Program: Complex molecules in space – how they formed and how they got here

Robyn Williams: Hello, Robyn Williams with another science show and you may not know I've actually died three times. The first time in 1998 it was Dr. Norman Swan who revived me. Ten years ago it was my partner and ex-vet Dr. Jonica Newby who did the deed. Twice! This is why next time, the fourth, I don't want to come back as Spider Man. Here's why. 

Finally, why do some creatures, the female, eat the male?

Anastasia Shavrova: That's a really interesting question and it really depends on the species. So in spider species with a female is much, much larger than the male. What can happen is because she's so large, she's also really angry and therefore the male can anger her by giving a really bad mating display. So maybe he's just not very good at plucking the web and serenading her with it. She'll cannibalize him.

There are also times that because she's so big and her eyesight's not very good, the way that he walks on her web confuses her and tells her that this is actually prey, and she'll bam, go for it and eat him instead. And then there's other species of spiders in particular, where the male evolutionarily, in my opinion, has given up in evolution and just catapults directly into her fangs. 

And the only way that he wins in evolution is that because he catapults into her fangs and basically sacrifices his whole body for her, she will therefore use most of his sperm and therefore he gets to father most of the offspring. So there's a lot of different reasons why they can cannibalize, but these are my three funnest ones, I'd say.

Robyn Williams: One of the stars of the Beaker Street Science Festival, Anastasia Shavrova, who will be with us later in The Science Show. And yes, Beaker Street in Hobart every year is one of the greatest and liveliest science festivals in the world. But now we must chuck a uey and resume our habitual ultra-seriousness and muse for a while on broadcasting and how it's done. Should we be TikTok or should we be measured and sound like Jane Austen or Attenborough?

Given the public records on science awareness and attention spans, it may be time to rethink. This is the research province of Professor Steve Most of the University of New South Wales, ex-Harvard.

Steve Most: I'm a cognitive psychologist. My specialty is a line of research where we try to understand how the mind processes information. So how we pay attention, how we form memories. A lot of students, when they arrive at university and decide that they want to major in psychology, only have in mind that they want to be a clinical psychologist. And there's certainly a huge need for clinical psychologists out there in society. But they often don't realize just how large a field it is.

We have people who study social interactions who are called social psychologists. We have people who study health behaviours who are called health psychologists. And we have people who study how the mind processes information like me, who are called cognitive psychologists.

Robyn Williams: I work, of course, in the ABC. It's 50 years of doing The Science Show. And the changes have been to do with lots of things which listeners write in about. Some of them don't like the fact that so many programs have music underneath everything and the complaint is like that. And also the other detritus words, which I mainly cut out because it seems to me that they don't add to the conversation.

Are you aware of those sorts of things that the public is concerned about when it comes to understanding what, conversation or even broadcasting is about?

Steve Most: There is a vibrant field of research on cognitive load, which was actually spearheaded by a researcher at the University of New South Wales back in the early 80s on cognitive load theory. And it turns out that when you introduce a lot of extraneous features that don't directly support the message, then it can get in the way of understanding. And a lot of people will introduce decorations into their slides or asides that don't directly support the point and that can get in the way of understanding.

However, there's another line of research showing that when storytelling, for example, becomes particularly immersive, that this has a special power. People lose track of time. They really get involved in processing the message.

Robyn Williams: It's got an arc. You start at the beginning and then the dragon turns up and it's kind of resolved or goes wrong.

Steve Most: Well, sure. And I would imagine that anything like a sound effect that increases the sense of immersion that directly supports the point or directly contributes to the message can have a beneficial effect to how people are processing the underlying message of the story. But again, I mean, I think it's going to come down to personal preference. I don't think that research suggests that one is necessarily better than the other.

Robyn Williams: Except there are so many articles, and I saw four last week, some of them about numeracy, and I think one-and-a-half million people, young people, can't do numbers and can't read properly. And when you've got that sort of thing in addition to the worries about mental state, because when you've got scrolling and when I'm going on the bus, rather like Holbein, I'm looking at faces, I'm interested in looking around. People's faces are the most interesting thing, everyone else is on their device. And that surely can be a problem.

Steve Most: There's certainly a huge line of work looking at how attention is hijacked, for lack of a better word, by modern technology. We attention researchers have known for a long time that there are differences, that we use this word attention as an umbrella term, but really there are many different aspects of attention. There's the kind of attention that we can sustain and direct voluntarily. We can decide we want to pay attention to something and really focus on that for long time. But attention can shift involuntarily. If a loud bang were to go off, all of a sudden you snap out of it, and that's adaptive. Sometimes these loud sounds signal that something important is going on and you need to interrupt what you're doing. 

