UK invests in 'cyber army', and turning lead into gold
In this edition of The Naked Scientists: The UK announces a 1 billion pound budget for a cyber army: but what will these keyboard warriors be doing? Also, a vaccine for norovirus that is just one pill. And, physicists at CERN turn lead into gold, albeit briefly!
In this episode
01:03 - UK to splash billions on a new 'cyber army'
UK to splash billions on a new 'cyber army'
Danny Dresner, University of Manchester & Tim Stevens, King's College London
The 21st-century battlefield isn't filled with tanks, aircrafts and submarines - but code, AI networks, and the quiet hum of a global cyber war. With this in mind, the UK is reportedly investing billions into a new kind of force - dubbed a ‘cyber army’ - to "project power in the information age." Danny Dresner - a professor cyber security at the University of Manchester - and, up first, Tim Stevens, an associate professor of cyber conflict and the geopolitics of digital warfare at King's College, London, have been telling me about the plans…
Tim - The UK already has some capability in this space. In other words, it has military personnel and units that are already dedicated to, if you like, fighting in the digital battle space. But what's going on at the moment is, as we've heard from various governments and military officials, that we are at a uniquely dangerous point in the UK and indeed the world's modern history. And the digital battle space, cyberspace, the internet, is the origin of and the medium through which various strategic actors are threatening UK national security and UK PLC. That ranges from state actors like military and intelligence agencies who may wish to do the UK and its allies harm, through cyber espionage actors and through the cyber criminals that affect you and I in our daily lives. And clearly what the UK is thinking in this space is that they somehow need to harmonise its existing capabilities and maybe supercharge it a bit to enable the British military to operate and fight in that space.
Chris - Danny, we often hear cyber described as the new front line, but it is both everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. What does this shift towards cyber conflict mean for our security day to day?
Danny - Cyber abhors a vacuum. It has to be connected to something. There's no cyber security by itself. It's the security of whatever infrastructure, whatever devices, whatever processes and activities are actually going on. So I'm really pleased that there is actually some consolidation. This is something that has been needed for a while. As Ecclesiastes said, there's nothing new under the sun. And if you think about it, the signals intelligence people have been taking actions and have been actually out in action for well, as long as my short memory of history goes.
Chris - Have we seen much action on home territory in this respect? Have we been attacked much, Tim, in the past? And we just don't know about it.
Tim - Yes, I think that's undoubtedly the case. The intelligence agencies have traditionally taken the lead in this space when we think about strategic threats to the United Kingdom. And our signals intelligence capability, by which we mean government communications, headquarters, GCHQ, has been at the forefront of that. And they have very good what we call threat intelligence, intelligence about what is out there and who's operating against the United Kingdom. But there will always be gaps. So if we're going to put numbers on this, we think about the military piece, the Ministry of Defence has said something like several 10s of 1000s attacks against the defence estate over the last couple of years, which is far from insignificant.
Chris - So Danny, what sort of tech are we expecting to be deployed as part of this new initiative? They're saying they're going to spend a billion. It's big money. What are they going to spend it on?
Danny - Some of it will be on the kind of things that we've heard doing mischief to ourselves, I suppose the real development needs to come to make sure that these things don't go full circle, to a certain extent, anything that you can imagine all kinds of different levels of sophistication of software. But we'll want to look at our adversaries' systems, we'll want to be able to detect what they're doing, we'll want to deny them access when they do get there, we'll want to disrupt. But it doesn't always have to be as clever as a piece of software or a physical device. I remember Ian Levy, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre's technical operations, once pointed out that sometimes when they find a server, even if it's abroad, doing bad things to us in the UK, even a phone call to the people who are running that server in the internet service providers to say, please switch it off can be enough. It doesn't have to be a full attack like they did with Stuxnet, which is the famous case of cyber weaponry.
Chris - Tim, presumably, everybody's at the same game. So if we were to be having this conversation in Russia, in China, in other states like that, they would be saying, well, they're tooling up in the same way. So this is just sort of an arms race, but it's a cyber arms race.
