The stakes at COP29, and the rogue Skynet satellite
This episode of The Naked Scientists: what’s at stake at this year’s UN climate summit in Azerbaijan? Also, the 80 million-year-old fossil revealing how birds came by their big brains; and why the UK’s oldest satellite has wandered off over the Americas...
In this episode
00:54 - What's at stake at the COP29 climate summit?
What's at stake at the COP29 climate summit?
Mark Maslin, UCL
Leaders from almost two hundred nations are attending the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan amid warning that next year could be the hottest on record. The politicians are hoping to agree a financial plan to help lure both poorer nations and oil and gas rich states away from their reliance on fossil fuels. Mark Maslin is a professor of Earth System Science at University College. London, He'll be attending the COP climate summit, and he explains why wealthier nations - like the UK - were taking the lead at this year’s gathering…
Mark - If you have a look at the top 10 emitting countries, a lot of them are the industrial countries right from the beginning. The USA, all the European industrial nations, and the UK. And it's interesting, if you add in land use changes, you get other countries that are in that top 10, including Indonesia and Brazil because of the huge changes. So we are one of the top 10 historic emitters and therefore we had that legacy. And we've done incredibly well. Remember, we've gone from 2% of our electricity generation coming from renewables in the year 2000. We are now up to 50% of our electricity comes from renewables. So the UK's done really well cleaning up its act. But we have that historic legacy that we have to acknowledge and also help other countries to go on the same journey that we are going on.
Chris - It hasn't escaped the attention of many around the world that COP 20 is being hosted by Azerbaijan, which derives enormous amounts of its revenue from the oil and gas industry. And people have questioned their commitment. What's that looking like?
Mark - I think this is a misunderstanding of international negotiations. The reason why all 196 countries need to get together to talk about these issues is because how do we help a country like Azerbaijan whose 90% of its export money comes from oil and gas. So if we want this country to move away from fossil fuels, how do we help them build a different economy which is just as profitable that allows them to actually develop their economy and help their people out of poverty? We need to do this as an international community because if we just stop oil and gas from Azerbaijan, then it will plunge that country into abject poverty. So we have to think of this as a system-wide issue and not just blame countries because they have a natural resource. There is a huge global demand. Because remember 80% of the world's energy still is produced by fossil fuels. So they're still really important, but how do we actually help them transition?
Chris - They also have a record though in government terms of leaning on people who say do and criticise in the wrong sort of way.
Mark - So the issue we have is that we are dealing with an international community where governments vary hugely from full democracies to full dictatorship and therefore this is why something like the COP is really important because we need to actually take all of the countries of the world on this journey. And part of it is about negotiation. Part of it is by signposting. COP in Paris actually agreed in 2015 that we were going to limit CO2 emissions to two degrees warming or an aspirational target of 1.5 and that means going net zero. So this obsession with net zero comes from the COP meetings and therefore it has permeated every part of our culture and economy. But we need to then work out how we actually activate that. How do we actually move all of the countries, whether they are a totalitarian state or whether they're a full democracy? And that's why international negotiations are incredibly difficult, very tricky but absolutely essential.
Chris - But some countries don't even want to engage with them at all. I was just looking, the Argentinians have pulled out every single one of their delegates at COP.
Mark - So occasionally countries throw dollies from the pram and will step out. We had this during the first Trump administration. The US basically said, no, we're having nothing to do with the Paris agreement. We want to step out. And so countries do step in and out and what happens is you get other countries filling that void and taking on leadership roles and that's incredibly important. So what is fantastic about COP 29 is the UK has gone there. Keir has basically said, we are back. We are going to lead climate action and these are our new targets and we are here to help.
Chris - Returning to that point, I mean we can talk about America in just a minute because that's relevant too, isn't it? Based on what you just said about the previous administration, soon to be the next administration again. But Keir Starmer committing the UK to an 81% reduction in our emissions by, what, 2035 I think it is, isn't it? Given that countries like the UK are down at the 1% of total emissions level, is that really making a difference though in real terms? Because we are going to basically contribute less as a country in absolute terms, then China will increase its emissions by this year.