But it turns out that these aspects of attention are sometimes in competition with each other. We're trying to focus on one thing, whereas things that command or hijack our attention are competing for our priority. And the industry, computer programmers, app developers have gotten better and better at hacking the reward processing in the brain. Things that are just going to command our attention involuntarily, things that have strong emotional appeal, for example, will command our attention without our necessarily wanting them to.

Robyn Williams: And of course the real test, the evidence is does it work in terms of learning, terms of academic performance and all the indicators you see in the papers every day, newspapers, well if you read newspapers, indicate that the standards are going down and the mental health is not what it should be.

Steve Most: Yeah, that's something that people have been looking at, taking a look, for example, at media multitaskers. These days, people are often trying to do many different things on their devices at a time. And people have taken a look at people who do a lot of heavy media multitasking versus light. And you can separate the consequences into at least two different kinds of camps. 

How does that impact our ability to process a lesson, for example, in the moment? And you can take a look at does chronic multimedia multitasking lead to long-term reductions in our ability to pay attention? 

So there's pretty robust evidence that when you're multitasking, this interferes with your ability to process what's in front of you in the moment. There was a study that came out, I think, in 2013 where people were given a multimedia task to do on a laptop during a lesson. And as you might imagine, they did worse on a later test of their understanding of the lesson. But what was particularly striking was that other students, they couldn’t see the computer screen, even though they weren't doing the multitasking, they also suffered. So there is work showing that the degree to which our attention is absorbed in an ongoing multimedia task interferes with our ability to process, to think critically, to remember stuff that's in front of us at the moment. 

Now in terms of its chronic lasting effect, there is some evidence that people who are heavy media multitaskers perform worse on measures of attentional control, working memory, but that evidence is less robust and it's still in its early stages of just trying to get a sense of how strong those effects are.

Robyn Williams: Well, here we are, a problem for people in communication such as I am. There's been a bit of a revolution in that many broadcasters say that focus groups, when asked what they don't like, sometimes say they don't like scripted talks. Now, we used to have a situation where I invented Ockham's Razor, which was a scripted talk for the population in Australia. 

Wherever you were you could join in by writing a couple of thousand words or fewer. And you would, with a nice voice and certain amount of coaching, go to the local ABC or even talk on your phone and record it. That way you've got a distilled and thoughtful and somehow intimate talk that a person can listen to. But in these focus groups, people say, it sounds like a lecture, we don't like that. So have you come across that disjunction?

Steve Most: I’ve not. I teach a class on psychology behind giving effective presentations and it's just a really fun class to watch the students put together their own presentations. And one of the things that we talk about is the psychology of establishing a sense of interpersonal connection between the speaker and the audience. And this isn't something that's new in psychology. This is something that extends way back to Aristotle's book, Rhetoric, talking about a sense of ethos of the speaker and their relationship with the audience. 

I can understand what the audience might be thinking in terms of if you're giving a scripted talk, there might be less of an opportunity to engage interpersonally or to get a sense of feeling like you get to know the speaker. But I don't think that's inevitable. You can develop scripted talks that still give a sense of connection, that give a sense of where the speaker is coming from. And in fact, that's something that a lot of us face when we're giving lectures, we’re in front of the classroom, and although we do try, or I try to build in a lot of interaction, even in my large lectures, you're still there in front of the classroom. But I think the key is to show your own enthusiasm, to wear it on your sleeve, to connect as a person so that the students connect to the material through you. 

So I don't think that having a scripted talk is a recipe against forming a connection with the audience.

Robyn Williams: Just do it well. 

Steve Most: Just do it well and be mindful of the importance of not just communicating the information that's on the slide but putting some of yourself in there and some of your emotional connection to the material. And that's going to help your class.

Robyn Williams: The only trouble is that if I say, it's been so successful and at one stage Ockham's Razor the scripted talk was the top rating program on Radio National. And the head of Radio National, a young man, was terribly excited and we had a chat about it and we very pleased because from my point of view, it enables you to find new voices saying fresh things from different parts of the country or even if someone from say Harvard gets in touch and it's been known to happen, could you write me these words and talk into your phone and send it to me? 

There you've got another item from the highest kind of level of expertise and we don't do that anymore because there's a resistance. So you are now management person in charge of me and you want me to plan for the future, what would you say?

Steve Most: I think there is a lot of hand wringing about whether the rise of TikTok and YouTube shorts has decreased our ability to maintain attention for a long time, that students and the audience and the general public, for example, just have a harder time, are less enthusiastic about long form journalism and messages. Books like Stolen Focus suggest that this environment has reduced our ability to pay attention.

But I that there's also a question of has it really reduced our ability to pay attention or has the marketplace changed? There's more competition, for example, from these sort of rewarding sound bites on TikTok that may do a better job hacking into our limited cognitive resources. We have a decision. Are we going to pay attention to this short rewarding clip or a longer thing that has longer-term rewards, but those rewards aren't necessarily apparent right away. 

