Cheaper hydrogen, marine invertebrates and European wasps threaten biodiversity
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ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. There's something paradoxical about the science show this week. An upside down jellyfish, an Oxford team obsessed with BO, wasps beheading other insects and advice, you'll need this, on how to survive being in a black hole. Get ready. MUSIC

Hello, I'm Robin Williams and here's another paradox. The Royal Society of London, after 400 years of existence, has still not elected a woman as its president. Instead, a different initiative. They've just, for the first time in history, reappointed a former president.

The good news, he's a brilliant scientist, a poor nurse and human being. A very natural leader, able through flexibility and openness to get the very best from people. Here's how I met him in 2016.

And so we go to a brand new billion-dollar scientific institute, the Francis Crick. I'm carrying a bottle of the world's oldest beer from the museum in Launceston, Tasmania, and going to see Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, former president of the Royal Society of London and head of the Crick.

Well, Robin, you are one of our first guests, and I think possibly our first media guest, although we have plenty more in the next few days. We've only been in occupation for two weeks. We've moved 500 people in. We have about another 800, 900 to go eventually. So at the moment, we have about 20% of our research activity. My lab was the first to move in, which is only two weeks ago, and we are already doing experiments.

It is a glorious building right next to St Pancras Station if you want to have a look at the outside. It's fairly secure to get in. It's a wonderful new concept of

of how people can work together, old and young, and really interact, isn't it? We've really focused a lot on that. So the design of the building is really aimed at making people accidentally meet each other and have those chance conversations. The labs and the offices are in the arms of a chromosome, and the chromosome, of course, is joined in

in the middle by a centromere and all the interaction space is in the centromere. We only have three major experimental floors so it's horizontally designed rather than vertically designed because lifts or elevators get in the way of interaction. Although by the way it's quite

difficult to get into the research activities here. We have a very open public space, which is open to the local community, where we'll have lectures and availability for exhibitions and so on. So it is probably the most open research institution I know, at least in that front part of the building. Well, I can tell you, Sir Paul Nurse, it's a glorious building. Your own office is slightly bigger than a cupboard.

But you're in the corridor saying hello to people all the time, and it's not just an occasional thing. Now, two reasons I've come to you. One of them is to open the world's oldest beer, as displayed on the TV programme Catalyst, made from the wreckage, really, of the Sydney Cove on Preservation Island in what was eventually named Bass Strait. Victoria and Bass Strait hadn't been named yet because it's about 220-odd years ago.

Now, this was made from two strains of yeast which were found in bottles. And there is some discussion about whether the yeast can live that long or whether slight contamination could have got in. However, the scientists love debating these things. In any case, here is this what's called shipwreck beer or preservation beer. And I think there are two bottles in the world and I'm about to open some.

Ah, wasn't that sweet and gentle? And I'm pouring you, or just have a tiny bit, because it's only 9.30 in the morning. I'm tremendously excited by this. I've worked on yeast for nearly 40 years. I've occasionally made beer with the yeast I work on, which is called fission yeast, and it is pretty dreadful stuff that it makes.

But the idea of possibly drinking the oldest beer known to humankind is extraordinarily exciting. So, cheers! Now, this is quite an interesting taste. I'm rather a beer connoisseur coming from England, of course.

And it has an interesting taste and even an aftertaste. And what I like about it is it's not a lager beer. No, no, of course. It's a real ale. Of course it's not a lager beer. This is an ale and it has character. I could say ancient character, perhaps. I'm going to have another sip. And so will I.

and let's just host my program is 41 years today so we've been doing it for an awful long time this is amazing we have to congratulate robin 41 years running this program since the mid 70s always has something interesting to say always excited and how he's kept it up for 41 years is quite beyond me you are kind well the beer helps i can tell you that but

Do you have any doubts about the fact that yeast can survive over 200 years? Of course, it was preserved underwater where there was some sort of protection from the overlying silt and seagrasses and such like.

which kept it at a fairly constant temperature. I could imagine yeast surviving 200 years, I really could. I have recovered in my lifetime yeasts that have been around for 40, 50 years because that, I'm afraid to say, even includes the same yeasts that I stored 40 years ago when I started on my own research projects. So although there is significant lethality over such a period of time...

I think going back to 200 years is not only possible, but even likely, because I think once you've got down to a sort of residual survivors, they are likely to survive a long time. So I'm inclined to believe it. Excellent. Well, the real test is going to be when they go back to Preservation Island and look at the Sydney Cove and dig down and with any luck find some more bottles. And

and perhaps there will be some more residue from which they can get yeast. But I think it's a lovely story. It's the way science works. You test things, you find out more, and you make a decision. But, you know, you might have to revise it. Meanwhile, of course, a decision's been made about Brexit.