Mark - So it's about leadership. So if the sixth largest economy in the world, which is the UK, can change its whole economy and go fully renewable, it shows to the rest of the world that you can still be competitive. You can actually make a huge difference. And of course we can then export all that new technology and all that know-how to the rest of the world. You also mentioned China. So China has an aim that it's going to peak its emissions by 2030. Now if we look at the actual data, it looks like they will peak their emissions next year and then those emissions will start to drop. So that leadership role that, say, Europe and UK have taken is driving other countries. I think you also have to remember that the global economy is also shifting. And this is really powerful and interestingly enough, more powerful than American presidents, because you see the shift to renewable energy. The reason being is it's cheaper, it's more secure, and you are not beholden to the geopolitics of fossil fuels. And so around the world we're seeing this big shift. The only problem is as everybody would say, it's a fantastic huge shift, but it's not fast enough. And the ridiculous thing is even though it is almost an exponential growth in all renewable energy, we sort of still need it five times faster.
08:03 - Engineering fatter mosquitoes to fight disease
Engineering fatter mosquitoes to fight disease
Ben Raymond, University of Exeter
There’s been some promising news in the fight against mosquito borne diseases - such as dengue, Zika and yellow fever. A study at the university of Exeter has found that one particular bacterium, which lives in the insect’s intestine, can fuel the growth of mosquito larvae, so they mature much faster and may even grow into bigger adults. Why on Earth would you want to make more and fatter mosquitoes, I hear you scream! Well it could have implications for improving the breeding programmes used to rear modified mosquitoes designed to control wild mosquito populations and therefore disease spread. Here’s Ben Raymond at the University of Exeter…
Ben - The problem I wanted to address was really how to grow more and better mosquitoes for use in biological controlled studies of mosquitoes.
Chris - I'm glad you added that last bit because when you first said, I'm trying to find out how to grow more mosquitoes <laugh>, immediately I thought most of the world is trying to get rid of the blinking things. There are thousands of species of them and they are the most dangerous animal on Earth.
Ben - Yes, as I tell my students in many introductory lectures there's a higher mortality from mosquitoes than any other animal on the planet. For context, it's important to realise that releasing mosquitoes in various ways is now an increasingly important part of how we control mosquito-borne diseases. And there's a whole range of technologies that do that, ranging from classic sterile insect release, so that's just releasing lots and lots of sterilised males which swamp the native population of males that carry particular microbes. There's one in particular, Wolbachia, that induces sterility in the females but can also prevent those female mosquitoes from transmitting viruses. So there's a whole raft of technologies involved in releasing the particular strains to control mosquito populations.
Chris - But it all centres critically on being able to produce enormous numbers of mosquitoes. And that is the issue that you are kind of going for.
Ben - Yeah, so for example, there's a recent trial in Singapore. They released a hundred million mosquitoes just for an experimental study, another study releasing these Wolbachia to prevent transmission. They would release a hundred thousand mosquitoes per kilometre squared per week for 16 weeks. So really very, very large numbers.
Chris - What can you do then in order to make that a more efficient and rapid production process to breed up those mosquitoes that you want to release?
Ben - A starting point for this study was we're working with this particular mosquito, the yellow fever mosquito. And it's been known for a number of years that this has to be colonised by bacteria. It has to have what we call a microbiome in order to complete its development. Without being colonised by microbes, the larva will not develop and will not form a pupae and it can't produce adults. So we know it needs to have bacteria. And it did raise the question as to, you know, we can actually control what bacteria are colonising the mosquitoes and try and find ones that either can accelerate development or make bigger or better mosquitoes. So that's the starting point.
Chris - What have you actually done in that direction?
Ben - So we wanted to look at this little odd microbe Asaia, which is found in nectar. And we know from studies and other mosquitoes that it has strong association with mosquitoes that transmit malaria, the genus anopheles. So we wanted to look particularly in this yellow fever mosquito to see if they also could form an association with mosquitoes and would have any impact on their development.