Tim - In China, fairly recently, they reorganised their military under something called the Information Support Force, which contains cyber and electromagnetic warfare. The US, of course, has US Cyber Command. And inevitably, this will be compared to that, although that's a much larger, much better resource. Russia's a little bit different. The operators of cyber and electronic warfare in that are spread across the military and intelligence. But of course, Russia has a slightly different way of looking at this environment. It thinks of it in a much more holistic way anyway. We tend to separate out cyber from electromagnetic warfare and from information warfare and from other forms of land, sea and air power. The Russians tend to bring it all together and think of it more as cognitive warfare, if you like. So creating effects in the cognitive space through whatever means necessary. So the UK's approach is similar in some respects, but different in others. The one major difference, of course, between the US, Russia and China, is that we don't have the money to set up these major kind of institutional units within a relatively small military of a middle power.
Chris - Do we also have the manpower, Danny? Because in the last 10-15 years, we've been reminded by successive governments that there is a digital skills gap emerging in countries like the UK, and we really need more people who are savvy in this space. Can we lay our hands on the expertise we need in sufficient numbers to build this kind of cyber army that we're envisaging?
Danny - I think we can. I think we already are. I'm not actually worried from that point of view. And what we've seen already with the National Cyber Force, which is already in existence, and will work alongside this new construct, is that that is already making use of existing agencies and bringing skills together, which is what you need to do with cyber.
07:45 - Norovirus could soon be treated with a one pill vaccine
Norovirus could soon be treated with a one pill vaccine
Becca Flitter, Vaxart
A new oral vaccine for norovirus has performed remarkably well in clinical trials. The pill - which has been developed by the pharmaceutical company Vaxart - is attempting to address the lack of safe and reliable vaccines for norovirus, which is a leading cause of gastrointestinal infections worldwide. In the UK it routinely costs the NHS close to £100 million per year, in cancelled operations, closed wards, staff sickness and by prolonging hospital stays for patients. It works by using a disabled “cold” virus to smuggle into the gut the genetic message for a part of the norovirus outer coat, fooling the body into thinking the infection is there for real and provoking an immune response. I’ve been speaking with Vaxart's Director of Immunology, Becca Flitter…
Becca - Our vaccine is an oral vaccine and it's a pill. It goes into the intestine and it stimulates your immune system in the gut to make protective responses, antibodies that attach to the virus, letting your immune system know like, hey, it's time to get this out of there.
Chris - What is actually in the pill that does that?
Becca - Our vaccine is based on an adenoviral vector, a non-replicating virus, and what it does is it holds the DNA of a norovirus protein that tells the cells in the gut to make the norovirus protein so that the immune system learns how to detect the protein code of the virus and make a response to it. It's very safe. We've done multiple human trials, and because it's a room temperature pill, it can easily be distributed. It can literally come to you in the mail or be distributed in the military quickly, and they're a great alternative to a needle-based injection that only provides immunity in the bloodstream, whereas our tablet, because it's released in the gut, is training your body to learn how to make a good immune response in the gut where the norovirus infects.
Chris - And how quickly does a person build a response once they've actually been exposed to the pill? And is it just a one hit? You take one pill, and that's enough to drive the immune response?
Becca - We've seen immune responses start by day eight, and then it peaks right around one month after vaccination. And those responses stay pretty high out for like three or four months, and then they start to decline, but they stay out until at least a year. Right now, we're working towards having one pill per year. Unfortunately, for norovirus, it's a very diverse sets of viruses, and so it's constantly evolving. So it'd kind of be like the flu shot or the flu vaccine where you go in once a year, but instead of getting a shot, you can just take a pill.
Chris - And does it actually work to protect people? As in, if you take this pill and then you are actually challenged with norovirus for real, do you not catch it, which has to be your goal here?
Becca - Phenomenal question. So in a recent paper that we just published, individuals in the placebo group who got a sugar pill had about 82% infection rate compared to the individuals who got vaccinated, that was a 57% infection rate. And I just want to caveat this with the fact that we challenged them with a really high amount of norovirus. It takes 10 particles to really make someone sick. In this particular study, we challenged them with over a million particles. So we were really aiming to make people infected.
And the reason we did that was to make sure that we could measure the immune responses very accurately and model them to know which ones were important for resisting infection.