And you wrote a really interesting article about the five myths to do with Brexit and how it'll affect science. One of the myths you talked about is that there was more money coming from local sources in Britain than from the European source. But you said Europe is a colossus and we cut ourselves off with some sort of risk. I think there is a risk because

The European Union is a colossus for science, it's a population of 350 million, highly developed, very high quality science.

And an open market within science, an open market which doesn't respect boundaries, which allows connections across countries, give you a much greater critical mass for actually doing research. So what this means for a country like the UK, which is a high-quality science country, of course, is we have a population of around 60 million, but we cannot cover everything.

And if new areas start to develop, having that open access to a population base provided by the European Union means that we are much more likely to be able to attract those skills in science that we need. Now, only pulling upon our own population restricts that. Now, naturally, science is an international activity and we pull on the rest of the world. But what

But what the EU provided was an extremely simple, non-bureaucratic transfer of labour from one part of Europe to the other part of Europe. And that is what we will lose with Brexit. Well, of course, you said in your second myth that there's this point about bureaucracy, that there's more bureaucracy, if you like, for you from British dealings than from Europe. And most people would be surprised by that. Of course they are. But there's really a lot of myth around this.

Dealing with administrators, and of course I'm an administrator myself, is by its very nature bureaucratic. And Britain's perfectly capable of producing quite a lot of bureaucracy itself. And this naive notion that once we have left Europe, all bureaucracy will go is complete, total and absolute nonsense. I have had to fight bureaucracy all my life, and it won't simply go away by separating from the European Union. That's just naive.

Well, finally, I'm going to leave you with this bottle. Shall I do that? I would be delighted if you could leave it with me. I feel a bit guilty about it, though. Oh, guilt is a wonderful thing indeed. But finally, before I toast you, what about the Francis Crick Institute? What is the main thing you're tackling here? What's the line of research? In fact, the strategy is really to build on highly talented individuals...

carrying out discovery research, having very good taste and choice in identifying those individuals, making a focus on younger researchers who tend to break the mould more readily than grey-haired people such as myself, and give them the freedom to pursue what they think is interesting with the support and critical comment from more senior people such as myself.

so that they can set out the roadmap for the future. So in a sense, my strategy is not to have a strategy, at least a strong programmatic strategy. It is one where we promote the best people to pursue discovery research in areas relevant to biomedicine. And then we capture...

Those discoveries which look important for translation, wherever that translation may take us. So conventionally you might have a cancer research institute or an institute interested in diabetes or neurodegeneration. This institute will potentially cover everything because when you're doing discovery research you can't really predict what discoveries you make, where they will end up in application. So we are, in my view, a rather more honest sort of institute which says...

fund discoveries and that will drive improvements in the lot of humankind, particularly in health. We just can't yet predict quite where it will go. And this whole institution is built on that premise. And frankly, I admire the funders, Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, The Wellcome, for example, three London universities. I admire the fact that they have adopted

this rather liberal approach to programme, rather than being top-down directed, which tends to happen. And we will be a discovery centre...

producing that knowledge which will drive the future improvements in biomedicine. Well, you've got the reputation, I must say. Not just yourself, but the 1,500 people in the building. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Sir Paul Nurse, Nabil Priseman, as I said, and now the first man in a 400-year-old history to be reappointed as President of the Royal Society of London. And yes, that was eight years ago, because next year the science show will be 50 years.

And so to another winner, one more of the Prime Minister's prize winners, this one from Melbourne. The next prize is the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year. This prize is named in honour of Sir Malcolm McIntosh AC. It's actually my father's prize. The winner is Distinguished Professor Tianyi Ma.

I'm Tianyi Ma, a distinguished professor in Center for Atom Material and Nanomanufacturing, School of Science at RMIT University. I'm leading a group working on harvesting, conversion, storage and application of renewable energy sources.

My team focuses on not only fundamental science breakthroughs, but also technology translation. This led me to explore a concept of photocatalysis. It can directly convert solar energy into chemical energy that is stored in small molecules like hydrogen.

My team pioneers a polarization method that can efficiently increase the photo catalysis performance by up to a hundred times. We then made one of the first square meter sized hydrogen generator. This technology can largely lower down the cost of producing green hydrogen.

I also focus my work on carbon capture, utilization and storage. My team integrates CO2 capture from industry processes with CO2 upgrading into value-added chemicals. This is one of the most important processes to help us to achieve net zero for Australia and also globally.

Upgrading them so that the carbon is used to make what sort of other chemicals?