And so I don't know if it's right to say that we now have a reduced ability as a society to pay attention long term. In fact, I was reading this fantastic article in The New Yorker from January. The author's name is Daniel Immerwahr. He's a historian, not a psychologist, but he was talking about this, are we doing too much hand wringing over this attention crisis? And he says, well, it's not that people aren't paying attention anymore. They're choosing to pay attention to different things. 

One of the biggest hits in the video game industry takes 75 hours to complete, which is longer than Wagner's Ring Cycle, right? So people can pay attention for a long time, but they're choosing to pay attention to different things. And that just might be because of the competition is different in the attention.

Robyn Williams: And you keep being interrupted! 

Steve Most: That's right. Yeah, so there's less opportunity to engage in sustained deep processing. And the question is, if you have more of a time to engage in the deep processing, are people going to self-sabotage in a way, turning to their phones by their own volition because their reward system has just been so primed to get these little doses of reward.

Robyn Williams: Steve Most, Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales via Harvard. And back to that scripted talk argument just then. I know there are as many varieties of prose writing as perhaps there are people. However, here is an example of a regular we have on The Science Show, former Professor of Botany, Dr Peter Bernhardt of St Louis, Missouri, who this time is thinking about spring in his customary, irascible manner.

Now our Australian spring is still a few weeks to go, but there are similarities. Peter.

Peter Bernhardt: An early spring in St. Louis means early tornados, so we watch local television stations as they track advancing storms for hours. They always do an excellent job addressing potential disasters but sometimes they contradict themselves when addressing some of our smaller and natural problems. 

For example, last week a local station decided to warn us that our early spring also meant an earlier bloom cycle and there were higher counts of pollen in city air especially on windy days. Advice from an urban allergist came with footage of flowering magnolias and forsythia bushes shaking their branches at the edges of a park. This wasn’t right at all. 

I went to YouTube to see if the same station posted the piece as a video? It did. I ran the video, hit the thumbs down icon and wrote the following in the comments section.

“The footage in this video does not match the information. Magnolias and forsythias are insect- pollinated. Their pollen grains are large, heavy and coated with an oily substance, pollenkitt, so they cling to each other or to bee hairs. The pollen of grasses and larger canopy trees - oaks, elms, cottonwoods, hickories etc. - is mass-produced, smaller, drier and built to ride on the wind. Air-borne pollen is not especially problematic on windy days as it is whipped up into the troposphere and drifts down miles away. It is most irritating on warm and still days when it lingers in the air.” 

With additional investigation on YouTube, I found that high pollen levels were also recent concerns of other television stations in western states. Their footage implicated innocent cherry blossoms, tulips, dogwoods and even seeding dandelion clocks, which are devoid of pollen. All this does is scare asthmatic Americans and it’s comparable to warning Australians of a suburban black snake invasion while showing a video of eels swimming up the Yarra. 

Why am I such a vigilante? Blame the School of Botany at Melbourne University back in 1977. That’s when I arrived to do my PhD and the late, great Professor Bruce Knox made space for me in his lab to learn microscopy. He received funding to study how and when pollen grains released their allergens. Bruce explained that, in Australia, the real culprits were the grains of European grasses blowing into cities from paddocks and some species, like ryegrass (Lolium) bloomed up to twice a year, releasing their pollen at dawn. Native trees and shrubs were of little concern as dominant eucalypts, ti-trees and banksias make big, sticky grains and are pollinated by birds, small marsupials and insects. Allergies to winter blooming wattles are a myth. Wattle grains link together until they resemble a thick tray of buns eaten by bees, beetles and hoverflies but wattles bloom at the same time as wind-pollinated, European trees planted along streets.

Bruce wanted young people to know what pollen is, what it contains and what it does to people. By 1979, Edward Arnold Publishers in London published his booklet “Pollen & Allergy.” It was aimed at high school students considering careers in Biology. I recommend it if you can find a copy, as it’s only 64 pages in length and contains diagrams and simple graphs of the movement of air currents containing pollen, hourly pollen counts over a day and a pollen calendar from Holland showing the months when grains of different weeds and trees peak. I made it required, reading material for my American undergraduates for over 25 years. Bruce noted that if a breeze lifted ryegrass pollen a meter in height while the wind blew at 10 knots it could travel over half a kilometre provided there was little turbulence. And so, an uneaten particle of a sheep’s breakfast irritates your nose while you wait for the lights to change on Main Street. 

Oh, don’t bother looking for that video on YouTube. It vanished less than 48 hours after I added my comments. Draw your own conclusions.  Now, what about those pollen videos posted by television stations in other states? Today Missouri… tomorrow Oklahoma! 