Chris - How?
Ben - For these mosquitoes, it's quite easy to make sterile insects. You just need to sort of surface sterilise the eggs and then we can rear them in sterile water. We can then add in our bacteria of choice.
Chris - And what sort of a difference do they make when these ones you've found are there? How different is the maturation process for the mosquitoes?
Ben - So it only takes about nine days to make an adult from egg to pupa. So quite rapid development. So we could shave nearly a day off by adding one of the species of Asaia that we put into the rearing water. And in particular we showed that when we added our Asaia to the sterile animals, we didn't get much of an improvement. We got a little bit of improvement, but actually we could find nice robust effects on the sort of normal rear of mosquitoes, which is kind of important if you want to take this into an application.
Chris - So in other words, they're better when they're part of a community, a mixed community of microbes, they add something. Do you know how they're doing this? What are the bacteria in the mosquito gut doing to speed up growth in that way?
Ben - The bacteria in the gut have to make an environment that's starved of oxygen, so they have to remove the oxygen from the gut and that lack of oxygen drives the hormonal changes which signal moulting for the larvae. So that's one thing we know the bacteria are absolutely required for. We don't know if there's any sort of nutritional role these bacteria play. What the Asaia do is they don't seem to persist very long in the larvae. It's quite a curious result. But what they do do is have a long-term effect on the makeup of that bacterial community for the duration of the larval stage.
Chris - How would you use this then? If you can shave off a day, that's 10% off of the rearing cycle, does that mean that you could knock out lab grown mosquitoes about 10% faster and in possibly therefore 10% greater quantities?
Ben - That was one possible implication. The other thing we've looked at is we can also in some cases make the mosquitoes slightly bigger as well. So we're not only making them faster, but in some cases we can make them larger males and sometimes slightly larger females and get that boost in development rate. So hopefully more than one benefit.
14:43 - Ancient skull reveals origin of big bird brains
Ancient skull reveals origin of big bird brains
Guillermo Navalon Fernandez, University of Cambridge
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have described an extraordinary fossil of an ancient bird skull. The 80-million-year-old specimen, of an early bird species called Navaornis, is so well preserved - and comes from a period that is so poorly understood in the evolutionary history of these animals - that zoologists think it could revolutionise our understanding of how modern birds came by their surprisingly big brains. The findings have been published in the journal Nature, and I went to meet Guillermo Navalon Fernandez to find out more…
Guillermo - Birds, modern birds, have very large brains and very complex brains and we actually don't know where and when these evolved, which is one of the biggest mysteries in vertebrate devolution.
Chris - Birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs, aren't they? So does that mean dinosaurs potentially were brainy? They were certainly the ancestors of birds. So if birds are brainy, perhaps they were too.
Guillermo - This is what we thought for a really long time. And definitely dinosaurs had more complex brains than other groups of reptiles. However, we know that they are still very far away from the condition that we see in modern birds. So even the first birds that we have three dimensional brains from, we can see the form of this structure like Archaeopteryx, the earliest bird that lived around 150 million years ago, these early birds have these brains that are still very similar to dinosaurs.
Chris - So there's a gap there. We've got very early birds, very similar to dinosaurs, their descendants, modern birds, big brains quite different. And we want to know what sits in that gap over, what, about 60-100 million years?
Guillermo - Yeah, so we are talking about a gap between 70 and 60 million years because we have Archaeopteryx 150 million years. And we know that the modern birds appeared at the end of the Mesozoic era or the age of dinosaurs at around 80 million years ago. Now we know a lot about the birds that came evolutionarily in between these two endpoints in evolution, but the fossils that we have from these birds come from fossils that are completely flattened. So this has opaqued our ability to reconstruct the three dimensional morphology of what's happening within the skull, which also includes the shape of the brain.
Chris - What have you got then in your hands now that helps to address this problem?