We make carbon dioxide into CO, carbon monoxide, methane, methanol, ethanol. So you make alcohol as well as CH4? Yes, CH4 is also something we can make, yes, and alcohol.

particularly methanol and ethanol. Methanol as well? Methanol as well. And then having made them, what do you do with them? We can burn them as a fuel and we can use them as a starting point to make other chemicals. Hydrogen. On what sort of scale can you make hydrogen? Now we're making, as supported by the ARENA, Australian Renewable Agency, a project, a five-year project, to try to scale up the catalysts

to square-meter sized hydrogen generator that can float on the surface of water, seawater and wastewater to generate hydrogen. For now, what we can do is produce roughly one liter of pure green hydrogen

from one square metre of our prototype in one hour. And so does that break up water, as you might do with electrolysis, for example? Same sort of thing? So if you're doing it green, you're not doing the electricity from some other suspect source?

Oh, yes. There are many pathways to generate green hydrogen. The electrolysis is one of them. So first of all, they receive solar energy by using solar panels, PV, and then store the electricity into batteries, and battery will power the electrolyser.

to electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen. And you can scale it up on a big scale? Yeah, but in our way, what we call is a photocatalysis. It's one step, straightforward, to using some semiconductor film, the catalyst, to receive the solar energy and directly convert it into chemical energy to split water into hydrogen. That is chemical energy, store chemical energy in hydrogen molecules. Now, Tony, you...

You'll have noticed that in the newspapers in the last few months, there's been some question about hydrogen as a major supplier of energy. And lots of people, including Twiggy Forrest and others, are withdrawing, perhaps, their investment.

Is this a problem for you? Do you think the market is going to diminish? To me, it's not very much advanced. I mean, the hydrogen, green hydrogen production technology compared with the fossil fuel, traditional energy sources. But hydrogen is a

promising because it's a clean energy carrier. When you burn it, you only get water, no emission, green and easy to be transported in cylinders. As you may know that Toyota recently launched their new hydrogen fuel cell cars, which is pretty good, clean energy car. But to me, there's still a lot to do in terms of advancing the technology of produce

transport and utilise green hydrogen. There's a lot of things to do at a fundamental research stage and also the translation stage, but I always have a belief in it. In the close future, we'll have it really widely utilised. Well, it's one of the most simple molecules and it's one of the most abundant elements, isn't it? So you're not going to run out of anything. No. But once the...

market is on your side more, you'll be in a position perhaps to provide a wonderful innovation to make it work even better. Yes, I believe so. I fully agree. Yes. Thank you and congratulations. Thank you very much. Distinguished Professor Tanyi Ma from RMIT University, PM's Prize winner for Physical Sciences. But stand by, I'm about to sink you into a big black hole.

Diana Levin has a book you can take with you on your next frolic in the TARDIS. And if you venture too close to a black hole, she has a chapter on how to survive. You have a nanosecond to read it. She's with Shelby Traynor. Black holes are nothing. Black holes are special because there's nothing there. I probably accepted black holes whole.

as complete conceptual entities, before I was able to doubt, before I had intuition to combat. They were fodder for fantasy. I received the fact of their existence without resistance. Gullible and without prejudice, I could see the plausibility, appreciate the curiosity, their peculiarity, accept the universe as it was presented. Maybe it was the same for you.

It's very unlikely that this is your first encounter with the astrophysical oddity that is a black hole. The warp in space-time so strong that not even light can escape. So you say that black holes are nothing.

Can you explain that? Yeah, I think a lot of people imagine a black hole as an incredibly dense object, as though if you had the misfortune of floating up to a black hole, that you would find the densest material we can conceive of in the universe. And in fact, there's really nothing there. It's an empty space-time. Sometimes I like to say black holes are more of a place than they are a thing.

And you could sail across the event horizon, which is this famed region beyond which not even light can escape. And you can cross that event horizon, and it is empty. There's no matter. There's no dense material. If there ever was something that created a black hole, like a collapsed star, it's gone. And it left the black hole in some sense behind as a kind of archaeological imprint. It's left behind on the spacetime.

And you hint at the start of the book how black holes came to be. And they started off in the mathematics, essentially, before we knew that they even existed. How did we get from there to where we are now?

Well, there's kind of a tragic tale behind it all. When Einstein first successfully published, finally after many failed attempts actually, to write down the general theory of relativity, that was around 1916, one of his friends was in the front of World War I.

And was a German soldier fighting on the Russian front. And he was also an astronomer. And between calculating ballistics, was reading the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. And he reads Einstein's famous theory. And he sets about trying to solve this problem. What would happen if you just imagined this?

crushing the matter of a star to a point. He didn't say how this would happen, just imagine. So all the mass of the star is just crushed to a point. And he wrote down what we now call the mathematical solution for black hole spacetime. His name was Schwarzschild, and for many years it was called the Schwarzschild spacetime, still is in technical quarters, but didn't have the name black hole.

