The UK's smoking and vaping plans, and stranded astronauts
In this edition of The Naked Scientists: How the UK looks set to take the world’s toughest line on smoking; the new study showing that last year’s Canadian wildfires pumped more CO2 into the atmosphere than most countries worldwide; and why are those astronauts still stranded on the International Space Station?
In this episode
01:02 - The UK mulls new smoking and vaping curbs
The UK mulls new smoking and vaping curbs
Linda Bauld, University of Edinburgh & David Strain, British Medical Association
The UK prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has said that his government is looking at tougher rules on outdoor smoking to reduce the number of preventable deaths linked to tobacco use. To find out more, we put in a call to Linda Bauld who is professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh…
Linda - The government has a piece of legislation called the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. We were hoping it would come to the next stage of parliament in the summer, but it looks like it'll be into September. In the meantime, there's been this period of potential strengthening of the legislation. So some of the big ticket items that we know about, raising the age of sale, the smoke free generation addressing vaping, are still in there. But they seem to have added extra things and one of them is to put more restrictions on smoking in partially enclosed or outdoor areas.
Chris - What's the significance of this?
Linda - I think the significance is we still have about one in eight people in the UK who smoke. It's still the leading preventable cause of death and banning it in outdoor areas actually isn't directly about the health harms because obviously mainstream smoke and sidestream smoke quickly dissipate in the open air. But it's more about the continued de-normalisation of smoking. So some of the areas that are being discussed, I understand, are things like children's play parks, beaches, university campuses, potentially the whole area around hospitals, town centres. So it's really about taking smoking out of normal life and extending those smoke-free laws.
Chris - Is there an evidence base to support these sorts of measures, arguing that they actually work? Because, for instance, I work in a hospital and it, for about the last decade, has been a smoke-free site. And as I walk into work, I see various members of staff lurking having a crafty fag behind the hedgerows.
Linda - So there's a difference between evidence from studies and implementation evidence. So if we deal with the first one, there are some studies, I'm just recalling one from New Zealand for example, and they looked at pub balconies and outdoor areas next to pubs. They put air quality sensors inside and outside and they found that actually the smoke when doors were left open, and maybe better weather than we have in the UK, drifted inside. And so people inside were still exposed to smoke when there was an outdoor seating area and that might have health risks. So there's some evidence to support that. There's also studies that have looked at areas like children's play parks, where it's absolutely the case that if children see lots of adults smoking, it normalises the act of smoking to a greater degree. There's also an environmental argument where cigarette butts and the filters on cigarettes are a major cause of plastic pollution on beaches. On the implementation side, you're absolutely right. Implementing smoking bans in outdoor areas, around hospital buildings, mental health facilities are a particular issue. And on the grounds of hospitals when you don't have staff to enforce it, many hospitals have extensive grounds or some do anyway, is actually really, really tough. So there is evidence behind this, but the implementation of it can be tricky.
Chris - Would this then add up, if you put all of the legislation, all of the things we're doing here, would this make the UK one of the toughest places to be a smoker? In other words, is the deterrent here one of the strongest globally?
Linda - We'd be amongst the strongest countries if they introduced all the things that are in the tobacco and vapes bill, including, they'd be discussing other things like licensing cigarette shops as one of the newer measures.
That was Linda Bauld at the University of Edinburgh. It follows a call from the British Medical Association for the UK government to stop what it called a “growing epidemic of vape use in the UK” by tightening regulations of e-cigarette products and restricting access to them, and targeting particularly those designed to seduce and addict young people. David Strain is the science chair at the British Medical Association board…
David - We are asking the government to include a ban on all the flavours of vapes that are so attractive. We're asking them to limit the advertising, limit the bright shiny packaging and even the naming, the blueberry fizz, gummy bear, candy floss flavours. We want these vapes to be put behind the counter next to the cigarettes. So they are offered for smokers, but they're not offered and freely available in the same way as a bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps is. And finally, we're asking for a ban on single use vapes. These ones that you use once then throw away, which is contributing about 10 tons of lithium waste to landfill every year. That's about the same amount that goes into making 5,000 electric cars just ends up in a landfill.
Chris - Have we got evidence that these seductively coloured and flavoured products are luring in kids and exclusively for those reasons? Or are we at risk of upsetting entrenched smokers who are trying to give up, who actually quite like those flavours and they may actually be deterred and encouraged to smoke more?