Chris - One of the really big problems with norovirus is that it is the king of the shapeshifters, and it mutates so fast that it's impossible almost for our own immune systems to keep up, isn't it? So what's the evidence that if this were the real world and a group of people had your vaccine, but then were exposed to real norovirus evolution, not something you're infecting them with in the lab, that they would be protected for a reasonable period of time?
Becca - That's a fantastic question. So one of the things that our vaccine actually is really good at is something called cross-reactive immune responses. And we think this happens because our vaccine is targeting the gut, where it's likely most individuals have already encountered a norovirus infection. And not only does our vaccine stimulate new immune responses to the target protein that we're trying to produce antibodies against, but it also stimulates memory responses in individuals who've already seen norovirus. And we see an increase in the amount of immunity to multiple different types of norovirus. This gives us a lot of hope that our vaccine can actually be used for protection against multiple different norovirus circulating strains. So we're hoping to get broad cross-reactive protective responses using this vaccine technology.
Chris - Is the performance that you're getting going to be good enough to satisfy regulators and going to be economically viable?
Becca - We are in conversations with the FDA here in the United States and they're encouraging. And in terms of cost, we've made some significant strides in really making sure this vaccine does not cost a lot of money. And we want to make sure that this vaccine can be available all over the world, especially in areas where cold chain can be an issue. And so we really hope that some of this new data coming out, as well as the published results that we have put out this year for this norovirus vaccine, will really help convince the regulators in many different countries that this is a great solution to reducing the norovirus disease burden.
15:09 - Earliest amniote fossil rewrites evolutionary timeline
Earliest amniote fossil rewrites evolutionary timeline
Stuart Sumida, California State University, San Bernardino
Fossilised claw prints discovered on a slab of rock in Australia may be rewriting part of the evolutionary timeline. Believed to be around 356 million years old, these tracks are thought to have been made by an early amniote - the egg-laying group of animals that includes reptiles and birds, and would later go on to include us mammals. The tracks themselves might have belonged to a creature that resembled a monitor lizard, with clawed legs splayed out either side of the body. The discovery, which has been published in Nature, suggests that amniotes left the water and ventured up onto dry land much earlier than previously thought. We asked Stuart Sumida, a palaeontologist at California State University, San Bernardino, who authored a commentary on the discovery to us through the findings, starting with what the specimen actually looks like…
Stuart - So what you can see on the slab is a series of what people refer to as footprints or ichnotaxa. Ichnotaxa is the fancy word for impressions left in the stone, and you can see the impressions of both the hands and the feet. And you can see imprints of all four limbs as the animal apparently walked across a sandy, muddy surface over 350 million years ago. And one of the things that's absolutely key about this is that in addition to seeing the prints of the hand and the foot, you can see claw marks associated with each digit. And that's significant because fishes don't have claws, amphibians don't have claws, but reptiles do.
Chris - Now the key breakthrough here is the age of this thing you're saying. So how do we know how old those tracks are, reliably?
Stuart - Geologists have come to the conclusion that it came from a particular formation that was dated independently by other Australian geologists at about 360 million years old, which is much, much older than you would have expected for an animal like this.
Chris - Now explain the significance of that time. How does that fit into our understanding of what was happening when, all the way back then, and why this one is a standout finding?
Stuart - So one of the things people talk about when we talk about vertebrates, backbone animals, getting out onto the land, they refer to it as the water to land transition. And it's important to remember that this wasn't an animal jumping out of the water saying, ‘hello, I am now dry.’ Wasn't so simple, right? The earliest animals that walked around on the land probably just walked from puddle to puddle to stay wet. And the earliest land dwelling animals, which we call tetrapods, almost certainly had to return to the water to reproduce. That is a feature of amphibians. The kind of animal they found, okay, a reptile belongs to a much more advanced group called amniotes. Amniotes were the ones that developed an egg that you could lay on the land away from the water. You didn't have to lay it in the water. So we like to refer to that as the end of the water to land transition, which previously thought to range from about 400 million years ago to about 320 to 300 million years ago. In other words, 80 to 100 million years. That's a long time. Well, what's happened with this new discovery is that if you see a reptile or evidence for a reptile much, much earlier, that means that the evolution of this group we call amniotes, which includes reptiles and the ancestors of mammals as well, must have happened much, much, much more quickly than we ever imagined.