for decades. He sent this in a letter to Einstein. He said, you know, I've had the pleasure to walk through the land of your ideas, which is a crazy thing to say in the middle of this war. Einstein was very impressed with the mathematics, but didn't believe that nature would allow such a crazy thing to happen. And it really wasn't until Oppenheimer, interestingly enough, that he realized, in fact, that if a star was heavy enough to

in its death throes, it would not be able to resist catastrophic collapse to a black hole. It still wasn't called a black hole. That was in 1939. It wasn't until the 60s that John Wheeler coined the term black hole. It seems like in the book you're trying to say black holes are

aren't actually this hugely catastrophic thing that we imagine them to be. What are they then if they aren't these hugely destructive things in space? Yeah, there's a lot of this kind of monster truck talk around black holes that I think is a little undeserved that they're

weapons of mayhem and destruction. In fact, if you keep your distance from a black hole, it won't bother you. Don't bother it and it won't bother you. I mean, if our sun were to become a black hole tomorrow, which it won't do in its lifetime, but if I were to magic it into a black hole, our orbit would actually be fine. We'd be barely changed.

So the black hole doesn't have this insane gravitational pull from afar any more than the sun does. It is true that the gravitational effects become really strong when you get really, really close.

So if you get very close, yes, a lot of interesting things happen. But from afar, they're quite benign. So how you survive a black hole is stay away. Exactly. Keep your distance. You could set up a safe orbit, have a nice little space station, watch it from afar, see what goes on.

So say our listener is on that space station, what would they be seeing? Really, you'd see nothing unless you have some other source of light. So the whole point about the black hole is that light can't escape from a certain point of no return. And so black holes cannot emit or reflect light within what we call this event horizon.

And it's really a shadow. So a tree doesn't have a shadow unless there's another source of light. So if you just had a black hole in an empty space-time, you'd see nothing. However, if you have a black hole between you, let's say, and the rest of the Milky Way galaxy with all of its...

billions of stars, you would see a shadow cast by the black hole. It would act literally like a lens, making things look warped and weird. So that's your first clue that there's something there. And again, it's kind of like the shadow of a tree. You can step into that shadow and it's benign. You can step into the shadow of the event horizon

And it should be no more dramatic than stepping into the shadow of a tree. But you shouldn't do it because you can't get out again, unlike the shadow of a tree. Exactly. And that's the problem is you can't get back out again. So then you have really bad news ahead of you. But let's take our time. We're still out at the space station.

So if you're still outside of that event horizon, though, is there anything happening in space and time that would give you hints that you are still very close to a black hole? Well, let's say you didn't have a source of light like the galaxy behind it. Another typical source of light around a black hole is something called an accretion disk. If something like a neighboring star does veer too close...

The black hole will cannibalize that star. It will pull off tufts of that star like cotton candy, and it will spill into like a vortex orbit around the black hole, and it'll form like a bright, hot disk. You can think of it like Saturn's rings, which are also debris orbiting Saturn, but this stuff's really hot.

And it's really hot because it's splattered onto this very small object from a great distance. Imagine dropping, in New York we would say, a penny from the Empire State Building. It comes down fast. So unlike Saturn's rings, this stuff is moving at relativistic speeds sometimes. It's very hot. It's like a plasma. And so it illuminates the black hole. That's how you would see it from afar. That would be helpful.

It would be helpful to know when you're getting way too close. So what happens if our listener isn't paying attention and gets too close? Well, maybe a good comparison is if there's two astronauts on the space station and one of them goes on a spacewalk and

untethered and gets too close. What will happen is even though they had their clocks synchronized perfectly on the space station, they would find that the one left in the space station orbiting safely, watching their companion get closer and closer to the black hole, literally their clock starts to run slowly in comparison.

And it's not just their clock, this mechanical instrument or digital instrument on their wrist. It's their biological clock. To the astronaut falling in, it's completely normal. Their clock's ticking at a normal rate and their heartbeat is synchronized with it exactly as they expect and their thoughts are happening in the right timescale. But from far away, it appears that they're getting slower and slower and slower as they approach this event horizon.

And one way to think of it is that the black hole is creating a kind of rotation in space and time. In a way, I can rotate my left and right relative to yours simply by turning, performing a spatial rotation. The black hole is performing a space-time rotation. It's not rotating their left into their right, but it is rotating their space into their time.

Eventually, at the event horizon, it's as though the time will appear to stand still, and the astronaut who got too close will hover there. You would say forever is what people often hear, that the time dilation, as it's called, is now infinite. And so the observer in the space station has now aged 20, 30, 40 years, 100 years, the entire galaxy has come and gone, and that astronaut's still just hovering at the horizon, but

But really, if you correct for the fact that the astronaut also curves space-time a little bit because she has a little mass, it will happen in a finite time that you will see that astronaut move.

into the event horizon, plunk in there like a stone and disappear. What is that experience like for that astronaut that's in that black hole? What are they experiencing? Is it immediately just death? No, it's not. Well, okay, so that's interesting. It kind of depends on the size of the black hole. You can still see light because black holes might be dark from the outside, but light can fall in behind you

and you can still see the space station, you can still see the galaxy. In fact, it's crushing down on you, and it looks sped up, and it's getting brighter and more intense. Now, once you cross the event horizon, how long do you have before it becomes totally catastrophic? It depends on how big the black hole is. It's very fast if the black hole's the mass of a sun or 10 times the mass in that range. Very, very fast. Fractions of a second, right?

that you find that you are forced inward towards...