David - There's two separate questions there. The first is, do we have evidence that these fruit flavours are attracting people? And actually the evidence for that is very simple. We have seen that with the expansion of fruit flavours, with the more and greater availability of them, we've seen a sixfold increased risk of the number of young people who are being attracted to this as a brand new habit. So these aren't smoking quitters, these are people who've been attracted to it. We're also seeing more than half of 11 to 17 year olds who use vapes are doing so on a regular basis, and that's just about exclusively the fruit flavoured market. So that's the closest to evidence that that is the reason that these are going for them. The second piece of evidence is the advertising. Advertising works. That's the reason that so many millions are pumped into the advertising campaigns. And when we moved cigarettes from being broadly advertised to behind the counter with plain packaging, we saw a reduction in the number of new smokers as a result of it. The second question is a lot more tricky, whether banning fruit flavours will prevent people from quitting smoking. And this is something that is very difficult to know for certain. We know that about half of all adult vapers are ex-smokers. Now many of those have gone for straight tobacco or plain vapes. Some of them do go for fruit flavours and lots of stock services do offer the fruit flavours, but they offer them because they're there. What we don't know for certain is what would be the impact of not offering fruit flavours to potential quitters. Now, the majority of people, if they are offered, will take fruit flavouring. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't rather be on a tobacco flavoured or a plain vape rather than being on a cigarette, remembering that cigarettes themselves are harmful, they're associated with cancer, and they're a lot more expensive than a vape. So when we offer every single smoker a tobacco or a plain flavoured vape on the day that they buy their cigarettes, then potentially we are offering them a life saving and cheaper option going forward.
Chris - Are you not incredulous though, David, that we've ended up in this position at all? It did not take Einstein, let alone a public health specialist and the medical profession, to spot that if you have an unregulated industry and it's linked to an addictive substance and you can sex it up, make it look nice and smell nice, that it's going to seduce young people and it's going to hook a whole legion of new smokers?
David - That's easy to see with hindsight. It is very easy to see that nicotine-containing products are very, very highly addictive. And once you're on them, it's very difficult to stop them. What we're at now is a turning point. If we don't stop this now, we're going to see an entire generation that will no longer be able to smoke due to that tobacco and vaping bill, but instead we'll be hooked on a different drug. And don't get me wrong, vaping is another drug, albeit a legal drug. But it is a drug. What we need to do is now, before we have millions of people addicted to this, put the bans in place to make sure that we don't face another public health crisis in about 15 to 20 years, when we suddenly realise the adverse effect that all of these are happening on the development of the brain, on the whole body as we go through the change.
09:52 - Canada's wildfires released unprecedented amount of carbon
Canada's wildfires released unprecedented amount of carbon
Brendan Byrne, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
A new study has found that carbon emissions from the Canadian wildfires of 2023 exceeded the annual fossil fuel emissions of seven of the ten largest emitting countries in 2022. Only three nations: China, India and the USA emitted more fossil-fuel based carbon in that period. The study - which has been published in Nature - was carried out by Brendan Byrne at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Brendan - Last summer we saw that there were these really enormous fires in Canada that went through the entire summer. And so we wanted to estimate how much carbon was released from all those trees burning. And in addition to that, we wanted to understand why this happened in 2023 and not some other year. So we also looked at climate data to see if there was something unusual, in particular about 2023.
Chris - How do you go about doing a study like this to actually get numbers that are a reasonably good guesstimate of what happened?
Brendan - When fires burn, they release a lot of smoke and aerosols into the atmosphere. And one of the things they release is carbon monoxide, which is produced by fires. There are satellites that measure the amount of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere. So what we did is we took satellite data of the amount of carbon monoxide emitted by the fires and then we were able to use that to back calculate how much carbon must have been emitted when they burned.
Chris - Were you watching one particular patch of space then, or do you assume that the carbon monoxide is only around for a little while? So anything that gets added is just been added and you can measure the background level everywhere and that gives you that approximation.
Brendan - Well, the nice thing about carbon monoxide is that, in general, forests are not releasing very much when there isn't a fire. It's really a signal of fires burning. And so from there you can really see it kind of like you would see a smoke plume coming off the fires. So there's pretty low background levels.