Robyn Williams: And maybe the next day, Oodnadatta or Freo!  The exasperated Peter Bernhardt in St Louis, Missouri, fondly recalling his Melbourne training. And staying with IT and tech, I saw a full-page report in The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday with the latest Elon Musk horror, an AI service called Spicy Mode, allowing you to take a photo of someone, anyone, and turn it into porn. And the paper commented, ‘We are now so used to this behaviour from Musk, it barely registers.’ 

Well, you may remember a different suggestion for AI we broadcast earlier this year from Caltech and a professor, Pietro Perona, doing frontline research on AI for education. Just a thought experiment, I've mentioned on The Science Show a few times, Project Grad Grind, named after Charles Dickens' rather severe teacher, and you've got a situation in many countries not least in Australia, where it is impossible to do in many classes the necessary work because the pupils are not prepared. 

Is there a way, not substituting for the teacher, but in fact bringing the pupil in a sort of learning game with an AI question and answer situation before you go to school so that you go through what's next in the curriculum or in the teaching procedures with a dialogue with this machine which asks you whether you've learned various things so that you can be put through a Q &A and it can be done in a way that adapts to the pupil so that it's interesting and friendly.

Pietro Perona: Yes, so this is definitely a worthwhile pursuit. And I want to be clear about a couple of aspects because it has many elements that need to be considered. So one is it's true that since the 1850s, society has seen that we have to train everyone to the maximum of their potential because the wealth of nations nowadays is in knowledge, the people's knowledge and not in oil or farming. So we have massified education since the 1850s and we have taken groups of 30 pupils and putting a classroom in front of one teacher. 

Now this is a very unnatural situation and it's difficult for pupils to pay attention to one teacher when there are lots of other kids around. So having individualized learning that is affordable, a little bit like nobleman used to get in the 1700s where they would have a tutor, personal tutor that would follow them or how Plato used to teach his students one on one, that would be amazing and certainly technology can help a lot. 

So now let's think about what are the challenges in getting there. And so one challenge is of content. How do we get an AI system to know all the things it has to know in order to be able to teach them? And how do we know that it knows them well? And so that's not a huge challenge for settled fields like mathematics or the foundations of physics and chemistry. We know exactly what to teach and what are the concepts.

But as we know, human knowledge evolves very fast. So systematizing fields that are not yet settled is going to be difficult for humans. It is difficult for machines as well. So that's one challenge. The second challenge is, as you said, you want to personalize education so that the machine should know what each student knows and doesn't know. How do you do it? It turns out that this is reasonably easy in mathematics and not so easy in, for example, how do I teach someone to recognize birds? OK, so there are reasons for that. 

The third challenge is one of motivation. And the question is, a pupil has many interests and many impulses. Attention may go here and there. Can you build an experience which is as engaging as the one of interacting with an adult person who the student trusts and respects?

And so this is driven to my attention every day by my wife, who is a professor of mathematics. And she's very sceptical that it can automate teaching of mathematics for the majority of the kids who go to school and who are not particularly interested in the subject and only having a very meaningful, emotionally satisfying contact with the teacher, you can get that. And so could the machine reproduce this kind of experience? And so that's a third challenge.

Robyn Williams: Is anyone doing anything about it now that you know of in America? You know, to any level? Everyday teaching?

Pietro Perona: So historically, there have been teams working on this. So there is a team at Irvine, University of California at Irvine, for example, that has thought of how to systematize the teaching of mathematics and have demonstrated that indeed it doesn't take much for a machine asking questions to get to the point that it knows exactly what the pupil knows and doesn't know. Now, one of my students, Nihar Kondapaneni, together with a professor at the University of Edinburgh, Oisin Mac Aodha, is looking at the question of how to systematize teaching of visual concepts, how a machine that may be very good at recognizing birds or skin disease or radiology, how can a machine that knows this can estimate what a human knows and doesn't know and present the next most interesting piece of evidence so that that person is both challenged but not overwhelmed and can learn a new concept as quickly as possible. And so there are partial results, of course.

Robyn Williams: Pietro Perona at Caltech. And since that was broadcast just weeks ago, the AI venture in the classroom has really taken off. There's no difficulty briefing the machine what to prepare because there is a clear and regular curriculum. And AI experts at the University of New South Wales and Sydney assure me interactions with students are straightforward. Just look at 7.30's report on ABC television. All about AI in the classroom. That was just a few days ago.

Given the huge amount of AI costs and energy to run, why not concentrate on education, supporting teachers instead of Musk's spicy mode or silly games? The Science Show on Radio National.

Well, last week we left you in Cambridge dangling with an unanswered question about asteroids and how they can be packed with goodies, having come from a rather deprived remote part of the galaxy. Well, fear not, here's Chris Smith with Sara Russell and the solution. 

Chris Smith: The Earth didn't have it. You've argued that it was hot and a horrible environment here to start with, which would have boiled off a lot of this stuff. But where did the original chemicals come from, or how did they come into existence that are aboard asteroids like Bennu?