Chris - What is the impact or significance of that then? Does that mean that the processes that drive the invasion of the land, because we know that plants moved during the period we call the Devonian 450 million years ago. So that's when plants begin to go onto the land and you get trees springing up and that creates a wonderful place animals want to be. They probably follow, but this argues then that they follow pretty quickly and then evolve pretty quickly to be there. If this is right, what they're seeing.
Stuart - I'm so glad you said that because yes, a lot of people when they talk about the water to land transition, they think of backbone to animals like us. But you are absolutely correct. Plants did it first and don't forget insects. So what this means is that the drive to get out onto the land and exploit those new environments must have been greater than we had originally expected and it must have happened much more quickly. So because what happens is if you're stuck reproducing in water near the ocean, near streams, rivers, and lakes, that means you can go only so far. But once you're independent of that, you can radiate all over the land masses and take advantage of all of those other potential resources that you mentioned. And here's something that's fascinating. We don't find plant eaters amongst amphibians. We find plant eaters amongst amniotes, which includes reptiles and their relatives, the synapsids, which led to mammals. Which means that those opportunities, those animals were probably taking advantage of those opportunities much sooner than we ever expected and that the evolution of those groups took place much faster than we expected.
Chris - Do you think then that what actually happened is that plants got onto land earlier than we had thought, making the environment nice for animals, so this group then come along? Or do you think the plants did invade the land at roughly the time we thought and the evolution was just a lot quicker off the mark and animals like this came along sooner than we had previously thought? Which is it?
Stuart - That's not an easy question to answer, but I suspect your second scenario is a bit more likely. Our fossil record for plants back into the Devonian is quite good. The Devonian and then the time period immediately after, called the Carboniferous. It's called the Carboniferous because so much carbon was laid down in those plants. They dominated the planet and they changed the planet fundamentally in part because of the oxygen they released. You know, some interesting work has been done, people suggesting that evolution has been driven by oxygen content in the air and people mostly pointed to the end of that time period, the end of the Carboniferous, when we used to think that the earliest reptiles were around. We're now thinking that it must have happened earlier, so we need to reassess all of those hypotheses, not just when the earliest reptiles and amniotes showed up, but also the things that might have driven them to develop then, including the plants, including the oxygen that they produced and the environmental niches that they might have provided for those animals as they radiated across the planet.
22:17 - CERN scientists turn lead into gold
CERN scientists turn lead into gold
Ben Allanach, University of Cambridge
The age-old dream of turning lead into gold has finally been realised…if only for a brief moment. It was not the work of ancient alchemists, who actually boiled up urine trying to do this, but instead physicists at CERN, who did it by using the world's most powerful particle collider. But, before you grab your shovel and a swagbag and head for Geneva, it’s not going to spark a new gold rush: the amount they’re making is measured in picograms! Nonetheless, it is a milestone, and could also help to shed light on how elements form across the universe. Marushka Soobben sat down with Cambridge University theoretical physicist Ben Allanach on the banks for Cam to hear how the team behind the discovery did it…
Ben - So atoms, if you remember, have a dense nucleus and then lots of space and they have some electrons around the outside. Protons are different kinds of particle. They've got positive electric charge and gold has 79 protons in its nucleus and lead has 82.
Marushka - So basically we lose three protons and we get gold.
Ben - If you manage to shave off three protons off a lead nucleus, you get a gold nucleus. And in modern scientific terms, that's really what we're talking about. Once you've got a positive nucleus, it's easy to get the right electrons to fill up the rest of the atom and so on.
Marushka - Okay, so the nucleus is the important part of this experiment. And how did the scientists at CERN manage to do this?
Ben - One or two months every year they fill the beams that they collide at CERN with lead nuclei and they fire them at each other at very close to the speed of light, really high energies. So you get these two lead nuclei. Often they collide and that's actually the main science purpose of doing this. Occasionally they kind of just miss each other. And that's where this interesting result came from.
Marushka - And what is that called when they just miss each other?