Chris - Does it hang around for long? Because how good a register is it of what's happening here and now? Because if you produce some carbon monoxide, does it not sort of go up and then saturate in the atmosphere and then you lose what else goes on since? Or does it go up and come down quite quick, which means you really have got a moment to moment index of what is happening on the ground?
Brendan - The nice thing about carbon monoxide is that it lasts for about a month in the atmosphere. It's converted into CO2 through chemistry in the atmosphere. So it doesn't have the real long lifetime of CO2, which gets really mixed into the background or the very short lifetime of ozone, which is just there momentarily. So it's kind of a perfect lifetime to be able to track fires with.
Chris - And what did that reveal then about how much you think came off from Canada when the fires raged?
Brendan - Yeah, we provided an estimate range of 570 to 727 megatonnes of carbon. I think this is better contextualised when you look at a country's fossil fuel emissions. So this would've ranked as the fourth largest emitting country after China, the US, and India. So we saw really unprecedented amounts of carbon being released from these fires over Canada.
Chris - We always regard trees as a good thing to have. We plant trees, they soak up CO2. But then if you have events like this, you liberate all of the good work that's been done and put the CO2 back into the atmosphere. Is that sort of what was in your mind when you were doing these calculations?
Brendan - Yes, to an extent. Everything else being equal, if you have a forest fire, you'll release a bunch of carbon, but that forest will regrow over the coming decades. So you'd expect it to reabsorb all of that carbon, but we may not see that with climate change.
Chris - In what respect?
Brendan - When we looked at this event, we found that these really extreme emissions coincided with the hottest and driest year for Canadian forests in the climate records we looked at, that were 44 years long. And so, you know, we're seeing under hotter and drier conditions that will potentially have more extreme fires.
Chris - So more fires, but potentially also less regrowth then if the conditions are more stressful for the trees and they're not going to lock away as much CO2 as normal. So it's potentially a double whammy then?
Brendan - Yes. So what we see is that, you know, this year was very unusual with the heat and drought relative to the 44 year climate record. But if we look at climate model projections, by the time we get to the 2050s, we find that this becomes kind of a normal summer temperature-wise for Canada. So we may potentially see a shift to having more frequent intense fires that could potentially change how the ecosystems are able to store carbon.
15:22 - Can American mink be eradicated in the UK?
Can American mink be eradicated in the UK?
Bill Amos, University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge’s Bill Amos has been involved in a project that aims to eradicate mink from the UK's waterways. American mink began to spread through the UK after they escaped or were released from mink farms, which were banned here almost a quarter of a century ago. To find out more, Chris Smith caught up with Bill on the banks of the River Cam at Queens’ College, Cambridge…
Bill - So the American mink was brought over as a source of fur and they were farmed extensively throughout the UK. And when fur farming became less of a nice thing to do, many of them were just released or escaped. And so around the 1920s, 1930s, an awful lot of mink entered the English countryside where they found themselves very nice places to live.
Chris - What do we think the population of them is then?
Bill - Very difficult to tell. There are probably fewer than we think. We've basically looked to eradicate them from East Anglia as a start of tackling the problem. And in East Anglia we've probably caught 300-400 and we now think that there are none left. So it's not seething with them, but they do an awful lot of damage.
Chris - So you don't need many to have quite a devastating impact on the ecosystem.
Bill - Absolutely. They really are voracious hunters and they will hunt anything that they can catch. There are pictures of them attacking animals as large as a heron, which, considering the mink itself is only about a foot and a half long, that's impressive.
Chris - How are you trying to get rid of them then?
Bill - People have tried before, but the problem is that you have to be humane. You can't just allow them to starve to death in empty traps. So earlier trapping efforts really suffered from the fact that you need to inspect every trap every day to see whether it's triggered. The modern traps we have are fantastic because they're fitted with a little telephone device, which means that they signal whenever they trigger. And so you can run a hundred traps and the one that actually catches something you can go and visit. And so you can actually be extremely humane in getting rid of the mink and that's transformed the number of traps that you can have out in a given area. The other thing is that we've discovered that mink are incredibly inquisitive anyway, but if you've got the smell of another mink <laugh>, then they really go to town. So now all the traps we use, they're baited with the smell of mink, which is extracted from some of the dead mink we've culled as part of this process.
