasionally extremely loud sounds. So if you do not hear sounds, including those of people and yourself talking, what form do your thoughts take? Well, that depends on when the individual became profoundly deaf. As deafness cognition expert at UCL Bencie Woll explains...
Bencie - Somebody who's become deaf late in life and who grew up only speaking English, their dreams are going to be in English. A person who was born deaf, the languages they might think in are going to be related to the languages they know. You can see young deaf children signing to themselves just the way young hearing children speak to themselves.
Will - So if your deafness came on in later life, it's highly likely you'll retain the language you heard growing up as the one you think in. But those born deaf will see or even feel themselves signing in their head.
Bencie - And the most interesting research is on deaf people with schizophrenia. People who had some hearing in their lives but became deaf later. They're perfectly able to imagine just a voice. People who were born deaf do report voices, hearing voices being in conversation, but there's always an image of a face or a person to go with it because that's their experience of spoken language that you only communicate when you can see a person.
Will - Fascinating stuff, but with this being a language same as any other, does it develop in the same way as spoken language among those profoundly deaf at birth? Here to explain that is Beck, University of London's Victoria Mousley.
Victoria - We know from research with hearing children that younger kids, more so than older kids are likely to use and to benefit from overt self-talk during certain tasks, so talking their way through certain things. It seems like after about five years of age, kids do this less and it's also less useful for them. So this could be around the time where we start to see the development of covert self-talk or inner voices in young children. We also know that profoundly deaf kids who experience full native language access early in life achieve very similar cognitive and linguistic milestones to hearing children. So I would expect that deaf and hearing kids would develop inner voices at pretty similar ages, and that both deaf and hearing kids inner voices likely reflect their language and communicative experiences up until that point. But we would need more research to test these hypotheses.
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