Guillermo - We've been working since 2021 in this spectacular locality in the south of Brazil and we found these very unique birds preserved in three dimensions. So that allowed us to reconstruct or have a very good representation of how the skull of these animals that have the brain inside were like so we could reconstruct the morphology of the brain of a bird that is right in the middle in the evolutionary journey between Archaeopteryx and modern birds.
Chris - What's the timeline then? When do these fossils date from?
Guillermo - We currently believe that these fossils date from between 80 and 70 million years ago, we are talking about the end of the era at the age of dinosaurs.
Chris - How big would the bird in life have been? How big was its brain?
Guillermo - We are talking about a starling size animal and the brain was more or less 10 millimetres end to end, which in a starling it would have been bigger than that. So we are talking about a brain that is relatively smaller relative to what we are used in modern birds.
Chris - It really is then that stepping stone. It's bigger than Archaeopteryx but smaller than a modern bird brain. So it is arguing that brains were beginning to get bigger in these birds as they began to evolve towards the tail end of the reign of the dinosaurs.
Guillermo - Exactly. This is precisely what we believe at the moment. This new brain is showing us that the size of the brain is increasing in these groups, but also is telling us the sequence of evolutionary changes that led to the origination of the modern brain. And by that I mean is telling us the sequence of expansion of the different areas of the brain because it was not a constant sort of expansion of the total brain. Some parts of the brain were actually expanding to modern standards while other regions of the brain were not expanding at the same pace.
Chris - Which bits were getting bigger. And in biology when things change in that way, they usually change for a reason. So what was driving this change?
Guillermo - So we are still unsure about these specific drivers. Some of the characteristics of this brain that are quite modern is for instance the general architecture of the total brain. So, by that I mean that the brain is starting to fold, to flex upon itself, kind of like what happens in humans. However, we see that many of the other regions of the brain, for instance the cerebellum, is still very flat and very small. And we know that this area of the brain is very important in modern birds to coordinate very complex mechanics of flight. So we have no idea how Navaornis and the rest of the group that Navaornis belongs to were flying effectively without this neuromotor coordination, this very complex neuromotor coordination, because we know from many other aspects of the anatomy that they must have been flying very well. As any scientific finding solves some questions, we are also left with millions of new questions that we have absolutely no idea what they mean.
Oldest UK satellite goes rogue
Stuart Eves, The British Interplanetary Society
The UK’s oldest satellite was launched into space in 1969 to aid the communications of the British armed forces. Years later, Skynet-1A was decommissioned, and space scientists predicted that gravity would pull it towards the Indian Ocean. But, instead, it appears to have mysteriously been redirected so that it now occupies airspace over the Americas. But no one seems to know why. The space consultant Stuart Eves has been investigating the puzzling progress of Skynet-1A, and he brought me up to speed with what he’s found…
Stuart - When I started researching this, I rapidly convinced myself that there was no realistic prospect, that natural perturbations due to solar radiation pressure, the push that the radiation coming off the sun gives the satellite, would ever be strong enough to overcome the gravitational forces which would leave it oscillating around the Indian ocean. So I concluded that it must have been deliberately moved by firing the thrusters on the satellite itself, but by whom and when wasn't at all clear.
Chris - When did someone notice it was in the wrong place then Stuart?
Stuart - I think that was probably me. We are required as a nation to inform the United Nations of the locations of all the stuff that we have put into space. And because it's our oldest satellite, the first entry in that registry is Skynet-1A. It's location on the geostationary ring says 105 West. And I looked at that and thought, well surely that's not right. I was pretty confident that the satellite had operated somewhere near 40 degrees east when it was operational. And as you'll readily appreciate, you can't even see 105 degrees west from the UK because it's too far around the planet. So <laugh>, it initially looked as if there was some sort of mistagging or error in the catalogue, but over the time of my investigation I've become more and more convinced that the thing that is 105 west really is our satellite and that's why it's puzzling as to how it got where it is.