Sara Russell: So we think that Bennu's parent body formed right in the outermost part of the Solar System. So there it didn't get heated by the young Sun. It would have stayed very, very cold. And so it was really rich in these volatile elements that are actually very abundant in the universe. So going back to the work on nuclear synthesis, so the most common elements in the universe are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen.

And so these are really important elements in Bennu as well. So it accreted from this very primordial material and it wasn't boiled off like it was in the innermost part of the Solar System. But then we think Bennu in its early history probably had pods of water, salty water, and these would have been fantastic environments to make more sophisticated organic molecules like the amino acids, for example, may have formed inside this parent body itself. And so all of these wonderful ingredients for life were being cooked up in Bennu's parent body, not just Bennu, but also loads of other small bodies around the Solar System as well. So these sorts of environments were likely very common in the outermost part of the Solar System. And all it needed was some mechanism to eject them to the inner solar system and from there to hit all of the inner planets.

Chris Smith: This is really intriguing then, so we end up with the Earth being a potential home, but it's not ideal and it hasn't got things really that it can use to kickstart life yet. But in a much more propitious environment, way out in space, it's much colder. You've got all the raw materials there and they're in a body which can cook them up like a pressure cooker out in space. And then they're conveniently dislodged and chucked at the Earth by other bigger planets jockeying for position and that brings these molecules that have been cooked out in deep space to Earth where they can potentially trigger life processes.

Sara Russell: It sounds almost fantastical when you say it, but it makes sense that the outer Solar System would have been this environment full of all of these really important molecules. The planet migration, we think, may happen on exoplanets as well. So that means that potentially these processes are not just limited to our Solar System. They may be universal processes that are found, we may discover, on exoplanets as well.

Chris Smith: Did asteroids like Bennu have a heat source then? Because some of this chemistry can't ever happen to make these exotic molecules at the really low temperatures that are out there. It must have needed some heat. So where would that come from?

Sara Russell: Yeah, so there were some radioactive isotopes around in the early solar system. So probably the most significant example is Aluminium 26. So this is a radioactive isotope with a half-life of just three-quarters-of-a-million years. And this was around in the early Solar System. And it could have provided enough heat for asteroids like Bennu to heat up enough, at least to make liquid water.

Chris Smith: And if this chemistry was happening in the outer Solar System and then these things were being delivered inwards to planets like the Earth, that adds enormous credence then to the idea that there may have been life processes on Mars as well, because it wasn't just some chance roll of the dice here on Earth. These things were raining in on multiple planets and if the conditions were right, they could kickstart life processes.

Sara Russell: Yes, I think that's something that the rest of the mission team and I are really believing, that there's nothing particularly special about Bennu. It is a fairly ordinary asteroid and we found all of these amazing things in Bennu and that means there's probably loads of asteroids like that and they would have impacted not only the Earth but all the other inner planets as well. And yes, of course Mars is a particularly target of interest because in its early history it would have been warmer and wetter, so it's very likely that these could have equally kick-started life on Mars.

Chris Smith: When that sample arrived on your desk, what was that moment like? Because you think that's come from deep space, this bit of Bennu. Presumably you're very careful with that. You don't want to drop that. But what's it look like? And how much of it have you actually got to play with?

Sara Russell: So yeah, it was an incredibly exciting moment to get the sample in our lab. It's been a long time coming, so I've been part of this mission since 2013 and I was there to watch it launch, which was in 2016, so we've been waiting such a long time. What we actually got was a teaspoonful, basically, of little black grains. So probably not very much to look at, to be honest, but still incredibly exciting.

Chris Smith: I wonder what Colin Pillinger would have made of it.

Sara Russell: Yeah, he would have loved this mission. He would really have loved this mission. He would have loved everything that's happening in planetary science at the moment, including the exploration of Mars and the potential to get samples back from Mars as well. He would be blown away by what's going on at the moment in planetary science.

Chris Smith: He was one of the first guests we had in The Naked Scientists when we actually started the program and he was going to launch Beagle and we actually had him on the program to talk about it. It's very nice to have talked to him.

Sara Russell: Hey, that's brilliant. Yeah, he was an incredibly inspiring person. I mean, he really kickstarted my career and that of many, many of my colleagues as well. He really had an incredible effect on the planetary science community in the UK.

Chris Smith: I remember him famously saying to us, he's a scientist know a lot more about art than artists know about science. I think he was a bit sniffy about his science, but he was a lovely chap. But when you're not thinking about asteroids, what do you do to unwind? Because when you've been on a project like this and it's so intense and it's been so exciting, do you not have the bit like David Cameron said when he stopped being prime minister, he used a swear word and said, I'm bored SH1T-less and he found it really hard to unwind. Do you have that?