It's the center of that black hole where people talk about a singularity, a region of infinite curvature, but probably something else is going on there that's very complicated. But whatever it is, it's really bad. But if the black hole is a billion times the mass of the sun, which we see, we see these supermassive black holes, they exist, or even a trillion times the mass of a sun, then you might be able to get a year out of it.

A very quiet. A very existentially terrifying year. Yeah, because that singularity becomes the only future that you could possibly have, right? Yes. To the astronaut whose space and time rotated so much once they crossed the event horizon, that singularity isn't a point in space. It's a point in time. And it's a point in their future. And they can no more avoid the singularity than they can avoid the future coming.

And so the singularity is an absolute inevitability. There's nothing you can do to stave it off forever. And without getting too gruesome, what are we talking about here in terms of this being very, very bad for a poor astronaut? Yeah, tidal forces, when you think about the tides on the Earth and how the moon can pull on the Earth and create waves,

waves in the shape of the Earth and also in water, this would be in the most extreme form. You would actually be squeezed and stretched by the shape of space-time. Parts of your body would be accelerated towards a singularity faster than other parts of your body. This is famously sometimes called spaghettification, not my favorite term, but you know, you get the idea. You're pulled limb from limb and you're crushed. It

It's a kind of squeezing, crushing, very unhappy condition. And presumably, even before you would be able to find out what there really is at the center of the black hole, you would be torn apart into your fundamental particles. Then your fundamental particles continue to rush towards either the singularity or whatever quantum remnant there might actually be in the center of the black hole. Yeah, and we talk about this singularity with air quotes because...

It's stated as fact that there's a singularity at the center of a black hole, but some people think that that infinity might be possible. Other people think it's a sign that our maths isn't quite there yet. Yeah. What are kind of the assumptions of what could be happening there? Yeah.

I think it's very much the math telling us we can no longer ignore quantum forces and matter forces. It's saying that I can't ignore the fact that the universe is fundamentally quantum mechanical. So what we really need is to go beyond Einstein's theory of big, smooth, lumbering space-time and black holes and the whole universe and start to talk about quantum gravity, and nobody knows how to do that yet.

If you had a choice of what would happen once you reached that quote unquote singularity. Oh, as a scientist, like what's my fantasy? Well, you know, I'm forced as a scientist to be agnostic and to take what comes. But that truth is we pursue certain ideas because we like them more than we like other ideas. And so there was very early on.

an observation that if I looked at the spacetime of a black hole going towards a singularity, it sure looked a lot like a kind of reversal in time of a spacetime that had a big bang. And so maybe I could kind of sew those together. Maybe the inside of the black hole could be sewn into a big bang spacetime so that what's happening is when you get to the singularity, you're actually blown out into a new universe.

There's a lot of reasons to think it won't be true. But, you know, maybe one day that model of the interior being a Big Bang will be resurrected. I mean, I kind of like this

Your particles are blown out into a new ecosystem. So, you know, there's this tragedy of your current organization being torn apart, but you'll find new life and a new cosmos somewhere. A new cosmos. Such a consolation. How to Survive a Black Hole, a book by John Levin, Columbia University, New York, with Shelby Trenor.

I now suspect if you did survive a black hole, you'd end up looking like an upside-down jellyfish. Picture it now, crushed to pulp, but waving those remaining jelly arms upwards, hoping for help. Okay, so let's hear more about that jellyfish. Claire Rowe is a collection manager of marine invertebrates of the Australian Museum in Sydney. How did you start in marine science?

I've always loved the ocean. When I was little, I'd go to the beach all the time, lots of snorkelling. I just love being in the water and that developed a keen interest in marine life. So it's always been a passion of mine and then I just stuck with it and here I am.

Well, it's the same sort of question perhaps that I ask people who are studying insects instead of lovely furry animals or wombats or things that go boing, boing. Why didn't you choose sharks or growth as well, that sort of creature? So I started volunteering at the Australian Museum in the Marine Invertebrates Collection in second year uni to get some experience there.

And the more I worked with marine invertebrates, the more I realised how weird and wonderful they are. And I think it's their diversity and how different each type of marine invertebrate is that piqued my interest. And so that's how I ended up here. I love the weird and the wonderful and the unknown, basically. Well, that's a very good answer. Yes, indeed. And

Jellyfish, how come? Jellyfish are quite understudied in Australia. There's a few researchers who study them up in Queensland, but there's so much that's unknown about jellyfish and that's really interesting. There's a lot of work to be done about what species are occurring and where, why they're blooming, where they're blooming. There's a lot of unknown and there's a lot of mystery and I think it's a great area to be working in.