Ben - You could call it a glancing collision. But the important thing is this electromagnetic dissociation. So basically, because these protons have positive charge in the nucleus, the nucleus has a very strong electric field around it. And if the other one glances close to it, the electric field is so strong, it can upset one of them and it can lose a proton or two or three in this case. And so what they wanted to do is to see how often it lost a proton or two or three, which would change the nuclei from being lead ones to either thallium, mercury or gold nuclei, depending if it's one, two or three protons. So you detect how many protons come off and you infer that some of the lead nuclei have been changed to, for example, gold nuclei.
Marushka - Is this viable in any way?
Ben - The calculations from the experimental measurement tell us that since 2015, so over the last 10 years, CERN has produced 10 to the minus 11 grams of it, which is a lot less than a gold grain of sand. So you certainly wouldn't use CERN to produce gold. In no way is it scalable or practicable economically or otherwise.
Marushka - So why do we bother with doing experiments like this if it's going to create basically dust?
Ben - There are deep scientific questions these experiments are trying to answer, and the lead into gold was just kind of an interesting byproduct of trying to answer those scientific questions. So what you're doing, colliding lead nuclei together, is you're recreating the conditions that were around in the very early universe, in fact, like something around a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. There you don't have nuclei and atoms, everything's shoved together and it's too hot and too dense. And so you're trying to recreate, in the centre of the collision, a little bit of space where you've got a lot of particles and it's very dense and hot so you can measure and constrain that scenario and try and work out what was going on in the early universe.
Marushka - So there's a lot of implications for this work outside of just making a little bit of gold.
Ben - Yeah, that's right. In particular, you could ask, well, what about these glancing collisions? Why are they interesting and why did they write a paper? And what they really want to understand is this business about the high electric fields. Because it turns out you can use those to make measurements of interest and constrain particle physics if you can understand them well enough. So this is like a sort of precursor to that, to try and understand these very intense electric fields and make sure that you know what's going on with them. And then you can use the rest of the data to constrain what's going on with the particle physics. I mean, the lead into gold made a nice new story and it's kind of interesting in its own right. The big work of the science is in other areas really.
27:12 - Does low oxygen in planes cause jetlag?
Does low oxygen in planes cause jetlag?
Thanks to Malcolm von Schantz for the answer!
James - In the literal sense, jet lag might refer, as Alan writes on our forum, to a loss of synchrony between the travellers' circadian rhythms and the habits of the people at his destination. In other words, when you travel across multiple time zones in a relatively short period of time, so the length of a flight, your body's internal clock or circadian rhythm might take a few days to adjust to your new bedtime. But some people's definition of jet lag might include other components. Here's Malcolm von Schantz, Professor of Chronobiology at Northumbria University.
Malcolm - So if I may answer your last question first, do you get jet lag after travelling within the same time zone, say from Amsterdam to Johannesburg? You do not get jet lag in the formal sense because you haven't travelled across different time zones. There is no body clock disruption that will prevent you from falling asleep. But then there are the general consequences of sitting in a metal tube at a high elevation and most of them you can't do anything about and they affect everybody. Aircraft are pressurised so they contain much more oxygen inside than there is outside of those elevations. It's impossible to pressurise them at quite the same level as we experience at sea level. So there is less oxygen in the aircraft than there is on the ground. And the result of that is that our lungs have to work harder to keep our blood oxygenated. There are also other effects of that which are somewhat uncomfortable, such as it causes our stomach, our intestine to bloat up.
James - What's more, the drier air you find in planes can also leave your skin dehydrated and cause irritation in your respiratory system.
Malcolm - And then there is another really interesting question which takes me way back. What about smoking in the cabin? And I'm old enough to remember that and it was horrible on a long haul flight as a non-smoker and that certainly will have made it worse because of the nicotine and carbon monoxide and god knows what that forms part of cigarette smoke in addition to the lower oxygen level. Another improvement with modern air travel is the new aircraft models which are made of essentially a composite instead of metal. And that means that it's possible to operate those with a higher cabin pressure and also with higher humidity than earlier aircraft model.
James - So Mark, you will suffer less jet lag if you take a flight with minimal disruption to your circadian rhythm. And thanks to the smoking ban and improvements to aircraft design, other adverse health effects of flying induced partly by the lower levels of oxygen have been mitigated.
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