Sara Russell: I honestly never find it hard to unwind. yeah, would, you know, I'm happy to have a good book, cat on my knee. Also with my family, we go out hiking and yeah, we just love traveling and exploring the world.

Chris Smith: I bet you have busman's holiday though because whenever I go anywhere I find myself drawn to the geology and I'm always looking at the geology. I can't just look at nature I have to see the geology or the biology at work when I'm there.

Sara Russell: Absolutely. We went on holiday to Iceland last summer and that is a geologist’s paradise. Everywhere you look, you see some incredible geological formation. Yeah, it's impossible not to be a geologist if you're there.

Chris Smith: Amazing stuff. Sarah Russell, thank you very much, our Titan of Science. 

Robyn Williams: Chris Smith in Cambridge, hosting our sister program, The Naked Scientists on Radio National. That's 10pm on Fridays and online. And yes, in this 50-year span of The Science Show, there are indeed plenty of female titans in research. And we saw several at the Beaker Street Festival in Hobart last weekend. First, let me introduce Anna-Zoë Herr from Heidelberg in Germany.

Robyn Williams: So how did Heidelberg inspire you to come to Tasmania?

Anna-Zoë Herr: Heidelberg didn't inspire me to come to Tasmania. I actually have had a fascination with Antarctica for the past 15 years and I have always loved thinking about the environment, thinking about ecology but from a different perspective, so from the humanities, from the arts or social sciences and that has gone through my life, connecting a focus and a vision of ecology but from a very different perspective.

Robyn Williams: How people behave in connection with the landscape and how they did so in old times and present. Do you cover lots of history?

Anna-Zoë Herr: I have been looking at narratives a lot, at feelings, especially when it comes to communication of crisis. And the most important crisis that we're talking about is the climate crisis, which most people don't really understand, but some people do a little bit. And what's interesting about that is the majority of society is not involved in climate science. 

So we all rely on information from people who actually do the studying and who go to places like Antarctica and who go and do the ice core research. And all that we get as an information is their communication about it. And this aspect of the communication is what I'm interested in because that's where the arts come in, that's where the social sciences come in, the humanities, and whenever we think about global problems, it's so important to think about them as a holistic problem. 

So we have people that study Antarctica, for example, and then we have people that study how do we communicate that, how can we bring solid, reliable information to the public, how can we not discourage the public so that people feel activated. Those are all questions that make more sense in the social sciences and that combination is really important.

Robyn Williams: As we're in Hadley's Hotel in Hobart, downstairs is a very big picture featuring the great writer H.G. Wells, who came here in the late 1930s and he said, looking around, that for the indigenous people, when the Europeans turned up in their amazing big ships with all their apparatus, not to say guns he said it must have been a bit like the Martians landing from outer space. And that's when he had the inspiration to write the book, which became a series on television called War of the Worlds. And that sort of interaction of what we're dealing with is something that is really so sort of cosmic. So what has been your conclusion in doing your studies about how people can understand more effectively what the information is about?

Anna-Zoë Herr: I love that question and something that has really honed in my studies, the focus that I have developed is on hope and looking at how narratives actually shape our affect towards something. So affect is like the emotions we have, not just singularity, but also collectively how we feel towards something. So I'm currently looking at the role of hope in feeling active towards something and also the role of fear towards something. 

And the majority of the climate communication that we've had so far has been quite paralysing. It has created a lot of fear. And I also don't discount the role of fear in that.

We actually need fear often to wake up, but over a long period of time, fear actually paralyses us. So we need something else. We need a vision to work towards. And what I'm currently looking at is what can wonder do? What can awe do? Courage? What are all of these aspects of maintaining hope in a quite hopeless situation that we're in?

Robyn Williams: And you think Tasmania is different in that regard as community?

Anna-Zoë Herr: People have to see, I don't think it will be that different, but it is interesting to work with people who research a field that is so relevant to the public, which is the polar ice caps, but so inaccessible at the same time. So the only thing that we get from that is the communication about it. There's no other way. And so it really creates a space in which it's quite easy and quite accessible for me to research.

Robyn Williams: You're not tempted to go down there because there are ships from here. You can see them in the waterfront who go down into the ice.

Anna-Zoë Herr: I really would love to go down and also follow the Antarctic scientists and see how they actually work in the field. But so far that hasn't come about. But if you know anyone!

Robyn Williams: I do actually. Someone who used to be in the ABC TV science program Catalyst working with the Antarctic Division here and he was instrumental in bringing the new ship from the north where it was actually made to be quite large there on the waterfront. Have you talked to Bob Brown at all? He's quite well known here.

Anna-Zoë Herr: No, no, not yet. I just arrived. 

Robyn Williams: When did you arrive?

Anna-Zoë Herr: Four days ago. 

Robyn Williams: From where?