Chris - What smell in particular?
Bill - It comes from the anal glands at the back end. And the scientific name for the mink is a mustelid and must is the name that we use to describe some intense smells and mink are very smelly animals and this is where the smell comes from.
Chris - Are they attracted because they want a mate or are they attracted because they think this is a potential rival or is it both?
Bill - Probably both. We get males and females coming to the smell of mink. We have had traps before which have caught nothing caught, nothing caught nothing. There's a camera trap nearby, there's a mink around. You put the lure in, within 24 hours it's caught the mink and then you see nothing on the camera traps. So it's incredibly potent at mopping up the last few.
Chris - This is then presumably your strategy going forward that we use both digital traps that can be put at scale so that you can monitor very big flotillas of traps as it were, but equally you bait them up with this smell of mink, which enormously improves the efficiency of the whole operation.
Bill - Absolutely. It's completely transformed. I would say over a period of something like two to four years you can clear a really large area. And this is transformative. Previously people were putting out traps, they were having to visit them every day. You couldn't get enough traps and mink reproduce quite fast so they were just replenishing and you'd never get to elimination. And many people thought that it was actually impossible to eradicate mink from the UK.
Chris - Is eradication possible? Because elimination means we've cleared them from a geographical area. Eradication means we've cleared them totally. Do you think the latter is feasible? Because if they have a lot of babies it doesn't take very many mink to quite quickly repopulate.
Bill - No, we really do think this is possible. So I think the main part of using smart traps and lures started in about 2020, and already basically there are no mink in East Anglia. So I mean really <laugh> a huge chunk. Loads and loads of traps, not a single catch last year and no evidence of reproduction for two and a half years. And that's a large piece of the country. So all those traps or many of those traps are now being redeployed further out and we're trying to spread out across the UK. And yeah, as soon as the trapping goes, you start off catching loads and within a very short period of time, trap numbers plummet <laugh>, the number that you are catching plummets, and yes eradication or clearing of an area follows quite quickly.
20:37 - Why astronauts are stuck on the ISS
Why astronauts are stuck on the ISS
Richard Hollingham, Space Boffins
It looks like two of Nasa’s most experienced astronauts - who have been stuck in space for over two months - won’t return to Earth until February 2025. “Sunny” Sunita Williams and “Butch” Barry Wilmore were only supposed to take part in an eight-day mission, but a problem with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that took them to the International Space Station means they will remain in space until next year. With me to explain what’s going on and what will happen to the two astronauts is broadcaster Richard Hollingham from the Space Boffins podcast. And he’s the perfect person to ask because not only has he partied with one of the astronauts, he’s also just penned a piece for the BBC called What happens when astronauts get caught in space…
Richard - This is Boeing's Starliner, the rival to the Dragon Spacecraft. It's been much delayed. Its trial uncrewed flights were not wholly successful. This was its crewed flight, first crewed flight, to the International Space Station. And what they found was on approach to the Space Station, 5 of the 28 thrusters failed. They recovered the spacecraft fine, and docked successfully. They're on the Space Station. The question then is, are these thrusters going to fail again? So there have been tests ever since and, well, I think the best word to sum them up is inconclusive. So that's why they've made the decision to keep them there.
Chris - So this is a bit like having a car parked in the garage and you could jump in it, but you might break down on the motorway. And obviously when it's life and death like this, no one's willing to take that risk.
Richard - Yeah. So it's a little complex with the problem with the thrusters because they don't entirely understand what's happening. They've been running a load of tests in space, docked to the Space Station, and in space the thrusters seem to be absolutely fine. There seems to be no problem. The actual problem does appear to come down to a single component, a Teflon element within the thruster, which seems to be swelling and reducing how much propellant passes through the thruster. That seems to be the problem. But in NASA's words, they do not understand the physics of the problem. So it might have fixed itself, it might be fine, but they don't know why. And that's obviously a real worry.
Chris - Why can't they just come home? And, I mean I know I'm trivialising a bit, but what is the problem with sending something else up there to get them back? There are things going to resupply the International Space Station quite frequently, aren't there?