I must interrupt by dropping in a piece of music. That, of course, is Rhapsody in Blue, written by George Gershwin. And the one person who is a world authority...

and she's based in Australia in Hobart, is Lisa Ann Gershwin, who's written three books. Have you seen them? Yes, I've read all of them. Big fan of Lisa Gershwin. I met her once at the Opera House when she was doing a talk there. It was great. I was just about to start my PhD, so it was great to meet an expert in the field and get a little bit of advice from her. She's discovered what I think there used to be one or two Irukandji that were known as the really dangerous ones.

who stop you going to the beach in northern Queensland. And she's found another 18 species. She's found a lot of species. And when you go around the museum collection, you see her name all throughout. Every jellyfish that's in the collection basically has Lisa's name on it. It's fantastic. And what about the one that you study, which seems to be upside down?

It's called the upside-down jellyfish, and it's basically the lazy jellyfish of the sea. It spends most of its life upside down with its bell resting on the sediment and its oral arms extended above it. It does this because it's got photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae in the tissue of its oral arm. Just like corals. Just like corals, exactly. And so this allows the jellyfish to photosynthesize and get 90% of its nutritional needs from the algae and then the other 10% from filter feeding.

I see, but I got the vague idea that the arms were up there to grasp things. If it doesn't need so much to supplement the food that's given to it by the algae, why does it do that? It still has stinging cells, which it'll use to capture prey. It's a bit of both. It provides a home for the algae and it's still able to get some nutritional needs, but I feel like the zooplankton will add a bit of extra food source to the jellyfish and so it relies on both.

Did you imagine in the beginning that they were indigenous? There are native species in Australia. They're cryptic, so it's quite hard to identify upside-down jellyfish. So there are some local species, and it's trying to distinguish the local ones versus the invasive ones that's quite a challenge. Invasive ones, are they prolific?

They are moving down the East Coast. So for upside-down jellyfish, it appears they originally occurred around Moreton Bay. And since then, we've found them in Wallace Lake and Lake Macquarie. So they are moving down the East Coast. They're still in quite small numbers, but upside-down jellyfish have the potential to bloom in really high numbers.

Overseas, they've been recorded in densities of over 100 jellyfish per metre squared. 100 per metre squared? Huge numbers. And these jellyfish can be the size of a dinner plate as well, so you can just imagine the ecological impact that that could have. How big are the ones you've found here? We have seen some that have been about the size of a dinner plate, not in those densities yet, though. Most of the ones we've seen have been roughly a hand size. Wow.

Well, I remember Lisa Gershwin telling me, actually on the science show, that the way that climate change is going and the jellyfish become more prolific because they can gobble up all sorts of things and carry on regardless while other creatures go extinct. Soon the number of jellyfish may in Australia match the ones that you said were about 100 species per metre. Yeah.

Absolutely. Climate change is helping jellyfish. They're one of the few species that will continue to thrive with global warming and increasing ocean temperatures won't impact jellyfish as much as other species. Additionally, things like eutrophication can cause an environment that jellyfish will still do really well in. More food than there used to be. Exactly. Same with artificial structures such as seawalls, providing a habitat for them to

have their polyp stage their life cycle attached to hard substrate. So basically we're creating the perfect environment for a jellyfish. Actually, seawalls are a good thing, aren't they? Yeah, for some animals they definitely are. A bit like hedgerows in a field. It's where all those tiny birds used to get on so well until the hedgerows were taken away.

in various parts of the world. So where's your research leading at the moment? I'm still trying to work on upside-down jellyfish and distinguish them from the native species versus the invasive species. I'm still doing quite a bit of work on that.

With the Australian Museum, we've been doing a lot of deep-sea research on the RV Investigator. So I'm trying to also expand my range from jellyfish in 15 centimetres down to 4,000 metres. You don't go down four kilometres, do you? No, we send down beam trawls, which trail along the bottom and bring up the jellyfish. And, yeah, it's fascinating. It's really interesting seeing those deep-sea species. That's the Investigator, the huge ship that's usually in Hobart. That's the one. LAUGHTER

Yeah, how often can you go on that? So I recently did two voyages to the Indian Ocean. We went around Christmas Island and the deep sea mounts around there. For those samples, we were trawling down to 5,000 metres and we brought up some beautiful jellyfish. So I'm currently working on trying to identify those species at the moment. We had a programme a few months ago, a science show, looking at exploring the deep ocean and

And one of the people who was on it was Emily, who's from the National Museum in Darling Harbour. And she's dived down to where the Titanic is being eaten by various creatures. And the question we asked her at the end and her colleagues is, how much would young people really have a career looking at work that needs to be done in the ocean? You know, irrespective of whether they're going to be jobs, is there huge amounts of work to be done?