Anna-Zoë Herr: Germany.

Robyn Williams: So you're living in Berlin and you speak perfect English. Mind you, lots of Germans and Austrians do, don't they?

Anna-Zoë Herr: I did study in the US, so I have that advantage. I do think when people start listening more attentively to my English, will hear the German accent.

Robyn Williams: So what do you think about the American politics now that so much is signing off from any particular activity connected with climate change and prudence?

Anna-Zoë Herr: I think I have two ways of thinking about it and holding that at the same time. I think it's quite devastating. It's absolutely devastating to all productions of knowledge, all systems that create art, spaces of real deep thinking and visions. And at the same time, I'm wondering if this is a catalyst into kind of a new world order. I don't really know. I'm just hoping, I have this hope, that this crisis will bring about something new that will also have something fruitful.

Robyn Williams: Do you know there's one way of doing politics and that is to ignore the difficult questions and just deny them? It's very simple, you just say no.

Anna-Zoë Herr: Right, I'm not sure if that is the best way to go about it. Just for everyone to know, as far as my research has shown, hope is not something that ignores at all what is in front. It actually is created through the crisis and by facing what is in front. And optimism is what says, I hope in a way that climate change doesn't exist. But that's an optimistic viewpoint that says, I don't really need to work towards something. Hope needs us to work, needs us to have a vision, it needs us to be active, to get engaged with whatever it is.

Robyn Williams: No, I thought denial is more of a very simple, lazy political attitude. You just say, nah, hoax! And walk away.

Anna-Zoë Herr: Yeah of course, it also takes a lot of energy to get engaged and to feel this frustrated all the time and you feel like you don't have power or you don't have a voice.

Robyn Williams: Because I think there's at least 200 years of experimental evidence showing in its many forms how in fact climate is changing dramatically. And when you see, I've seen the recent news from the Mediterranean around Spain and Greece and so on, it's just gigantic, let alone the other sorts of things that are happening where we are, where you've got cold winds coming by paradox. There's more energy and so you get the freezing effect as well. The freezing and the burning at the same time.

Anna-Zoë Herr: It's confusing to people that don't fully understand the science behind it because sometimes things can actually become colder when everyone's talking about global warming and it's important that we have constant information accessible to people as well to understand whatever is going on right now.

Robyn Williams: And finally, what made you come to the Beaker Street Festival?

Anna-Zoë Herr: I came as a guest researcher to the University of Tasmania and I saw that this Beaker Street Festival is going on and someone alerted me to it. So I asked them if I could research the Beaker Street Festival and they actually found out that what I'm researching invited me to present my research as the roving and artisan as well. 

Robyn Williams: Thank you. 

Anna-Zoë Herr: Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Anna-Zoë Herr at the Beaker Street Festival on the weekend in Hobart. And I note that Trump's cuts to NASA have led to the decommissioning of two satellites which measure greenhouse gases. And those satellites are essential for the monitoring of climate data. That's the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. Cheerio to that. But hello to another of the stars of Beaker Street, Anastasia Shavrova from the University of New South Wales. She of the cannibalistic lovers we heard at the beginning of the program. Here she is again, another roving scientist.

Anastasia Shavrova: So was born and raised in Russia and then I immigrated into Canada where I did my uni and masters. 

Robyn Williams: In what?

Anastasia Shavrova: In animal behaviour and my masters was in the reproduction of different kinds of manipulative sperm.

Robyn Williams: Do the sperm manipulate?

Anastasia Shavrova: Very much so, yes. The sperm itself doesn't, but all of the stuff that comes with the sperm, they're called sperm proteins. They are so manipulative. They can make the female smell less attractive to other males. They can make the female just uninterested in having sex altogether. They can make the female want to eat more so that she feeds herself and therefore her offspring. A lot of this happens in animals. We're not sure exactly how it happens in humans, but we're talking mice, rats, a lot of invertebrates, super manipulative sperm.

Robyn Williams: But the sperm are too little, surely, to have an influence. You're saying it's coming with the proteins though.

Robyn Williams: Well, in some cases in mice, what happens is some sperm develop hooks so that they hook up to the good sperm to actually help guide it to the egg. And what they'll do is they'll fight other sperm, competitor male sperm, they'll fight it to make sure that their sperm is actually the sperm that gets to the egg. It's a whole big race inside the uterus.

Robyn Williams: So do you watch that on some great big blow up of the microscope or something?

Anastasia Shavrova: Yeah, you can actually inject the sperm with light, with very specific light-up proteins, and then you can have red sperm versus green sperm, and you can actually watch it happen.

Robyn Williams: And how did you get the clues that this was going on in the first place?