Richard - Yeah, I mean, they could even actually fit in the Dragon that's docked to the Space Station. They could fit two extra people into that Dragon spacecraft. They could actually bring them back now. And it's about the balance of risks, isn't it? So right now, the safest place to be is on the Space Station. If something catastrophic were to happen to the Space Station, a piece of space junk hit it, some sort of depressurisation event, a fire, all the awful things that could go wrong in space, they could come back straight away. And they'd either come back jammed into the Dragon Capsule, which is already docked to the Space Station, which is the SpaceX spacecraft. Or they could come back on Starliner because the risk suddenly shifts. So right now it's safer to stay on the Space Station. And given that these astronauts are so well-trained, the best option I think is to keep them on the Space Station, extend their mission, send a spacecraft up with just with two spare seats, and then they come back after a long duration mission, which is very usual on the Space Station, and they come back early in the new year.
Chris - I did hear that the one downside for the two astronauts is they didn't pack many pairs of pants. I'm being slightly facetious, but they didn't take extra clothes. And of course you don't. You don't do that when you go into space. Weight is everything. You don't take what you don't need. So they're kind of living in the same clothes a lot.
Richard - It's true. And also they had to actually take some of their personal possessions off Starliner to take in some spares for the plumbing system on the Space Station. So even on their eight day mission, they didn't have many personal possessions with them. So some have been sent up since, more will be sent up in supply missions and in the Dragon mission, which will now only carry two astronauts. There are going to be some difficult decisions made at NASA about which two astronauts get bumped off that mission. I wouldn't want to be in those meetings. So they are going to get some personal possessions. I imagine too, either in the Dragon Mission coming up or in a forthcoming supply mission, there are supply missions all the time. They'll also take up their presents for Christmas as well.
Chris - Have you interviewed or met the pair of them, having made hundreds of space programs and episodes of things like Space Boffins over the years. Have you had them on the program?
Richard - No. I've not interviewed Butch or Sunny, but I have been at a party with Sunny Williams. So I used to do the live launch commentaries for the European Space Agency when Soyuz flights launched with NASA astronauts or the European Space Agency astronauts to the International Space Stations. I was in Moscow mission control and she was one of the astronauts assigned there. So they always had astronauts there in the sort of support roles in Moscow. And so I was at a party with Sunny Williams. I can confirm she is lovely. Very chatty, great person. I mean, you know, the ideal companion on a space station.
26:16 - What would Earth look like with no Moon?
What would Earth look like with no Moon?
James - This question refers to the giant impact hypothesis, our best guess as to how our moon formed. It's the idea that the earth collided with another planet, which set both bodies on the path to their present trajectories, and we've been able to track down just the man who can help with your question. Dana Mackenzie is the author of 'The Big Splat, Or How our Moon came to be'. I asked him what Earth would've been like before the giant impact.
Dana - To be honest, James, we don't know much about the Earth before the impact because whatever was there before was totally scrambled. A lot of the impactor lunged into Earth, some of it was blown off into space and also a lot of Earth's mantle was churned up and thrown out. All this material made a disc sort of like the disc around Saturn, but much denser, much less stable. And so that disc rapidly coalesced and formed our Moon. And this was about four and a half billion years ago. What are some effects of the giant impact? So first of all, the length of our day 24 hours is governed by the Earth's rotation. That rotation rate was set by this giant impact. In fact, that impact was oblique and set the Earth spinning at about once every eight hours. So we had eight hour long days. Gradually over the billions of years since then, our days have slowed down to our present 24 hours. But it's fair to say that we would have slower days, even than that, if we had never had the giant impact. Another big effect of the impact is tides, because we have a Moon. Our Moon is larger relative to our planet than any other body in the solar system except for Pluto. So the moon has an outsized effect on our planet. A lot of people think that tide pools are where life evolved, the first life, and so possibly the Moon has given us life. In any case, it certainly gave us tides. Another interesting thing, the results from the impact is the Earth's tilt. So our planet is tilted by about 23 degrees, and that's what gives us our seasons. We might have had life without the Moon, but life would certainly have been different if we hadn't had seasons. Another important aspect of the having a Moon, having the giant impact is that the Moon actually stabilizes Earth's rotation. So over the millions of years, the axes tend to move around a little bit, and this moving around has been much more pronounced in Mars, for example. And so they've had much more dramatic climate swings. You know, our poles move a little bit, but not a lot, and that has perhaps contributed to the stability of Earth climate.
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