Chris - How do you think it did get there?
Stuart - So as a result of some of the publicity that this story has generated recently, I have found some additional information which seemed to confirm that the satellite was actually manoeuvred in 1977. So that's considerably after the information that I'd been able to find. I found reports that were created by what's known as the Royal Aircraft Establishment at the time and they went up to the end of 1973 and then the trail went very, very cold. And I think that's probably around the time when the satellite stopped providing a useful function, the actual communications payload probably wasn't working. So I think the satellite was still capable of receiving commands to do things like make manoeuvres. And as far as I can tell, in 1977 a decision was taken to actually move the satellite across the Atlantic. And I'm fairly confident that both the UK and the US must have been involved in the decision to actually do that.
Chris - So someone would've known, probably multiple authorities would've known, but they just kept quiet and they didn't update the official register. That's what you are contending. Why on Earth would someone want to do that with a defunct satellite? It argues there was some other reason for wanting to park it back over the Americas.
Stuart - So it's possible that the satellite was transmitting on a frequency that was causing some form of interference and that they wanted the frequency clear for other satellites to use. So they decided to kind of move it out of the way to avoid the radio frequency interference. The other hypothesis that I have is that you have to remember that we're in the very early days of geostationary satellites. Technology is not well developed. A lot of the subsystems on the satellite would've been flying in space for the first time. And it's possible that although the UK didn't have much utility for the satellite because it wasn't providing a useful communications function anymore, it's possible that its builders over in the United States might have thought, well it would be quite interesting to see how the different bits of the satellite, you know, the batteries and various other subsystems are standing up to the radiation environment in space. So they might have been quite keen to sort of have it back and be able to watch how it degraded over time and how long it lasted.
Chris - And I was hoping you were going to come up with something a bit more X-Files than that.
Stuart - So it is quite interesting that the sort of advertised function of the satellite was definitely about military communications for UK forces. But there are bits of documentary evidence in various books and things that I've been able to find that suggests that GCHQ was also making use of the satellite. Today if you launch a geostationary satellite, you were assigned a particular location, essentially assigned a particular longitude. And it's your job as satellite operators to sit your satellite at that longitude and not move around too much because potentially you'll cause interference if you drift backwards and forwards. But there was very little else in geostationary orbit when Skynet-1A was operational and it was allowed to drift backwards and forwards by up to about 20 degrees at times. That aspect of it would've been quite consistent with GCHQ using the satellite to try and work out where various foreign transmitters were, for example.
Why do geese honk when they migrate?
Thanks to Viola Ross-Smith for the answer!
James - Thanks for the question, Rick. Native to North America, Canada Geese migrate South in the Winter and North in the summer. They have been known to fly as high as 9km in the sky in that striking V shaped formation, and you’re right to bring up energy expenditure, because that’s the exact reason the bird at the point of the ‘V’ rotates throughout the journey, as it takes the most effort to fly in that position.
So why go to the trouble of all this honking? Surely, there's a method to the madness? Here’s Viola Ross-Smith from the British Trust for Ornithology…
Viola - Thanks James. The Canada Geese are honking to maintain contact with each other. This is especially important when they are flying in formation, which saves energy expenditure in the flock overall. The honking helps each goose communicate its position, and coordinate with the other geese in the V when they shift position. So the energy expenditure of the honking itself is outweighed by the energy they save from the formation flight. Individuals can also use the calls to warn the rest of the flock about an approaching predator.
James - Clever. Is this something other migratory birds do as well?
Viola - Migratory flight calls are common in passerine or ‘perching birds,’ (think Redwings migrating overhead at night in autumn) but their behaviour is much less well understood, and these birds aren't flying together in V formations. There was a study from North America a few years ago showing that passerines of different species with more similar nocturnal migration flight calls follow more similar migratory routes and destinations, so in this case the flight calls might help individual birds to remain on track. Again, even though the calling itself takes energy, it is less energetically costly than getting lost and not reaching your destination at all (and quite probably dying as a result).
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