Absolutely. So little is known about the ocean floor, especially in the deep sea. That's the amazing thing about going out on voyages on the Investigator and similar research vessels. We've discovered so many new species.

because so little is known. There's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of taxonomy work that needs to be done, identifying those species. There's a lot of geology work that needs to be done. It's a fantastic area of research and really interesting. And it's not just collecting things, is it? It's just not just adding another tick in a million boxes. It's to do with...

understanding the environment and making it more healthy and more productive for us as well. Absolutely. And also with things like climate change, we need to know what's down there so that we know what's vulnerable, what we may be losing. Museum collections are also a really important resource for that. So museum collections are able to pinpoint what species occurring at that point of time in that location.

and being able to develop these collections so that people can reference them in 100, 200 years is extremely important. Thank you and good luck. Thank you. Claire Rowe at the Australian Museum with her marine invertebrates. And yes, it's going to be a jellyfish world.

And here's another spineless creature few of us know much about, an invader whose presence creates huge consequences, domino effects. Scientists need us to realise, or all about them, Fleur Connick is with some of these creatures. This blowfly is being brutally attacked by a European wasp.

The fly is desperately trying to escape the wasp's firm grip as it's pinned to the ground. Moments later, the wasp decapitates the blowfly.

It's a bit gruesome, but a team of scientists monitoring animal carcasses found this behaviour is not rare. If any insect came to that carcass, European wasps being quite aggressive and territorial, they would kill that insect. And where flies were concerned, they actually grabbed them and then bit their heads off.

So the heads would fall on the ground and then they'd often fly back with the body to the nests as well. Thomas Newson is an associate professor at the University of Sydney's School of Life and Environmental Sciences. He is part of a team of researchers that has been studying the role of European wasps as scavengers in the Australian landscape. First discovered in Tasmania back in 1959, the invasive wasp is now found in every state and territory and...

Its numbers are rising. European wasps are fascinating because they have really flown under the radar as an introduced invasive pest in Australia. We know a lot about the vertebrate pests in Australia, things like foxes and cats, but actually the invasive insects we know much less about. So they've flown under the radar because they're not an agricultural or huge agricultural pest. So in a day-to-day life of a farmer,

They're not really talking about, oh, all these European wasps are doing all this damage. They're less visible, but they are probably doing a lot of damage to our biodiversity. For the past six years, Thomas has been involved in a series of investigations into European wasp impacts in Kosciuszko National Park. The first study focused on kangaroo carcasses, while more recent research has been monitoring feral animal carcasses left behind after a culling event. We

We notice in the Alpine region that in 2018, which was also a dry year, that after we experimentally placed some animal carcasses across the landscape, that within minutes, hundreds if not thousands of European wasps congregated on this food source.

And that was not something we were expecting. We knew that European wasps were there, but we didn't think they'd be that prevalent on the carcasses or find them so quickly as they were put out. And had there been much research in Australia on that in particular? Nothing that we knew of other than it was known that European wasps would probably use carcasses for food. There's some farmers that we had met who'd spoke about European wasps often coming to carcass sites.

But there hadn't been a study to date that had documented both their occurrence on these animal carcasses, but also their impacts that they were causing in terms of the behaviours that they were applying at that carcass site as well.

In Australia, animal carcasses aren't in short supply, with millions produced each year due to culling, road accidents and natural disasters such as droughts and bushfires. When carcasses are left to rot, it provides a perfect food source for European wasp colonies, allowing some to build super nests of up to 100,000 individuals.

One of the things to highlight is carcasses themselves can actually provide insights into how an ecosystem functions and they are a naturally occurring food. They attract a plethora of insect and vertebrate scavengers to a focal spot that you can actually monitor. So what we found is that these animal carcasses can provide really unique insights into what species are present,

and farmers or managers might be interested in what invasive species are present compared to native species. But you also get insights into the behaviour of the species when they're there as well. That might be in group sizes, fighting with each other, interacting with different species. So you can actually learn a lot.

from monitoring a carcass. And so it's not that we're really into dead decomposing things out in the landscape, but it is a weird and wacky natural food source that animals are attracted to, and you can learn a lot by studying it. More so than just the animals there, because you can also look at how long the carcasses are persisting in the environment. And that can give you an insight into the ecosystem health, because a healthy ecosystem is...

is typically characterized by one where scavengers get in and clean the landscape of carcasses really quickly. So if the carcasses are persisting for a long time in the landscape, well then the questions are A, are there too many carcasses in the landscape? Or B, is there a functional scavenging guild there to help remove that carcass biomass?