Anastasia Shavrova: I specifically, I worked in Drosophila melanogaster or fruit flies, which you say small, but they have the biggest sperm in the world in proportion to their body size. Their sperm is eight times their body size, which because it's so big, they don't make a lot of it. But their sperm is actually quite manipulative for that female. She's unattractive to other males. So they try to do whatever they can to make sure that she never mates again. It's only his sperm that can fertilize the eggs.

Robyn Williams: You're putting forward an idea that the encounter sexually in the animal kingdom can be pretty rough stuff.

Anastasia Shavrova: Yes, actually, most of the time, reproduction and mating has more of a dark side than it does a light side. So one of the big misconceptions that people have is that birds are monogamous. Birds are actually socially monogamous, meaning that the male and the female will raise the chicks together. But almost all birds cheat, and almost all males get, therefore, cuckolded which means that another male has fertilized some of those eggs and therefore that male is raising offspring that are not all his.

Robyn Williams: And I gather this is the case that when this happens with lions, the successor lion, the non-cuckold, eats the offspring that came before.

Anastasia Shavrova: That's exactly right. It's a very extreme form of cannibalism called infanticide, where they kill off the juveniles that are not related to him so that it makes the female go into heat so that he can mate with her right away.

Robyn Williams: Do you have a serene time doing this sort of study or do you feel more bleak about the world in general?

Anastasia Shavrova: Honestly, I find it really exciting because it's almost, you know, watching those like drama reality TV shows, but in animals and in real life. It's fascinating. And you find out really cool things, sometimes even accidentally.

Robyn Williams: Well I had the impression, especially when watching galahs as we speak this time of year, going at it in the most casual way, you know, there's a bit of a nibble on the neck and they get quite close together rubbing shoulders. Next thing you know, one's on top of the other and bingo. So it seems to be fairly straightforward. Is it 90 % straightforward and only 10 % rough stuff?

Anastasia Shavrova: Honestly, I'd actually say it's the other way around. It's 90 % not straightforward and 10 % straightforward. There's so many nuances to the reproductive life in the animal kingdom. And it was something that when an undergrad, I honestly thought it was 90 % straightforward. And then the more I started to delve in the research, the more I realized it was the other way around. And that's why I wanted to explore that 90 % that was not straightforward.

Robyn Williams: What do you think the evolutionary significance of that is?

Anastasia Shavrova: Ooh, interesting question. So you know how natural selection is the idea of escaping predators? Well, sexual selection is to gain as much selfish genes as you can. So the female wants the best quality offspring and the best dads and some of the best sperm. And the males sometimes want the prettiest females or the ones with the most luscious egg, and all of them really have the same goal of reproduction. So because they're all fighting for the same goal, but they're actually really selfish at the same time, is why sexual selection comes about.

Robyn Williams: May I give you a contrary example to that? Because in my own zoology degree, my Oxford-trained lecturer talked about something called the sneaky fucker strategy. In other words, why is it that so many of the stags aren't the biggest with the hugest horns, with the biggest shoulders and brutishness and so on? And the point is that when the biggest stags are fighting each other. The younger stag notices this, goes oi to one of the does and sneakily, haha, you’ve heard of that?

Anastasia Shavrova: I have heard of that and it happens all the time because things like weapons and being big is very, very energetically costly. And you can't always be the biggest male. So you always have to find a different way to attract a female. And sometimes it is sneaking. One of my favourite stories that I read in a scientific paper, I believe it was published in like the 1970s, was a scientist discovering that horn beetles actually have a very sneaking behaviour and it's very cute the way that he describes it. Basically, he sees a male with a female in a tunnel and the male is the biggest male. He's the sexiest male and the female's super excited to have him. And then all of a sudden he sees another male digging a tunnel behind her, releasing his sperm on her eggs and then sneaking right out. The other male never even knew. It’s so fascinating. It's just incredible. It's just a rom-com all the time in the animal kingdom.

Robyn Williams: It's quite interesting, there was a conference a long time ago in Germany, yes indeed, and various people, including the ones I mentioned just before, were putting forward some sort of paper and they thought, well, we have to be fairly discreet. And so in German, what we're going to say is something about encountering observation, minimalization strategy. And they sent that off. And there came a reply from the organizers, the German. And it said please explain what do you mean by this? It's very obscure. And they tried to explain it and then the German said, oh, you mean sneaky fucker.

Anastasia Shavrova: (laughs) I like that I'm gonna start using that in my manuscripts.

Robyn Williams: It’s true.

Anastasia Shavrova: It is, it is. Yeah, like, listen, that's exactly what happens. Yeah, they can't invest in the big size or the weaponry. They have to find a different tactic. They still want to mate. So they're gonna do whatever they can. 

Robyn Williams: Good luck, thank you.

Anastasia Shavrova: Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Anastasia Shavrova, University of New South Wales, at the Beaker Street Festival in Hobart. Next week on The Science Show, our program turns 50. Production by David Fisher. I'm Robyn Williams.