You can pull different levers to tweak both of them in terms of minimising carcasses in the landscape or supporting and promoting scavengers that might provide that ecosystem service. One of those native scavengers is the humble blowfly, which not only helps clean up carcasses but are also major pollinators.

Typically, when we were studying these carcasses, we'd see flies being there within minutes as well. And they perform a really important ecosystem service by laying the larvae everywhere. Maggots get all over the carcasses. It's a little bit gruesome, but that actually helps to accelerate the carcass biomass loss. And they're helping to clean our landscapes of these dead animals.

And these carcasses also provide a really important food source for vertebrate scavengers. Little ravens and crows are often the first to arrive at carcasses as well, but that's also followed by a suite of native species that use carrion as a food source. But when we

were observing these carcasses that were inundated by European wasps, that natural process seemed to be completely broken down because we didn't see any flies at these carcass sites. And when we sat there and observed what the European wasps were doing, first of all, they were taking little bits of meat back to their nest. So it was sort of like a conveyor belt of meat going back to the nest. Second of all, if any insect came to that carcass, they would kill that insect. And where flies were concerned, they actually grabbed them

and then bit their heads off, so their heads would fall on the ground, and then they'd often fly back with the body to the nests as well. And so they were essentially stopping that normal process that we would be typically witnessing. But those effects even extended further because when dingoes came into scavenge, from the camera traps that we were using monitoring dingoes,

all the other scavengers that were coming in, we found that the dingoes were sort of looking in the air, their heads were snapping around, and they didn't really look comfortable at the carcass sites, and they weren't actively scavenging these sites either. And this was the European wasps actually attacking

and annoying and stinging dingoes and pushing them off the carcasses. And then the final sort of interesting thing that we noticed was that when feral pigs came in, they didn't seem to care about being covered in European wasps as they ate that carcass. So we sort of had a flow on a whole lot of different interactions there, which are interesting, and it fits in with some theory that we talk about, which is called invasion meltdown, which is when one invasive species might facilitate the impacts of another invasive species. And here, chronologically,

Quite uniquely, we have an invasive insect pushing our native species off the carcass and potentially facilitating or allowing access to that carcass for an invasive feral pig. And I think in addition to some of the impacts of European wasps around the carcasses, we can only speculate about what their broader impacts might be in the environment. If they are highly aggressive and territorial and they're killing blowflies around the carcass sites, they're probably actively targeting other insects

around as well. And that, of course, might have impacts on the ecosystem services they provide, primarily, for example, pollination. I was really interested to hear how this might change or add to our knowledge, like an scavenger and invasive species in Australia.

I think it really adds to our knowledge of what invasive species can do. We're in a biodiversity crisis. Invasive species are up there, if not number one, with habitat loss in terms of major driver of this extinction crisis. A lot of focus of that has been on the impacts of mammals. Half the world's mammal extinctions have been in our backyards over the last 200 years. But there's probably a whole lot of other species that we're just not surveying.

We're not monitoring well enough and we're not documenting the impact. So often it's we find out that something's gone when it's too late. And that's in part funding driven. It's in part political driven. But, you know, as scientists, we're trying to understand as much as we can with the limited resources available and try and direct some of the funding towards action.

understanding the impacts of these lesser known invasive species. And I would put European wasps in that category as a species that we don't really know much about, even some of their basic biology we know very little about. So I think that's an area that we need to focus on as a country and put more efforts into understanding the impacts of these species. Associate Professor Thomas Newsome, University of Sydney, and that report by Fleur Connick.

And before I go, back to the British Association Festival. In fact, it's BO of the BA, a team from Oxford. But I didn't think Oxford dons could possibly have BO. Hello, I am Dr Chitra Joshi. I work as a postdoctoral research associate at Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. And you're studying why people smell, stink. What's behind it? What are the main ingredients?

We all smell, all humans, mammals, everyone. The body odor is colorless and odorless. It's the bacteria behind and then turn it into thiol-containing compounds and that actually produces the strong sulfur smell

we can smell from people. Especially boys. Yeah, there is a study which links high testosterone to higher body odour, but the science behind all of this is very much poorly understood.

I would have thought that was a fairly obvious thing. Is it connected with diagnosing illness or something like that in your research? Are you saying particular smells belong to particular maladies? In previous days, any kind of stinky smell was associated with diseases. But now we know it's a very natural phenomenon and there is no link to any illnesses if you have stronger or less stronger body odour.

Dr. Chitra Joshi from Biochemistry, University of Oxford. But why have BO at the BA? Answers next week. And well, how come so many male giraffes, even chimpanzees, seem to be gay? And how do Komodo dragon females dispense with males altogether when reproducing?

It's a rainbow land all over nature, says the new book, Nature's Sexual Spectrum. And we'll hear all about it with so-called queer entomology next week. The Science Show is produced by David Fisher. I'm Robin Williams. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.